The Secret CFO
@SecretCFO
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Sharing real world insights as the CFO of a multi-billion dollar company. Opinions, not advice.
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Joined July 2021
How did one VP of Finance bring Macy's to its knees with a $151M accounting scandal?. Here’s how I think it all went down… (THREAD)
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@evanlapointe Ps - I answer three questions like this in my mailbag newsletter every Tuesday. Sign up here:.
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Well, this is nice:.
This answer from @SecretCFO is maybe my favorite piece of written material in the world. The writer (a finance VP) asked how to get a voice at the decision making table. Read carefully. This answer will apply to you when you ask this question one day, whether you're in finance
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Running a company comes with a duty of care to many stakeholders; but especially to your shareholders and your employees. This duty is even more acute if you are the founder. If you don’t have the integrity to honor those duties that come with running a company, you shouldn’t.
Here is most of what I’ve gathered on the Windsurf / Google Deal. The founders and dozens of engineers are going to Google. This group, along with the preferred shareholders will be sharing the $2.4B headline number. The exact split is unknown but investors are making some money.
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From the very beginning of Secret CFO (when it was just a Twitter account), I’ve vowed to share more than just theories. I share real lessons from years in the trenches. Recently, 2,205 CFO Secret readers took time out of their busy days to complete a survey to help me make my.
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Having grown up in industries that have to be super efficient to earn a single digit operating margin, the Soham Parekh thing is incredible to me. The tech business model is so good, the management can be crap.
The fact that Soham Parekh was able to work at the same time for multiple start-ups over and over proves that these early-stage companies: .(i) expect ~30 hours of work per week,.(ii) are distracted managers, and .(iii) are desperate for talent . Proof? Have you ever seen someone
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It's your favorite time of the month: CFO Secrets newsletter series announcement day. This month we have a 4 week series diving into the CFO's role in corporate politics. Plenty of finance leaders like to pretend they’re “above” politics. That staying hiding away will protect.
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Well said.
@SecretCFO Tech sector is facing industrialization now. What young companies preached as “outdated practices”, is what tech needs to stabilize & professionalize.
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The Soham Parekh thing is just more proof that tech is full of stunningly bad management.
(1/4) My take on the “SaaS is a bad business model” discourse:. Actually, SaaS is SO good that:.1. VCs couldn’t help themselves and funded 20k companies, driving down returns .2. There were so many tailwinds, and the business model is so good, that management got lazy
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Perfect.
"If a company has so much cash that it cannot find a business use for it, it should not invest in gold, bitcoin or Picassos. Instead, it should return that cash to its stockholders who can invest in gold, bitcoin or Picassos."
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It’s hard to find balanced takes on what AI means for finance teams in the short term. Over on LinkedIn, people are fully losing their minds. My feed is filled with fantasies of CFOs firing their whole team after a heavy weekend of vibe coding. Let’s be clear: AI is going to.
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RT @f9_finance: @SecretCFO just summarized the limitations of AI in one sentence:. “Most CFOs still struggle to pinpoint root causes, let a….
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RT @SecretCFO: VCs will say “startups are simple, just build something people want.” Then in the next sentence use the words “orthogonal” a….
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VCs will say “startups are simple, just build something people want.” Then in the next sentence use the words “orthogonal” and “heteroskedasticity” with a straight face.
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Good advice.
When giving feedback on someone’s work, it is far more important that the feedback is rooted in what they are trying to do than in what they actually did. Most people are bad at feedback because they never even consider the difference between these two things.
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If you want to know what the fuss is about. You can find more here:.
I love watching the reactions roll in for the latest Playbook newsletter piece. But this Saturday's was a particularly exciting one…. It’s a topic I’ve been itching to write about since I started this newsletter two and a half years ago: how to build a variance bridge properly.
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RT @SecretCFO: I love watching the reactions roll in for the latest Playbook newsletter piece. But this Saturday's was a particularly exci….
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We've grown so fast in the last few days I didn't get the chance to grab the screenshot at 50k. We just blew straight through it and onto 51k.
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CFO Secrets just crossed 50k subscribers. Since the first email I sent in Jan-23, we have sent 4.9m emails in total. Read by CFOs all over the world. From one person finance teams, to CFOs of huge multinationals. Every day I get emails from finance pros who have used it in some
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RT @SecretCFO: Woke up this morning to an email from the CFO of a tech giant who has been enjoying the newsletter. And has been using the….
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