What makes a great CFO?

Events for Gundo founders

Author

Michael Morgenstern
July 16, 2024

Happy Tuesday Brex community,

When it comes to steering your startup to success, having the right financial leadership is crucial. As founders, you might be grappling with several questions about hiring a CFO. What makes a great CFO? What qualities should you be looking for? When is the right time to bring a CFO on board? Can fractional CFOs be just as effective? Who are the top fractional CFOs in the market?

If these questions resonate with you, you're not alone. At Brex, we've been diligently analyzing these questions and we're here to share our insights and recommendations.

To address these questions and more, book 1:1 office hours with Anshul Shah - Head of Accounting & CFO Partnerships at Brex!

Growing together, Michael Morgenstern

Upcoming Events:

  • Brex Supper Club 7/22 in El Segundo, CA

    Designed as a private conversational Omakase dinner for defense tech and AI Gundo founders

    Apply Here Brex Host: Michael Morgenstern

  • Brex Mixer Club 7/25 in Bridgehampton 

    Designed as a curated cocktail mixer for founders and investors spending the summer in the Hamptons

    Apply Here Brex Host: Erica Wenger

  • Brex Supper Club 8/1 in SF

    Designed as a private conversational dinner for AI founders cohosted with Gradient Ventures

    Apply Here Brex Host: Jonathan Chang 

  • Brex Supper Club 8/14 in Nashville

    Designed as a private conversational dinner for founders in Nashville

    Apply Here Brex Host: Anshul Shah

Startup of the Week 🤩 

Erez Agmon is the Co Founder and CEO of Vayu

Vayu was built by fintech veterans and employs AI to help B2B mid-market businesses dealing with advanced pricing manage their billing and contract-to-cash operations. 

Vayu is tailored to accommodate any flexible contract and pricing model, instantly collecting all commercial data to create a digital record that seamlessly takes advantage of market opportunities with pricing changes, usage models, and greater sales flexibility.

Vayu's revenue platform handles the complete revenue workflow: from usage and contract tracking, billing, and invoicing, to reporting – reducing the labor of finance and R&D teams and cutting the time-to-collect by 75%.

Ambassadors Perspective: Billing should support growth, not restrict it. By scaling in the mid-market, Vayu is well-positioned to continue capturing market share. We are watching Vayu and their excellent team closely.

Venture Capitalist Spotlight 🤩 

Ryan Lewis is a Partner at SRI Ventures

SRI Ventures is the corporate venture fund for SRI International, a leading independent nonprofit research institute. The fund invests in early stage deep tech companies as well as incubates and spins out companies leveraging its IP portfolio and EIR program. Since joining SRI in 2022, Ryan has backed over 10 companies across a variety of technical sectors with a particular focus on the enterprise IT and advanced analytics sectors. Several of his recent investments include Zephr, Kurve, and Pienso.

In addition to his work with SRI Ventures, Ryan serves as the Co-Chair of the Defense Technology Council for Global Corporate Venturing (GCV). Prior to SRI, he was the Senior Practice Manager of AI/ML for AWS National Security. Before he joined AWS, Ryan was a Senior Vice President at In-Q-Tel, where he founded and led SpaceNet, a nonprofit managed dedicated to building and releasing computer vision datasets, algorithms and data science challenges.

The financial stack that scales with you. ðŸ¤© Trusted by 1 in 3 US startups, Brex allows you to manage your spend from MVP to IPO. Interested? Sign up here using the referral code NEWSLETTER and get 25,000 bonus points, $5K AWS credits, $2.5K OpenAI credits and up to $150K in SaaS discounts.

Don’t hesitate to reach out,🦾!