Internet Backyard

Congratulations @ianwcrosby on raising $10M USD in seed funding for Synthetic to build “the Shopify for software companies,” starting with fully autonomous accounting! Last week, Ian and I chatted about his serial entrepreneurial and investing journey leading to today. We went as far back as when he was 19 studying finance and economics at UBC, when he got his first job as a bookkeeper because it was his only shot at working for a video game company. It was there that he learned programming because he wanted to spend more time testing games than bookkeeping. After graduating, he worked as a consultant at Bain & Company but left after two years because he felt it didn't match the pace that he wanted to operate at and that entrepreneurship might be the only path. What he took with him was a knack for uncovering what would make a business more successful and recognizing teams with a high bar of competence. He would go on to build Bench even though tech legend Joel Spolsky, who co-founded Stack Overflow and Trello, kept telling him it was doomed when the startup got into the Techstars accelerator. Bench would become the largest bookkeeping service in the world for small businesses, evolve into banking, cards, payroll, and taxes, and raise over $100 million. After over a decade at Bench, Ian accepted Shopify’s offer to run its banking division after stepping down from the board. At the time, Bench had just raised a Series C, turned down a “highly lucrative” acquisition offer, and had “budding partnerships” with Shopify and other major companies. Yet some board members wanted to take the company in a different direction with a new CEO, which, as Ian anticipated, would prove to be the wrong call. The company would later shut down without notice and only resume operations after an acquisition saved it. By then, Ian had left Shopify to build Teal: APIs and tools that let companies build accounting offerings. Working at Shopify gave him more exposure to a problem no one had solved yet: how companies could integrate accounting into their products—like banking and lending—and draw insights from them. Less than a year and a half after launching, Teal was acquired by Mercury. Ian then joined Mercury as its head of accounting products. It was after that position wrapped up that he ended up in Europe, where he thought of the idea for Synthetic after experimenting with ElevenLabs and finding himself prototyping instead of sightseeing. In this piece and podcast ep, Ian and I talk about how Synthetic will work as a fully autonomous accounting platform and why his next priority is turning it into “the Shopify for software companies"—where it would handle their websites, incorporation, bank accounts, payments, accounting, and everything else in between. We also talk about how “winning in AI now means winning the reliability race,” Synthetic's approach to quality control, and his advice for other early stage startups. earlystagejournal.com/p/synthetic-ra…