Jessica McKellar (Pilot) - Serial Co-founders

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jessica McKellar is the founder and CTO of Pilot, an accounting firm powered by software that has raised more than $160 million in venture capital funding. She also founded Zulip, a group collaboration tool that was acquired by Dropbox in 2014, and Ksplice, which was acquired by Oracle. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Emily Ma, McKellar discusses her 15-year journey founding three startups with her co-founders, as well as her passion for creating opportunities for the previously incarcerated.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.
0:13.0	Hello everyone, my name is Emily Ma and I'd like to welcome you to the Entrepreneur Thought Leaders series
0:19.0	presented by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which is the Entrepreneur Thought Leader series presented by the Stanford Technology Ventures
0:20.9	Program, which is the Entrepreneurial Center in Stanford School of Engineering. Also, sponsored
0:27.1	by Basis, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. Today, I am thrilled to welcome
0:32.7	Jessica McKellar to E.TL. Jessica McKellar is the founder and CTO of Pilot.com, an accounting firm powered by
0:40.2	software that has raised more than 160 million in venture capital. She earned her bachelor's and
0:46.1	master's degree in computer science from MIT, and prior to pilot, she was on the founding teams
0:51.5	of two other startups, Case Splice and Zulip. She also teaches Python at
0:56.4	California San Quentin State Prison. And through that experience, she became passionate about
1:01.0	building bridges between the tech industry and individuals impacted by the prison system.
1:05.9	So that's definitely something we're going to talk about. Welcome, Jessica. Let's start by maybe an introduction
1:12.1	to everyone of what pilot.com is and what kind of users it serves for small businesses and startups.
1:18.9	Let's start with that. Sure. Pilots how I retire. That's the high level. That's a note. Yeah, so Pilot is
1:26.6	basically an accounting firm, but one that works in a very special way.
1:31.3	Because a lot of the work that we do behind the scenes to deliver accounting services, bookkeeping, tax, CFO services, other advisory support, a lot of that work happens in software, which is good for us, but it's
1:46.5	actually good for the customer as well because it means we can deliver a higher quality,
1:51.1	more consistent experience. And we can also do things with data that nobody else can do to
1:55.9	reflect kind of insights back to the customer in a way that nobody else can. So we've built a business around bringing small businesses into the 21st century
2:05.3	with their finance and accounting needs,
	...

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