Sales tax originated after the Great Depression for local governments to be able to meet their budget deficits.

Yet they're stuck in this world where all of our sales tax regimes are very much built for the retail world.

It makes no sense.

Welcome to the PEO. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Nan Capital.

Today's episode is with Michelle Valentine, co-founder and CEO of ANRoc, a sales tax

platform built for software companies. Our fun conversation gets into the history and evolution of sales

tax tax, plus tips and tricks on avoiding tax headaches for scaling software companies.

Something very simple to do as you're setting up your billing and payment systems. Collect

the customer address. Michelle takes us inside the seed round she raised in 48 hours.

Your vision is important, but how you package yourself with that vision is even more important,

where you're really the reason why investors are betting on you in the early days.

We explore how Anrock cut its first customers.

You know you've hit a pain point when you're in stealth and you're talking to real businesses

about something pretty important like tax compliance and they're like, we've looked at solutions

on the market. They don't work. I'm willing to take a bet on you. Anrock raised a $30 million

series B in the string of 2024 and we talk early lessons on scaling a sales team.

If you're doing enterprise sales, I'd recommend hiring two AEs at the same time.

We hired folks with two very different backgrounds and not knowing which one would work out.

Michelle spent a few years in VC before Anrock, and we wrap up talking building and investing in AI.

Our human intuition makes it difficult to think in those exponentials. We often don't see things

like that in our lifetime. You want to look at markets where there's rising tide and the size

of the pie is growing. And then you also want to look at the speed at which you can win the size of the pie.

...