Learn to love accounting

Before he co-founded Wave , Kirk Simpson ran an outdoor webcasting company. Keeping track of invoices, taxes, payroll and accounting was a major pain, but he couldn’t find any programs to help. “If my sister wasn’t a CPA, I would have been in a whole bunch of trouble,” he says. He figured there must be a better way, so in 2010 he and co-founder James Lochrie, CTO at a tax prep company, created Wave to help service-based small business owners do what they love by automating what they didn’t.

Simpson knew his audience—entrepreneurs or startups with no more than 10 employees—and he knew their pain. With Wave, he and the team created software to run their business and offer the traditional banking needs in one seamless platform. The bet has paid off. Today, Wave serves over four million customers, generates $50 million a year in revenue and is growing fast, with 235 employees based in Toronto’s east end. “There’s an opportunity to build a global company in this sector from Canada,” Simpson says. With more people working for themselves these days, Wave’s cloud-based software will always be needed, and it will evolve with the capabilities of technology.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are big priorities—Simpson thinks the billions of financial transaction data points Wave collects can be used to automate accounting even further. And introducing more financial services, all embedded into the core software, is on the horizon as well. “We want to be the one-stop-shop for small businesses, a place where they can run their entire financial lives,” Simpson says. “It’s about simplifying their life and speeding up their cash flow.”