Thought leadership

Co-authored with Mux CFO Jaime Ortiz on why the old revenue-banded hiring ladder for finance teams breaks down, and the three principles that replace it: prioritize whichever leg of the stool—accounting, FP&A, or business ops—is weakest, default to generalists over narrow specialists, and scale through systems and data before headcount.

There's no single right exit—IPO, acquisition, sponsor sale, secondary—so the real job is building a company that's ready no matter which door opens, starting years before any process does.

Stacking metrics isn't the same as building a dashboard that matters—the harder, more valuable work is the cross-functional alignment on what the business needs to see.

A panel with CJ Gustafson (Mostly Metrics) and Danny Prohaska (EPM Solutions) on why spreadsheets still run FP&A despite years of planning-software investment, and where AI creates real value for finance teams versus where it's just noise.

Customer speaker at F Suite's virtual demo day evaluating Abacum, Aleph, and QuotaPath—live demos and a closed-door, vendor-free CFO panel on FP&A tooling.

A panel on what AI adoption changes inside a finance team once the pilot phase ends, recorded live at Abacum's invite-only summit in New York.

A working session, not a demo reel: how finance teams are using Claude to run multi-step workflows end to end, including a live example completed across systems from a single prompt.

Hosted The F Suite's virtual Cash Cycle Demo Day—five vendors (RightRev, Routable, Sequence, Tabs, Vayu) walked through billing, collections, and revenue-rec tooling, followed by a closed-door, vendor-free Q&A with peer CFOs.

Led this Clubhouse discussion on staying strategic as a CFO scales—delegation, building operational partnerships, and structuring finance teams without getting pulled into the weeds.

Brian's own interview series, hosted via OnlyCFO—operators on how their companies make money, in their own words. Full episode archive.

Sowmya scaled finance at Square, Rippling, and OpenAI before founding Lumera—we get into how OpenAI rolled out AI in finance, including running internal hackathons instead of mandating tools from the top down.

The venture market has split in two—'golden child' companies raising at premium valuations with leaner teams, and everyone else stuck extending via bridge rounds, which succeed at raising a real Series A far less often than a properly priced round does.

ARR stopped being a clean metric once companies started blending usage-based and non-traditional revenue into it—we dig into what's worth tracking instead.

With Meir Rotenberg and David Ma on quota setting, scaling a GTM team without breaking it, and comp plan design—including why misaligned incentives across sales, deal desk, and implementation cause most of the pain, plus whether AI SDRs are earning their keep or just hype.

With Spiff's former exec on how a years-long relationship with an investor (Salesforce backed two rounds before acquiring) became an exit, plus a banker's take on when to engage advisors, what drags out diligence, and how strategics and PE firms value a target differently.

Numeric’s Finance Engineer newsletter profiled Brian on build-vs-maintain: when a spilled water bottle killed his team’s homegrown procurement tool, and the four practices—modular builds, project-based context, portable Skills, release notes—that keep a tool alive after the builder moves on.

Six lessons from 15+ years scaling tech companies through two exits—starting with the one metric worth tracking above all others early on: ARR per employee.

Brian's answer in a CFO Drive roundup on cost-saving measures: size headcount to expected ROI, function by function—sales and customer success scale with revenue targets, but R&D should be sized to where the business will be in a year or two, not where it is today.

Why documentation is the multiplier for a lean team: Loom walkthroughs of the close process and numbered checklists that cut onboarding time without adding headcount.

The case for building good documentation habits before they're painful to build, plus how to time new hires so you're neither churning your team nor over-staffing ahead of need.

How the F Suite mobilized over 200 CFOs onto a call within a day of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, and coordinated with sister legal community TechGC to keep finance and legal leaders moving together through the crisis.