Being a CFO in a new industry can feel like a completely different job. I've spoken with dozens of CFOs about this: Cameron Kinloch, who described the muscles she had to rebuild switching from Consumer Goods to SaaS to FinTech Darian Wright, who walked me through his move from Hospitality to Non-Profit And many others Which is why I got so excited a few months ago when NetSuite offered me the chance to build a new webinar series around exactly this idea — deep dives into CFO journeys from one...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
As a startup CFO working with CEOs, there are just certain things that feel like they should be easy to CEOs But that are actually ALWAYS a pain in the butt for a finance operator (Hello, real-time accounting data... sigh...) Here's the one that always breaks my brain: Per-project profitability. It comes up CONSTANTLY. And for good reason: Figuring out which projects (or products, or customers, or departments, etc.) are making money Is really important to leadership. Because one of the most...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Recently, I sat down at a table full of CFOs, and the question came up: How are you forecasting compute spend in the age of AI? Most times at these rounds, the conversation is vibrant. Lots of folks eager to weigh in. But this question left everybody stumped. And when they did talk, it was more complaints and confessions. One CFO admitted he’d unintentionally personally spent $100k in a single month building with agentic AI. The general mood around the table was stress. But then something...
4 months ago • 2 min read
I keep hearing the same fear-mongering online lately: "Learn AI before someone who knows AI takes your job!" But something about this line just makes my brain feel itchy. It takes me back to a strategy class at NYU, where we learned the resource-based view from a clip of The Wire. In the clip, Wallace marvels at whoever invented the chicken nugget. Surely that guy must be really rich. D'Angelo turns to him and explains that of course not — he's just a cook in a basement somewhere, probably...
4 months ago • 2 min read
If I'm learning one thing this month about experimenting with AI in 2026, it's this: In a world of emergent technology, no one experiment with one tool at one time provides a complete picture of the landscape. Last week, after posting about AI sucking at Excel, a few things happened at once: I got explicit approval from one client to plug their financial data into AI A CFO peer told me how they're successfully using AI for Excel work Claude released a much more powerful model, Opus 4.7 The...
4 months ago • 2 min read
I've been playing around with using Copilot and Claude for building models in Excel, lately. As I've been playing, I've noticed something: Using AI can really speed up some building. Some of my favorite prompts so far: "Can you make the model formatting prettier?" "Can you review this whole model and tell me where there may be mistakes?" "I want to use this model in a demo. Can you sanitize it of any identifying data?" "I'd like this revenue forecast to be based on a marketing funnel. Can you...
4 months ago • 3 min read
As a CFO who used to be technical, I specialize in working with engineer founders. And it's in this context that I encountered something interesting this week: I was sitting in a client team meeting and we were discussing updating their financial software stack as they move from seed stage to series A Which is a typical conversation we have during growth: Lower-cost solutions like Quickbooks, Xero, manual processing, on-the-fly analysis tend to break down when volumes go up, so it's typically...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Sometimes as a founder, you just need someone who's been there before to tell you how it's done. Having founded 3 companies, I can't tell you how many times I've felt that way. But there's a big issue with most advisors: They're giving advice based on their past experiences, not yours. Because no matter how much you speak with them, they can't know your company as well as you do. So often, you take the advice, put it into practice, and realize you may have been better off just going it alone....
5 months ago • 2 min read
This week I learned: The most dangerous thing about AI isn't that it might take your job. This week has been a strange mix for me. On one hand, I've had three different brands and creators reach out asking for the prompts I've been using for financial ops and analysis. On the other, I've been wearing my other hat: Security Nerd. As a CFO who started on the technical side, who’s first CFO role involved also pinch-hitting as a security engineering team manager, I’m familiar with living at the...
5 months ago • 3 min read
