When John Rettig joined Bill back in 2014, the company had just $13 million in revenue and a modest employee base. What drew him in, he tells us, was the combination of people, culture, and a product that placed finance operations at the center of its design. It marked the first time in his career that he’d worked this closely with a finance-focused technology platform.

At the time, Rettig expected a 10x growth opportunity—comparable to the trajectory he’d experienced at a previous company. “It turns out, it’s 100x,” he tells us. Over the last decade, Bill has grown to 2,500 employees and serves 500,000 customers through a network of 7 million members. It now processes $300 billion in annual payment volume and generates $1.5 billion in revenue.

Much of that growth, Rettig explains, has come from addressing challenges faced by small and midsize businesses. Early on, the company focused on modernizing manual, paper-based financial processes. As a result, it now supports areas such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, corporate cards, and cash flow management.

For many of these businesses, Bill has become deeply integrated into their daily operations. “We become the center of their financial operations,” Rettig says of the company’s role with customers. His focus remains on scaling impact across what he calls the “Fortune 5 million”—millions of smaller businesses that operate without the deep finance infrastructure of larger enterprises, but still face the same need for speed, visibility, and control.

During his decade at Google, Tim Ritters worked at the intersection of product and finance, helping to launch financial systems in collaboration with engineering, marketing, and product teams. The role gave him early exposure to cross-functional work and large-scale data environments. “Day one, you’re working cross-functionally,” Ritters tells us. He adds that this mindset became foundational to his approach going forward.

When Ritters joined Gong in 2019, he says the company had already begun challenging traditional approaches to customer data. “We asked a really interesting question… what could we do if we gathered the 99% of information about your customer that was not in a traditional CRM?” Ritters explains. According to him, that original question continues to shape Gong’s mission today.

Ritters tells us that Gong’s platform has since scaled to analyze more than 3.5 billion customer interactions. He says the company now serves approximately 4,700 businesses globally, including organizations such as Google, LinkedIn, Canva, and Anthropic. The platform, Ritters notes, helps customers extract insights from a broader set of data sources—including conversations, emails, and documents—that may not be captured in traditional CRM systems.

Ritters believes that AI adoption has made Gong’s value proposition more tangible to prospective buyers. “When [they] peel back the onion… they start seeing some of the incredible sort of results,” he says. According to Ritters, some customers have reported “halving of deal cycle times” using the platform.

All of Gong’s growth to date has been organic, Ritters tells us, and he views the company’s trajectory as part of a broader evolution in how organizations approach customer intelligence. “The sweet spot we’re in right now,” he says, “is helping companies make smart business decisions.”

It’s no secret CFOs frequently exit soon after a major acquisition—especially when a larger enterprise takes the reins. But Rene Ho stayed.

Ho had been CFO of Taulia, a working capital fintech, when it was still an independent company. After helping lead the firm through its acquisition by SAP, he chose to stay on, guiding the company through integration while preserving what made Taulia unique.

It’s a reality Ho doesn’t resist—instead, he works to make those connections scalable. That mindset reflects a broader shift under his leadership. “We’re also embedding our technology more and more into the SAP technology,” Ho tells us, noting that when he joined, the two platforms were sold separately. Now, integration enables “more of a single sale,” smoothing the go-to-market motion.

While SAP Taulia continues to align its tech stack, one area remains purposefully independent: the financing operations. “We don’t use our balance sheet to finance the invoices,” Ho says. Instead, more than 30 financial institutions and non-bank entities fund those transactions.