An accountant is an unlikely place to begin an internet story. There is no obvious theatrical entrance. Someone has records to review, a deadline to meet, a client waiting for an answer. Yet this was the person Brett L. Prager put near the center of an early online business: the professional who already had a reason to be in the room.
As an early co-founder and CEO of CPA2Biz, Prager helped pursue a proposition with a pleasantly practical premise. Small businesses needed technology. Accountants already advised them. Connect the two, and a professional relationship could become a route through which software reached the people who might use it.
CPA2Biz would later become CPA.com. Prager’s part belongs to the opening chapter, when the business was being assembled and the word “portal” still carried the promise of a destination. He eventually moved into a different role, as a partner at DFW Capital Partners. Accounting would come round again.
The relationship came first
In January 2001, Microsoft and Thomson’s commitment of $50 million to CPA2Biz gave the proposition substantial backing. The planned services ranged from general ledgers and payroll to customer relationships, procurement and online banking. It was an ambitious shopping list for a venture whose intended customer might have been perfectly satisfied to get one troublesome process working properly.
Prager’s argument concerned access as much as applications. An accountant could influence decisions inside a small business because the advice came through an established relationship. A technology supplier approaching the same business began from a different position. In that gap lay the opportunity.
There is something revealing about a technology venture that gives an existing adviser such an important part. The accountant remains recognizable. The tools around the relationship change. The software has to earn its place in work that somebody already does, for a client who already expects an answer.
“Building this site isn’t easy”
Brett L. Prager, speaking in 2001
Prager and AICPA chief Barry Melancon took the CEO and chairman roles respectively during the venture’s development. A transitional site, CPAWeb.org, preceded the broader rollout. Education and professional resources offered somewhere concrete to begin before the larger plans for connected business services.
The scale of the proposed market was one thing; the order in which to serve it was another. A portal could advertise an expansive future while still needing to make its first useful encounter count. For an accountant, a grand entrance is less persuasive than a piece of work completed without fuss. The profession makes a demanding audience for promises. It spends a fair amount of its time asking for the supporting detail.
Microsoft and Thomson’s announced commitment to the CPA2Biz venture.
Two audiences, one transaction
In 2002, CPA2Biz combined with Rivio, a Santa Clara business supplying online applications to small companies. Prager became CEO of the combined business, with Rivio’s Navin Chaddha as president. The deal gave the original proposition a more tangible arrangement of people and products.
CPA2Biz had the accounting audience. Rivio brought applications and a technology platform that could be offered under an accountant’s own identity. That private-label capability mattered to a business built around the adviser. The client could encounter a digital service through the firm they already knew.
“Rivio has proven applications and a technology platform that allows full private labeling by CPAs,” Prager said at the time. The terminology belongs to its period. The commercial question is readily recognizable: whose relationship brings a customer to the product, and whose name appears when they arrive?
The combination brought together about 100,000 registered users: 75,000 accountants from CPA2Biz and 25,000 small-business owners from Rivio. Rivio’s human-resources applications, including payroll, used a single database. Prager described the opportunity to extend what accountants could offer their clients.
Those two audiences explain the deal more clearly than a list of corporate adjectives could. One group worked with business owners. The other group included business owners using applications. Bringing them into the same organization created an opportunity to connect professional advice with everyday administration.
It also shows how much of this internet story depended on ordinary business arrangements. Leadership had to be assigned. Applications had to fit together. A service needed to look familiar to its customer. The combination was a transaction, with the practical work of making it useful still ahead.
A founder on the other side of the table
Prager’s career also ran through investing. He began in JP Morgan Partners’ private equity group, founded Theo Capital Partners in 1999 and joined DFW as a partner in 2006. At Theo, his work included investments in service and technology businesses, consulting and merchant banking.
His education crossed engineering and business: degrees at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering and Wharton School, followed by an MBA at Columbia Business School. Penn’s alumni record places him in the engineering and Wharton classes of 1988.
A résumé with both founding and investing invites an appealing story about learning to see every problem from both sides. The chronology supports a more precise observation. Prager has occupied different positions in the process of building a business. His responsibilities have included leading a company and working at a firm that supplies capital to companies.
Those positions ask different questions of the same proposition. A founder has to explain how the business will work. An investor has to decide what to support. A customer, meanwhile, is free to ask a shorter question: will this make the job easier? The early CPA2Biz case is interesting because all three questions sit close together.
By February 2001, CPA2Biz was also being discussed as a possible future public offering. That was an intention of the period, with an organization and financing structure still developing around the venture. The prospect of a market listing belonged alongside the more immediate business of getting services to accountants. A financing plan and a working product keep separate calendars.
There was a literal move in that early expansion, too. In February 2001, the venture was preparing to take its offices across the street from the AICPA’s New York headquarters, where most of its roughly 100 staff worked. It is an agreeably unglamorous detail in a story about the internet: a young business still needed desks, rooms and a place for people to turn up. Even a portal had to find an office.
Accounting, again
In January 2024, DFW announced an investment in Idaho-based Harris CPAs. Its services included audit and assurance, tax, advisory and consulting. Michael J. O’Donnell, a DFW operating partner, joined as CEO. Prager spoke about why DFW had chosen the business following a review of the accounting-services industry.
His comments focused on the management team, the firm’s culture and its record of improving client service. He also described support for partnerships with other accounting firms, alongside the practical pressures of staffing, technology and increasingly complex client demand.
Placed beside the CPA2Biz chapter, the investment makes a useful pair of bookends. Earlier, Prager had been helping assemble services for accountants to use and offer. Now he was discussing capital and support for an accounting business itself. The profession appeared in both transactions, with the commercial arrangement changed.
The continuity is specific enough to resist decoration. Accounting firms have clients to serve. Technology changes the tools available to them. People have to deliver the work. Prager’s two documented chapters approach that collection of needs from different positions, separated by more than twenty years.
Meanwhile, the business he helped lead early on had acquired a new corporate name. CPA2Biz became CPA.com in May 2014, under then-president and CEO Erik Asgeirsson. The name change sits later in the company’s history. Prager’s founding role and the subsequent organization belong to a sequence, with each chapter retaining its own cast.
A life outside the announcement
The public glimpses of Prager away from transactions are smaller and warmer. In a 2003 Penn alumni note, Wendy Prager announced the arrival of their third daughter, Savannah, joining Amanda and Kiara in Short Hills, New Jersey. She described their household with the amused perspective of someone whose family had just grown again.
The detail changes the scale of the biography. Corporate history deals in combinations and appointments. An alumni note records the sort of news its writer actually wanted old classmates to hear. During the same broad period in which the business story was unfolding, there was another audience receiving a different update.
Wendy and Brett Prager also appear on the supporter list for SEEDS’ 2017 anniversary benefit. A photograph from that April places them with Imani Gilliam and Susan Present. It is a modest addition to a professional profile, and better for being modest: an evening, a group, a connection outside a deal.
The business story ends where it began, with a relationship between people doing useful work for one another. Prager’s early proposition assigned the accountant a central place in the digital business. His later accounting investment returns attention to the firm around that professional. Across those chapters, the person behind the numbers remains firmly in view.