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Cash is King, But Who’s Guarding the Throne?

Cash is King, But Who’s Guarding the Throne?

How startups evolve their cash controls—and what good looks like at each stage before the scammers get there first.

CJ Gustafson's avatar
CJ Gustafson
Apr 10, 2025
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Cash is King, But Who’s Guarding the Throne?
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I once wired $10 million bucks to the wrong company.

The Maury Show

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.

Veep

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?

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