What is Pilot's bookkeeping labor model - in-house vs. outsourced and domestic vs. international?

So they had a team of people who were extremely skilled but they weren't typically former bookkeepers. They came from all kinds of different jobs, but they were really good and very smart. Most of them were in Nashville, just for the cheaper cost. We had a small cohort of them in San Francisco who were the original hires that were really scaling out the methodology. We were trying to turn bookkeeping into something that became a little bit more of just a playbook that you follow, and didn't require somebody who was quite as smart to do it. So the folks in San Francisco were really, really incredible and the team in Nashville were all very diligent and good, but less of a huge spike there.

Overall, it worked out pretty well. But that team was still making pretty good money. It's a different kind of a person than you normally see in a fancy tech startup. Their other opportunities were not working for San Francisco tech startups, those folks, but it was not anywhere near a low skilled or unskilled job. I’d imagine they were all still making pretty good money.

Most of the challenges we faced were more just around the, “We are building the product that they're using to do books,” and culturally, they needed more of, "Tell me what to do and I'll do it," kind of product experience than our San Francisco team, who were more, "Build me the power tool. Give me the gun that you can trust me not to shoot myself with." 

We had to solve that problem, but that was kind of a product development problem more than anything else. There were interesting problems here around “How does somebody who doesn't know anything about the customer do their books?” That’s because to scale bookkeeping, you do need to be able to solve that problem.