#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Sal Abdulla, Founder & CEO, Nixsheets
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Building New Ways to Simplify Accounting Processes
Nixsheets is an innovative workflow and automation platform for accounting teams. By combining several software categories, Nixsheets simplifies accounting and reduces manual work. We spoke with Founder and CEO Sal Abdulla about how his varied background in finance and politics led him to launch his own company, the gap Nixsheets fills in the current market, the burdens of a state-by-state patchwork of privacy laws, and how policymakers can help facilitate (or at least not frustrate) critical interoperability.
Tell us about your background. What inspired you to create Nixsheets?
I have a pretty unorthodox career background for someone working in finance, including studying philosophy and religion, completing the fire academy to become a volunteer firefighter, and coming to DC to work in politics. But I eventually realized that the business world was the right place for me. Growing up, I worked in my dad's grocery store in our small California town so I was always oriented towards business as a kid, even though I lost sight of that true passion for a time.
During my college years, I had the opportunity to work overseas at two different startups that grew to significant scale. The first was an oil and gas drilling operation where I was tasked with managing all things finance and administration. I then became deputy CFO of an overseas PaidTV company that was just launching. These roles have afforded me great experience building teams and financial infrastructure for companies at an early stage but in different industries. I had to leave the country I was working in due to political instability, and after I moved back to DC, I knew I still wanted to get back into emerging businesses, but landed at a public affairs software company Quorum where I built out their financial and operations teams and eventually became VP of Finance.
That brings me to Nixsheets. All that experience was preparation to go out on my own. I always valued independence and autonomy, but felt like an entrepreneur without an idea. Then I saw a compelling problem at these previous startups: accounting in the middle market is broken. If you're a small company, QuickBooks is very beneficial. If you're a big company, you can get an expensive, custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. But for mid market companies with between 50 to 500 employees, there is significant complexity in their accounting and operations, without the resources to mitigate that. I knew what product needed to be built, so I made the jump.
What is the work you all are doing at Nixsheets?
With products currently in the market, at the center of a company’s tech stack is core accounting software, called the general ledger. Around that core, there are a bunch of different modules that drive specific functions like manufacturing, HR, or billing. Nixsheets is bridging gaps between all that tech.
In the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of point solutions that do specific jobs really well: payroll, accounts payable, expenses, payments, and so on. All of these tools integrate into QuickBooks, so for the first time ever, small and medium sized businesses can cobble together a makeshift enterprise resource planning (ERP) system using off-the-shelf tools that are really good at the one thing that they do. Accountants are spending 90% of their time on these point solutions, and they're only really using accounting software at the end of the month to close the books and bring the entire picture together. This new “distributed ERP” world, however, is not all positive. Several problems still exist, including: siloed, non-uniform data (each system records data in its own way), the need to maintain excel spreadsheets for details that can’t be captured in the accounting system, etc. And there are still automation gaps because transaction data often needs to be manipulated in a way that is unique to the business. You may need to manipulate the data two or three times in Excel before it's ready to go to QuickBooks. I think the best way to think of accounting today is a “partially automated assembly line.” Companies that don't have big ERP systems with great automation are dealing with all of these problems. What we've built is a tool that automates all of your accounting by wrapping around your entire finance and operations tech stack.
What policy or regulatory issues are on the horizon for Nixsheets?
Typically, we don't run into issues with regulations this early—Nixsheets is at the minimum viable product stage. Usually, those regulations will kick in when a company’s complexity increases. For now, we are heads down, trying to build our product.
But from my prior experience, I do know what we will be on the lookout for. For example, with data privacy we are seeing a huge proliferation of laws that differ from state to state. Even a very simple question—like what meets the definition of personally identifiable information (which creates the footprint of liability)—could have multiple answers depending on the state. Even at companies trying to do their best and be very ethical, they can struggle to untangle this complexity. What we’re seeing are penalties for people simply not understanding the law. In some capacity, you have to be an attorney to understand everything. Another practical implication of all of this complexity is that insurance premiums have skyrocketed for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Insurance companies themselves have a hard time measuring the risk exposure as it pertains to their cyber and data security. For that reason, SaaS companies have become very expensive to insure. I think premiums have actually tripled in the past two years.
How important is interoperability to building companies like Nixsheets? What would it mean to you, for example, if the law changed and reimplementing an application programming interface (API) created copyright infringement liability?
Nixsheets would not exist if that were the case. We would not be able to build anything and I wouldn't even try getting this off the ground. It would wind back the clock 20 years in terms of the progress that's been made. If that were the law, moats would essentially be placed around the existing players.
Without QuickBooks and its API, I would have to build an accounting platform from the ground up and then convince people to use my accounting platform, which would be impossible because no one would want to integrate with it (the value in a platform is the number of integrations that it has–it’s great for established companies, but a big barrier to entry for innovate startups.). The true value of Quickbooks lies in the fact that you can connect it with all these other tools in the Intuit app store and automate your accounting that way. The last 10 or 15 years has been about moving on-premises software into the cloud. The main benefit of that is the integration and the ability to move between different platforms. In changing interoperability, you might as well just unwind the last 20 years of moving into the cloud. Everybody would get back on to on-premises software where they download their software onto desktops and laptops, losing the main benefit of moving to the cloud: being able to connect everything.
What are your goals for Nixsheets moving forward?
My goal is to solve the issues Nixsheets is built to address and get to serious scale. The hardest part is that I have a vision of where the product could be and I know where the product is now. The question is how to be successful in the interim in order to get to my long-term vision. I can't sell a product today based on my long-term vision, I have to sell on the value that I provide now. It's navigating and balancing the long-term versus what I need to do today in order to succeed. I would also love to see this company IPO one day and prosper.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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