Skipping Two Generations of Accounting Software | DualEntry on Lightwork

Santi Nestares joins Claire Zau and Sam Eisler to explain why he rebuilt the ERP from scratch. Santi ran a previous company to about a hundred million, then lost nine months to a legacy ERP migration that left him staring at a blank screen while lenders and investors waited on numbers. His argument is that the ERP looks too big to attack directly, so startups go after an adjacent wedge instead, get good at it, and end up dependent on the system they meant to replace. DualEntry went at the hard thing first. Santi calls it the first ERP created after ChatGPT-3. Sam explains why this was a team Lightspeed wanted to back, and Santi tells the story of a negotiation that ran from a car to JFK and ended with him arguing millions on the phone in front of a TSA agent, then tearing up his ticket and heading back into the city. He also describes the team he put in what they call the basement, kept from talking to the rest of the company, and tasked with collapsing the product onto a single Kanban board where agents draft the work and a human approves it. Along the way, a customer who took one discovery call, went quiet for a month, spent 36 hours in the sandbox and came back ready to sign. A team of close to a hundred that includes a top 150 tennis player and a professional poker player. And a migration Santi ran from his plane over a Starlink propped in the window, books reconciled to the penny before landing. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome to Lightwork 1:41 What Is DualEntry and What Is an ERP 2:20 Why Build a New ERP 3:50 How AI Made Next-Generation ERP Possible 5:44 Leaving a Successful Company 7:58 Finding the Right Way to Tackle ERP 12:23 Which DualEntry Customer Stories Stand Out? 14:03 How Lightseed and DualEntry First Connected 18:12 How DualEntry Has Evolved Since the Partnership 20:40 Inside Project Helios 24:59 Building Fast-Moving Teams at DualEntry 26:09 What Makes a Great DualEntry Hire 30:02 The Future of AI, Fintech, and Organizations