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Know Your Numbers
Investors prioritize startups led by individuals with strong business acumen, essential for translating technical innovation into successful, scalable businesses. Demonstrated financial management skills, including understanding financial statements and core business drivers, are crucial to gaining investor trust.
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A Startup’s Chart of Accounts
Building a business requires accounting for the funds flowing in and out of it. Honestly, it is one of those necessary evils that few entrepreneurs want to spend time on even though it is essential.
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Banking for Startups
As an entrepreneur jumping into the deep end and starting a business, one of the earliest actions you need to take once you form a corporation to “house” your fledgling business is establishing a banking relationship to conduct financial transactions. What does that look like for a startup?
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Building a Financial Function
Few startup founders come from a finance background (except perhaps fintech startups!), so building out the foundational financial function is often outside the founders’ comfort zone. Yet, building a robust financial function becomes essential as a startup grows, especially if it raises money.
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Thresholds of Spending
What seems like “a lot” of money? There is no absolute answer as it really depends on what you are used to spending routinely. This is one of those phenomena that affects entrepreneurs as they grow their companies – and it deserves some intentional management.
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Cap Table Housekeeping
Good housekeeping of a corporate capitalization (cap) table is an essential demonstration of a startup leader’s competence, yet it is full of potentially painful pitfalls when moving along the learning curve.
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Funding Foundations
A house built on sand is unstable, indeed. A house built on a solid foundation can support itself even when the winds howl, the rain comes, and the floodwaters rise. In business, cash is the lifeblood, and the source of that cash reveals the nature of your foundation.
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Startup Financial Modeling: Things to Know
What are some of the different uses of startup financial forecasts, and what is the one thing we know for certain about them? Financial forecasting is an essential business planning tool. For startups, financial models are critical tools that serve many purposes and ultimately embody the financial implications of a host of strategic decisions and assumptions.
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Pricing Strategy
One of a startup’s most significant decisions is pricing strategy. This decision is critical because it sits at the nexus of so many different dimensions in the startup’s strategic positioning, and coming up with a good, balanced solution for all these dimensions is so strategic. Failure to solve this well can cripple or kill a startup.
