Original
October 15, 2025
The BILL Executive Leadership Team, after careful review and consideration of our business, teams, and goals, has made the decision to update our organization to align against our highest priorities. We are sharing below a note sent from our CEO and Founder, René Lacerte, to BILL employees today.
BILL Organizational Update
Hi Team,
I have an important organizational update to share. We’ve been hard at work executing a strategy to drive value creation for all BILL stakeholders. Alongside this, we are becoming a more focused and efficient organization, realigning teams around top priorities and improving execution. These efforts have laid important groundwork, but they haven’t yet delivered the level of results necessary to achieve our continuing profitability goals.
To ensure the long-term competitiveness of the business and best position BILL for the future, we must take additional steps to align our cost structure and talent more closely with our growth trajectory and invest more deliberately in the areas where we can have the greatest impact.
After careful consideration, the executive team has made the decision to reduce our workforce by 6%. Below, I’ve outlined further why we’re making this change.
When BILL began, our mission was to help small and medium businesses grow by showing them they didn’t have to do it all on their own, we would be their partner. Since then, we’ve built a platform that supports nearly half a million SMBs and 9,000+ accountants in managing their money, giving them back time and control to focus on what matters most.
Earlier this year, we set a bold ambition: to reinvent our category and lead a new era of intelligent finance for SMBs. Our goal is to shift from doing the work with our customers to doing it for them by anticipating their needs, streamlining financial operations, and helping them grow faster. We're not just eliminating busywork – we’re enabling smarter decisions, unlocking capital, and helping SMBs thrive.
We’ve made strong progress toward this vision. We’ve launched key innovations like the BILL Cash Account and Accountant Console, added mid-market products like Procurement and Multi-Entity, and expanded our reach through embedded partnerships with Oracle NetSuite and Paychex. We’ve modernized our payments infrastructure and made strategic investments in predictive and agentic AI to support long-term growth.
Reducing our workforce improves organizational agility and efficiency, while also freeing up capital resources to fuel investments that strengthen our market leadership.
This decision is not taken lightly. We are parting ways with talented teammates who have made meaningful contributions to our company, culture, and customers.
To those leaving: thank you. Your work has shaped what BILL is today, and we are truly grateful. This change reflects the needs of the business, not your talent or dedication. We are committed to supporting you through this transition with care, respect, and resources for what’s next. If your role has been impacted, you’ll receive a calendar invitation shortly for a meeting with a member of the People team to discuss next steps.
Summary: I know today is not easy. We must use this moment to help redefine our future. We must use this to drive greater focus, stronger discipline, and a more resilient foundation that delivers even more innovation and value to our customers.
Thank you all for your ongoing commitment, resilience, and belief in our mission. We also want to express our sincere appreciation to those we are saying goodbye to today. Your impact on us, our business, and the SMBs we serve has been truly meaningful.
- René
Translated
CEO René Lacerte and the BILL executive team announced on May 8, 2026 that they are firing approximately 6% of the company's roughly 3,357 employees — around 200 people — while on the very same day authorizing a $1 billion share repurchase program. Let that sink in: the company says it cannot afford its current headcount, but it can afford to hand a billion dollars to shareholders.
The memo is dressed up in the usual language — "realigning teams," "streamlining," "saying goodbye to talented teammates," "freeing up capital resources" — but the arithmetic tells the real story. BILL's median employee earns about $191,000 according to the company's own SEC filing, and by the company's own disclosure, CEO Lacerte is paid 85 times that — roughly $16 million a year. Firing 200 people saves approximately $38 million in annual compensation at median. Lacerte's own pay package is nearly half that figure. The $1 billion buyback authorized yesterday dwarfs the entire annual payroll of every employee being let go. This is not a financial necessity; it is a decision about who keeps the money.
BILL is not a company in crisis. In Q3 FY2026 — the quarter this memo references — the company posted 13% revenue growth to $406.6 million, an 85.1% non-GAAP gross margin, and a 94% net dollar retention rate across 493,000 SMB customers. That is an exceptional gross margin for any software business. The company serves nearly half a million small businesses and processes $89 billion in payment volume. These are the numbers of a business that works. The workers being fired did not produce a failing product; they helped build one of the strongest SMB fintech platforms in the market.
The memo also leans on the "agentic AI" frame — BILL says it is shifting from "doing the work with our customers to doing it for them" using "predictive and agentic AI." That is an unverified productivity claim, not a demonstrated outcome. No specific tasks, no measured efficiency gains at this company, no audited timeline are cited. "AI will do this" is the same rhetorical function as "headwinds" — it makes a human decision sound inevitable. The people losing their jobs are not being replaced by a proven system; they are being replaced by a pitch deck. Meanwhile, the stock jumped 7.5% in after-hours trading on the day of the announcement, and analysts raised price targets. The market rewarded firing people. That is the actual value creation happening here.
Lacerte closes by saying "this change reflects the needs of the business, not your talent or dedication." The business just posted 85% gross margins, authorized a $1 billion buyback, and is growing at 13%. The people being fired are not the problem. The executive team that over-hired while the company was losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually — $326 million in FY2024 alone — and is now cutting workers to "free up capital" for stock repurchases is the problem. Taking responsibility would mean Lacerte declining his bonus, surrendering equity, or stepping aside so a more disciplined operator could run the company without making workers pay for leadership's planning failures. None of that is in this memo.