Bizora Brews

Adam Tahir
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  • Entrepreneurship

Welcome to Bizora Brews, the podcast where tax professionals share the stories behind their careers. Guests open up about their early beginnings, the turning points that defined their expertise, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the wins they’re proud of. You’ll hear practical advice for young accountants, insights on how technology is reshaping tax work, and thoughtful perspectives on the future of the industry. It’s real conversation, real experience, and real guidance for the modern tax professional.

  1. 2d ago

    What Does It Take to Lead Strategy at a Big Four Firm? - John Modzelewski

    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 EY's M&A tax practice, then KPMG, where he built the firm's first models for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and later took on the CDO role for the entire tax function. Together they explore why the foreign tax credit engine John coded alone on weekends still runs inside KPMG's models today, why clients so often protect their own tax processes even when a better tool is sitting in front of them, and how KPMG rebuilt its approach to firm wide AI rollout after learning hard lessons from an earlier push with GPT. John started building KPMG's first corporate tax reform model in December 2016, days after the election, working from two competing draft models that neither team could finish alone. When the full bill passed a year later, he was the one who volunteered to program the foreign tax credit module nobody else wanted to touch, a piece of code still doing real work at the firm years later. Tune in for a conversation about what it actually takes to move a large tax practice from spreadsheets to a centralized, AI powered data function.

  2. Aug 10

    Why Do Reputations Follow You Across the Accounting World? - Brendan Ryan

    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 into tax once he found himself doing forecast research instead of just review comments. Together they explore why he thinks compliance work is already gone and much of consulting work is next, and what actually pulled him away from a firm and a leadership team he still speaks about with real respect. Brendan sold his mattress, his old TI 83 calculator, and everything else he owned, then drove from Greenville, South Carolina to New York City in a 2002 Chevy Blazer to pursue a master's in tax, living for months on canned chicken and rice cakes in a spare bedroom in Bayonne, New Jersey. Tune in for a conversation about what tax professionals are actually worth once the compliance work disappears.

  3. Aug 8

    Why Accounting Software Is the Hardest Category to Build? - Jeff Seibert

    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 ledger instead of a dashboard layered on top of QuickBooks, what it took to run a real bookkeeping firm internally just to stress test the product, and why large language models still cannot be trusted to do the math in accounting. Jeff walks through the two calls from Twitter that led to the Crashlytics acquisition, the patent Digits holds on self improving regex models that predates the current AI wave, and the moment CLA selected Digits as its future platform for thousands of clients. Tune in for a conversation about what it actually takes to earn trust in an industry that changes accounting software once a decade at most.

  4. Aug 3

    What Builds an Accounting Firm's Reputation, One Client at a Time? - Wayne Pinnell

    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. Together they explore how Wayne became managing partner with just four weeks notice after cofounder Steve Haskell was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and what it meant to have fifteen months working alongside Steve during his treatment, absorbing a lifetime of institutional knowledge in real time. They also get into why Haskell and White has stayed independent while private equity buys up firm after firm across the profession, and what Wayne means when he says the goal is life work balance, not work life balance. Wayne traces his own path back further than most, from a bicycle paper route in New Jersey to six years at McDonald's, where he became a swing manager and learned to reconcile hamburger patty counts against register receipts before he ever opened an accounting textbook. Tune in for a conversation about staying independent, transferring knowledge instead of hoarding it, and building a firm around people rather than a balance sheet.

  5. Aug 1

    Product Market Fit, Three Ways - StanfordTax, Taxwire and Vinyl

    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 fix the broken client intake process using prior year data. Jordan and his cofounders ran a marketing agency for accounting tech companies before building Vinyl, an AI meeting assistant purpose trained on accounting terminology and context. Andrew ran finance at a fast growing school lunch company, got frustrated trying to buy sales tax software that actually worked, and built Taxwire as both a tax engine and a managed service. Together they explore how each of them found product market fit in an industry that moves almost entirely on word of mouth, why throwing AI at a problem without deeply understanding it usually makes the product worse rather than better, and what they would each choose to fix if they could spend the next eighteen months on a single technical problem inside their companies. Dan explains why Stanford Tax's first product, launched without the personalization layer, sat unused for an entire tax season before the company cracked the formula that got firms handing over their credit cards. Andrew walks through the thirty thousand dollars he personally spent on a bad implementation with an incumbent tax vendor before deciding to build the alternative himself. Tune in for a conversation about what it really takes to earn trust in one of the most conservative buying communities in software.

  6. Jul 27

    When the Algorithm Asks the Questions - Eoin Fitzgerald

    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 compliance across dozens of entities and countries, and before that he was in consulting at BDO. That arc, from advising clients from the outside to owning the outcome from the inside, shapes almost everything he talks about in this conversation. Together they explore the difference between giving good tax advice and giving advice a business can actually use and scale, what it looks like to build a tax function in a region with no legacy systems or institutional habits to unwind, and why real time government reporting in the GCC is shifting the real work of tax teams from filing to explaining anomalies the algorithm flags automatically. Eoin talks through what it was like managing thousands of filings across Europe on spreadsheets at Dell, and what changes when a government portal can question a single invoice within weeks instead of waiting years for an audit. Tune in for a conversation about what tax compliance looks like when a region builds its system from zero instead of retrofitting one that is decades old. Eoin's Article: https://keeyns.com/news/chapter-1-the-indirect-tax-function-as-it-stands-today

  7. Jul 25

    Why AI Finally Works for Accounting? - Byron, Ping and Truss

    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. Camden Bean, co-founder of Ping Assistant, built the first accounting firm partnership program at Divvy before its acquisition by Bill.com, then ran a $100 million venture fund before selling his carried interest to build full time. Dan Pinkous, founder and CEO of Truss, bootstrapped a document intake and tax workflow platform from scratch starting in late 2022, without ever raising outside capital, and now counts many of the top 100 accounting firms as customers. Together they explore why two of them walked away from venture capital to become operators instead, what it actually took to earn trust with CPAs after years of broken promises from legacy vendors, and why they see partnership, not competition, as the winning strategy in a market too complex for any single platform to own. The conversation covers how Byron's document processing pipeline first got tested through an unplanned pilot on Truss's platform, why Ping was built on the bet that AI will free accountants to talk to clients more rather than less, and how the wave of private equity money entering accounting since November 2021 is reshaping buying behavior across the industry. Tune in for a conversation about what it takes to build trust, product, and a business inside one of the last industries AI hasn't fully transformed yet.

  8. Jul 20

    Who Teaches the Next Generation When AI Does the Work? - Muhammad Yammout

    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 he ever touched a tax return. Together they explore what changed as LLM's came around and what actually gets harder (not easier) between making manager and making senior manager at a Big Four firm, and why Muhammad thinks the next decade of tax work belongs to a new hybrid role he calls the tax engineer. Tune in for a conversation about what it takes to stay relevant in a profession that is being rebuilt from the ground up.

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About

Welcome to Bizora Brews, the podcast where tax professionals share the stories behind their careers. Guests open up about their early beginnings, the turning points that defined their expertise, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the wins they’re proud of. You’ll hear practical advice for young accountants, insights on how technology is reshaping tax work, and thoughtful perspectives on the future of the industry. It’s real conversation, real experience, and real guidance for the modern tax professional.

Information

  • Creator
    Adam Tahir
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Adam Tahir
  • Show Website
    Bizora Brews