The Zero Day Close - Stephen Hedlund of Rillet

What does it take to convince a public company CFO to rip out an ERP they have trusted for twenty years and replace it with something built four years ago? Stephen Hedlund is Head of Finance at Rillet, the AI native ERP that just closed a Series C led by ICONIQ at a 1 billion dollar valuation. Before Rillet he worked at Walmart on SAP, then joined a Silicon Valley startup where migrating off QuickBooks onto NetSuite took eighteen months instead of twelve. He joined Rillet when the company had twelve employees, taking a pay cut with a second baby on the way, betting that the same broken finance tooling he saw at the largest retailer in the world was about to get rebuilt from scratch. Together they explore how a dinner conversation with Dean at Armanino turned into the partnership model Rillet now runs with EY and KPMG, what it actually takes to reach a zero day close when prepaid schedules and journal entries are read and booked from a PDF with no human touch, and why Stephen thinks the ERP itself, not a chat wrapper sitting on top of it, will end up being the cheapest and fastest way to run finance AI agents. Along the way Stephen talks about Boba, the internal agent that lets anyone at Rillet request a product change and see it shipped to production the same day. Tune in for a conversation about rebuilding the ERP, the end of the monthly close, and what the office of the CFO looks like when AI adoption becomes the job.