#127 Top 5 VC CFO Reads This Week, Unpacked

January 25, 2024

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There’s a lot of great content from notable VCs, LPs, and CFOs/finance pros on the internet. Here, we’re focused on pulling out the insights out that really matter, as well as finding the most current content that overlays historical lessons with current market dynamics, which are changing faster than ever.

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Top 5 VC CFO Reads This Week, Unpacked

This week we’re unpacking some of our top VC CFO reads this week and sharing key takeaways and what really matters. There’s a lot of great content coming out right now from old friends and new ones! Here’s the latest, curated for your reading pleasure, with our top reads unpacked:

Tech in venture capital is something we’ve been talking about a lot for the past decade and seen firsthand under the hood at some notable PE/VC funds. It has accelerated in the past year+ with advancements of low/no-code tools and AI. Here are some great insights from this DDVC post:

AI Will Bring the “Tinder Moment” to VC

“Stephane expects a dating-like situation where all VCs have access to the same data but will eventually get different matches, based on their individual preferences. And not to forget: Someone needs to still go have the date. This will remain all human.”

Surprisingly, “only 1% of all VC firms have internal initiatives to become more data-driven (referring to findings from the Data-driven VC Landscape 2023; survey for 2024 edition open here).”

“Mike resumes that there are two categories of deal-winning:

  • Human-led, tech-augmented traditional winning capabilities

  • Tech-led, providing access for founders to data-driven insights about their company or leveraging data-driven recruiting tools

His analogy is network-driven sourcing vs data-driven sourcing. There is not one or the other but a combination. For Moonfire, for example, 75% and 50% of “opportunities sourced” and “deals done” are data-driven, respectively. Is attribution for deals won similar? We’ll see.”

  1. Strategic storytelling (Jim Cook @ Netflix/Mozilla): “The great ones own the numbers and are great story tellers. The good ones also own the numbers, but have a hard time being strategic - story telling, and designing the future of what the numbers will look like. It’s a slight difference but it’s no different than being a professional QB or college QB or a high school QB; it’s still a QB but there are different ways of being crisp and story telling”

  2. Flexibility (James Curier @ NFX): It’s the ones that are flexible and say yea, let’s see how big we can make this thing. And we’re going to mitigate our risks, here are our risks in doing this, and if I see the risks increasing I’ll let you know. And it might be that we have to change something later on but we’ll get to that…let’s just get going. Go Team.”

  3. Understanding the world outside your business (Tom Tunguz @ Theory): The great CFOs are both able to understand that and what’s happening to the business in its financial context - what’s happening in terms of the public markets, what’s happening in terms of multiples, what are the benchmarks of other businesses, how do we compare, what innovations in the finance world could be interesting.

What is QSBS and what does it mean? In simple terms it means an incredible opportunity to reduce (all the way to $0.00) the tax liability on your first $10M in returns. To understand this further here’s the take from Stripe:

The question for you as a VC is;

The QSBS Eligibility VC Tracker from Graph Advisors can help.

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