On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou sits down with Brad Silicani, COO of Anrok, to talk about his journey from Big Four accounting to leading operations at a fast-growing tech company. They dive into the hard work it takes to build and optimize finance functions, from developing revenue recognition methods to managing international tax structuring ahead of an IPO, and discuss why a background in accounting and finance has helped Brad be the operations leader he is today.
On this episode of Controllers Classified, host Erik Zhou sits down with Brad Silicani, COO of Anrok, to talk about his journey from Big Four accounting to leading operations at a fast-growing tech company.
The discussion begins by covering Brad’s transition from audit to client side, and highlights the myriad of roles he held at Dropbox. In his time there he was Controller, tasked with landing a sound revenue recognition method, Head of Tax, focused on developing the right international tax structure prior to IPO, and Treasurer, responsible for managing $2B in cash in a changing interest rate environment. In covering all this, Brad shares how these experiences set him up for success in his current role as COO at Anrok, highlighting why a background in accounting and finance makes him the operations leader he is today.
And of course, no modern finance conversation would be complete without tackling the AI revolution. Erik and Brad dig into how automation and AI are reshaping accounting, tax, and treasury functions—not just making processes smoother but fundamentally redefining the role of finance leaders. Whether you're a CFO- OR COO-in-the-making, or just someone who loves hearing behind-the-scenes war stories from hyper-growth companies, this episode delivers sharp insights and great conversation.
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0:00:01.6 Announcer: Welcome to Controllers Classified, the podcast where we take a deep dive into the dynamic world of controllers, accountants, and finance leaders and hear how their ever evolving roles are redefining accounting and the future of business. And now, here's your host, Erik Zhou.
0:00:23.6 Erik Zhou: Welcome to Controllers Classified. I'm your host, Erik Zhou, the chief accounting Officer at Brex. And I'm really honored to have our guest today. This is Brad Silicani, the COO at Anrok. We haven't had a COO on the show before. This is a show, it's called Controllers Classified. We're really talking about accounting and finance and tax and treasury and all this stuff. But Brad's great because he has an accounting background. He was a Big 4 person. He worked in accounting. He was a controller at a large company before, worked on tax and somehow made his way into the operations of his new org at Anrok. Welcome to the show, Brad.
0:01:00.5 Brad Silicani: Yeah, thanks Erik. Excited to be here. Appreciate you having me on.
0:01:03.9 Erik Zhou: Maybe just to get kickstarted for the audience, give yourself an intro to everyone. How did you end up as the COO of a company giving your background?
0:01:12.6 Brad Silicani: Yeah, well, maybe, origin story on the accounting side of things to tie in for the controller audience here. I like to joke that I was born that way. So my father was a partner at KPMG for his whole career. My sister, my older sister had started at KPMG as well. And I went to college and took my first business class with no intention of being an accountant. And yeah, for me, it was like almost the clairvoyant moments that I saw debits and credits and everything just made a ton of sense to me. So I quickly that freshman year figured out that I could go out, get my accounting degree, get my master's accounting, do that very quickly. And it just made so much sense to me that that got me into accounting in the first place. And yeah, roll forwards where I am today. Anrok is a company that helps support accountants and supports folks within tax to be able to solve the problem around sales tax and VAT. So I've been able to use my experiences from those even early days on the accounting side of things at UI all the way to make my journey here to interact today.
0:02:07.3 Erik Zhou: Just for fun, I just want to ask this question. I didn't realize that your dad was a partner at KPMG. Okay. And then you just told me your sister is at KPMG or, I don't know if she's there anymore. And then which firm did you join?
0:02:21.0 Brad Silicani: Yeah, I joined Ernst & Young. I look a little much too much like my dad. And so I wanted to step away from the family firm there, if you will, and ended up with Ernst & Young. They also encouraged me over that for my internship. I did that internship in San Francisco. Then they offered me the opportunity to start actually in the national accounting group for my first year out in New York. So that made the decision pretty easy. Got to skip the first year audit experience there and do technical accounting research instead. So that helped as well.
0:02:49.4 Erik Zhou: But then you came back to the San Francisco area. And did you get involved in tech while you were at Ernst & Young or what was your intro into that? I grew up in New York. And naturally for me, when I went back to New York and worked at Pricewaterhouse. Oh, financial services. Like, but go somewhere else for me in New York. So I'm just curious about your experience.
0:03:09.7 Brad Silicani: Yeah, maybe that also leads into why Ernst & Young, which is, yeah, I grew up here in the San Francisco Bay area. So tech, of course, is the industry here. So I knew I wanted to work with tech company. So when I came back to San Francisco, got assigned to work on Oracle and Salesforce, it's pretty much my only two clients. Snuck in a few smaller private tech companies here and there, but yeah, that was, I think an intentional choice on my side to try to get exposure to those companies and understand the industry a lot better and yeah, work with I think some of the companies that were the brightest there. My Salesforce reference, which may be dating me here was I remember being on the audit as an intern and their controller came up and he was very excited about their progress. And he was, came to down to me, said one day we are going to hit 500 million in revenue. And I remember looking around at the senior and the manager and they're like, no way, not going to happen. And hey, he was right. Look at Salesforce today.
0:04:06.6 Erik Zhou: It's really interesting that you say that. And I'll just share this with the audience as well. I'm the chief accounting officer at the company and I recently also became the SVP of finance. So I look after corporate FP&A and strategic finance as well. And then there's that side of me where I look at all the numbers and I'm looking at all the projections, and we have very big dreams at Brex too for revenue and the whole company, etcetera, and in my heart I'm just trying to reconcile, okay. With what I see in the field today and with what's like going on, are we really going to be able to hit this objective? And I think that's the thing that's really interesting at the end of the day, when you're running the business and leading the business, it's not just about everything that you see in the field, but it's what you can envision and imagine them to be and what they'll grow to be that will get you to that number. And so, there's still a part of me, the accountant in me just keeps looking at the past, the finance piece in me like, yeah, I'm looking towards the future and trying to build this company now.
0:05:05.5 Erik Zhou: That's really exciting. I'm really curious. Yeah, I'm really curious. You joined Dropbox pretty early stages, I think.
0:05:13.9 Brad Silicani: Yeah, that's right. So maybe picking out that UI that stayed there for maybe four, five years, I looked at myself. I obviously had my dad who I could look at as well. I love my dad to death there, but yeah, I knew that I didn't...
0:05:27.8 Erik Zhou: He's going to love this show.
0:05:28.5 Brad Silicani: Yeah, he's going to love it when I give this next one, which is, I knew I didn't want to be a public company partner. To me that didn't fit with the curiosity that I had about trying new things, testing, iterating. As you know within the Big 4, you got to follow the process and stick to what's going on. So got interested in thinking about joining a tech company. To be honest, I had no idea what Dropbox was when I applied. I was mid interview process with them and then they came out and announced that they had raised the Series B, that was $250 million and a $4 billion valuation. And I was like, okay, well product makes sense. I can understand file sync and share there and wow, they're an 80-person company with this valuation. This seems like a good choice. So decided to join there and yeah, had a long journey there about nine to 10 years before I [0:06:14.5] ____.
0:06:14.5 Erik Zhou: I can only imagine what that must have been like. 80 people, $4 billion valuation, growing bananas. You need all these new people to come into the company every month to start building what you've promised to these investors and building the revenue. It's chaotic when you're growing so fast, and I believe you were the controller there for a bit. How did you put it all together? Payroll is expanding, maybe opening new entities in other countries. I'm just curious, what were your focus areas during that time there?
0:06:51.0 Brad Silicani: Yeah, so when I joined, we were an accounting team of two people. And then, the time I stepped away being the controller there and the county team was about 25 people. And so one thing that was has stuck with me through today that is relevant here is the main priority we had to get an order was what was going on in revenue in order to cash there. The company had no records about what was happening on how to record revenue or recognize what's going on. And that was definitely our biggest journey to figure out. I vividly recall my very first day having to go talk to an engineer about, hey, can I get a report on revenue? And we had this very gruff conversation where they gave me a lot of feedback about what the hell I was talking about, that I was wasting their time and that this data didn't exist. And to me, that was a big transition from being in an environment where I was around a bunch of accountants who knew the language, the acronyms that gas them, if you ask another accountant for a revenue report, they know exactly what you're talking about.
0:07:48.1 Brad Silicani: And then being in this world where you had to learn how to communicate with people who had no experience or background on accounting or finance and how to find a common set of language there. So that, I think, was a challenge addressed on the revenue side of things. We had to get a sales tax and VAT system in place, a billing system in place. We had to convince engineering to make a ledger and immutable transactions for what a historical ledger would look like, and, yeah, continue to grow from there. So revenue, I think, was definitely the biggest challenge given their small transactions and high velocity there. And then that expanded into as we got to 25 or so on the accounting side of things, like, how do we start addressing international. How do we localize for currency? How do we start thinking about attack structure and what the implications of that are going to be for the long term as well.
0:08:33.6 Erik Zhou: I want to go back to something you said. Building out the order to catch. You guys were growing like a rocket ship, right? Like you're building the plane as you're flying it. Like that's a common expression, I think, but it applies here. How long did it take? So you asked for a revenue report. It doesn't exist. What was your first month of revenue close then? How long did it take before you could get all the revenue kind of like into your GL comfortably, knowing it would be complete and accurate? Like, like maybe size that for the listeners.
0:09:05.5 Brad Silicani: Oh, I think to like, get to a process that we are comfortable with was like, probably close to a year to be able to, like, go through getting the reporting ticked and tied. Like, what did it look like in the beginning? Which is, I think a common experience across, like many things with accounting in a startup, which is like, you have to work with what you have, right. And take the information that is available. That may mean that, like, you're going to come back to it, interrupt or make adjustments. And so I think in the beginning. Yeah. What can you start with? You can start with cash. You know what the cash is in your bank account and try to parse from there. So I think we kind of comically tried to look at the bank statement and see the credit card charges. Come again? And categorize each one as a monthly charge or an annual charge and figure out amortization. And then maybe 12 months already got to a place where we could get to an internally produced report because they had built their own billing system that gave us maybe more structurally the ability to answer those questions and get through a revenue close that may take seven to 10 days.
0:10:00.5 Erik Zhou: What you just share with me reminds me of an episode I did last year. We had the controller of OpenAI on the show and she was explaining how, I mean, she's like in house. So there was no concerns by her of using the tool and all the privacy stuff that, like other potential buyers are worried about. Anyway, they went to getting revenue like overnight, right. It was a free product and all of a sudden they started charging like $20 a user.
0:10:26.7 Erik Zhou: And like they had like 100 million users. Like let's just say 2, 3, 4% of the users are paying. And so, yeah, like no revenue. One month, next month, 4 million lines of credit cards. Yeah, 4 million lines on a CSV file for like credit card charges. And I'm not sure if that's... It's definitely a large data file. That's what she said. She would not share the exact details. But you know what she did? She wanted to reconcile that credit card statement with what she had in her GL. And she fed both sides into ChatGPT. Asked ChatGPT to write a SQL query to restructure the data in both sides so that they can be comparable and then put the new sets of data in there and ask ChatGPT to write a Python code so that you can reconcile the two. And she had like whatever, like JetBrains or something and some other engine to run Python to run the code and just did it.
0:11:31.1 Brad Silicani: That's amazing. Yeah, I was born too early for it.
0:11:35.2 Erik Zhou: Well, yeah, no, Dropbox was obviously like years ago, but I'm just saying.
0:11:38.6 Brad Silicani: Yeah, I wish. Now I'm being jealous here.
0:11:41.5 Erik Zhou: I thought it was so impressive, like just to think that Order to cash so quickly for such a large accelerated business to some extent.
0:11:49.0 Brad Silicani: Yeah. That is awesome. I think it speaks to like, the flexibility of being successful right at those early stages is just like finding new methods and approaches and working with what you have. And if you can do that, then you're going to find success on being able to navigate and push the company forward. If you can't and you get stuck and like, it has to be this way. And this is the the ideal process or outcome. You're going to go too slow and not be able to keep up with that business.
0:12:14.7 Erik Zhou: So one other thing that you mentioned was, okay, so you're in the org, you're now creating a bunch of entities in different countries in different locales. When did you get introduced to tax? Was that when you got introduced to tax, and started working on that at Dropbox?
0:12:31.2 Brad Silicani: Great question. So my first exposure and kind of what drove my eventual becoming the head of tax at Dropbox actually started back at the auto dates. So I was working on Oracle. Oracle is even then and definitely now like a complex global company. And I got assigned the audit team job of going to coordinate with the tax team. And I think many people found, would look at that job and be like, oh, this is the worst. I actually found it probably to be one of the most interesting things I worked on my career genuinely because I think what that taught me, my frame is like, how the world works. And I generally think that tax drives a lot of how the world works. And what I mean by that is I had no concept of what a legal entity was. I had no concept of why a company would establish a different legal entity, no concept of how income got attributed across the globe, no concept of the geopolitical considerations of how that all worked and the mechanics which fall into transfer pricing and all these other wonderful things. And just being able to get exposed to that.
0:13:29.4 Brad Silicani: I feel like it was really a light bulb moment for me on understanding why a business would make a decision about where they're going to place their people, why they're going to produce their products, how they're going to become profitable, why they would acquire a company and do it in a certain way. Yeah, I think really understanding that is like a serious light bulb moment for me on better understanding business context in general. And so I enjoyed that experience at Oracle, started poking around on that on the Dropbox side of things. And yeah, this was maybe 2014, 2015 at that point. Dropbox was always 18 months away from going public. And so we were constantly ready to pull the trigger there.
0:14:11.2 Brad Silicani: And we knew that an important activity for us to think about was our international tax structuring before we got to the IPO, primarily because of evaluation differences that happened pre and post IPO. So, yeah, I knew we had to take this project on and, yeah, ended up switching over to start our tax team and implement our international tax structure there. And I thought that was particularly interesting, again, on like, tying back to that theme that I learned at Oracle about just really understanding the considerations of not only the accounting and finance aspects, but just like, why is Ireland interested in offering this tax rate? Why does AmErika think about that? What are going to be the considerations when those governments come to look and think about different transactions? How should we think about other alternatives like Netherlands, etcetera. So that was really enjoyable experience.
0:14:52.5 Erik Zhou: Just to give some context to the audience as well on this okay, so you're 18 months... So we have a saying too. So where we're like two years away from being two years away.
0:15:00.7 Brad Silicani: Yeah, right.
0:15:01.8 Erik Zhou: Like always 18... Yeah. So you're 18 months away. Let's just say. That's what's the starting point where you guys decided, like, okay, like, we got to get this stuff going to make sure we have the right legal entity structure when we're a public company to kind of... Because at the end of the day, and I've heard this from many people, right. Tax is important because ultimately it does impact, like your bottom line significantly, especially as you become profitable, especially as you earn revenue in different jurisdictions with different rules. And so you take two companies, they could be in the same business, same revenue. If one company just spent the time they needed to invest in the right tax structure, they're just going to have a higher valuation because your bottom line is going to do it at the end of the day.
0:15:44.0 Brad Silicani: Yep.
0:15:44.3 Erik Zhou: And so like what was the timeline when you guys decided, like how long did you think it would take? Like, you know what I mean? Just trying to level set with the audience, how they should be thinking about if those are their aspirations as well.
0:16:04.0 Brad Silicani: Yeah, I mean project wise, I think it took about nine months to be able to get there. That was a fast nine months from knowing that we want to be prepared to enter that timeline. Yeah, I think the important considerations is just like you don't want to do it too early. If you do it too early before one, you become profitable or two, you have a transaction, what you're doing is giving up the generation of net operating losses for paying income taxes here in the US assuming that you're not profitable. So you don't want to do that too early. You don't want to do that too late, say like post an IPO, because then likely your value at a minimum is just like very publicly known. It's very clear. You can look at the stock price and see what the value versus private company valuations. And two, it's likely to be higher just by nature of waiting. And so for us, like we wanted to peg looking at this about 18 months before an IPO. Of course Dropbox didn't end up going public for about three years after that point for different reasons.
0:17:03.6 Brad Silicani: And so 18 months was the kind of timeline where I said, hey, we would feel comfortable one, being able to do this and then two, giving ourselves some distance between that transaction and a public offering event to have confidence in the valuation side of things.
0:17:17.8 Erik Zhou: Well, sorry, just so I understand too, and for the, what do you mean by the valuation, what's so important about the private company valuation that you would be using for some of these tax decisions versus like a public company valuation? Knowing that what you're saying is like, okay, public company valuation is higher, that's not the right time to do it. You want to do it maybe when it's lower. But why?
0:17:38.9 Brad Silicani: Yeah, so like to try to simplify what you're doing in these types of transactions, you're going to essentially sell a portion of your business to another affiliate or subsidiary there. And to sell it, you have to value it. To value it, you need to determine what that value is. And just by nature of private markets, value is more ambiguous. There's not literally the stock price ticker there. And so oftentimes those Private company valuations, at least back in that period, significantly lagged kind of what you were able to achieve on the public markets. And so being able to do that in a period where there wasn't a stock price that's going to draw a straight line on that value was helpful. And so that's really what you're thinking about there is like, hey, can I get this done at the lowest price possible to make that transfer, to make it the most cost effective and then taking that in consideration with that future public company valuation and yet the literal stock price that's going to be available on marketing that transaction.
0:18:38.0 Erik Zhou: And once you transfer that value, basically that's how you're able to kind of record revenue in a certain entity and then take advantage of the local tax rate there. Am I kind of like getting that correctly?
0:18:50.7 Brad Silicani: Yeah, you're right in the ballpark there. Yeah. So you come to an agreement about how you're going to pay for that and then at that point they say Irish entity or foreign legal entity there has the rights to then go sell your product internationally. And so you record revenue over there. And yeah you're off in the way.
0:19:08.9 Erik Zhou: Maybe just a round off, like just talking about your Dropbox experience. So now you guys are going out to IPO. Did you move on to even something else at Dropbox. That's what I recall from talking to you previously.
0:19:22.9 Brad Silicani: Spent about a year as the head of tax there, completed that international tax transaction. We were even close to the IPO at that point. And yeah, I think interest rates were starting to come off of zero. And we took a look around and I had actually, even though I was... Controller and head of tax is very common, like I was responsible for bank accounts. And so we had a few hundred million literally just sitting in a cash account because previously there are zero interest rates that was changing and so I wanted to take on optimizing that for Dropbox. So stepped over and became the treasurer there, taught myself or got an education on how to become a treasurer, which was exciting and fun and credit to our partners on JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, many others who spent hours on helping and answering lots of my questions. And yeah, I ended up being the treasurer there for about five or six years through IPO and I ended up managing about $2 billion in cash, which was a fun experience to again learn about a new area of the world which I hadn't had that much exposure to on interest rates and corporate debt and financing.
0:20:22.9 Brad Silicani: So that was another area of excitement for me and maybe putting a theme on, maybe my assignment was non traditional experience on the accounting side of things. Like my goal during that period was prepare myself as best as possible enough when I wanted to become a CFO and so I knew that if I wanted to do that, the best path was to be able to speak to every part of the finance work with expertise. And so I was working hard to ride out my experience in that way.
0:20:49.4 Erik Zhou: Wow, okay, so that begs the question, you are now not a CFO, but a COO. Still C level. That sounds great. In many orgs actually the CFO may even report to a COO. You're actually running all the parts of operations of the business. How did that come together for you? Like what drove you to this kind of role versus staying in finance and accounting and tax and treasury and all that stuff.
0:21:14.8 Brad Silicani: Yeah. As I was at maybe the later years there at Dropbox, I think my career goals changed from being a CFO to a COO. And it did that because I was like exposed and interested to even learning more and more about different parts of the business. I got great opportunity at Dropbox to work closely with the legal team, work closely with the HR team, managed our real estate and workplace services. So started to get some exposure on operations outside of finance. And in my vision wanted to jump to a startup, do that early stage chaos there again and be able to broaden and learn about different areas of the business. And so yeah, got connected with Michelle, who's the CEO here in Anrok. And what she had started working on just immediately resonated with me as a problem that I knew well, which was solving the risks around sales tax and VAT. Going back to that story on early stage revenue there at Dropbox, I had to deal with that from day one there, was a big problem and cost that business like $15 million in historical liabilities.
0:22:15.6 Brad Silicani: And we built our own tax engine. So I knew this was a problem that was out there to be solved. And it also gave me career wise, the opportunity to be able to explore and learn new areas. And so here it was maybe a secret advantage for me which was I could jump into Anrok and actually be our first salesperson and learn about sales and how that worked. And I could do that because I could speak to our buyers and resonate with the same background. So it gave me technical advantage on that sale to then while I did that, learn how to sell, learn how to market, learn how to take on these other aspects of the business which I previously hadn't had experience to.
0:22:51.9 Erik Zhou: I love that. One of the big reasons I joined Brex man, six years ago at this point, and one of the big draws actually for my team members to continue working out at Brex is that we're the first users of our own products, right. We use our own card, we use the spend management software, we're using our banking platform, etcetera for payments, etcetera. And at the end of the day, because we're customer number one, we're also like really credible folks within the company. The product org comes and asks us first, hey, does this make sense to you? Because if it doesn't make sense to us, like, why would it make sense to a vast range of different companies that we're trying to market this new product or feature to? So it's like a really meta job in that way for me. Like you have this tremendous, I would say pedigree all the way going to your family on accounting and finance too. So like I gotta imagine you got a pretty big voice at the company on how Anrok should be solving these particular tax and finance and accounting etcetera problems for your customers.
0:23:52.6 Brad Silicani: Yeah, team effort always. But from those early days until now, I was able to work closely with our engineering and product team on yeah, being that voice of the user experience, being that voice of the pain points and the problems to be solved to help us make sure we're really addressing that and solving that effectively. For our customers, it's something that I really enjoy about that process and maybe takes me back to what I was describing about the Dropbox experience in those first days of being able to just really step outside that accounting and finance world and speak with people across the business. In that Dropbox case, the engineers. And here at Anrok, we get engineers and explain to them like, what is the pain point? What is the problem? Is exciting, like a fun challenge to walk into every day.
0:24:33.9 Erik Zhou: Okay, so I have a different topic that I want to talk to you about. It's related to Anrok and actually Dropbox to some extent. When I think about tech evolution over the last, call it 20 years and especially I would say software solutions within the cloud, I think maybe when you started working and certainly with Salesforce like you're talking about Cloud 1.0 to some extent the first service providers that were putting software onto the cloud so that you can access it through the web and Internet interface versus like having on prem software. And so that in and of itself was great because you can now bring your work with you anywhere on a laptop. You can access things that you need, applications that you need to access at home to do work. And it just made productivity across many different companies much better, from that perspective. We're in the second wave of cloud and it's been going on for a few years, but you guys are in it, I think, you're taking advantage of cloud and providing software as a solution, but with consumer grade features and user interface versus... I love all the services that I have from called the Cloud 1.0 days.
0:25:49.9 Erik Zhou: They were built back then, so there's just a little bit clunkiness some of those, which I mean now those people are scrambling to try to keep up with all the new software solutions out there that are giving people a better user experience. I'm curious about your views and how you think about that being at Anrok and how you're serving your customers.
0:26:09.6 Brad Silicani: Yeah, I love that. And I would agree with the perspective there that I think the generation of cloud companies before this are all about just taking things from the data center and being able to access it. Right. And I agree that there's definitely elements of the new aid which is better about better UI and workflow improvements. For me, what really stands out even beyond that is providing software that actually not just has like a bias towards action, but just like allows you to go out, out of the box and solve that problem. And maybe an example that I give is thinking about when we installed NetSuite at Dropbox, we got our general ledger and put it in there and then next question is, okay, how are we going to put data in there? Okay, well now we need to go build our own integrations to be able to bring in bank statements or revenue. Okay, now the revenue is in there. How are we going to go about amortizing it or how are we going to like run appreciation? Okay, now we need to like bring in this other stool set or manually address moving these things forward.
0:27:07.3 Brad Silicani: And it really to me like lacked the active management of those transactions and their life cycle. Like sure, you could put the data in there and you could click a bunch of buttons to get it to where it needs to be, but when you're doing that at mass, at the scale of number of transactions that a business needs to operate in, you're not really automating what is happening there. I think the approach that we're taking here at Anrok and I think there are other companies and other spaces that are taking this approach as well, is think about the entire problem that you need to solve here, which for finance folks is moving a transaction through that process. And how can we ensure that the data that you need is all included within this platform and that the transaction can actively move through that process as efficiently as possible with the right configurations, as little touch as possible. So going from a place where for our industry, like a legacy player, where you might get a tax calculation but then need to go work with your accounting firm to figure out where the next place you needed to register for or get that return filed, Interact can come to the market and provide a solution that gives you visibility from when and where all the way through to execution in one single package.
0:28:16.1 Brad Silicani: And I think that is this next generation of software. I think you see that come with other companies that are within the AI space as well of trying to take large pieces of data. You give in that OpenAI example, which comes to mind there. And how do we actively move from not just ingesting data to making it usable and processable and getting to our outcome if we take that back to the core of what we are trying to do on the accounting side of things, we're trying to sell the customers and bring the cash in and then we're trying to buy things and send cash out. So how do we make sure that those functions are as efficient as possible and provide an experience to somebody who's buying your software that doesn't require them to buy a bunch of other tools along with it, doesn't require them to have a bunch of professional services or manual processing around that. And yeah, we're a Brex user. I think you guys take on that philosophy as well.
0:29:07.5 Erik Zhou: I love how you're describing the goal which is like through your software, even more can be done as a service provider, we can be doing more for you to improve your quality of life as a customer, etcetera. I'm curious since we did touch upon AI a bit, what is your view on like the use of AI, whether it's in your software or within the operations of your business? How are you guys thinking about the technology yourselves?
0:29:36.4 Brad Silicani: Yeah, I think it's a super important area for all businesses. If I take that to like Anrok level. For us, the core problem that we're solving is a deterministic one. So there is a absolutely correct answer to what we need to do do to follow the laws and support our businesses on executing. That doesn't for today's AI end up being a great use case for going through and handling maybe that core process of executing the job to be done. The place where AI really fits in supporting I think Anrok and General's other businesses is how do we make our operations more efficient and how can we make sure that as we go to execute on the accounting side of things, as we go to execute on support, as we go to execute on customer success or sales, that we are leveraging AI to make sure that we can yeah, see large bodies of data and get the right outputs and insight, that we can see the patterns of language that we're using in our communication with customers and surface the right insights to them. And so we're super focused in on how to and today using that piece of AI to be able to help support those functions.
0:30:41.0 Brad Silicani: And yeah, that's I think a super important place for all businesses to think about because if we can take on many of those examples of how we can address doing our jobs faster and being able to see better insights, we can reduce the risk for our businesses and be able to spend more time probably doing other things that we love doing.
0:31:01.7 Erik Zhou: How many people are at Anrok today?
0:31:04.1 Brad Silicani: Yeah, we're 75 today.
0:31:06.1 Erik Zhou: It's like the perfect size right now where you guys are still building out a lot of processes. I'm assuming you can correct me. Of course, but you guys are nimble. You can create new processes. You can consider the use of AI for your kind of foundational operational processes to build off of versus you know, if you had started the company or if you're already been, if you're already at 500 people or a thousand people, it is just a little bit more difficult to steer this bigger ship, so to speak.
0:31:38.6 Announcer: I agree. And yeah, I've seen that at Dropbox on the large side of things, which made you want to come to these earlier stages. For me, what's really exciting about our stages, like we know our business pretty well and we're able to hire now experts within functions of our business who can then dive deep on being able to solve that problem. So it's a super exciting time. And yeah, I think that has been the places where we've been able to implement a lot of these exciting solutions is you bring in the person internally who has the technical, functional expertise of the job to be done, pair them with this modern set of tools there, and they can go further and faster than they had ever previously, which is super exciting to see.
0:32:16.2 Erik Zhou: Maybe last question, what are your plans for this new year in 2025?
0:32:20.6 Brad Silicani: Well, for me personally, I'll answer that side first. Yeah, got into running in the last year, so going to work on my first half marathon on marathon during this year, which is pretty exciting and that's awesome, yeah. So I'm excited about that. Once the rain goes away. Yeah. And on the business side of things, yeah, for, for us, it's all about growing really, really quickly here, so continuing to expand the team, make sure that we can get out there and support every business that needs to solve this risk. That means being able to expand the types of customers that we support and being able to provide them better and better tooling to be able to do that. So we're super excited about that and we'll have some fun announcements coming up here in the coming month or two.
0:33:00.5 Erik Zhou: Yeah, I got to say, sales tax is one of those things where, yeah, there's these exceptions and then these things, but like, if you start selling to more customers in more states and you don't keep track of it all and you know, it'll creep up on you when you start to expand quickly and yeah, it becomes a pretty, it can be pretty troublesome at the end of the day.
0:33:17.4 Brad Silicani: Yeah. And I really love sales tax. Like my plug here for this issue is like, it probably isn't an issue that is more financially consequential to your business that is within your control as a finance person. Like, if you think about the problems that are out there, there are very few for which on the sales tax side, 8% of revenue or VAT, 20% of revenue that you have complete control over being able to solve. And so I love that we're able to bring that solution for our customers and be able to help them bring that blend of, again, passing that cost on to their customers so that they're not taking that hit to their bottom line and cash flow. So been good in that regard.
0:33:56.4 Erik Zhou: I mean, at the end of the day, I'm still a finance practitioner. I think you are as well in your role still. And yeah, I just want to make sure I'm managing the finances of the company appropriately in a risk adjusted, risk mitigated way, so to speak, and you can't get away from this, so it's definitely important. All right, Brad. We always end our show with a little section called Finance Leaders are fun too. So I'm just curious if you have any, like, accounting debacles or finance debacles or maybe tax jokes, I don't know, like, if you can share with the audience.
0:34:28.8 Brad Silicani: Yeah, I'm light on the jokes, but maybe my best accounting debacle or worst accounting debacle, I was getting married. I was at Dropbox, and we had turned over our payroll portion, so we had in a contractor. The team Overall was about 20 people, so they were being managed by somebody else on the team at that time. I got married, went on my honeymoon, and when I came back on Monday, I walked into the company and see the company team just, like, seriously on the phone and working on their computers and kind of calmly come back after being away on the honeymoon for two weeks. What's going on? What's happening here? And they let me know that the contractor had paid about 20 people at their company their entire salary in one payroll cycle. And we had to unwind and deal with that. So decently financially problematic there and definitely operationally problematic. It was like this fast switch from highlight of my life getting married and being on the honeymoon to then coming back and having to deal with that one. So that was pretty bad debacle.
0:35:26.3 Erik Zhou: Oh, that sounds like a nightmare. Oh, my God. And then there's these different, like, payroll and labor laws in different states that it's... You can't really claw back. That's... Oh, man.
0:35:36.2 Brad Silicani: Yeah. Oh, exactly. It was a whole mess. But, yeah, we worked through it. But that one definitely stands out as a big debacle.
0:35:45.2 Erik Zhou: My heart's wrenching.
0:35:46.1 Brad Silicani: And to me, it also, like, anytime you're dealing with paying people, that's the most important thing. So you don't want to mess things up for employees. So that one hurt extra bad in terms of...
0:35:55.6 Erik Zhou: Yeah, like, maybe one of them. Like, I don't know how much these people were paid, but, like, all of a sudden they see their direct deposit. Like, whoa.
0:36:02.3 Brad Silicani: Yeah. No, there was. There were some nice payments in there.
0:36:07.7 Erik Zhou: Oh, man. Okay. Well, Brad, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a pleasure having you. I love your experience and talking about it. So thank you.
0:36:16.9 Brad Silicani: Yeah, thanks again and take care.
0:36:19.9 Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to Controllers Classified presented by Brex. Brex is an AI powered spend platform with global corporate cards, expense management, we reimbursements and travel. Visit brex.com and follow Brex on Social to see how they can take your accounting game and your company to new heights.