Key points
- Waseem Daher argues a company's mission basically doesn't matter, because day-to-day happiness comes from the people you work with.
- Pilot's 2017 bet that computers would do 99% of accounting work is now consensus, with LLMs pushing automation from 70-80% to 95-99%.
- Daher advises founders to take money off the table at Series B or C so they can swing for the fences.
Pilot's CEO says passion follows the work, not the mission
Waseem Daher has built three companies and argues the mission barely matters. Ksplice, Zulip and Pilot each came from a problem the founders had themselves, and what sustained him was the people and the daily work. Pilot's bet that software would do nearly all the accounting work was contrarian in 2017 and consensus now. The hard part is surviving the years after the idea works.
Takeaways
- Mission matters less than the team. Daher says daily happiness rarely comes from the mission, and on bad days curing cancer does not help. He was never passionate about the Linux kernel, group chat or accounting. Passion is the output of where you spend your time.
- Pilot bet software would do the work. The 2017 thesis that services would become tech companies was contrarian then and consensus now. Doing 70 or 80 percent of the work with software would already be valuable, and LLMs pushed it toward 95 or 99.
- The game never ends, so enjoy the days. Each milestone, from a Series A to an IPO, is replaced by the next one. If the day-to-day stays bad it grinds you down and you quit, so Daher asks whether he is learning, stretched and working with people he likes.
- Take money off the table at Series B. When founders reach Series B or C and can sell some stock, Daher says they should. The cushion lets them swing for the fences, and they need to be at peace with the company failing.
- Founders should stay world-class in the weeds. Daher warns against delegating everything to VPs and losing contact with reality. Agarwal says a founder should be world-class at their function and able to step into finance, legal, HR, marketing or sales if that person left.
- AI has lowered the barrier to entry. Daher says starting a company is easier than ever because you can vibe-code a prototype and hand it to someone to try. The target always moves, so mastering one thing brings a new challenge.
The path through Ksplice, Zulip and Pilot
- Ksplice updated running Linux systems without rebooting. It began as cofounder Jeff Arnold's MIT master's thesis, born of the pain of administering servers as a student, and the technology still sits inside Oracle's Linux offering.
- Zulip brought robust group chat to businesses before Slack, drawing on MIT's 1980s Zephyr tool the Ksplice team used internally. Dropbox acquired it, and Daher spent two years there learning what world-class design, sales and marketing look like.
- Pilot applies the tech-enabled services idea to accounting and tax for small businesses, a market Daher calls functionally infinite. It has run for nine years, and brand, scale and install base help against steady competition.