They now have up-to-date financial models: So Nick and team can plan quarters in advance and manage their growth.
A CFO-level thought partner: For recurring accountability, and to run ideas past.
Bookkeeping on autopilot: With financials Nick can trust and not feel the need to double check.
“ We were fundraising and I needed help—and Pilot was there for me.“
After stints at Lucasfilm and Marketo, Nick retired. But in that first year of reading and relaxation, he kept hearing all his former colleagues continue to complain about fragmented data. He couldn’t help but grow curious. Curiosity became an idea. He called his old Marketo colleague Neelesh, who confirmed it was a serious opportunity in a big market: A software to overlay all other core software to manage the flow of customer data.
Nick asked if Neelesh would start the company, hoping to pass it off. Neelesh said he wouldn’t do it alone. So in 2019, Nick found himself incorporating another venture, this time as CEO.
When you become a founder, you have to become an expert in things like accounting, finance, and HR even if you never set out to learn about them. Anything not explicitly part of someone else’s job title is, de facto, part of yours. At some point, however, doing it all yourself becomes the reason nothing else gets done. Nick knew he needed to understand which parts of running the business he wasn’t best at and find someone to handle them. One clear area was bookkeeping and certain parts of finance.
Nick is naturally careful with money, and especially other people’s money, like Syncari’s initial seed capital. He wanted to be able to account for every dollar. For years, he reviewed and issued every payment the company made. “If you don’t understand your financials at a very fine-grain level,” says Nick, “you will make mistakes that could cost you your company.” He searched around for a bookkeeper to help, and evaluated Pilot on recommendation.
Nick expected Pilot to be just another interchangeable outsourced bookkeeper service. He was struck not only by Pilot’s software, but the fact it was a full financial team that’d fill in pieces where needed. Instead of hiring a CFO, he could hire a fractional one through Pilot. Nick being Nick, he’d actually already built out a spreadsheet financial model for Syncari, but he knew it wasn’t exact. His Pilot CFO added formulas and showed him how to make it more accurate, and incorporate GAAP financials. His CFO then assumed responsibility for maintaining the model. Now they meet every other week and his Pilot CFO surfaces items for him to review. When Nick needs quick answers in a meeting, he can log into Pilot’s software and investigate every expense.
If you don’t understand your financials at a very fine-grain level, you will make mistakes that could cost you your company.”
The biggest change that Pilot helped Nick make was integrating his forecasting model with his GAAP financials and balance sheet instead of manually updating the model each month. With Pilot’s help, each month ends with Nick having a clear picture of what happened the previous month and what that means for his forecast for the next several years. With this, he’s able to comfortably plan for new hires and investments sometimes years in advance.
This back office financial support has allowed Nick to spend considerably less time on the finances, and more time on the product and go-to-market. Their initial target audience, the revenue operations team, turned out to have less budget than they’d hoped. So while Syncari was selling deals and growing that customer base, they also expanded to launch a partnerships team to approach big systems integrators, and branch into selling to data teams. “Customer data quality is a big, universal pain that no one wants to take responsibility for,” explains Nick. With Pilot, he can pivot, test, and model out what initiatives and hires they can afford to test new markets.
You want people that are better than you doing the things that you are not good at.”
At the end of the day, no amount of financial software makes up for having a human thought partner. Nick says he’s pleased that Pilot has shown not only understanding of his business, but of the startup landscape. As trends change—as revenue operations teams ascend, then fall out of budgetary favor—his CFO is tracking the same events. They’re talking about the news from a shared awareness. And when Nick went back to begin their latest successful fundraise, Series B, it was based on numbers and decks the Pilot team helped him prepare.
"One of the things that I think about when I think of Pilot is you have a bird's-eye view of everything that's been going on in the economy from at least a startup perspective over the last few years.“
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Syncari is a data automation and master data management (MDM) software which creates a central source of truth and unifies data across services.
After stints at Lucasfilm and Marketo, Nick retired. But in that first year of reading and relaxation, he kept hearing all his former colleagues continue to complain about fragmented data. He couldn’t help but grow curious. Curiosity became an idea. He called his old Marketo colleague Neelesh, who confirmed it was a serious opportunity in a big market: A software to overlay all other core software to manage the flow of customer data.
Nick asked if Neelesh would start the company, hoping to pass it off. Neelesh said he wouldn’t do it alone. So in 2019, Nick found himself incorporating another venture, this time as CEO.
When you become a founder, you have to become an expert in things like accounting, finance, and HR even if you never set out to learn about them. Anything not explicitly part of someone else’s job title is, de facto, part of yours. At some point, however, doing it all yourself becomes the reason nothing else gets done. Nick knew he needed to understand which parts of running the business he wasn’t best at and find someone to handle them. One clear area was bookkeeping and certain parts of finance.
Nick is naturally careful with money, and especially other people’s money, like Syncari’s initial seed capital. He wanted to be able to account for every dollar. For years, he reviewed and issued every payment the company made. “If you don’t understand your financials at a very fine-grain level,” says Nick, “you will make mistakes that could cost you your company.” He searched around for a bookkeeper to help, and evaluated Pilot on recommendation.
Nick expected Pilot to be just another interchangeable outsourced bookkeeper service. He was struck not only by Pilot’s software, but the fact it was a full financial team that’d fill in pieces where needed. Instead of hiring a CFO, he could hire a fractional one through Pilot. Nick being Nick, he’d actually already built out a spreadsheet financial model for Syncari, but he knew it wasn’t exact. His Pilot CFO added formulas and showed him how to make it more accurate, and incorporate GAAP financials. His CFO then assumed responsibility for maintaining the model. Now they meet every other week and his Pilot CFO surfaces items for him to review. When Nick needs quick answers in a meeting, he can log into Pilot’s software and investigate every expense.
If you don’t understand your financials at a very fine-grain level, you will make mistakes that could cost you your company.”
The biggest change that Pilot helped Nick make was integrating his forecasting model with his GAAP financials and balance sheet instead of manually updating the model each month. With Pilot’s help, each month ends with Nick having a clear picture of what happened the previous month and what that means for his forecast for the next several years. With this, he’s able to comfortably plan for new hires and investments sometimes years in advance.
This back office financial support has allowed Nick to spend considerably less time on the finances, and more time on the product and go-to-market. Their initial target audience, the revenue operations team, turned out to have less budget than they’d hoped. So while Syncari was selling deals and growing that customer base, they also expanded to launch a partnerships team to approach big systems integrators, and branch into selling to data teams. “Customer data quality is a big, universal pain that no one wants to take responsibility for,” explains Nick. With Pilot, he can pivot, test, and model out what initiatives and hires they can afford to test new markets.
You want people that are better than you doing the things that you are not good at.”
At the end of the day, no amount of financial software makes up for having a human thought partner. Nick says he’s pleased that Pilot has shown not only understanding of his business, but of the startup landscape. As trends change—as revenue operations teams ascend, then fall out of budgetary favor—his CFO is tracking the same events. They’re talking about the news from a shared awareness. And when Nick went back to begin their latest successful fundraise, Series B, it was based on numbers and decks the Pilot team helped him prepare.
"One of the things that I think about when I think of Pilot is you have a bird's-eye view of everything that's been going on in the economy from at least a startup perspective over the last few years.“
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