CEO-turned-CFO & finance instructor, Lauren Pearl, drops a daily tip that helps startup founders grow their businesses and control their destinies. Learn why this growing list with a 60% open rate led to LP being named top 25 Finance Thought Leader and host of the #3 CFO podcast for 2025
Employee -> Founder
|
When you transition from being an employee to being a founder, You need to completely rewire your internal performance gauges. As an employee, you're rewarded for meeting or exceeding expectations. You can’t mess up. Your job is to impress your higher-ups. As a founder, the rules flip. Your #1 goal is to iterate as fast as humanly possible. Getting it right every time is completely unrealistic. Your job is to do as many things wrong, as quickly as possible, in hopes of finding the one thing that works. And forget about being impressive or cool- In fact, you’ll look foolish in front of most people. Many people believe that entrepreneurship is a step down. And guess what? You're going to have to sell to them. 😱 But that’s just the price of admission. Want to be a good founder? Forget how to be a good employee. Focus on getting good at making bets And then doubling down before others catch up. Your Daily CFO, Lauren |
Founder-Friendly Finance
CEO-turned-CFO & finance instructor, Lauren Pearl, drops a daily tip that helps startup founders grow their businesses and control their destinies. Learn why this growing list with a 60% open rate led to LP being named top 25 Finance Thought Leader and host of the #3 CFO podcast for 2025
Recently, I read a comment from a startup advisor peer about the lack of women in VC-funded startup leadership. Essentially: "Maybe this is just a product of preference. Maybe women are just more risk-averse. And maybe men are simply dumb enough to try." While framed as flattery, it disguises something ugly- It’s a tidy explanation for the funding gap That promotes a dangerous narrative Which is also - blatantly - wrong. Women do start venture-backed companies - many of them. About 1 in 5...
AI is supposedly making us faster. In conversations with founders and engineers, I’m hearing the same story: Prototypes that once took weeks now take days. Code that required whole teams now gets drafted in an afternoon. Experiments are cheaper, iteration is faster, and the barrier to entry for creating new products has never been lower. But speed in one part of the system often exposes constraints elsewhere. Recently, I’ve been reading Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book on...
The junior employee who says: “Managers are a complete waste of money - they just sit around doing nothing while others work.” The first-time founder who says: “Big-firm lawyers are a total rip-off. I’m paying $700/hour for a contract that should just be a free template.” The nursing student who says: “Ugh, doctors don’t know ANYTHING.” The independent consultant who says: “Those jerks at McKinsey are a scam. People pay them millions and all they do is create a PowerPoint and walk away.”...