Digits Hosts Digital CPA 2021 Kick-off

Celebrate with Digits

The AICPA invited Digits to be part of its 10th-annual Digital CPA conference in Nashville next month, and to help kick it off, we’re excited to announce http://digits.events!

Join us at The Dream Hotel, just a couple blocks away from the conference, for a kick-off event to remember.

We’ll have one of our favorite DJs, along with gourmet bites, great drinks, and a few fun surprises on hand! Learn more about the event here

  • Bring your appetite and your sense of wonder!
  • When: December 5th, 7pm – 10pm
  • Where: The Dream Hotel, Nashville, TN
  • How: RSVP at http://digits.events

Building Digits: Our New Engineering Blog

Peek behind the curtain as we build the financial engine of tomorrow.

Our recent launch of Digits Search represented the culmination of over 30 human-years of software engineering work, from a team with hundreds of years of combined experience. All to make a financial search box… work.

Of course, there’s a lot going on under the covers.

From stateless request authentication to streaming data processing pipelines to search index generation and efficient view serving, the Digits engineering team continues to push the bounds on how modern, secure, highly-scalable, and highly-available SaaS products are built, tested, and (continuously) deployed.

Today, we’re excited to launch Building Digits, an engineering blog dedicated to sharing the details behind what we’ve built, how it works, and the tips and techniques we’ve learned along the way.

Deep Learning, live, in production

And to kick things off, what better topic than machine learning? While seemingly every startup pitch now mentions AI and ML, the harsh truth today remains that very few companies run deep-learning models live, in production, and that efficiently training, deploying, and tuning these models is still quite challenging.

At Digits, we’re firm believers in the benefits of continuous deployment across our entire stack, and we’ve invested heavily in ML infrastructure to address those challenges and support these workflows.

For a peek under the covers of how we process and classify financial transactions, and an introduction to how we train and deploy transformer models to production, check out Training and Deploying State of the Art Transformer Models at Digits.

A novel playground for innovators

Digits stands at the unique intersection of big data, continuous development, and consumer-grade design—focused by our team’s shared obsession to modernize business finance.

From designing Ferraris, to building the origins of Twitter Mobile, to authoring Building Machine Learning Pipelines, our team brings a diverse array of backgrounds and unique skillsets to tackle the most impactful problems in this space.

If you have a passion for hard problems, deep technology, and human-centered design, we would love your help shaping the future of business finance.

Come build with us 🙂 We’re hiring!

Digits Search: A finance tool so powerful, you'll think we stole it from the future

Today’s finance software falls far short of what business leaders need—intelligent, powerful analysis and instant answers.

No longer.

We’re excited to introduce Digits Search, a brand new way to know and understand your business.

Digits Search was born from the frustrations we experienced building and growing our first companies. But the discomfort went beyond just frustration—to pain and constant uncertainty. After speaking with hundreds of business owners, we realized we weren’t alone.

For a growing business, nothing is more important than knowing the numbers.

Before now, even with the best software and teams of accountants and analysts, entrepreneurs couldn’t get the answers they were looking for without sending out requests and twiddling their thumbs. They might be waiting hours or days until their books were updated, those reports were run, the figures exported, and finally shared. Just imagine if something came up over the weekend.

Finance, meet search.

For 99% of businesses out there, the flow of financial information is slow and fragmented. Needed receipts are strewn about like Legos on the living room floor—mountains of financial figures buried under emails, Slack threads, and random account statements.

It’s time someone applied some order to the madness. We realized that the unassuming, familiar search bar could be the gateway to financial super-intelligence.

Digits Search changes the game.

Imagine trying to find something on the Internet without a search bar… what a nightmare. Now, imagine getting instant intel on all of your company’s finances with just a few keystrokes, immediately saving you both time and money.

Digits Search unlocks answers to all of your questions in one powerful, yet easy-to-use tool. And the best part is, you don’t have to ask anyone for help! Your finances are now right at your fingertips, instantly.

The future of finance is instant and informed.

Put Digits Search under your company’s hood in just a few clicks, and you’re in the driver’s seat. One-click suggestions draw your attention to what matters most, and anything you’re curious about is just a few keystrokes away.

Digits sits on top of your existing accounting software and your existing accountant’s work. You change nothing.

Digits gives you a living, learning, hyper-aware model of your business, and it never stops working. Digits gets smarter and more accurate with every new transaction or account change and automatically learns what drives your business forward.

Oceans of financial data? No problem.

Once activated, Digits starts running machine-learning algorithms that absorb your transactions and perform millions of calculations to form a living model of your finances, working for you 24/7.

Digits seamlessly blends historical data from QuickBooks with live, real-time transaction streams from your banks, corporate cards, and more, giving you a complete picture of your business.

Financial clarity is a beautiful thing.

Gone are the days of dense spreadsheets and black & white reports. We’ve designed Digits Search from the ground up to make your company’s finances visually immersive, easy to understand, intuitive, even dare we say… beautiful?

With just a click, instant search results give way to deep-dive insights and analysis, all performed automatically on your behalf. Vendors, customers, budget categories, and more dance at your fingertips, with plenty of helpful graphs and nary a pivot table in sight.

Get Digits Search today, for free.

The power to know how your company’s money flows, gets invested, and is spent is priceless… but today it’s free.

We want every small-business owner and startup founder to experience the power of Digits Search, and you can get started today, for free, in just a few clicks. Digits Search integrates seamlessly with your existing accounting software and your existing finance workflows, with no configuration or manual data wrangling required.

Advanced features and upgraded pricing plans are coming soon, but the core features of Digits Search will always be free.

Get Digits Search

We’re just getting started.

It’s simple. We wanted better financial tools to run our own company, but we wanted to build them for everyone.

Our goal with Digits is to usher in a paradigm-shift in business finance, and we couldn’t be more honored to work with the incredible band of engineers, data scientists, product designers, and so many other talented folks that form the Digits team.

They have poured their hearts and souls into this launch, and we have quite a bit more we’re cooking up behind the scenes. Search is where we start. Just wait ’til you see what’s next.

We can’t wait to hear what you think,

Wayne Chang

co-founder

Jeff Seibert

co-founder

Digits Wins Awards for Real-time Finance

The past year has been quite a journey for us all. Thinking back to just over a year ago, when we announced our Series A, feels like a distant memory of an antique land… We sincerely hope that you’ve stayed safe and healthy during this time.

Through the travails, uncertainty, and drama of 2020, we have done our best to stay heads-down building, fully-remotely, and in focused pursuit of our mission to bring business finance into the modern, real-time era.

We’re humbled by the recognition we’ve received for this mission: Business Insider ranked Digits amongst the top 100 startups of 2020, Built in SF shortlisted Digits as one of their top 50 to watch, while EqualOcean called Digits one of their Next 50 in Global Fintech.

Embroker went even further, naming Digits the #1 fintech startup (and #6 overall) on their Top 200 list of the world’s “fastest growing companies that… will fundamentally transform our society.” We’re honored to be included!

What Digits is doing for businesses is truly phenomenal. Being able to analyze and visualize financials in real-time is especially huge for startups and other high-growth companies where KPIs are always moving quickly and changing rapidly.

-Yotam Shacham, Co-Founder,

The Digits Real-time Engine

Every financial transaction impacts your business’ bottom line. But today, businesses are forced to rely on a web of antiquated, manual, and time-consuming processes to record and model their financial activity to understand these impacts.

While unwieldy, historical data is straightforward—it’s studiously recorded in the general ledgers of businesses worldwide, but it’s static and outdated. Real-time transaction streams are increasingly available from financial institutions, but they are raw and unreconciled. Forward projections are still powered by spreadsheets and approximations, each one manually maintained—delaying leadership teams from making crucial decisions.

As serial-entrepreneurs, with 6 companies between us over the past 20 years, we realized that the holy grail of business was having a real-time, living model that empowers decision-making in the moment.

Two years ago, we embarked on our journey to solve this problem, and we believe we’ve now achieved this with the Digits Real-time Engine, which seamlessly (and accurately!) combines full-historical data, current real-time activity, and forward looking projections into a single, immersive, and intuitive financial dashboard for business owners, finance leads, and their department heads.

The Digits Real-time Engine has been the missing link in business finance. It’s the infrastructure that converts your data into a living model of your business, enabling an entirely new class of business software. With each change in your business, our Real-time Engine re-analyzes everything to give you the latest, most accurate view of your world… With Every. Single. Transaction.

It’s the 21st century. Business happens in real-time. What is your finance stack waiting for?

See how Digits Works

The Best is Yet to Come…

We’re truly honored by the recognition we’ve received so far as well as the feedback and feature requests from our Early Access community.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard on a number of exciting new tools, supercharged by our Real-time Engine. We can’t wait to show you what’s behind the curtain—stay tuned for our next major announcement!

Wayne Chang

co-founder

Jeff Seibert

co-founder

The Magic of Remote Work at Digits

Back in early March, before the full extent of this pandemic set in, I kicked off our introduction to remote work at Digits as follows:

To be sure, working remotely is not for every business, and not for every individual.

Little did I know how soon so many businesses and individuals would be forced to make do, and how quickly fully-remote work would become mainstream.

It’s been an abrupt transition… and for many, it hasn’t been easy.

Over the course of the year, I’ve heard from countless startup founders, small business owners, and team leads looking for more advice on how to build effective, collaborative, productive, and happy fully-distributed teams. The last, of course, being the most challenging.

For those of you that have held-off implementing major process and collaboration changes to optimize for remote work, the time to reconsider is now.

While there may soon be light at the end of this tunnel — thanks to the incredible vaccine development efforts by scientists and researchers worldwide — I foresee no quick reversion to “normal”. Remote work is here to stay, and every industry that can do so will embrace it.

Success in 2021 and beyond will be defined by those who adapt to remote work most effectively.

Here’s what we’ve learned at Digits.

If you’d rather listen than read, Stanford University has published a full interview covering our approach to remote work, as well as a short 7-minute summary as part of their free Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast.

What We’ve Learned, Remotely

Digits went fully-remote the day we started the company in 2018, with my co-founder Wayne in Los Angeles and I in San Francisco. We knew it would be a fools-errand to try to build the company we envisioned in just one city (there’s simply too much great talent everywhere) and we both shared distinct, negative prior experiences managing multiple remote offices: the “second-class citizen” effect felt by those not frequently present at HQ is hard to overcome.

So (and despite distinct skepticism from a few of our investors — don’t worry, we appreciated the push-back!), Wayne and I made the decision to embrace remote work wholesale: Digits would never own a physical, shared office, and we would design our approaches and processes from the ground-up to champion distributed work.

After seeing so many different attempts at remote work by so many companies over the course of this year, and after reflecting on the most effective aspects of our own culture at Digits, it’s become more clear to us than ever what’s really important.

There are now thousands of online articles pitching countless techniques for improving the remote work lifestyle — it’s overwhelming.

As founders, here are the practices we believe have had the most positive impact at Digits, and the ones that we would recommend you try out with your teams today, even if you’ve previously preferred an in-person work experience.

Embrace Synchronicity

For many, remote work is black and white: you’re either in the office together, or you aren’t. But degrees matter. Time zones matter.

In our experience, productivity and happiness go hand-in-hand with collaborating live, so we’ve made a conscious decision at Digits to agree to all work roughly the same hours: in our case, US Central Time. Folks out West tend to fire up their computers a bit earlier than they otherwise would, and those back East tend to stay on a bit later, or check back in after dinner, or once their kids are asleep. There is still a bit of skew on each side, but to have our entire team online together, every day, simultaneously, for the core hours of US Central Time is magical.

Sure, there are downsides. There are incredible folks (and former colleagues from prior companies!) in EMEA and APAC that we would adore the opportunity to work with, but we have assembled an incredible team that can collaborate live across North, Central, and South America synchronously. The pros outweigh the cons dramatically, and we communicate this upfront in our recruiting materials: when you join Digits, you’re free to move wherever you want within continental American timezones.

For those of you who already have colleagues spread around the globe, our advice would be to strive for team synchronicity. Here’s how.

The Buddy System: Scaling Synchronicity by Shrinking Teams

The traditional “two-pizza” team of 8–10 folks gathered around a conference table may work well in person, but we’ve come to realize it’s unwieldy on Zoom.

Even on fast Internet connections, latency often makes it awkward to get a word in edgewise in group settings, and inevitable background noise from pets, children, construction, or everyday city life motivates a default-to-mute culture, which adds another layer of friction to highly-participatory group dialogue.

That’s ok — we’ve never found large group meetings to be productive to begin with 😉

At Digits, we consciously break teams down into their smallest possible units: every project is tackled by tiny teams of 2–4 people, and in practice we found that 4-person teams often self-divide pairwise to get work done more effectively. We call this the Buddy System.

Working on something by yourself is lonely.

Working on it by yourself, in your home, with nobody else around, is just sad.

Working on it with a buddy is awesome.

In practice, substantially everything we do at Digits is tackled collaboratively by 2–3 people. They work together, synchronously, throughout the day, and decide when they want to pair on Zoom, Tuple, or Slack Audio, and when they want to go heads-down and sync back up in an hour or two. But they always know who they can count on to brainstorm with, or get feedback from, or have review their work, and they know they won’t have to wait around for it because that person isn’t elsewhere working on something else.

Yes, this means we take on fewer projects simultaneously than we otherwise might, but in exchange, each work-stream gets completed far faster, at a far higher quality level, and the work day is far more enjoyable.

We default to coordinating work between teams asynchronously: via shared Google Docs and Trello, in order to minimize meetings and maximize flow. Input is welcomed, and actively sought from broad groups across the company, but that doesn’t take a meeting to accomplish. Let people chime in on a doc when they have time, and then grab time with them and their buddy directly if it deserves a live conversation. After all, they’re unlikely to be in another meeting…

The Maker Schedule, Writ Large

One of the most challenging aspects of almost any large organization is the meetings. An endless parade of prescheduled time-blocks, which require abrupt context switching and leave little time for thought, creativity, or even a snack. How easy it is to end the day exhausted, yet with the gnawing feeling that you didn’t actually accomplish anything of note?

For those with the maker mindset — with roles that require creativity and execution — this sparks terror. There is no better way to ruin the productivity of your design and engineering teams than a few poorly placed meetings. Losing half a day or more due to a couple preset commitments is not an exaggeration. At large companies, it’s a way of life.

At Digits, we discovered something we hadn’t realized: scarce resources are largely to blame.

Conference rooms are evil.

At a traditional company (all of Silicon Valley included), I need a place to hold a meeting. It would be rude to stand around and make noise somewhere public, where others are trying to work, so I book a conference room. Genius.

Except, conference rooms are in high demand, so I must reserve one in advance, and my meeting must conform to the room’s list of available slots. Without thinking about it, my meeting must now be 30 minutes or an hour long, and the time it will happen is now fixed on the calendar and broadcast in advance.

This is a nightmare.

It turns out that the maker schedule is not all that disrupted by the meeting itself… but rather by the presage of said meeting.

There is nothing more distracting than seeing a hard-stop on your calendar in 90 minutes. Do I have enough time to build out this feature before then? Can I really sink my teeth into this design problem in less than two hours? Should I just spend this time replying to email, or triaging bug reports, or grabbing coffee?

Don’t worry, I’ll dive into my real work after that meeting. (I tell myself)

Oh no. I also have a 2pm!?

At Digits, we have full-company, all-hands meetings 3 times a week, spaced every 48 hours:

  • Monday morning Kick-off (30 mins)
  • Wednesday morning Check-ins (30 minutes)
  • Friday afternoon Show & Tell (75 minutes)

They are scheduled to fall at the beginning or end of the day, to minimize disruption.

More importantly, we aim to schedule no other internal meetings.

Sure, interviews need to be booked, and customer and partnership calls need to happen, but it’s easy to distribute interviews across the team (and monitor how frequently any given engineer is pulled into an interview) and external-facing roles tend to be less maker-schedule driven.

This does not mean people don’t talk! Instead, we highly prioritize an ad hoc, interrupt-driven culture. Remember, the meeting itself is far less painful than the upcoming hard-stop on the calendar. And with no conference rooms to book, there’s no need to schedule anything in advance, so we don’t bother.

Much to our initial surprise, this has lead to a bit of a utopia: our typical “meeting” is 5–7 minutes long, includes less than 6 people, and happens with just a couple minutes of notice. Everyone is typically available because they’re all working US Central Time, and they aren’t tied up with any other pre-scheduled commitments, so why not join? And in just 7 minutes, they’re right back to being productive, because the meeting wasn’t long enough to “page out” or forget what they were doing and shift them out of flow.

This sounds too good to be true. It isn’t. It’s reality.

Remote Work At Digits

Taken together, our days and weeks at Digits look like the following:

  1. High-bandwidth all-hands, every other day, so we all know what everyone else is working on and how it’s all progressing. The complete, cross-functional visibility these provide builds confidence that the whole company is rowing in the same direction, and immediately surfaces any duplicate or conflicting efforts.
  2. Empty calendars, devoid of pre-scheduled internal meetings, so everyone can stay in flow and focus on getting work done.
  3. Tight-knit, synchronous collaboration with a buddy, day-in and day-out, so you’re never alone during the day, and you always have someone you count on to brainstorm with and get feedback from.
  4. Asynchronous, cross-team collaboration via shared Google Docs and Trello cards. Input and feedback is actively sought, but never blocked on, and each team is empowered to deliver their work end-to-end.
  5. Ad hoc check-ins throughout the day, as needed. With no notice or preparation that takes you out of flow, it’s trivial to pause for 5 minutes and share an update, or get input from another team and then go right back to being productive with your buddy.

Spreading the Word

A few months ago, it was an honor to be invited by Stanford to share Digits’ approach to remote work as part of the university’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series, and they have published the full talk here.

With 2020 coming to a close, Stanford eCorner just recently published a recap of their key entrepreneurial takeaways from this year, and I was floored to be featured again. Thank you Tina 🙂

Join us at Digits

We’ve been heads-down for the past two years, building out our full vision for Digits, and we can’t wait to share it with the world in 2021.

If you’re excited to join a passionate, fun-loving, fully-remote team that’s obsessed with building delightful business finance software, we’d love to get to know you! See our open positions here.

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