Bizora Brews

Jeremy Hartzell is the COO and General Counsel of HBK CPAs & Consultants, a top 50 firm that just went through a strategic growth investment from H.I.G. Capital. He spent twelve years at Deloitte, moved in house at BNY Mellon, and has helped lead HBK’s growth since 2015.

In this episode, Jeremy shares the M&A closing where his client insisted on having him in the next seat, and why that same client still works with him today. We talk about what firm owners get wrong about private equity, how HBK ran its process down from 15 interested fi...

Jim Chapman enlisted in the Army as a private and retired twenty years later as a major. After stints as a county budget analyst, in insurance and investments, and running a fine art print business, he joined H&R Block in 2004, became an enrolled agent as part of the first computerized exam group, and has run his own practice since 2010. Since 2009 he has represented more than 3,000 tax returns in face to face IRS audits.

Adam and Jim met at the NAEA conference in New Orleans. In this episode they talk about why the number of active enrolled...

What happens when an information systems graduate gets handed a sales tax audit and a tax engine implementation before she has ever filed a return?

Olga leads indirect tax at Avanos Medical, a medical device company recently acquired by private equity. She studied management information systems at Wayne State University and fell into sales tax when a small Detroit company she interned at got hit with a Michigan assessment. Her path since then runs through Citrix, Ryder, RockTenn during its WestRock merger years, and Workday. She treated each stop as a deliberate step in a...

What does it take to sell AI into the largest accounting firms in the country when the hardest part has nothing to do with the technology?

This founder series episode features Cosmin “Cos” Nicolaescu, CEO and co founder of Accrual, the AI native platform built for Top 100 accounting firms. Before Accrual, Cos was CTO at Brex, an early engineer and manager at Stripe, and started his career at Microsoft. Two years in, Accrual has grown from individual tax returns into a full platform spanning tax, audit, and client advisory services, with Armaninoamong its first customers.

What does it take to run a top 100 firm’s entire tax department when your career was built in sales and use tax, not federal compliance?

James Ortiz is the Head of Tax at REDW, which just climbed to No. 96 in the IPA rankings. His path started in the call center at the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department while he was still finishing a finance degree. From there he moved into gross receipts tax audits, then to Moss Adams reviewing the same refund claims he used to audit, and then to Gap’s shared serv...

What does it take for an established accounting firm to put its name behind an AI native ERP that had no money, no clients, and a very big pitch?

This is the first live taping of Bizora Brews, recorded in front of an audience at Armanino’s San Francisco office during SF Tech Week. Adam is joined by two returning guests. Dean Quiambao is a Partner and the Northern California Market Leader at Armanino, where he spent his first twelve years in audit. Stephen Hedlund is Head of Finance at Rillet, the AI native ERP th...

What does it take to walk away from a partner seat at a top 40 firm at 38, with no equity path and no real plan, and start over at a six person shop?

David Barbeito is the CEO and managing partner of DPB PLLC in Miami, one of the fastest growing CPA firms in the country, and a recognized top 200 accounting leader. He started out doing bookkeeping for Domingo Alonso while still at FIU, then spent 16 years at Morrison Brown Argiz & Farr (MBAF), where he made partner at 30 and eventually led the audit department as the...

What does it take to turn a two person practice with a few hundred thousand dollars of business into a $35 million firm, when nothing in your accounting training taught you how to run a business?

Michael Stephano is the Managing Partner of Stephano Slack, a top 200 CPA firm based in Wayne, Pennsylvania with roughly 130 people. A Villanova graduate and the son of a CPA, Michael made manager at Rainer and Co and partner at Carrow Doyle before leaving in 2004 to start his own practice with Blake Chapman. His career is a study in what happens...

What happens when a software engineer who hated writing billing code ends up building the AI agent that does it for everyone else?

Bailey Spell is the cofounder of LedgerUp, a Y Combinator backed company automating billing, accounts receivable, and revenue workflows through its AI agent, Ari. Before LedgerUp, Bailey was a software engineer at Microsoft, where he helped take Viva Learning from zero to one. He then moved to San Francisco to join Respell, a workflow automation startup later acquired by Salesforce. His path runs from big tech, to a three person engineering team, to building...

How does someone who calls himself a terrible auditor become the person clients ask for by name?

Dean Quiambao is Chief Relationship Builder and Northern California Market Leader at Armanino, where he has spent the last 25 years. He joined in 2001, when the firm had two offices and 80 people. It now has 30 offices and close to 3,000 people. He started out planning to become a financial planner after interning at Charles Schwab, took one piece of advice about getting his CPA, and built his career under Andy and Matt Armanino. His arc runs from audit, to the...

What happens when a firm owner decides the only real fix for busy season is building the software himself?

Dave Haase is the founder and CEO of Juno, a tax prep automation platform built by CPAs for tax firms. He came into the profession sideways: a finance degree from Indiana, brand work at General Mills, and an MBA from Stanford. Then in 2015 he turned down a product management offer at Salesforce to buy his mother's Bay Area CPA practice. He earned his EA and CPA after the purchase and started out as a preparer inside...

What makes someone pull over at a phone booth in the middle of a workday, call his wife, and tell her he is quitting to become a CPA?

Randy Crabtree is the founder of Tri Merit, the specialty tax firm he built around R&D tax credits starting in 2007, and the creator of Bridging the Gap, the wellness focused accounting conference now heading into its fifth year. He retired from Tri Merit two days after this conversation was recorded. Before any of that he studied computer science at Northern Illinois University, spent a...

What happens when a client tells their wealth advisor they got married, and the tax team only finds out after the return is filed?

Naomi Owotumi is General Manager of Accounting at Jump, where she is building the accounting vertical inside a company that already dominates wealth management with more than 40,000 users across 14,000 firms.

Before Jump she spent ten years at KPMG, first in financial services tax on regulated investment companies and partnerships, then in asset management tax technology, where she started and led a 40 person global data automation...

What happens to a profession when the jobs where people actually learned it start to disappear?

Kait Zech is a Partner at PKF O'Connor Davies and the incoming president of the New Jersey Society of CPAs. She started in accounting before college, doing back office work for a sole proprietor in her hometown and eventually learning bookkeeping, individual tax and business tax there. From that came a local firm near Seton Hall, an Ernst & Young member firm in New York City auditing large private foundations, and 15 years at PKF O'Connor Davies, where she...

What if the two years at a Big Four firm that everyone treats as mandatory are no longer worth what they used to be?

Jerome Meyer is Vice President of Global Tax at AMD, where he leads a team of roughly 60 people covering every jurisdiction the company operates in. He got there without a plan. He grew up in Switzerland and southern Spain, came to Texas at 17 to play college tennis, went to law school in San Diego, and took an entry level job at KPMG because the financial crisis had closed the...

What happens when you spend twenty years building a tax career in a country that did not have a corporate income tax?

Humayun Naseer is VP of Tax at Gulf Islamic Investments in Dubai, a Shariah compliant alternative investment firm with more than $4.5 billion under management. He started in 2005 at McDermott International doing intercompany accounting, work nobody else in the building wanted, and moved through Transocean, Oceaneering, Al Futtaim Group and Dubai Islamic Bank before landing on the investment side. He has never worked at a Big Four firm. Every step came from...

What happens to professional judgment when the machine gets good enough to exercise it?

Adam sits down with Tomás González, a 35 year veteran of tax across Latin America. He started at Arthur Andersen in Buenos Aires in 1988, made partner, moved to EY Argentina after the Andersen collapse, then crossed to the corporate side as Latin America tax lead at Shell and spent 16 years at Unilever running tax for the region. It is a career built almost entirely on walking into rooms where the function did not exist yet and building it.

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...

What happens when the CPA, the attorney, and the insurance advisor are all the same person sitting across the table?

Christopher C. Papin is a CPA, a licensed attorney in New York, Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma, an insurance advisor, a Thomson Reuters thought leader, and the author of 168 Hours. He started in the corporate tax department of a Fortune 500 oil and gas company in Oklahoma City, moved into private law practice when the headquarters relocated to Houston, and then built his own firm of roughly eight people serving small businesses and their owners...

What happens when a chemical engineer ends up arguing tax law in front of judges, then spends a career deciding what KPMG's tax data should look like next?

John Modzelewski is Chief Data Officer, Tax at KPMG, where he leads the firm's Ignition practice. His path there was not a straight line. He studied chemical engineering at MIT, worked as a research analyst crafting economic testimony at the Brattle Group, then went to Georgetown Law, where a class with Professor Martin Ginsburg redirected him into tax. From there it was Fried Frank, then...

What happens when a tax professional on the partnership track walks away to spend his days teaching AI models the work he spent a decade mastering?

Brendan Ryan is an AI tutor working with xAI's human data group, where he helps train frontier models on finance and accounting knowledge. Before that he spent over a decade at RSM building a career in financial services tax, working with hedge funds and private equity clients out of New York City, after starting his career as an auditor at a small South Carolina firm and pivoting...

What does it take to build a new general ledger from scratch when the two incumbents have owned the category for over thirty years?

Jeff Seibert is the founder and CEO of Digits, an AI native accounting platform going head to head with QuickBooks and Xero. Before Digits, Jeff cofounded Crashlytics, the mobile crash reporting company that now runs on billions of smartphones worldwide, sold it to Twitter, and went on to lead consumer product there during the company's IPO years.

Together they explore why Jeff chose to build a full...

What happens to an accounting firm's identity when its managing partner gets four weeks notice to step into the role?

Wayne is the managing partner of Haskell and White, a Southern California accounting firm. Before that he spent ten and a half years at BDO, then known as Seidman and Seidman, rising from audit staff in Beverly Hills to partner. He has also spent time on the board of LEA Global, an international alliance of independent CPA firms, and taught auditing and intermediate accounting at Cal State Fullerton for almost two decades.

What does it actually take to convince an industry built on trust and referrals to adopt something new, and why do three founders attacking completely different parts of the accounting workflow keep arriving at the same lessons about how this profession actually buys?

This episode brings together Dan Berenholtz, cofounder and CEO of Stanford Tax, Jordan Vickery, cofounder of Vinyl, and Andrew Rea, cofounder and CEO of Taxwire, for a wide ranging conversation on building software for accountants. Dan started at the IRS before landing at Stanford and eventually Wix, and built Stanford Tax to...

What happens when a region skips straight from having no tax system at all to running some of the most advanced real time reporting in the world? Eoin Fitzgerald has spent his career answering that question from the inside, and this episode digs into why the GCC's compliance future looks nothing like anywhere else.

Eoin currently leads tax at Keeyns in the UAE, building out a function from the ground up in a market where tax as a concept did not exist eight years ago. Before that he spent time in house at Dell managing...

What happens when two venture capitalists trade a fund for a product roadmap, and a bootstrapped founder becomes one of the accounting industry's most trusted vendors without ever raising outside money?

This episode of Bizora Brews' Accounting Founder Series brings together three builders reshaping the accounting tech stack from three different angles. Blaze O'Byrne, co-founder of Byron, left a venture role at City Ventures, where he backed companies like Deepgram, to build AI-driven tax document processing, following years at Credit Suisse and a computer science degree from the University of Chicago.

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What happens to a tax career built on international structuring when a five word email from a national partner make you question whether the work still needs you?

Muhammad Yammout is a Senior Manager in International Tax at EY, where he has spent his career since starting in Diversified Staff Group and moving into International Tax Services. Before EY, he worked tax controversy at Optima Tax Relief, closing audits. He later completed a tax LLM at Loyola. His path started even earlier, as a teenage spoken word poet and volunteer poetry mentor before...

What happens to trust when AI can do the work but the client still needs to believe in the person doing it?

This episode is a founder series conversation with Thomas Shelley, co founder of Magnetic, and Anderson Petergeorge, co founder of Quanto. Thomas built his career through Zynga, and Keeper Tax before starting Magnetic, an AI tax preparer built on a multi agent system with EAs and CPAs reviewing every return before it reaches the firm. Anderson's path ran through auditing, private equity before he built a bookkeeping firm and eventually pivoted Quanto into...

What does it take to defend a tax credit once the IRS decides to take a closer look?

Andrew Brewster is a Senior Director at Alvarez and Marsal Tax in Washington DC, where he leads work across research and development tax credits and IRS examination defense. Before A&M, Andrew clerked in the Department of Justice Tax Division, interned at the IRS, and spent nearly a decade at Deloitte building his expertise in R&D credit studies from the inside of both the government and the profession.

Together they...

What happens when three founders, each betting on a completely different piece of the accounting stack, end up needing each other to win?

That's the setup for this episode of Bizora Brews. Pujun Bhatnagar is founder and CEO of Kintsugi, a sales tax compliance platform serving over 7,000 clients across 102 countries, built after watching his father and grandfather navigate the same compliance mess as CPAs and after his own stint at Meta.

Leroy Kerry is cofounder and CEO of Filed, an AI tax return preparation platform based in Stockholm, previously...

What happens when your first product actually gains traction, and you have to decide whether to bet everything on it?

David Wyle is the founder of SurePrep, where he built one of the most widely used platforms in tax automation. Before that, he spent years in the trenches of early software development, cold calling pilot firms in 1997 and building ePACE, one of the first paperless audit tools to take hold in a profession that did not want to change.

Together they explore what product market fit actually looks like...

What does it actually take to leave a 25-year career in Big Four tax and build a national practice from nothing in a country where your firm had never operated?

Sean Keegan is the Managing Director and Head of Tax Australia at Alvarez and Marsal, where he leads a full-service national tax practice built from the ground up in under two years. Before A&M, Sean spent nearly eight years as a Transaction Tax Partner at EY in Sydney, advising private capital investors and corporate groups across some of Australia's most complex M...

In this episode, Adam sits down with Oleh Fedusiv, Director and Head of APAC Tax at Uber, where he oversees the tax function across one of the most complex regional footprints in the gig economy. Before Uber, Oleh spent nearly seven years climbing through EY across two countries, working his way from transfer pricing consultant to senior roles in Amsterdam. His path started in Kyiv, running through private equity, banking, and Big 4 before landing at a company that operates in almost every major market on earth.

Together they explore what international tax looks like inside...

In this episode, Adam sits down with Jorge Gallardo, Global Head of Tax at Airwallex, where he is leading the transformation of the tax function across 26+ jurisdictions.

Before Airwallex, Jorge served as Head of Finance and Tax at Fazz and Senior Manager International Tax at PwC Singapore, bringing a career that spans Big 4, fintech, and high-growth startup environments across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Together they explore what it means to own global tax at a company expanding at that pace, how transfer pricing works in a cross-border payments business, and...

What does it take to build a global tax function from scratch, not once, but multiple times, across some of the world's most complex business environments?

In this episode, Adam sits down with Clara Navalón Valero, a global tax leader whose career spans Deloitte, Repsol, Adevinta, Amazon, and Sandoz. Clara has built tax functions from the ground up at multiple companies, navigating IPOs, billion-dollar acquisitions, cross-border M&A, and digital service tax in some of the most heavily scrutinized regulatory environments in the world.

Together they explore what i...

What does it take to build and lead a world-class family office advisory practice across three decades at two of the world's most respected firms?

In this episode, Adam sits down with Robert "Bobby" Stover Jr., former Americas Family Office Leader at EY and current Executive Director of the Family Office Initiative at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. With over 13 years at EY and nearly a decade at Grant Thornton before that, Bobby has spent his career at the intersection of family wealth, legacy planning, and professional services leadership.

What happens when a tax professional grows into a finance leader who oversees both tax and treasury at one of the fastest-growing consumer brands in the country?

In this episode, Adam sits down with Michael Tufts, VP of Tax & Treasury at Ruggable, whose career path spans ITW, KPMG M&A, and an 8-year journey through Mattel, where he rose from Tax Manager to Finance Director.

Michael shares the pivotal lessons that shaped his leadership style from supporting global supply chains and managing IP-driven...

What does it take to build a world-class international tax function across industries as different as media, consumer goods, and real estate tech?

In this episode, Adam sits down with Renato Carneiro, Vice President of Tax at eXp World Holdings, whose career spans KPMG, WarnerMedia, and Newell Brands. Together they explore how global tax strategy has evolved, the leadership lessons behind managing cross-border teams, and what the future looks like for tax in a digital-first world.

From navigating transfer pricing challenges to scaling tax functions...