Lay of The Land #117: Anees Pretorius & Cono Onorato (Bean)
Anees Pretorius and Cono Onorato — co-founders of Bean ($1.7mm in funding) — on the pursuit of their vision to reimagine the global accounting industry and elevate the profession into the digital age.
Anees Pretorius, a former Big 4 Accountant, is the CEO of Bean, a market network for specialized accounting services. Originally from South Africa, Anees previously held positions at Deloitte in Cape Town and San Francisco, and later at EY in Cleveland. During his time as a consultant, he worked alongside High-growth and Fortune companies, providing compliance and strategic services. However, it was his experience in the Bay Area working alongside some of the most influential and technologically progressive companies in the world that inspired him to think beyond the traditional constraints inherent in accounting and financial services.
Cono Onorato is the CTO at Bean, with over 15 years of experience building, designing, and deploying apps across many industries, including finance, healthcare, and education. Cono worked as a consultant for Fortune 500 clients such as UPS, Coca-Cola, Chick-Fil-A, Verifone, and AT&T, where he deployed creative and engineering solutions. Cono also founded and built an app called Gitful, where he successfully scaled the company to service hundreds of thousands of users across the globe in less than four years.
In this episode, we dive into the arc of their careers, their paths to entrepreneurship, and how they joined forces to create Bean. We explore their original insights, the questions they asked, and their vision for the future of accounting. We unpack their approach to building in stealth mode and the advantages and disadvantages of it. We also discuss the history and current state of accounting, the implications of AI in accounting, and how Bean will bring about the future of accounting in the digital age! Please enjoy my conversation with Anees Pretorius and Cono Onorato!
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Connect with Anees Pretorius on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneespretorius/
Connect with Cono Onorato on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/conoonorato/
Learn more about Bean — https://getbean.com/
Follow Bean on Twitter — https://twitter.com/one2bean
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