Three weeks. That was how long Flint Lane’s retirement lasted before he told his wife, Kathy, that it was going to require revision. It was early 2023. He had finished a long stretch running Billtrust, the billing and payments business he founded in 2001. A sensible next chapter was available. Lane proposed a professional table tennis league instead.
Kathy laughed. Her reply, as he later recalled it, was “Of course you are.” There is considerable marital history compressed into those four words. She had already given him the birthday present that turned a recreational interest into a serious attachment. Now the attachment was asking for teams, players, venues and a business plan.
Major League Table Tennis began in 2023. For anyone accustomed to encountering the sport beside a washing machine, the proposition required a little adjustment. Lane wanted Americans to buy tickets, follow teams and watch professionals whose command of spin made the familiar game look suddenly unfamiliar. He had spent years persuading businesses to rethink ordinary paperwork. Here was another ordinary object with more going on beneath the surface.
Running Billtrust. Then trying life without running a business.
The expensive problem inside the envelope
Lane grew up in New York and liked computers early. He studied computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1988, then worked at Andersen Consulting and a succession of software businesses. His route toward entrepreneurship ran through practical software work rather than an early desire to become a public figure. The recurring attraction was finding a problem a computer could help untangle.
In 1998, he and Edward McLaughlin founded Paytrust. The irritation was domestic and recognizable: bills kept arriving on paper. Their service redirected customers’ bills to a processing center, scanned them and made them available online for payment. The screen looked like progress. Behind it sat the stubborn expense of handling envelopes.
Customer acquisition was difficult, too. People had established habits around paying bills, and a useful service still needed to persuade them to change. Lane’s first venture exposed a gap between a technological possibility and the pace at which customers and institutions would adopt it. A digital destination could remain dependent on a very physical journey.
Billtrust approached the problem from the biller’s side. It began in 2001, helping businesses manage billing and, over time, more of the work required to get paid. The change in perspective mattered. Instead of expecting every participant to arrive in the electronic future together, Lane could sell a service that dealt with the present.
Eight dollars is a poor sales pitch
Even that idea needed correction. Early Billtrust conversations concentrated on smaller companies. Lane later gave a wonderfully deflating example: a business generating 50 invoices a month might save only $8 from a 10 percent reduction in costs. The problem was real. The savings were scarcely worth a conversation.
After three or four months, the company moved toward larger customers. Wholesale distribution and manufacturing offered more promising volumes; bottled water helped introduce it to bigger industries. By 2012, Lane described a target range of 1,000 to a million bills a month. Counting the invoices told him more than admiring a customer’s name.
A company could be enormous and still be a poor fit. An aircraft manufacturer did not necessarily produce thousands of monthly invoices for aircraft, while a point-of-sale business had a different payment pattern altogether. Lane’s attention settled on the repeated transaction. What happened often enough, with enough friction, to justify paying someone else to handle it?
Distribution required similar precision. Accounting software companies became useful referral partners because they already served businesses producing large numbers of bills. Billtrust offered a revenue share for introductions and handled the selling itself. The arrangement put the pitch near the people who might need it. Lane still had to explain why a billing provider could help a customer move online.
“What would the customer want?”Flint Lane’s Billtrust team mantra, 2012
Paper paid for the electronic future
The early Billtrust proposition had a quietly useful feature: print and mail could produce a viable business while electronic billing developed. Lane self-funded the company initially, then brought in angel money and a venture round from Edison. In 2012, he described roughly $500,000 in angel funding and $4 million in venture funding up to that point.
His accounts of the company’s growth resist the tidy upward arrow. Equipment and infrastructure came first. He said Billtrust reached profitability within two years, then deliberately accepted periods of losses when it invested in salespeople and marketing. The calculation changed as the company grew. Profitability was a decision to revisit, with a business underneath it.
Acquisitions offered another way to reach customers. By 2012, Billtrust had bought two smaller businesses with 75 and 200 customers respectively. Lane described integrating those customers into its own platform. The logic was straightforward: salespeople could win accounts individually, or the company could buy a business that already had them.
Some early targets were small print-and-mail operators. Their customers could be offered electronic billing alongside existing services. Lane preferred cash purchases in those deals, avoiding additional stockholders and complexity. This is the unglamorous machinery behind a company’s growth: somebody has to integrate the accounts, keep the bills moving and make the next service useful.
By 2022, the acquisitions had crossed the Atlantic. Billtrust’s purchases of iController in Belgium and Order2Cash in the Netherlands expanded its European presence. Lane was still working on the same broad question, with more countries and more moving parts: how does a business turn an invoice into money without making a small administrative expedition of the process?
A company can outgrow its own habits
Billtrust became publicly traded on Nasdaq in 2021. In September 2022, it agreed to an acquisition by EQT that valued its equity at approximately $1.7 billion. That figure belongs to the company’s transaction, and describes the scale of what Lane and his colleagues had built over two decades. The announcement offered shareholders $9.50 a share in cash.
In December 2022, Sunil Rajasekar succeeded him as CEO. Lane remained a director at the transition. The founder’s operating chapter had an endpoint, even if his interest in companies plainly did not. A business that began by helping send bills now had a new capital partner and a new chief executive.
Long before that handover, he had been thinking about how teams change with scale. In 2012, with around 100 employees, he described promoting people internally while hiring outside expertise where necessary. A team that had brought a business to one stage could need help reaching the next. Loyalty and competence had to share the room.
He applied scrutiny to boards as well. Lane’s advice to founders was to choose directors with the care they would give to important employees, and to assign useful work between meetings. Introductions to a candidate, investor or partner were tangible contributions. A board seat came with homework. The stationery was more impressive than in school; the principle was familiar.
- 1998Paytrust
Consumer bill payment - 2001Billtrust
Business billing - 2014Princeton Pong
A club for the game - 2023MLTT
Professional team competition
The birthday present that kept growing
The table tennis story had been developing alongside the payments story. For Lane’s 45th birthday, Kathy arranged a lesson with David Zhuang, a three-time Olympian. Lane arrived expecting to give him a match. The results were 11-0 and 11-0. Two games, twenty-two points, and a recreational player’s understanding of his own ability thoroughly revised.
He kept training. In the summer of 2014, Lane and Zhuang opened Princeton Pong, creating a place where that interest could become a community. The club has 14 professional tables and offers coaching, open play and tournaments. It is the sort of business in which an abstract ambition acquires opening hours.
Roger Kang and André Liu later joined Flint and Kathy as co-owners. Lane now calls Naples, Florida, home, while retaining ties to Princeton, where the family spends summers. His table tennis life connects a home city, a club and a league. The birthday lesson grew quite an extensive address book.
His league biography calls his playing ability “solidly mediocre.” A founder willing to publish that assessment has at least understood one advantage of being the organizer: there is no requirement to beat the people you recruit. The useful skill is recognizing what they can do, and giving other people a reason to watch.
Give the crowd a reason to stay
MLTT began with eight teams and expanded to ten for its third season, adding New York Slice and Atlanta Blazers. It has drawn investment from figures in professional sports, including David Blitzer and Daryl Morey. That brought experience and connections from beyond the table tennis circuit into Lane’s attempt to build an audience.
The league’s team format supplies a finale called the Golden Game. All five players rotate through a race to 21, and the winning team earns six points toward the match result. It makes the ending consequential for the whole team. For a spectator learning the sport, a shared finish offers something immediate to follow.
By April 2024, Lane was appearing with players on Chicago morning television ahead of the inaugural championship at Loyola’s Gentile Arena. Enzo Angles and Ievgen Pryshchepa joined him to introduce the competition and demonstrate the sport. Building a league includes these modest acts of explanation: bring a table, show the game, invite people in.
A national television agreement with CBS Sports Network followed in 2025. In May 2026, Lane said MLTT had closed another $5 million funding round, bringing total funding above $15 million. The league reported ticket sales up 80 percent from the previous season. Those figures describe a developing sports business, with the continuing work of turning attention into repeat attendance.
By September 2026, fourth-season competition was underway. Lane’s ambition remains to establish professional table tennis as an American spectator sport. It asks him to solve familiar business problems in a louder setting: recruit capable people, find customers, organize delivery and give the audience a reason to return.
Another point to play
The payments chapter continues through board work. ClassWallet appointed Lane a director in June 2025, and his other board roles include Dash Solutions and Solutions By Text. He also serves the Boys & Girls Club of Collier County and has volunteered as a Big Brother for nearly two decades. His calendar holds commitments beyond whichever business currently gets the headline.
There is an appealing lack of finality to his story. Paytrust led to a different billing model. Billtrust required adjustments to its customers, funding and team. A birthday defeat led to lessons, then a club, then a league. The outcomes vary, but the habit is recognizable: encounter something awkward, pay attention, try another arrangement.
Retirement would have offered Lane the rare pleasure of an empty schedule. His response was to create fixtures. Somewhere between the envelope and the scoreboard, he found the same invitation: there is work to organize, and another point to play.