Episode 169: Creating Success Means Letting Go Of The Ego, Being Humble, And Open To Continuous Learning And Curiosity With Ariege Misherghi
What if true success isnโt about climbing higherโbut about letting go? In this episode, Ariege Misherghi, SVP and GM of the AR, AP, and Account Channel at BILL, reflects on how humility, curiosity, and a willingness to quiet the ego have shaped her leadership journey. Raised by immigrant parents who instilled deep values around education and gratitude, Ariege shares how those early lessons continue to guide her today. We explore her career path through product management roles at PayCycle and Intuit, her leadership principles, her passion for gaming and technology, and her bold vision for transforming financial operations through agentic experiences. This conversation is a compelling reminder that success is as much about mindset as it is about metrics.
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Creating Success Means Letting Go Of The Ego, Being Humble, And Open To Continuous Learning And Curiosity With Ariege Misherghi
Roots Of Success: Ariege's Humble Beginnings
Iโm interviewing Ariege Misherghi. She's the SVP and GM of AP, AR, and the Accountant Channel at BILL. She is a dynamic leader with over two decades of experience. She has a proven track record of driving growth and delivering innovative solutions for small and mid-sized businesses for accounting professionals.
She joined BILL in late 2024 and brings extensive experience in leading teams and transforming businesses with a passion for empowering businesses through intelligent, automated financial solutions that free them to focus on what matters most. She's been recognized by Accounting Today as a Top 100 Most Influential Person and by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a Woman of Influence and holds a Bachelor's in Science, Technology, and Society with a concentration in Computer Science from Stanford University.
During this interview, we talk about Ariegeโs beginnings, where she started with an immigrant family and learned from her humble upbringings that education and gratitude are two of the most important values that have led a string of her path to success in her career, and found that by being curious, it has allowed her to stay humble and let go of the ego, so she is constantly learning and being open to what's new.
During this interview, you're going to learn about her curiosity around technology and how reinventing financial operation workflows through new AI tools are some of the most exciting things coming to help the accounting profession not only be able to process their information more accurately, but give them back more time so that they can spend more time with their clients and truly be in that advisory relationship. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Ariege. There are so many great nuggets in here to learn from in her journey, and if you do, please share this with your friends, your colleagues, or someone that this will be helpful to along the way.
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Ariege, I'm so excited to have you. Do you want to give a little background on yourself before we get started?
You got it. My job at BILL is to build an intelligent financial operations platform. We serve almost 500,000 small businesses and 9,000 accounting firms. We move 1% of GDP. The scale is insane. That's what I do. My job is to chart the company's future path through exceptional product experiences that solve my customers' problems.
Iโm so excited to hear how you got to where you are now. Why don't we start? Where'd you grow up? What did your parents do? Whatโs their background?
I grew up in Fremont, California. It was a great family-oriented neighborhood. My parents are immigrants from North Africa. I was 1 of 4 kids growing up, and my mom had a kid when I was in college, so a total of five. Growing up, it was the four of us, two girls, two boys. That was my life.
When did your parents immigrate to the US?
They came in the early โ80s. I was born in โ82. They were here before that.
Why did they come from North Africa?
My dad was getting his PhD in the UK, and things in North Africa, we are from Libya, under Gaddafi's rule, we're not totally stable. My dad had a brother in California, and they were fortunate enough to be able to come out.
What was it like watching their climb throughout your childhood? That must have been a lot, moving from another country and trying to make it here.
It's funny, I didn't think that it was terribly exceptional because I think I lived in a community that was mostly immigrants. My parents' friends were immigrants. When I went to school, it was like a super diverse experience. Fremont was, at the time, one of the most diverse cities in America. It didn't seem terribly exceptional. What was striking for me was realizing how different my life was from my cousins who lived back in North Africa.
What was their life like?
If I were to recall my own experience, I remember that we didn't have much, but I didn't feel like we were lacking anything. Iโll put it this way. I knew better than to ask for anything. One of the things that we did every now and then was when we could afford it, my mom would take my siblings and we would go back to Libya, and my parents were from huge families. We'd get there and I'd get totally lost in a sea of families, and all families. It was so awesome. Life there was so different. Here were all these people that I barely knew who loved me. This is before we could chat on our phones.
They all knew who I was, but I didn't know any of them. It was amazing to be around so much open reception, and I noticed some stark differences, even at a young age. That left such a huge impression on me. Maybe Iโll give you one example. One of my mom's brothers, my uncle, I had met him for the first time, I was under 10. I don't know, he was like 7 or 8 or something like that. I didn't realize until the moment that I reached out to shake his hand and say hello that he was nonverbal. It jolted me as a young kid.
Itโs not because I wasn't exposed to that. In Fremont, there's a world-renowned school for the deaf, and it's very common in our neighborhood for me to see people talking with their hands. I think the most jarring thing was to realize that I knew more American Sign Language than my uncle because of the lack of access. Those kinds of experiences, for me, fostered this very strong sense of gratitude that I have. I wake up every morning with so much gratitude for what I have, and I think about it every night before I go to bed. I have this very strong sense of appreciation.
Parental Influence: A Mother's Journey And A Father's Engineering Path
Did your dad end up teaching as a professor? Was he getting his PhD here in the US?
He did teach as a professor at Fresno State, but for most of his career, he was a satellite engineer. I don't know, he didn't do much with that. He was in chip development. He's deep into computers and things like that.
Thatโs where you eventually went.
Yeah, exactly. I thought my dad was an engineer, and so I thought I should be one too. It pays off.
Did your mom work, or was she at home with you all?
I think my mom was going through her own discovery journey. When she came to the States, she was in her early twenties. At that time, being so far away from your family, she primarily spoke Arabic, feeling disconnected. She went through this journey herself, of first staying anchored in people who were like her, but then getting more exposed to our neighbors and people in the community and broadening her connections, and then discovering community college and getting her degree.
By the time we were in high school, she was a teacher. She put herself through this education journey, totally self-motivated to push herself. It was awesome to see her transform. She was an amazing mom, warm and loving. Our house was so warm. That is the word that comes to mind. When she was ready, and she got to a point where she was ready to start working, it was like, โGo, mom. You're ready. You set us up well. We're ready for you to move on.โ
Probably from her point of view, to see that it was possible for her here. That may not have been possible where she was from.
I think people have a different perspective of Libya than what it was. Libya is a very metropolitan, super-modern place. I always used to say my mom came here in a miniskirt. She became religious later in life. It's a super modern place, and all of that is possible for you. I think the difference was economic. Libya didn't have the infrastructure support to enable the economic growth that would allow people to explore broadly. In that sense, because of all the embargoes that were going on at the time, it was a closed-off country, but the people and their history were not that way.
Where were you in the order of children?
I'm number 2. I have an older sister, but I always say I was number 2, but I acted like number 1.
What was it like for you growing up? What were you envisioning yourself to be, watching your parents on their journey, and being part of that immigrant community? I'm sure you saw a lot of struggle there.
The thing that I remember most is my parents emphasizing the importance of education. I think also because of my experience with my family in Libya, that strong sense of gratitude that I had also turned into fuel for me of like, โI have all these opportunities. How do I throw myself into them?โ If there is an opportunity, I want to attack it. All of that served me well, the positive pressure from my parents.
I think my nature was that I was very into achievement. Itโs that combination of the gratitude my parents and my own nature. I totally threw myself into education. I would skip home from school to do my homework. I knew that I wanted to learn, but I didn't know what I wanted to do after that. You asked me about my dad and what my mom does and that kind of thing.
I went down the engineering path because it seemed interesting. There were always computers around our house, and I would build them up and make machines and things. Because that was so present in my life, I went in that direction and I studied CS in college, but I didn't think about post-college. I think growing up, I thought college was the end.
Thatโs because that was the end of the learning.
I think thatโs what all my ambition was pointed to.
College Choices: Stanford And The STS Degree
Your father, did he ever talk to you about the computers that were around the house or teach you anything about them?
I wouldn't say so. My dad was present, but he was not super involved in our lives to that degree. My mom was very much the nurturer, the caretaker. What I got from my dad was education matters. If I needed help with my math homework, he was around. Of course, values and ethics, and how to be a good person, but aside from leaning in on school, they didn't pressure me.
Where did you go to college?
I went to Stanford.
When you went there, did you know what you were going to do there? How did you make your decisions?
This is interesting. I generally thought I would be an engineer, so I set myself up that way. I didn't enter college feeling totally at liberty to do a ton of exploration. The mantra that we have now of like โDo what you love, find your passion,โ was not a mantra I had or carried, or I could even apply to myself. I guess once I got to college, I felt the sense of like, โNow I have to pay it forward. Now I have to find a career that can be a stable source of income.โ That's what I was thinking at the time. It was like, โDo I get stability, not just for myself, but for my family? How do I help everybody?โ
That didn't come from a place of pressure. It came from a place of gratitude, like, โIโve been afforded so much goodness in my life. How do I pay that back?โ That was thought. It so happened that I loved to code. It was fun. In my later years in college, I ended up shifting my focus. It was a CS degree, but it was a degree at Stanford called Science, Technology, and Society, STS.
Success: I was thinking, I get stability not just for myself, but for my family. How do I help everybody? And again, that didn't come from pressure, but from gratitude.
It is a study of the connection and the interplay between people, society, culture, and the technologies that are built, how they're used, and how they're influenced in both directions. There was definitely a component of humanities in there, which I always found interesting. I didn't know what to do with an STS degree. I figured, then you go code. That's what's next. I had no idea.
That class seems so before its time. At that time, you wouldn't even have known what computers were going to do. The internet was so new, and all of it.
I went to school in the early 2000s. The internet was very real, but it was before the iPhone. When I was in college, Facebook came out. Shout out to Professor Robert McGinn, who started that program.
The Interplay Of Technology And Society: A Guiding Light
He had that foresight to know this was coming. When you think about that degree, before knowing what you know now, what were your thoughts as a college student with that degree for you to even have been attracted to it, and what has resonated with you since?
There were two components., I feel so fortunate that the path that I was exposed to growing up happened to coincide very closely, overlap very closely with my area of passion. Number one, some of that I didn't even see as a choice. I saw it as a smart decision, but not a personal choice. It worked out for me.
The other component for me was the contextual application of technology. That's been something Iโve been thinking about a lot. It's a big reason why I'm attracted to the accounting professional community, if I'm honest. When you work on a software platform that lots of people use, sometimes, it's easy to homogenize your customers, and it's hard to humanize them.
When you're working with accountants, they'll let you know what's up and how well or poorly you're doing. They're very direct and transparent about it. The reason I was into STS is that it gave me the purview to explore that, which over the course of my career anchored me further and further into this accounting professional community that welcomes you in that way. They want to be studied. They want you to study them. Iโve always appreciated it, and that has generally given me a leg up.
In your viewpoint, that intersection of science, technology, and society, what is the guiding light that you go by with that?
The biggest one is that technology isn't developed in a vacuum. Any tech that exists is not unbiased. Everything you see is biased by society. It comes from the people. It's built for the way that it's iterated on the rules and governance that exist around it. All of it shows up in the tech, which is especially telling and interesting in todayโs world with generative AI and these amazing companies that are standing up and doing things that nobody has ever done before. Thinking about how to eliminate the inherent bias that exists in those technologies and leverage it for the good of the broader community, all of that is interesting to me. It's a good background to have at a time like this.
It's a hard question to answer because, at the end of the day, a product targets a market. It's hard to ever not to segment it to whoever you're trying to attract. That's interesting. Once you graduated, where did you end up?
Unconventional Career Start: From Customer Service To Product Management
My first job out of college was at a different company. I'm at BILL now, but it was at PayCycle, which was this little startup. Dozens of employees, I think. It was in customer service. It's a long story how I got there, but there I had another offer. It was in development. I was going to code for another company. When I went to college, my mom had a baby.
At home, I had a sister who was very young. I was thinking about leaving the state to go work for this other place. I was part of the support team for my family in lots of different ways. I was thinking, โHow am I going to make this work, leaving the state to go do this thing?โ I decided at the end of the day, I couldn't. I had to turn down that offer, but I had to work. I was in a position, I was like, โI have student loans. Iโve got to work. Iโve got to figure it out.โ
I was looking around for what I wanted to do, and because this was so late in the hiring cycle, it was after graduation, and everybody had settled into their roles. I found myself doing a take two and saying, โWhat can I do to keep working?โ I can figure out what I want to do, and Iโll look for that in parallel. I took a job in customer service, and I took that job because the interview panel was amazing. The interview panel blew my mind. There were engineering leaders with whom I ended up working for twenty-plus years after that. The fact that they were on a hiring panel for a tier-one customer service agent, I was like, โWhat is this company?โ
The care that they put into making sure that people were the right cultural fit. I could tell through the interviews and the questions that they were asking that they were brilliant. They thought very differently from what I thought. I was like, โI want to be around that. I want to go do that. Let me go work with these people.โ
It was less about the work. I was not excited about the work. Honestly, it was a blow to my ego. I was like, โI'm going to be in customer service. I don't know about that. I went through all this education,โ but I wanted to be around those people, so I took the job. What shocked me is how much I loved that job. I loved that job. I still think about that job.
I got so much fulfillment from it. It was a payroll company. When people are upset about payroll, when something is not going right, that's a mortgage that might not get paid. It's a big deal. You'd get these calls from folks who were 10 out of 10 upset. To be in a position where I could help get them to a point where things were going to be okay, that was so fulfilling for me. The funny thing was that I couldn't end it there. The things that they were calling about, I would turn around and go talk to those engineers and be like, โWeโve got to go fix this. This isnโt working. Weโve got to go solve these problems.โ They'd start riffing with me on how to solve them.
At one point, I got a tap on the shoulder from somebody who said, โThat thing you're doing, it's called product management. Maybe you should go do that.โ I moved into product management not long after that. I never looked back. I didn't even know PM was a thing. I didn't even know it existed. The role of understanding your customers, understanding the market, figuring out what their needs are, turning that into products that solve real problems that a company can grow from, that was it. My entire career was built from that point. It was born at that point and built from that point.
Isn't that interesting how we find what we enjoy because it's so hard to know? Something that, I'm sure, was in your head every day and was like, โI graduated from Stanford,โ when you first took that job, when we allowed the process of liking a job. I know when I was in college, everyone told me, โYou have to go into public accounting because internal audit isnโt as great a path.โ
I went into public accounting, but then, to move to Florida, I got this role in internal audit, and they were going to move me to Florida. I was like, โIโll suck it up.โ That ended up being the job that opened my eyes. That's why you always have to be open to each experience and, to your point, grateful. It can totally shift your perspective on the way your path goes.
I don't know anyone who's had a straight path. Not a single person. I'm with you 100%.
Once you got into product management there, were you at Intuit because Intuit acquired them?
PayCycle got bought by Intuit. I was at Intuit for many years. I left for a little stint, and then I came back to Intuit, and then I chose to move on to BILL.
What got you excited about coming back to BILL?
That anecdote I shared with you about being in a position, I was a support agent, and I could go talk to the engineers, and they would listen to me because they cared about our customers very deeply. We would solve problems quickly. That is the culture I knew. By the time I came back to BILL, I'd also been working for accounting professionals for many years. Knowing the principled approach and the value that Rene places on accounting professionals was very attractive to me. I felt I could do what I knew needed to get done for the community through that transition.
I was also at a point in my life where I had two kids. I was looking for a change at work. I had been at Intuit for so long, and Intuit was great. They did an awesome job of investing in me. I enjoyed my time there, but there was so much change happening in my personal life that I was ready to mirror that change professionally. As I'm thinking that, I got the call from Rene, and it all happened. It all came together.
Cultivating A Customer-Centric Culture
Obviously, BILL has scaled to a much larger company than when you started at PayCycle. To keep that culture as a leader, because things can get bureaucratic or people start building their fiefdoms and protecting information, what have you learned yourself and advise others to keep a culture like that, where you can solve things quickly and make sure people are heard?
The things that Iโve learned are a few things. My mind is going to a few places. The first is that it's important that you give people big roles and hold them accountable. A lot of leadership, in my mind, is about creating a high degree of autonomy, like principled autonomy. Give people principles within which to make decisions, give them a lot of autonomy over a well-defined space, and hold them accountable for the outcomes. It's amazing what teams can do and how they can go attack the problems at the root of the issues that you're experiencing or that customers may be experiencing.
I think another is that you do a lot of it by example. When you're working at any company, it's easy for what the business is solving for to be too finance-driven versus customer-driven. Especially in a world when you're doing something for your customers, like product development or any service level role, our job is to keep our customer center focused. I genuinely believe that the way you grow is to deliver experiences to your customers that nobody else can deliver more value. That's how you set the stage for growth.
Success: The way you grow is to deliver experiences to your customers that nobody else can.
You mirror that. You exude that in every conversation. You role model it. You ask questions about the customer, you make sure when you're inspecting the work, when you're coaching your team, you're inspecting the degree of understanding they have about the problem, and how they're leveraging that knowledge to create creative solutions that differentiate us in the market. That's my brand of leadership.
When you say give autonomy, can you give an example with accountability? I think that can be perceived in so many different ways.
Iโll give you an example when I joined BILL. When I joined BILL, there was a strong team here that I inherited. They're awesome. Very passionate, understands the customer, understands the product. Some of them are CPAs themselves, very connected to the broader community. When I joined, one of our ambitions was to expand our addressable market to include larger businesses. How to make sure that BILL serves the needs of the lower mid-market.
There are a few dimensions of that. We have some amazing multi-entity experiences that we've launched. We've got some procurement experiences that we've launched for the first time ever in the financial operations platform, expanding to include some of these spaces. It's exciting to see the thinking that was already here. One of the things that I observed was that the person who was accountable for the multi-entity work was a different person from the person accountable for procurement.
That's okay if what you're after is a great multi-entity experience and a great procurement experience, but if what your job is to think about what it's going to take to win in the mid-market, and those are two features that happen to live in your world, but your job is to unlock the mid-market, then you're not so insular focused on those things.
You now have a charter to challenge yourself. Are they the most important? Are there other things we should be doing as well? Are you resourced enough to unlock that opportunity? If not, get loud and noisy because I'm going to hold you accountable for that as the outcome. It's expanding the role in that way led the team to propose some additional investment opportunities that we had to deliver even more value to our customers. Iโll give Richard full credit for this. He's the member of my team that I chartered with this, a very robust view of what it's going to take for us to meet the needs of those customers beyond just making an excellent multi-entity experience and excellent procurement experience, which we have.
That happens a lot where there's no vision of the total journey. What happens is people start solving in different ways or even duplicating work between those teams because it's very hard not to worry about the other thing too. They're like, โWait, we've got three people doing this in the organization,โ making it as efficient as possible. How do you hold them accountable? You're giving them the autonomy to solve and be creative, but what are you holding them accountable to?
To the outcomes that we expect to release. When I think about the pillars of my leadership style, the degree of directness and transparency is inherent to who I am. I try to create that for my team. We have very upfront conversations before any work happens. โI'm giving you this charter, and here's what I expect from you.โ That's a conversation. It's not a dictation. It's like, โThis is what I think we need to do in the market.โ
There's a discussion that we have about what it is we're trying to accomplish, and then we get broader alignment that this is the mission of this team. It's not me and my employee who think that's their job. Everybody at the company understands that, which gives them a broad charter for them to ask for what they need, even beyond our team.
There's almost nothing you could do at any company that doesn't require some level of cross-functional collaboration. We start by getting very tight on the outcomes. Usually, this is a combination of very clear outcomes for customers. What is this going to mean for the customers we serve and outcomes for the business? In this case, it was things like we never want an accounting professional to feel that BILL doesn't work for any client within their portfolio. It's got to work for every client in their portfolio.
What I'm going to hold Richard accountable for is to make sure that when we connect with these firms, when you look at their view of which customers are right for BILL, and they're making a decision about whether BILL is right for their client, the mid-market customers don't have any exit path. It's a good match. It's a good market fit for any one of their clients if they choose to use us. Iโm using that as an example. Those are some examples of the ways that I do that. That's how you set it up upfront, and then on an ongoing basis, you're connecting on what's getting in their way from achieving those outcomes. At the end of the cycle, you look at the numbers. Did we do it or not? Pretty straightforward.
Gaming And Product Design: Unexpected Parallels
As far as your coding and how much you enjoy coding, where do you get to enjoy that now? Do you still dabble in it anywhere?
I do, for sure. Especially now, I'm very detached from the most modern developer languages. I'm not super plugged in, but now with the advent of generative AI, you don't need to know how to code in order to code. Iโve been dabbling in some of that. On top of that, I'm a gamer. I love computers, I love what they can do. Iโve stayed very connected to the gaming world, which gives you a sense for how gaming is often on the cutting edge of technology. It's a great source of inspiration for me. Even in things like how to communicate. When you're gaming, the information on any screen is exactly what you need to know in that moment, in that millisecond.
Success: You don't need to know how to code in order to code.
You could get so much inspiration from those contexts, especially when thinking about working with accounting professionals. At any given time, you want to make them feel they have complete control over whatever the workflow is that they're in. All the information is at their fingertips without being overwhelming. They're focused on a task, don't get in their way, but they need to have, at their fingertips, access to whatever it is that they might want. I find a lot of parallels in gaming and product design.
Is there a game that you like?
Iโve been playing Dune these days. I don't know. I could list a few, but probably Dune is the big one.
What do you like about it?
There are a few layers to it. You could focus on resource management, you could focus on building, or you could focus on exploration. Honestly, the number one thing I about it is I could fit it into the life I have. Gone are the days when I have hours I could sit down and play a video game. Iโve got kids at home. If I have 30 minutes, that's pretty amazing. That's probably what I like the most about it.
You can tune out and be in that world.
For small bits of time versus some large chunk, which a lot of the games require these days, which I cannot do.
Lifelong Learning And Purpose-Driven Work
You brought up two big values that I heard over and over again, which are education and gratitude. How do you apply that now for yourself and for your teams?
Education is a lifelong thing for me. It is very important as a PM that you have the humility to know that you don't know everything. If there's ego in a PM, not going to cut it. You've got to let your customers guide you. That learning mindset and that curiosity to always understand, learn what you don't know, understand why things are the way they are, pressure test whether things have to be the way they used to be, or if they can evolve like that. It so happens that that is a foundational course skill set of PM.
Success: Education is a lifelong journey for me, and as a GM, it's incredibly important to have the humility to know you don't know everything.
In fact, when I hire, or even early career PMs, it's, I don't even rarely assess for the concrete skills in early career PMs. I don't care if you know how to write requirements, I don't care if you can put together a research brief, because I know you can learn that, so long as you have some of the raw materials. This is an example of it. It's very hard to teach humility and openness in learning. It's very hard to teach that. To have that, this is the career for you. That's that one. That's education.
The other one you mentioned was gratitude. I would say that helps in a different way. First, I'd say it's the combination of gratitude and the keen awareness that you have access to or that I have access to so much, and it creates this very strong drive. It's this combo of gratitude, and what am I going to do with it? That is the very next thought.
The way that shows up for me is being very mission-driven. Aware of the opportunity we have. I know the challenge that small businesses have in terms of being successful. I know that. I know that accounting professionals are the number one partners who they have to succeed. The gratitude I have that I'm in it, not alone, but with this community in service of the small and mid-size businesses, that's something that I try to echo with my team. It gives us a strong sense of purpose.
Of course, tactically beyond purpose, mission-driven work, and being wired for that. The other component for me is also being wired to recognize good work when it's happening. I think my team has appreciated that for me over time. I have a high bar. I hold my team to the same impossible bar that I hold myself. They know it, and it's tiring. It's exhausting, but it's also rewarding. Being able to do both. Hold a high bar, let people know what it is that we have to achieve, what winning looks like, and then take the time to reflect and celebrate the progress that we have made. I love to rally people.
Having kids, how do you make space for this big role?
I don't know that I have anything new to add to this component of the conversation. I have an insatiable desire to learn from others in this space because I have not figured it out. Somebody, at some point, maybe I had one kid, or maybe it was before I had kids, had said there's no such thing as balance. It's a daily thing, like every day. I don't think I understood that, but now I understand that.
The more visceral appreciation for the fact that this is a moving target, and with such young kids, every six months is different, and what they need from me is different. I'm a planner by nature, so I try to stay away from that because there is no way I can control the outcome of anything that is happening for me at this stage in my life.
The approach I take is to tackle it one at a time and lean on my husband, on my partner. He's amazing. He is definitely the primary parent. He takes care of a lot at home. I'm so lucky to be in a position where I have a partner as supportive as that because I love my work. I love him. I get so much fulfillment from it, and it's only through that daily task management and the balance that I find with him. He's definitely the yin to my yang. Through that, Iโve been able to find some level of stability. I don't know that I'm on solid ground.
The Future Of Financial Operations: Reinventing Workflows
I don't think there is a point you ever feel you are, but I think that it is important. What is left out of the conversation a lot is the communication that needs to happen between parents about what they need and what they need. Make sure that everyone can accomplish what they want to, to feel good as a person, because it gets hard to feel good when there's so much. It's a human condition. What are you most excited about coming up with BILL in the coming months or years?
There's so much I'm excited about. I think what I'm most excited about is the reality that we're at the brink of reinventing core workflows that will enable us to build a financial operations platform that enables your team to scale so much. With the advent of agentic experiences and building so hard into it, I'm very excited for what this means for our space. We invented a category, and we are reinventing it. Also, for the community.
Success: We invented a category and we are reinventing it also for the community.
As far as I can remember, as long ago as I can remember, the community has been talking about moving into advisory, driving efficiencies. The scale of what we're seeing now, the leaps that we're seeing now that truly enable that are absolutely unreal. This is a resilient community. This is a strong community.
There is such a deep need for a skillset of this community that I'm optimistic that we'll finally get to a place in our lifetimes, maybe even before that, in the next few years, where the need for this profession is well matched to the capacity. In other words, there has been so much more need for accounting professionals and their skillsets than there has been capacity. I'm hoping and optimistic that the work that BILL does and that's enabled through agentic experience, will help get us to a place of better matching the opportunity versus the need.
What does that mean for people who might not be clear on what agentic experience means or what your perception of that is?
I envision a world where a lot of the task-based work that happens in AP, AR, expense management, and procurement is handled through agents that follow a set of guidelines that accounting professionals themselves set. There are humans who are involved in the processes to the degree that you're interested in doing so. The work itself happens in the background.
There's no extraction that needs to be done. There's no data entry that needs to be done. There's no tracking down of bills, there's no risk protection additional work that needs to be done. It's optimized for you based on your rules, based on your guidance, and based on BILL's position. We have the benefit of seeing billions of bills through our system. One percent of GDP moves through BILL.
The scale that we have to recommend to you what we believe are the right actions is absolutely unmatched. To take the power and the scale of our platform and the capabilities that are continually growing on our platform, and to automate them to the degree where accounting professionalsโ roles become to set up and manage the system versus day-to-day execution, is extremely exciting for me. I think what that means is it frees up accounting professionals to do what they do best, which is provide some contextual guidance to your clients based on your knowledge set, versus the tactical execution of the work. That's the world that I envision. It's the world that we're building toward.
I'd like to wrap up with some rapid-fire questions. You get to pick a category, which is family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
I'm going to do family and friends.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with my family and friends.
Can I get fantastical with this?
Yes.
Do you know Harry Potter? Have you read the books? Do you watch movies?
No.
There is a device that Hermione Granger, the smartypants of the group, uses called a Time Turner. She takes this little dial, and it lets her go back to any point in time. I would love to have a full day to do what I want to do at work and a full day to do what I want to do at home.
I love it. That's such a great visual. Things are actions I do have that I want to keep.
I love the home that Iโve built. I love design. I love interior design. I never designed my own bedroom. I think Iโve had my college furniture for my own bedroom. Not college, but shortly after. I never changed it until 2025. It was very intentional, and I designed it. One of the things that I designed into our bedroom is a cuddle couch, which is a super amazing couch that's big enough for all of us to jump on, watch a movie on. We got the cozy blankets. It's so perfect. I love it. It's an addition to our lives. I'm so happy with it.
Isn't it funny how we do our room last?
I don't know why I waited this long.
You feel so good once you do it. It's the importance of taking care of yourself before you take care of others, so you can take better care of others. Things are actions I don't have that I don't want.
My children get along so well. It's unreal how well these two kids get along. I have this fear that at some point, they may not get along well. Sibling squabbles, I do not want them. I am afraid of it. I want peace in my house. I am not interested in sibling squabbles.
All right. Don't let them. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
I don't want to clean. I don't want to clean anything. I don't want to clean people. I don't want to clean dishes, floors, or clothes. I care very much that things are clean, but I don't want to clean.
Guiding Principles For Career And Life: Curiosity And Non-Final Decisions
That's totally fair. Anything else that we haven't covered during this interview that you want to make sure people leave with, or that you say that we haven't talked about?
This is funny. The one thing I would say, especially if any folks are thinking about career switches or early career experiences or any of those positions, is that whatever decisions you make are not final decisions. Every chapter is a chapter. Try to follow your natural curiosity. People say passion, I don't know, whatever. What are you curious about? Who do you want to learn from?
Success: Whatever decisions you make are not final. Every chapter is a chapter, so follow your natural curiosity.
Those are the two things that have guided me throughout my career. Who do you want to learn from? People have skills that you don't have, and what are you curious about? What do you want to learn? That has always been such a good guiding light for me as Iโve been making decisions throughout my career.
I don't know that Iโve ever thought about it that way because I get excited. Part of that is if they can't answer that question of what you're going to learn or how you're going to grow and expand, it's a hard decision. You're going against that gut feeling of like, โI'm not going to feel good.โ I love it. Thank you so much for sharing your story and being on. I know there's so much that people take away from this and are able to apply to their work and life.
Thank you, Amy. This was fun.
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Mindful Moments: Key Takeaways On Gratitude, Education, And Curiosity
Now for my Mindful Moments with this discussion with the Ariege. I hope all of you were able to take away some great little tidbits of knowledge to not only help you in life, but also help you as a leader. I know I did. I loved her story of her immigrant parents and what they taught her of appreciating and having gratitude for everything that she had, and understanding the differences of what she had versus her family that had not immigrated and the differences in how they live.
Each day, having that wonder of the abundance that she felt, even when by all sense of the imagination, maybe a little abundance. She had that with her family. She had that with her opportunities in this world and the opportunities that her parents gave her as well. Along those lines, she learned things from both her parents, her father being an engineer, where she got exposed to computers and building computers, and seeing the type of work that that was.
Also, her mom is going on this journey of taking advantage of being in America, growing her skills and education as her kids got older as well, and putting herself through college and becoming a teacher, which was inspiring for Ariege as well. I think one of the two most important things that came out of this was the values that her family instilled in her of education and gratitude.
You got a sense of that, no matter what Ariege has done in her career, in her life, of her strong feeling to be able to be open to learning and not get too stuck in the way things are, that there's always new ways of doing things and solving things, and brainstorming with other people on how to solve problems. That created her curiosity, which led her into her role now.
Even though she went on that path of becoming a computer coder, by accident, she fell into this customer service role in one of the earlier companies, and learned that problem-solving and working with products were where her passion was. That started her product management journey into where she is now.
I think these things are so important because we can get thrown off our path of what we think is success or what we envision as success, and pivot in other ways, and then find new areas of opportunity that maybe we didn't even realize existed. That area of opportunity aligned with her value system and her passions. You could see and hear from her as well how excited she got talking about these things.
The other thing that we talked about with gratitude and having that mindset, even when things are hard, of how fortunate you are in this moment, and things could be so much worse. There are so many people who do not have the things that we have. It's important when we look at the world with abundance versus from a negative standpoint of what we don't have versus what we do have and what is available and what we can work toward. It can totally change how we feel about life and our career, and our outlook on anything. That has helped her as a leader.
We talked about how you bring that in to leadership by demonstrating it. We can't just say these words of gratitude or continuous education and curiosity and learning without doing it ourselves to make it believable and to give someone something to model after. The important examples that she shared of how she does that in leadership are by giving people autonomy and allowing them to be able to solve these issues. Giving them the objective of what they need to solve, but not necessarily how to get there. I think that it is important for people to enjoy the work that they're doing, that they feel like they were part of the process, and they contributed as well.
As you walk away from this interview and the stories that Ariege told, I hope that maybe you can look at where you could start getting curious, where you could start being grateful and maybe thinking about how this would shift your mindset if you were able to realize that things don't have to be the way they were yesterday, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
There is always an opportunity to shift and change and reinvent what we do, whether that be at work, whether that be at home, but not closing ourselves off to the new things that are coming because maybe there's fear in that, or maybe we're worried we won't be good enough. Instead of letting the monkey mind go, we open ourselves up to that opportunity and think about what's possible, what we get to do versus what we can't control. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Ariege. I know I did. I think there are so many exciting things coming, and you can definitely tell with having a person like Ariege as a leader in her area, how much innovation is going to happen in the future that it's going to benefit the profession overall.
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About Ariege Misherghi
Ariege is General Manager of BILL's Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Accountant businesses. A dynamic leader with over two decades of experience, she has a proven track record of driving growth and delivering innovative solutions for small and midsize businesses and accounting professionals. Joining BILL in late 2024, Ariege brings extensive experience in leading teams and transforming businesses, with a passion for empowering businesses through intelligent, automated financial solutions that free them to focus on what matters most.
Ariege joins BILL from Intuit, where she led several business segments, most recently the Accountant Segment within Intuit'sยฎ Small Business and Self-Employed Group. In this role, she served more than 700,000 accountants globally, helping firms embrace technology, better manage their practices, and become strategic advisors to their clients. Her prior experience includes product leadership roles at Redbox and PayCycle (acquired by Intuit). Ariege's career began in customer service at PayCycle, where her front-line experience shaped her approach to product and business leadership.
Recognized by Accounting Today as a Top 100 Most Influential Person (2019) and by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a Woman of Influence (2021), Ariege holds a BS in Science, Technology, and Society, with a concentration in Computer Science, from Stanford University.