Nicolas Kopp: Take the wedge every single time

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Nicolas Kopp is the co-founder and CEO of Rillet, an agentic enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform for finance teams. Rillet spent years in stealth before launching in 2024, and last month raised a $100 million Series C – its third round in fourteen months.

Kopp recently sat down with a16z’s Seema Amble before a room of speedrun founders to talk about the strategy behind Rillet’s breakout performance.

Watch our full conversation with Nic above, or check out the highlights below:

How do you know you can execute?

Seema opened with the context: when Nic started Rillet, “there had been essentially a graveyard of companies that had tried to come up against NetSuite and SAP and not done so successfully.” So why do it anyway?

“What got me to do it anyway, and just block out a lot of the naysayers, is: I could feel there was an opportunity. I knew firsthand from a previous job that there was an opportunity, if such a thing existed. And I know it’s a very dangerous, or a slippery, slope to tell yourself that. But for us, it did work out, in the sense that I knew the problem existed. I knew, actually, roughly the shape of the solution – what it had to entail. And the hardest pushback I got from anybody was: nobody’s ever done this before. How do you know you can execute?

“And for me, I’m the type of founder who wants to bet on execution – of myself and the team – every single day. Versus, for example, there are other founders who want to build into a massive trend that may or may not arrive. It has its pros and cons; we can talk about that. But we were very much in the first category: the opportunity exists, it’s very clear, and my head was pretty clear on how it should all come together. So it’s very much down to execution. So we spent a couple of years in stealth – which is, again, really not the recommended approach to building businesses – and hence got here. We basically launched into market two years ago, and then it went up from there.”

Stealth doesn’t mean hiding from customers

Those stealth years came with a caveat:

“These days it’s a minimum lovable product... What is good enough for you to test your idea, whether it’s working or not? While we were in stealth, we had multiple micro-launches. We had multiple types of customers as part of that journey where we had the product in hand, live in production – in some cases, getting very negative feedback on what we were doing and how things didn’t work. And that part is invaluable.

“Being in stealth and not exposing your ideas and your work to the harsh truth of the market dynamics outside of your five best friends – getting to that point is mission-critical, however you want to call that journey. You can always do a bigger announcement later on, but you need to get it in the hands of customers. And we did that, despite being in stealth for an extended period of time.”

Take the wedge every single time

Seema asked how you launch a system of record – ERP, “boring, but very important” – with a wedge. Nic’s answer: Rillet didn’t, and he wouldn’t recommend it.

“We had to really have a bit of everything. Otherwise you just can’t compete – you get laughed out of a room if you want to sell that product. So we were platform-first. It’s very rarely, actually, that companies launch that way… If you guys have a wedge that credibly leads into a bigger thing, I would go with a wedge every single time, because it’s just so much easier to build, sell, support.

“Once you have customers on a platform – you’re happy about the first five to ten sales that you’re doing, and then you realize the amount of customer support that comes out of a wide platform product, and the interdependencies in the code, and the code paths that one could be taking, or product paths that the customer is taking, is insane. So you really start drowning much more quickly with the wide surface area, versus the more wedge products.“

Rillet’s own compromise was a wedge in the messaging, if not in the product:

“For us specifically, we had a bit of a wedge messaging around a certain market segment that we were going for – SaaS and AI companies that had very similar pain points. And we had, as part of the platform, one product around revenue recognition, invoicing, ARR tracking… that was very well received. So it was a platform, and it had a messaging and a product beachhead, and that’s how close I could take it to that direction. But again, if you truly have a wedge that is credible, I think it’s much easier to get the company off the ground.“

The talent bar is a flywheel

On hiring, Nic’s answer ended with the thing he’d double down on hardest – and an admission about how the early days actually feel:

“And it’s really hard in the early days, because you need that hire. You also have no brand. Nobody wants to work for your company in the early days – let’s just be real. You don’t have a brand. You’re part of the speedrun program, which helps you, hopefully. Hopefully you have a few friends that you can pull in. But it’s a real scratch and claw in the early days. But for us, if I just look back, these couple of early good hires literally made the company. There are these sayings that the company, or the product, is a reflection of who you have as people.

“This is one of the strongest things that I’m feeling – I’m so glad, today, that we did that. And we get a lot of questions from our investors – Seema is very supportive, but generally, people ask us a lot of questions: why does it take you so long to hire what is seemingly a very simple position? But having that density then attracts better people. It’s an absolute flywheel. So I cannot double down more on that part: if you have a talent bar that you believe in, just go for it. Forget what everybody else is telling you.”

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