On being the one number in the building that everyone else must trust
The board meeting is running long. The CEO has just finished the growth story, and everyone in the room is nodding along. Then someone asks the CFO the only question that matters: “Does the cash support this?” The room goes quiet in a specific way. Everyone else in that meeting is allowed to be optimistic. The CFO is not.
I have spent a career advising companies from the garage to the global stage, and I have sat across the table from a great many CFOs along the way, at companies raising their first institutional round and at companies six months from an IPO. The good ones share a quality that is hard to name and easy to recognize once you have seen it. While the rest of the company can afford to believe things, the CFO must know them.
