Delighting Customers One Filing at a Time
Here at XYZ, we are excited about the next wave of automation that LLMs will bring to tech-enabled services. Despite new models launching every week on Twitter, most industries haven’t actually implemented AI or LLMs yet. Integrating new technologies into archaic industries requires deep sector-specific expertise. Teams who know their customers inside and out have the ability to go far faster. So when we first heard that Nick Abouzeid and his cofounder Kyle Christenson had been working on an idea to make filing your corporate and personal tax returns delightful, we jumped at the chance to partner with them.
Tax prep firms today are stuck in the past, reliant on archaic tools and manpower to handle more clients and more complexity. Delighting customers isn’t the goal, but rather maximizing profits for the firm’s owners. It’s easy to let responsiveness, forward-thinking and proactive support, and an attention to detail fall by the wayside when the individuals responsible for implementing change are nearing the end of their careers and wealth from decades of business.
Enter, Rivet, a new kind of tax prep firm designed to make tax season less taxing. Nick and Kyle decided to compete with these firms, because It’s easier to delight customers than try to convince stodgy firms that they should change. Nick’s learned the ins and outs of taxes at AngelList, MainStreet, and investing at Shrug Capital. While leading two of the growth teams at Ramp, Nick riffed with his former MainStreet colleague Kyle about not just doing people’s taxes, but redesigning the entire experience with an emphasis on both saving their clients time, but also minimizing their tax liability. Kyle’s entire career has centered around taxes -- he spent six years at the IRS as an auditor and handled the more complex R&D credit claims during his time at MainStreet. They knew they could build something better.
Nick and Kyle have been maniacally focused on productizing their deep expertise, serving a small set of customers doing both their personal and corporate tax filings. When you couple Kyle’s industry knowledge with the growth tactics that made Ramp the fastest-growing startup of all time, you get an exceptional customer experience with an unfair distribution advantage. And likely more fun marketing stunts like the Shrug Calendar or Ramp’s Time Sq tweet billboards.
Today, we couldn’t be more excited to announce that we are leading Rivet’s preseed alongside 40+ executives from Ramp, Newfront, Deel, & more.
Looking for your next role? They’re hiring a founding engineer to help unify this massive (and ever-growing) set of unstructured client data. Apply here.
