I once wired $10 million bucks to the wrong company.
It was THE low point of my career.
What made it worse?
The party I’d accidentally sent the money to was TWEETING about it.
That’s right. Not only did I feel like a clown. They were telling the world I was a clown.
What started as a financial operations foot fault turned into a PR nightmare.
I remember going for a run that afternoon to blow off some steam. (Of course it was raining.) And I remember thinking… maybe I can drive Uber?
Luckily, the money was returned. No harm, no foul.
Well, kinda.
The investor we were wiring to had to wait an extra week, sure. But internally? Everyone suddenly treated finance like a live grenade.
And I felt like I was wearing a scarlet letter.
What caused it?
Pretty simple actually. A “template” was saved down in our SVB account with the wrong vendor name. Because it said the right party but had the wrong wiring details, the second and third approvers gave it the green light without much thought.
Instead of our investor getting a fat stack of cash, some random marketing agency we paid $500 to design our logo four years ago got it. F**K.
That’s when I realized: cash controls at startups are one of those “we’ll deal with it later” problems... until they’re not.
So I decided to write the playbook I wish I had back then.
Being a paid reader only costs $15 / month, and may save you $10 million in bad wires, lol
Stage Zero: Do They Accept Venmo?
“Can we Venmo AWS for our cloud spend?”
At this stage, the founder’s personal credit card might double as the corporate card. Bank access is limited to one or two people. Every invoice is a fire drill.
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