Finance leaders have become quiet forces behind startups’ growth strategy, forcing clarity, and surfacing choices and compromises.
That was the tone set by three panelists brought together for Scaling Realities: An Honest Conversation on Growth in the Post-Boom Era, hosted by Float and BetaKit on the opening night of Web Summit Vancouver.
Scaling today means closely considering financial implications of each decision, over the short- and long-term. And having a strong financial team is more essential to that process than ever.
“Once you’re past pre-seed, none of those things—vision, story, personality—matter if your numbers don’t hold up.”
Rob Khazzam, Float
Jonathan Martin, VP of Finance at Hiive, said “finance teams were the ‘no’ department” before capital was cheap and growth was king, but that dynamic shifted during the pandemic.
“We started saying yes to a lot of different things, and we overexpanded,” Martin said. “We should be better business partners. But we need to find that line—rather than just saying no or yes, how do we surface uncomfortable tradeoffs?”
At Float, those questions aren’t isolated to finance. Founder and CEO Rob Khazzam said that he expects everyone on his team to manage with a profit-and-loss lens.
“You’re business leaders first,” he said.
Instead of working toward static budget numbers, Float operates on ratios. Leaders track burn, churn, customer acquisition cost payback, and other thresholds that act as early signals for whether plans need to shift.
At Clio, which closed its landmark Series F funding round last year, VP of Finance Nav Gill is helping the company prepare for public-company expectations, which requires finance to be integrated into decision-making from the start.
“You have to be a thought partner,” she said. “If your CEO is coming to you, saying ‘Hey, can you sign off on this,’ or, ‘Do we have money in the bank to afford this,’ you’ve kind of lost that business partnership already.”
Gill said Clio has worked to create a culture where finance helps shape leadership decisions early. Early involvement becomes critical in a fundraising environment, she added, where an exacting level of diligence on the numbers is required.
Khazzam said that fundraising forces companies to demonstrate precision. And this requires internal precision.
“You can actually synthesize what must be true on a page,” he said. “If certain things aren’t true, we don’t raise.”
The message across the panel was consistent: past the earliest stages, investors don’t fund potential, they fund performance.
That shift puts finance at the centre of the process.
“Once you’re past pre-seed, none of those things—vision, story, personality—matter if your numbers don’t hold up,” Khazzam added.
Gill encouraged finance teams to work in advance to prepare themselves for the new fundraising environment.
“When it happens, it happens quickly, and you need to be prepared,” she said. “If you are able to set up your company in advance to have the data ready in a certain way, a real understanding of the story, a real understanding of the dynamics that are in play, you’ll be in a much better place.”
Martin described fundraising as a pattern-recognition process for finance leaders. Investors rarely jump in on the first meeting, which means money may come only after multiple pitches and follow-ups.
In the meantime, finance teams have to plan for different scenarios and timeframes.
“As a finance leader, the question becomes: how do you mitigate the risk of that situation?” he said. “Can you look at lines of credit? Can you look at loans? Can you look at how to extend that runway?”
Advice, the panellists noted, is everywhere and finance teams must learn to assess its credibility.
“People love giving advice. It’s free, and it’s often not right,” Martin said.
Khazzam, who was part of the early Uber team in Canada before starting Float, said he balances the advice of his investors and board against the insights of his internal team, who are deeply embedded in the needs of their customers, as well as the on-the-ground realities of building.
“We’re really lucky to have them, and they provide high-value advice when we need it,” Khazzam said of Float’s investors, “but they can’t tell you what your vision is, they can’t tell you how to build a product, they can’t tell you which staff to hire and which to let go, and they don’t have to deal with the consequences.”
The panel also discussed the benefits of AI for today’s finance teams.
“All of the hype is real, and everyone is underestimating it,” Khazzam said. “It will be the most disruptive thing that’s happened to the labour force in our lifetime, and it will be way more disruptive and way faster than people think.”
Float is already building around that assumption. “I expect people to review their teams and explain why things can’t be done with automation,” Khazzam said. “We reward people who say, ‘This process is dumb. Let’s fix it.’”
Clio has taken a gradual approach to incorporating AI in its finance teams.
“It’ll give you all the data. It’ll tell you some insights,” said Gill. “But when you try to connect dots, I haven’t found that it’s fully there yet.”
All three agreed that it is incumbent on finance leaders to explore the technology and work to understand its benefits, applications, and challenges.
“There’s no excuse anymore,” said Khazzam. “You want to learn financial modelling? Done. Want to learn how to do an M&A transaction? Done. The only thing stopping you is your initiative.”
Photos by Nicole Richard from Wax Pencil Imagery.
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