The State of Finance Talent (October)

Is the journal entry dead?

As the primary unit of accounting, maybe.

Today, your accounting team posts JEs to a GL. Then your FP&A team uses a separate stack of tools to rebuild the context your JEs stripped out.

What if both teams worked from one financial data warehouse that kept full context? Accounting logic becomes a locked, auditable layer on top, not the whole system of record.

Debits and credits are still there. They’re one view of the data instead of the whole picture. Enter data-centric accounting. Download Numeric’s Architecture for Agentic Accounting white paper (and start questioning JEs).

Welcome to our OCTOBER state of finance talent! I write this on a train on the way home from NYC where I just saw a woman projectile vomit on the sidewalk next to a Tinder couple obviously on their first date. NYC is so back.

Before I forget to do the button thing:

For those whom I haven’t bothered yet, it’s called Mostly Talent and we specialize in placing manager, director, and VP level finance pros. 

Mostly Talent is now far enough into the year, and into enough searches, that we’re starting to see patterns in what companies want and what finance people are willing to do.

The biggest trend: finance talent is moving earlier.

At the beginning of the year, I would have told you there was a pretty clean dividing line in the candidate market.

A lot of really good Directors and VPs wanted nothing to do with a company until it was post-Series B and had obvious product-market fit. They were scale up, not startup people.

However, how they evaluate early stage companies on the spectrum of risk and ambition has very much changed.

We’re seeing much more willingness to take the Head of Finance seat at a Series A company because a Series A company today can look financially very different from a Series A company five years ago. The financing rounds are wicked big, the bank balances are sizeable, and once you’re managing $50 million or $100 million of cash, and trying to hire 64 people in a quarter, it's worth paying for a full-time white collar handy man (or woman) to make sure you don’t light it on fire.

I like to think of these candidates as the Wolf from Pulp Fiction. They clean up messes, protect the cash, and ensure revenue does not leak.

We're finding that the label on the funding round matters less when there is legitimate revenue traction and a giant pile of money sitting in the bank. You could call it Round A, B, C or even L, M, N, O, P (also has anyone figured out if DataBricks has resorted to using SuperBowl Roman Numeral titling in lieu of letters?)

And as Biggie Smalls once said, with mo money comes mo opportunity to do something extremely stupid with it.

Who’s signing the checks? Who is telling the founder that maybe committing to $100 million of compute over three years with a single LLM provider deserves a second look? Are we positive that $200K WSJ placement is the best use of cash this month?

Also, maybe have some controls around who can wire money. Don’t end up like Dane Cook. Or hire his brother. And definitely don’t hide the money in jars of spaghetti sauce.

Investors are pushing founders to build finance internally sooner for the same reasons. The amount of capital these companies are deploying has gotten way ahead of the old hiring timeline. And the usage based pricing models are getting tricky where it's entirely possible to find yourself in a situation where growing more actually means losing more.

So the candidate appetite for early has changed with the characteristics of early. People are going sooner because they can get more ownership - both in role and in equity - without necessarily taking the same financial risk that “Series A” used to imply.

Going earlier makes the relationship with the founder much more important.

Every finance person does some version of the same dance when they meet a founder. Yes, this person is brilliant. Yes, they built something people actually want.

But are they a total weirdo?

Sorry. Somebody had to say it. Aside from whatever meager financial info we are given during an interview, it’s what all us finance people are “running the numbers” on when we meet a founder. Starting a company is a fundamentally disagreeable thing to do, so a little (or a lot) of weird comes with the territory.

The more important question is whether they have enough trust and low enough ego to let a finance person actually cook… to actually listen to their suggestions on how to price their baby…. to maybe not hire 20 people in a new country without checking the labor laws first… to maybe let the CFO tell their college roommate’s wife that her design consulting contract ain’t getting renewed… the list goes on.

We’re working with a lot of founders in their 20s who are building their first company and suddenly managing a business with over a hundred million dollars in the bank. They often need an adult in the room, and I use “adult” very loosely here because I don’t mean age (I was barely an “adult” when I became a CFO for the first time").

The profile that keeps coming up is someone who did two or three years of investment banking or growth investing, spent another three to five years operating inside a growth-stage company, and is now ready to take the Head of Finance seat themselves.

Founding finance with real operating experience is probably the hottest profile we’re seeing right now.

Investors especially push for somebody who has already made the transition from banker or investor to operator, because there is a learning curve and they would prefer that you made the natural mistakes on somebody else’s dime. They want someone who’s already had to gulp twice, look a CEO in the eye and say, “You can hire those 30 people, but then we’re fundraising again in nine months.”

We’re also seeing people who have already been through the later stages go backward in stage on purpose. They helped a company prepare for an IPO, or actually went through one, and now they want to go back to a smaller company where the growth is faster and they can own substantially more.

That experience is useful because a lot of founders are hitting the point where building a great product and building a great company start becoming two different jobs.

“I built this awesome product!”

Yes you did. And to raise the Series B, we’re going to need to prove there is a real business underneath it. One that is capable of slightly more efficient capital incineration.

Because what I’m also observing is the jump from generating revenue to generating good revenue is catching many AI companies off guard.

Having customers is swell. And the next investor is going to want to understand what it costs to serve them, what happens to gross margin at scale, and whether the unit economics are getting better as the company grows.

That is increasingly why finance is showing up earlier.

We are protectors of realm, defenders of gross margin.

I’ll be Frank with you. My government name is Carl, not Frank.

I don’t do the office.

I’m not a watercooler guy. I prefer to work from my attic in socks and sandals and a Peter Millar polo with my headphones on. I have never once woken up hoping to “walk the floor.”

Right, wrong or indifferent, founders currently want people back in the office. A surprising number of the searches we’re seeing are five days a week.

Five!

Like wtf, might as well be eight!

Can my kids live there with me?

To some degree, I get it, especially for these early finance hires. If you are supposed to be helping run the company rather than exporting results from QBO and chasing people over slack, being around the founder and the rest of the leadership team has a lot of value.

I also think a little abstraction is healthy for finance people.

When I worked in an office, somebody tapped me on the shoulder approximately every 26 minutes because they needed money sent for an event happening TONIGHT that was URGENNNNNT, wanted help fixing a long ass SUMIF, or needed my opinion on whether the Pats were going to cover the over that weekend.

Guys, I have work I gotta do.

Anyway, the market does not appear to share my love of attic-based finance.

If you’re looking at finance talent right now, the jobs are moving earlier, the candidates are moving with them, and everyone apparently owns pants again.

Thanks for hanging out with me and Callie in this issue. 

If you’re looking to hire go here.

And if you’re passively open to new roles go here:

Wishing you Series A talent energy,

CJ