Cashview
A couple of days ago, I got a phone call from my previous coworker Eric Chan. I first met Eric at Salesforce back in the year 2000. He was a young kid with lots of contagious energy and smart. He started at Salesforce years before that and when Salesforce went IPO, I’m sure he did well.
In the summer of 2006, I was approached by a recruiter. Someone named René Lacerte was thinking about starting a new company and was looking for someone to build the product. I interviewed with René and after 2 or 3 rounds of interview with him, a board member, and a couple of his previous company’s CTO and partner, I was hired. It was sad to leave Salesforce, but I knew it was time to go. One of the first tasks in the new company, called Cashview orginally, was to help build out the team. I immediately got in touch with Eric. He was interested and it took a bit of convincing, but I was able to hire him. Long story short, he and I built a prototype product within a few months. Our company gave the best demo at Demo Conference in 2007 and won the Demo God award.
Along the way, I tried to hire a couple more Salesforce engineers and Marc Benioff got wind of it and called me to ask me to stop. René, Eric, and I were in a meeting with Marc and we negotiated a truce between the companies. Marc became an investor, sold Cashview the bill.com domain. Cashview became bill.com.
Fast foward to 2008 after the economy tanked, I left the company. But I knew it was in Eric’s very capable hands. Getting the phone call from Eric was a very pleasant surprise! Bill.com was still going strong. So strong in fact that they were going to go public!
I was very fortunate to work for bill.com. The experience of building a company from the ground up was invaluable. Learning to craft a corporate culture was eye-opening. I definitely missed a lot of the people there. And it was good to get in touch with them after such a momentus event.
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