I wanted a personal-finance tool for people who didn't want to be accountants: something you could set up in ten minutes and spend less than five minutes a week on. Mint is now that tool.
Journalists ask me all the time, 'Akshay, do you believe in the numbers game?' My standard response: 'I can't count, that's why I have producers and accountants who calculate for me. As long as I have them in my life, I don't need to worry about numbers!'
Rapid development in areas like machine-to-machine communications and the Internet of Things, coupled with the proliferation of big data, means higher-skilled professions, such as lawyers, journalists and accountants, are changing too. Some of their tasks are being replaced.
I've always hated the way Hollywood has portrayed accountants. They're always little nerd balls, wimpy, afraid of everything. Growing up with accountants, I don't see them that way.
I'm not proud of this at all, but I'm someone who has relied on business managers and accountants and career managers to run the whole bureaucratic side of my life for the last 16 years, so anything, from filing tax returns to paying credit card statements, is something that I feel rather fortunate to have been out of the loop on.
If you could make something one percent smarter than a human, your artificial attorney or accountant would be better than all the attorneys or accountants out there. You would be the richest person in the world. People are chasing that.
Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.
If businesses don't know from state to state what the requirements are for taxes, they have to waste a lot of money on accountants and lawyers before deciding to expand their business into the state next door.
Films are now made by accountants. They pick a pretty young female or male face out of the air and give them a part - not because they think that person is right for it or is ready for it, but because they think that person will make them money.
I'm strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.
