Finance & Ops at an Early Stage Startup
Purpose of this note
This note is meant for anyone curious about the Finance & Operations role at an early stage startup. I was part of MissionU from the start and led this role for nearly two years, up until our acquisition by WeWork. Over the course of my tenure, we received over $11M in venture funding from First Round and FirstMark, and grew to several dozen staff.
This was my first experience at a startup, let alone in this type of role. Several times I found myself searching for best practices for what to focus on and how to execute. And while I received invaluable guidance from an incredible group of mentors, Google, and First Round’s content network, I never quite found a single blueprint.
After reflecting on my experiences, I wanted to codify and share my takeaways on the role. The good news for anyone who may be considering it, is that scaling company operations at an early stage startup is fairly straightforward and predictable.
Defining the role
So what exactly falls within scope of Finance & Operations at an early stage startup? One definition I’ve heard and liked is that it’s about maximizing the productivity of the rest of the business in pursuit of product-market fit.
To me, I viewed the role as creating and scaling core business functions. This is done by establishing policy and process, implementing systems and tools, and forming teams to keep these functions running. You start with nothing, and then build the organizational infrastructure so others can be best positioned to develop, sell, and service a product.
Of course, this will mean different things to different organizations. For instance, pending on the team that already exists, you may not oversee people ops or accounting. Conversely, you may oversee additional functions, like I did with marketing and business development until we hired our Head of Growth.
Below, I’ve outlined the key responsibilities associated with the four functions I had the privilege of building out during the full duration of my tenure.
People Ops sample scope
- Set recruiting strategy (in partnership with Finance)
- Design and manage onboarding experience
- Design and manage recruiting experience
- Determine company policy and maintain employee handbook / wiki
- Determine and roll out employee benefits
- Design and administer offboarding experience
- Plan and execute Offsites
- Roll out inclusion initiatives (e.g., ERGs)
- Design and administer performance reviews
- Know employment law
Office Ops sample scope
- Maintain office cleanliness
- Oversee office maintenance (e.g., lights, wifi, keys, desks)
- Order office supplies
- Execute onboarding experience
- Order food (e.g., office snacks, lunches)
- Know your employees (e.g., birthdays, work anniversaries)
- Plan and execute holiday events, and get team swag
- Spearhead team fun (set up a social committee!)
Finance & Accounting sample scope
- Set recruiting strategy (in partnership with People Ops)
- Provide guardrails for employee benefits; evaluate whether to join PEO
- Administer payroll
- Lead FP&A, including headcount roadmap / hiring plan
- Conduct month-end close
- Design General Ledger accounts
- Lead annual filings, and file for tax credits
- Lead AP / AR, including employee expensing
- Determine capital strategy (e.g., convertible notes vs. equity)
- Support with fundraising rounds
- Determine pricing strategy
- Build board decks
Company Ops sample scope
- Determine All-Hands agenda
- Prepare investor updates
- Facilitate cross-functional meetings
- Identify bottlenecks / critical issues
- Conduct ad-hoc analysis
- Drive company milestone setting (e.g., OKRs)
These responsibilities are not one-off tasks; they are persistent and should constantly be iterated on and improved. Onboarding should look different for employee 20 than for employee 5, and many of these will start as manual processes (often leveraging Google Docs / Sheets) before being rolled out into a system like Confluence, Bill.com, or Expensify.
Owning these responsibilities does not mean you have to be the one personally executing all of them. You can outsource (like we did for our month-end close), create shared accountability across the team (like we did with office cleanliness), or manage direct reports. Nonetheless, your role is to ensure these responsibilities — or whatever falls under your purview — are successfully accomplished.
Prioritizing All Those Responsibilities
Now the hard part… where do you start when there’s so much to do and everything feels important? As an operator, you will continuously be poirposing from the 10,000 foot view getting a sense for the most critical initiatives for the company at that moment, to the 10 foot view to project manage those initiatives to completion.
At times, it’s easy to diagnose which initiative is most critical at that moment, since it is the thing at your company burning in flames (hopefully not literally). But other times, anticipating what will eventually be on fire unless you address it today is not as obvious since things are constantly changing as you grow.
Plus, for a host of reasons each company will have different needs at a given time, so there’s no single playbook that’s best for all. If defining the scope of the role is a science, knowing where to play at any given time is the art.
To orient my focus, I found it useful to establish guiding principles for my role. At MissionU, these were to bring in great talent at our target hiring dates, achieve our milestones within budget, and improve employee productivity and morale. That said, there were certainly key initiatives that I did not focus on soon enough.
For instance, when we decided to ramp up hiring of contractors, I assumed that creating and posting job descriptions, and establishing a clear interview process was sufficient people ops support for the 10-person team at the time. Hiring had yet to be a bottleneck, and we expected these contractor roles to be highly coveted and easy to fill.
However due to a combination of our compensation strategy, candidate pool targeted, and a lineup of first-time hiring managers, we were unable to hire the number of contractors at the pace we would have liked. I had underestimated how much recruiting support would be required at such an early stage, which began to impact product quality and employee experience.
Once this began to turn into a fire, we reassessed our recruiting strategy (including the role description, target candidate pool, and compensation), accelerated my hire for people ops, and started supporting hiring managers with sourcing and screening applicants.
These types of experiences may feel jarring, since many responsibilities of the Finance & Ops responsibilities are invisible when being done successfully, but painful for the rest of the organization when missed. That said they are a good reminder to keep a close pulse on how everyone is feeling, and to always be ready to quickly adapt your priorities. In short, don’t get discouraged; this is a muscle that will build and strengthen with time.
Last, Broad Considerations
1) Eventually, you will want to build a team to increase your leverage
As your company grows, so do the breadth and depth of your responsibilities. They will eventually become untenable to successfully accomplish by yourself, which means it’s time to build a team (which can include interns and outsourced vendors).
Alternatively, if leading a team is not as important to you, leverage your position of being an early employee to craft right role for yourself. This could be in another part of the organization like product, supporting as a chief of staff, or hiring of someone above you who can serve as a great teacher and mentor.
2) Don’t underestimate importance of other’s buy-in to your initiatives
Your role is to put out fires, make your company feel more real, and bring scalability to chaos; so everyone is going to love you, right? Let’s look at it a different way. You are adding new tools and processes that individuals now need to learn and follow. Plus, you are doing this when everyone is barely keeping their heads above water (this tends to be the prevailing feeling at an early stage startup).
Over time, I established a playbook when rolling out significant initiatives. This included over communicating, providing as much leverage as possible, focusing on the why just as much as the what, ensuring senior leadership championed the initiative as a priority, and developing incentive structures that forced adoption (for instance, we told hiring managers they would only get recruiting support if they used our new Applicant Tracking System).
3) Continue to seek guidance throughout this whole process
While this note should serve as a reliable resource, there are certainly several things I have missed that will be important at your startup. It’s also worth noting that this note did not touch on several other important requirements to succeed, including personal leadership, understanding dynamics of startup, and developing deep domain expertise.
The best piece of advice I can give is to build a board of mentors, who can help you work through your burning questions and identify blind spots. Personally, I would not have been where I am today without the support from Mor, Itamar, Meg, and Scott (thank you, all!).
Concluding words
These experiences are based off the very early days of a startup, when we were going from zero to one (or zero to acquisition in our case). If you are fortunate, you will continue to grow your company much beyond this. When you get to that point, I hope this note will have provided you with some mindsets, tips, and frameworks that you proved valuable as you took this step in your career.
If you found this useful and would like to follow-up with any comments or questions, please feel free to message me on LinkedIn.
Some highlights from the role:
