Support for Mostly metrics comes from Mercury, the fintech startups use for banking and all their financial workflows. A word from our sponsor Mercury In the world of startups, being the first can be exhilarating. Being the first finance leader to join a startup, however, can be daunting.  Mercury shares the five steps to establishing a strong financial foundation in your first 90 days. The article covers navigating existing processes, aligning with the CEO on key priorities, crafting a financial strategy at scale, and building relationships across the company to make better decision ..read more

In this episode, CJ is joined by Angela Winegar, Head of Growth Strategy at Carta and recovering venture capitalist. Having had an unconventional career path, Angela’s experience in the worlds of both marketing and investing gives her a unique perspective on growth. She and CJ discuss the parallels between marketing and investing and Angela explains how marketing is really a form of capital allocation. She sheds light on what the return on investment should be for media budgets and why CFOs should seek to better understand the differences in outcomes and timelines behind individual campaign ..read more

The first thing I did when I became CFO was manually map out EVERY way in which cash entered and left the building. The buck stopped with me. And I felt the pain. On that note... A quick word from our sponsor Ledge Is your team struggling with manual transaction matching & cash reporting? Meet Ledge, a finance operations platform that automates cash reconciliation and journal entry creation, centralizes exception management, and provides real-time cash flow analysis and forecasting. Ledge glues together all your financial data spread across your ERP, banks, payment processors, data ware ..read more

Giving myself a pep talk each morning Welcome to our May series on Employee Equity. Part 1: What’s a 409a Valuation (TODAY!) Part 2: Paying (Avoiding?) Taxes on your Equity (NEXT WEEK!) Part 3: Getting RICH off Secondary Transactions It’s crazy - when you enter the startup game there’s no “crash course” on employee equity. We essentially trade four years of our lives for an illiquid bet on a single stock that may make us extraordinarily wealthy. But we fail to understand the basic mechanics of these strange wealth instruments. Two things I want to say at the start of this series: E ..read more

Scott Haralson, CFO of Spirit Airlines, joins CJ in this episode to discuss the complexities of operating an airline business. He explains what it means to run an ultra-low-cost carrier model and what goes into calculating the operating costs per available seat mile, Spirit’s most important metric. He talks about the difficulty of forecasting for an airline, explaining the costs you may not think about, what goes into network planning, the challenges of hedging fuel prices, navigating capital intensive decisions such as buying airplanes, and doing all of the above through unpredictable econ ..read more

Support for Mostly metrics comes from Mercury, the fintech startups use for banking and all their financial workflows. A word from our sponsor Mercury In the world of startups, being the first can be exhilarating. Being the first finance leader to join a startup, however, can be daunting.  Mercury shares the five steps to establishing a strong financial foundation in your first 90 days. The article covers navigating existing processes, aligning with the CEO on key priorities, crafting a financial strategy at scale, and building relationships across the company to make better decision ..read more

Mostly Metrics is supported by BlueRocket, a top pricing consultancy for tech companies. As a tech CFO, pricing is one of the most difficult undertakings I’ve personally wrestled with. The journey to price optimization is complex, but you don't have to navigate it alone. BlueRocket's pricing experts have all operated companies before. And they’ve used that hands-on experience to help companies like Salesforce, Gitlab, Brex, Zendesk, and Google optimize their pricing. Schedule pricing consultation Readers of this newsletter get a pricing audit with BlueRocket’s CEO Jason Kap. TL;DR: Multip ..read more

The terms Marketplace and Platform are often used interchangeably in the context of business models involving a middleman. While they share many similarities, including the presence of take rates and network effects, they sit on unique points along the middleman spectrum. It’s always dangerous when you attempt to define something that comes in many flavors, but hold my beer: Marketplace Business: Middlemen who actively facilitate liquidity on two sides, aid in demand generation, and handle payment. Platform Business: Middlemen who offer tools for creation, aid in discovery, and provide ..read more

Silicon Valley veteran and early employee at Google, Facebook, and Quip, Molly Graham, joins CJ to discuss all things related to scaling startups, growing as a leader, and progressing in your career. Molly talks about her famous “Give Away Your Legos” talk and how this came about before she and CJ discuss the concept of “work grief” and how to get through it when you have to give up something that your identity is tied to. Having had a very non-linear career path and “stumbling sideways into things”, Molly explains the J-Curve versus staircase analogy for career progression and encourages e ..read more

Support for Mostly metrics comes from Mercury, the fintech startups use for banking and all their financial workflows. There are a million ways to make a buck in this world, some harder than others. I moved stones as a mason’s hand for seven summers. For ~40 hours a week, I would lift things up and put them down. That was a hard way to make a buck; sweating my ass off in the summer sun, learning to lift with my legs, not my back. That’s why I chose SaaS as my muse. And it just so happens, there are about a million ways to make a buck in this world as well. You’ve probably heard it before ..read more