Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Alex Wu, the founder of CFO Advisors, a company that helps early stage startups not only build their pitch deck, but help them be more strategic financially, scale, get capital and grow. It's a fascinating story. Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Wu: Yeah, pleasure to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit about Alex. Alex is an experienced fractional CFO with a background in finance, venture capital and startups. He previously scaled Pilot's CFO practice, Sequoia backed, to one of the largest in the country before starting CFO Advisors. CFO Advisors has advised and partnered with 30 startups plus from pre-seed to Series C in industries including AI, SaaS, fintech, proptech, web3, micromobility, and CPG. He also holds an MBA from Stanford University. A lot going on there, Alex. Uh, and we'll dive into your background and your company, but before we do, give us a little bit of insight of where this all started. Where you from? And um what led you to uh to Silicon Valley?
Alex Wu: Yeah, that's a great question. Um so I was actually born in Germany, uh grew up in Canada, and spent most of my career in the US. My first job was in New York working at JP Morgan, and really quickly I kind of realized that the sell side wasn't for me. I really wanted to learn those operational skills. So I joined SurveyMonkey right after their IPO, um where I was very fortunate to work under Debbie Clifford, who is now the CFO of Autodesk. And really it was through her team and her mentorship that I just learned everything I knew about FP&A. Um, and then I had the opportunity to join Pilot to really take those public company rigor in terms of FP&A and forecasting to early stage startups which often had zero to little infrastructure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So for those that don't know about Pilot, Pilot raised $172 million in funding, uh they provide bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for growing businesses. To running your own company, what inspired you to, to leave Pilot and uh build your own company?
Alex Wu: I think Pilot was a phenomenal time. Um however, the CFO practice there, it was really a professional services firm within a venture-backed startup. The core thesis of Pilot was really leveraging engineering to figure out how we can one day automate accounting or make it a lot more efficient. And our CFO practice is really about "how can we retain our largest and best customers by providing a more white glove service?" Um however you know, there's obviously a constant tension when you run a professional services firm than a tech company. So for me it was just a lot more sensible to spin out and really, really focus on just that vertical.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So as a company today, talk a little bit about what you created. What's the value proposition if I'm a startup, say in the AI space, that you can come in [and] do for me as a founder of a, of a startup?
Alex Wu: So what we noticed about... well first of all I think I can talk about the value of [a] fractional CFO generally and how I differentiate. So you know, a lot of this came up because seed rounds and early stage rounds and just rounds in general have gotten so much larger, right. Rewind 10 years ago and when your seed round was $500,000, you don't really need a fractional CFO. It doesn't take that much math to figure out you know you can probably hire one or two engineers, and that's pretty much your entire runway. But now with the average seed, seed round nearing $5 million and then a Series A can be 10 million plus, you're finding that startup founders, especially without a business background, is looking for that professional advisory to help with the right capital allocation metrics, methods, in order to hit their target metrics for the next round.
In terms of how our firm does it differently, for the general fractional CFO market it's essentially largely dominated by this long tail of independent practitioners, which means they're not constantly finding the best practices and often limiting in capacity. Or you have some major firms out there that act more like an umbrella brand uh with individual practitioners below, with very little knowledge transfer and intentional kind of processes being built up over time. You know, for us we're really trying to, our long-term vision is to be the McKinsey of startups. So not only do we hire our fractional CFOs full-time, but we spend 20 to 40% of our time actually continuing to iterate to make sure we're setting up best in practices board presentations, best, best-in-class financial modeling, um as well as a host of repeatable deliverables that we think our clients can benefit from.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you went to school at Stanford, what was your intent of going into business when you got out? Was, was it to get into this kind of service line or was it just an evolution of learning things at you know your work experience and then identifying like an aha moment of "I think there's a gap, I think I could build something there." Like how did that happen for you? That is...
Alex Wu: So I actually went into Stanford with the goal of starting a, a venture-backed startup. Running my own thing has always been the long-term goal of mine. And I thought going to Stanford would be a fantastic catalyst. So I actually spent my first year around a whole host of different ideas around consumer tech um and engagement and things like that. But after I left Pilot, what started happening is the clients I worked with a year ago, two years ago who really enjoyed their time with me, told their VCs. And their VCs had other portfolio companies [that] needed a fractional CFO. So I think it was about the 15th client that I turned down where my girlfriend was like "this should probably just be your business." So you know, when we started, instead of saying no and starting to say yes, uh at the end of the first year the business very rapidly grew from there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, it's a dream for a lot of service providers to align with a VC firm. They have a portfolio of clients. It's the intro to you know, warm intros really to their customer base. And you know, if you can deliver, you build a great relationship. What VCs have you worked with that's really helped you basically understand how to approach that relationship with them, but also how is it served your, the customers that you've since now worked with?
Alex Wu: Yeah, so this leans into one of our unique insights that I think has driven us to really not have to worry about go-to-market frankly at all. Um, and it's the flywheel that we built. So our primary paying customers are Seed to Series B customers. However we do spend between 15 to 20% of our time doing completely pro bono work for pre-seed companies. And essentially the brand that we want to build is, how can we be helpful, right? We want to be genuinely helpful to early stage founders. Helping them you know, think through their pitch deck, think through their story, give market color of what we've seen, areas that are more competitive, areas that are less competitive. And ultimately building that trust during their zero to one phase such as, you know, they're eager for us to help them to introduce them to investors.
So essentially we have continually given really high-quality leads to tier one VCs because of just the reputation that we're trying to build that has grown over time, that "if you're starting a company just give these guys a ring. They're not going to charge you anything and they will be helpful," right. Um we have fully done entire pitch decks for early stage companies um completely for free just because we really believed in the founder and their mission and what they're trying to build. Um so as we continue to prove it out that we can provide really quality leads to high, to, to tier one VCs, they then want to further deepen the relationship by sponsoring events, you know recommending portfolio companies to work with us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So you're not just partnering with them and, and, and servicing their portfol- portfolio, you're actually providing them with opportunities that they might not know about that they can invest in.
Alex Wu: Yeah, I mean it's really a win-win. Because early stage founders come to us cuz they know that we can almost guarantee them a meeting with some of the best venture capitalists in the um you know on the street. And for the VCs, you know, they're eager to have an early look at some of the most high-potential founders.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. Um if you look at the market today, what are some of the differences that you see from um I guess ra-, rather what's the difference or similarities between building a VC-backed startup and, and a bootstrap- bootstrapped firm?
Alex Wu: Um yeah, that's a good question. So I think you know, in the similarities, I really like how Peter Thiel frames [it] in Zero to One: "what is the one thing that you're going to be 10x better at?" Right. And for startups that's incredibly critical because that's how you get that hyperbolic growth. But even as a service provider, right, what is the underlying metric and how are you going to be 10 times better than everyone else? For us at this stage of our journey we're highly focused at having a better process than any other fractional CFO practice. So what that means is we have drafted around 20-point questions of what we think founders don't know when they come to us and they want to learn. Such as, "what is my cash runway?", "what are the right metrics I need to raise, I need to hit to raise my next round?", "if I had an extra million dollars, where should I put it in my company?", and so on and so on. And our metric is "can we get to a place where founders confidently know the answers to those questions through data-backed analysis 10 times faster than any other fractional CFO practice or even full-time hire?" Right. Some of our competitors, it might take them a month and a half, two months to stand up a proper operating model. Through the lean methodology that we do it in, usually our founders have a pretty confident view of their runway seven days after they sign a contract with us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's amazing. When you look at the experience you've had so far with the startups and you know 30 plus startups, and, and maybe that number is a lot bigger because I got this information a while back. What are some of the insights that you can share that you've learned from other startups that you've seen or observed that you can share with other founders?
Alex Wu: I think really three things. And it, it changes from you know your zero to one, 1 to 10 as you're later on. So first off, it's the amount of unlearning you have to do as a founder. So in your zero to one stage, where most startups fail is they're not doing enough. And what that means is, especially if the founder doesn't have you know five, 10 years in the industry that they're building, they're not going to enough conferences, they're not speaking to enough industry experts, they're not speaking to enough customers. And really you want your calendar just back to back to back as you build this you know inherent mental framework of the problem space that you're exploring, just through pure osmosis, right? Where the startups that fail are ones that are trying to cook up a solution in a dark room by themselves without really continually experimenting their underlying thesis by going to market and engaging with the outside world constantly.
When you do find a hypothesis or two that you're starting to build conviction on, where, what's really hard is that that mentality does not serve you when you're in the 1 to 10 stage, right. At that stage it's all about focus. You basically have to unlearn everything that you did that made you successful thus far and really figure out, hone in on what are the two to three things that you're going to bet on for this year, and how can you hyperfocus your team to really execute against that.
Um I think secondly, once you stood up a product, this has been incredibly shocking for me, which is how many startups look at the wrong value metric. So whenever you see a pitch deck right, the problem slide will always have something incredibly compelling like, "Oh 90% of the time gig workers are you know at work they're underutilized" or you know "99% of outbound emails never get open or like never convert to a meeting" right. And then that is essentially the underlying problem space that the investors are underwriting. It turns out for the vast majority of startups, we're talking about 95% plus, when they actually build a product they stop tracking that underlying value metric, right? So if you're building a sales enablement tool and you're not tracking the amount of meetings that you, you've booked. Or you know you're building a tool that makes gig work more efficient and you're not tracking how utilization is changing with your tool. How do you know that you're really building something that's 10x better, right? And what we really coach our founders to do, especially in that stage, is what are the two to three value metrics? How are you going to make that 10x better? Because if you can, the go-to-market will really figure itself out. Um and then the benchmark that we recommend is versus the ne- most next most available alternative.
Um the third thing, when companies get larger uh at Series B plus, and you're starting to run really large organizations, is values right. And every company has values, most companies we've seen does not do it right. So values are really important cuz it's essentially how decisions are made when the founder is not in the room. So think about companies where they espouse values of you know "be entrepreneurial, fix problems" or you know "invest in your learning development." Where most companies get it wrong is they don't have the processes that actually ladder up to those values. So I worked for firms where it's like "fix what's broken," right. However, to get a tiny expense approval of a software tool that can make something more efficient would take CTO approval. I worked for a firm where it was like you know, "curiosity is king" or "continuing to learn" and we were the only large company in the valley that didn't have an education stipend. So a lot of this discrepancies um really echo down to like across your firm. So one thing that we really recommend for our larger clients is, what are your values right? What are the specific processes and rules that you're putting in place that ladder up to those values? And then we've seen companies be a lot more successful with that approach.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, measuring the metrics and understanding and tracking your growth is something that a lot of companies try and do. Do you have specific tools that you can think about that are really helpful, or do you have your own infrastructure you provide to your customer base?
Alex Wu: Yeah, you know we've seen our customers use a whole range of tools to be honest. A lot of the invoicing systems already have a lot of the key metrics. Um most of what we do is coaching our founders to not listen to a lot of the stakeholders and focus on the right metrics, right. If you're over anchored on ARR at a pre-seed to seed stage, you're focusing on the wrong thing, right. Because at that moment it's really about how can you prove out customer love? How can you prove out that for a specific segment they're getting 10x more value from your tool than what, how they were doing it before, and retention is 90% plus, right? Where we've seen startups go wrong is at that stage they fall in love with the top-line metrics um or other metrics that their investors have geared them to, and they end up plugging that hole with paid marketing initiatives right. But that's not the right problem to focus at that time, and you do end up getting growth, but ultimately you haven't really built a product that has product-market fit.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, interesting. Where do you see the market today? Um and from an investor's perspective or a VC's perspective, what is it they really want to see from their, their startups? Because you know we're, a lot of companies went out, raised a lot of money, and then they got upside down with their financials, and now they're trying to you know, they have to downsize and downsize and figure out how to get profitable, um but also find their target market. What, what are you seeing?
Alex Wu: Every investor that we've spoken to or most investors uh for most types of companies are looking for a path to profitability by the time you hit Series B. That's why late stage has been incredibly quiet I think, given the less manic market that we're in today. Um there's not, there's a lot more diligence because there's time to do diligence. It's not like if you don't put a term sheet in the next 72 hours you're just completely out of the round. Um even in early stages, deals that used to take you know frankly like less than a week are now taking two to four weeks, which allows investors to ask much better and insightful questions to understand the companies. And you know I really do think right now what people care most about is: have you really hit product market [fit]? I think there's a lot of companies that grew really quickly but because investors weren't looking at you know, like cohort or retention properly, they weren't looking at "has the underlying value operating metric 10x versus the most available alternative?" um you know, a lot of these companies were just underwritten through their ARR growth mostly driven by marketing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, as a company, um in addition to the coaching and the services and the strategy you provide for them, what are the tactical things that your service provides to a startup? Say I you know, I raise some money, I don't have a CFO, I need someone who's very financially savvy that can help me strategize, maybe understand my metrics. Like what do you leave them with? Is it a service, is it a platform, is it a combination?
Alex Wu: Yeah that's a great question. I think about our services in three large buckets. So the first one is really the operating model right, because that's kind of the engine of everything that we do. Um so a lot of companies come to us before they raise a large round or right after, and they just need visibility on their capital allocation decisions. They have somewhere to go, they have x million dollars of the bank, how do you get from point A to point B? Um so that is largely what we focus on in the first month. And once we kind of have that down pat, we've locked down a budget, we have it signed up, off by the board.
Then the second bucket is how much time can I give back to management, right. If management's spending 10, 20% in [fund]raising activities, that is not a great time, use of their time. They should be focusing on product and go-to-market. So for us we really take the pen on most of our clients' board deck meetings, investor updates, internal updates, anything that we can take them 90% with relatively low to medium context, and then we are able to give back that much time.
The third bucket is strategic projects. So for that it is really how can we really understand this company and industry and continually pitch projects where we can accelerate the firm right. So we've done everything from vendor negotiations for other firms, we have set up their entire G&A infrastructure, from switching them to a more scalable payroll provider, connecting it to the right BI tool, etc etc etc. Just because we have the benefit of seeing it over and over and over again, we know what good looks like, we know the downsides of a lot of these different tools, and we're able to create a custom essentially scalable background that allows founders to focus on what's most important.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Do you work with companies that go into accelerators like Y Combinator, Techstars, or you, after they get out of an accelerator, where do you, where do you kind of fit there?
Alex Wu: So for those companies they usually fit into that first bucket I talked about, where we're just provi- pro bono advice right, connecting them to the right people, maybe helping them find their first design partner. Um it's really after they raise their first material round well they become paying customers. Um but again, we spend you know anywhere from 15 to 20% of our time with those early stage companies. And just trying to be like, the mantra of our firm is "how can we help", right? That I truly believe specifically within the startup ecosystem is the greatest go-to-market motion ever, because you know even if they end up not raising or they end up not being a great fit, if you're genuinely just trying to help founders in this ecosystem (which so few people do right), they will tell their founder friends, they will tell like a VC that they've spoken to. The turnaround on that ROI has consistently been less than three months right. Where we help someone set up a healthcare insurance provider and they tell another founder friend and then they sign like a five to six figure deal with us within three months right. So that's why we're so comfortable investing so much time in the early stage community and just being as helpful as we can, because time over and over and over again we've seen that has always paid off.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well that's great. Uh what's, what's it like today for startups that are trying to put a pitch deck together? They've got an idea, they think they can bring something to the market that's going to change the world or change something that's going to make our lives better. What's it like to go out and pitch to raise capital in today's market for the you know, for the early stage companies? How many times are they presenting before they're seeing some results, and what's some of the advice you can give them in, as they approach that phase of, of uh growth?
Alex Wu: I mean early stage VC is still very, very healthy. Like the total amount of capital raised, the trends that we're seeing is you know, relative to a 2020, um it's the same amount of capital but fewer companies. So what that means is the same or more capital is just chasing higher quality deals. Um in terms of the you know back of the envelope metrics, usually people recommend for every 20 investors in your pipeline, that's probably going to convert to one person on your term sheet. So a lot of early stage founders truly underestimate how many people that they have to talk to in order to get a lead investor. Like on average for the people who have been successful that I've seen, had you know literally pipeline lists of 60, 80 to 100 investors for one lead, a few follow on and then three or four strategic angels.
Um in terms of specific recommendations, um it is important to know the VC word bank. And we have seen this firsthand where there was this incredible founder who built this great, great product with phenomenal traction and she pitched to several and was turned down by every single one of them. We helped her revamp her pitch deck and because we have some background in investing, just use the words that we know that will get VCs excited. Like demonstrating customer love right, "this is where the founder is spiky", "here's how she builds velocity", right um, "great founder-market fit", "here's like an example of a similar company that has recently exited," right. And it was even shocking to us how, of those minor changes of just understanding the language that VCs speak, taking the same material but just framing it slightly differently, that she was able to get a term sheet one week after we revamped her T-.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow that's amazing. Talk about value.
Alex Wu: I mean it's a little, I don't know how to feel about this, but it is really important that if you can have a mentor, a friend or like a trusted entity who just knows the investing world help you frame the same content in the right way and make it much easier for it to resonate with early sta- investors, the magnitude of difference that it can make.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah wow, that's incredible insight. We talk to so many companies that you know pitch 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 200, 500 times and you know they're on a hamster wheel trying to figure it out, so sounds like you've got some really good insights there. Talk about liquidity opportunities for bootstrapped services firms.
Alex Wu: Yeah, so this one has been uh an area that has really surprised me. So we've spoken to a lot of private equity firms and especially through my Stanford MBA days, um was really able to just get a ton of exposure into that industry. And effectively, one of the hottest themes right now uh because people are kind of gearing up for what could be an elongated recessionary period, is non-discretionary B2B services. So um there's a ton of interest from either the search fund side, middle market private equity of just acquiring bootstrapped B2B services. Um you know, ranges that I've heard is six to eight times EBITDA if you're doing you know 1 or 2 million of revenue. And as you scale up from there you might be looking at double digits of EBITDA in terms of evaluation. Um which is just incredible and rarely see um for these types of services based businesses. And I think you know, for the service owners out there, from what I've heard like what best in class looks like is if you're able to have a 20% EBITDA margin and then maintain that 20% top line growth, that already puts you in a top quartile like very attractive B2B business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Can you give us some examples of what type of B2B services that that would be, that you're seeing traction in, in terms of potential acquisitions?
Alex Wu: Yeah, I mean accounting and finance is a really hot thesis right now. Um we've had two private equity companies already try to begin to build a relationship with us. Um you know, I think so most major private equity firms have an accounting platform where they're starting to roll up this long tail of accounting service providers um both to startups and middle market and etc. Um another, I think another large private equity firm mentioned that you know they acquired a janitorial service that cleans offices. Um anything that is non-discretionary, so you kind of have to have, and they like the B2B because a lot of times it's much stickier contracts at high ACVs.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah that's great. Yeah, we've heard a lot about companies like in the next three to five years just really aging out, founders of service providers that are just yeah you know they are going to turn the keys over to their kids. And their kids are on you know YouTube and influencers, they don't want to get into that service line that their parents have. Whether it's a laundromat or it's you know some sort of service that's boring to them, um and they might do $3 to 5 million a year and you know they're just going to literally turn it off and go away. So I know there's an opportunity there to do a lot of acquisitions coming up. And you know specific to your industry or maybe even outside your industry there's a lot of momentum there so that's great to kind of see what you're seeing as well.
Alex Wu: Right now is definitely founder-friendly for people who run B2B services businesses, there's a lot of competition on the capital side.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah that's great. What's one impactful lesson you can share with other founders that you got from a founder that you felt was priceless?
Alex Wu: That's a good question. Um this is not a specific piece of advice but it's mainly through observation. Um and it comes back to what I think makes a great leader. So for the founders that we've seen do the most well, there's... they're shock absorbers versus shock amplifiers. Um so running a business or running anything really is such a roller coaster, and things will definitely go wrong, especially if you're a startup founder, you know, it really feels like every morning you have the highest highs and then you get punched in the stomach. And that feeling can alternate from 30 minute meeting to 30 minute meeting. And really the founders that we've seen most effective, that inspire, motivate their people, that people want to follow, are shock absorbers. Where no matter how bad the situation, how unexpected or how much of a plan went wrong, whenever that's brought to the founder they really, really kind of deescalate. And that just makes the entire company just less stressed and more focused on working the problem.
There are founders that we've seen that are shock amplifiers, where you can bring this tiny issue and then suddenly it's an explosion. It's like way more complex or way more worse than even originally the person who brought it. And that caused a lot of downstream effects right, where people are a lot more afraid to speak up, we're seeing attrition rates that are higher, um and so on. So I think if you're in a leadership position in a company, especially in its falt- early stages, the importance of being a shock absorber versus a shock amplifier is priceless.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Man, that is such great advice. I can't tell you how many companies we work with, a lot of startups as well. And you know, we see the ups and the downs and you can feel the energy when things are going good for them and when it's not going good. And that energy is not something that you just think is made up. You can see how it you know changes their communication with their own employees and the impact it has on, on them. So I think it's important when you, you're going through good and bad times to try and keep an even keel and remember you're the leader, you're there to lead, make sure that people are you know feeling good even when things aren't going great. And it's kind of a, a wonky time for a lot of companies too, so it's probably even more important to keep that in mind today. Um this is great. Um I'm going to ask you now three questions, it's not a lightning round or anything, we just call it "Three Questions" um with one simple answer. What do you, what do you or where do you go to think big or to brainstorm?
Alex Wu: That's a great question. Um so there's this great podcast that Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb was just on uh with Lenny's product podcast. And he talked about a framework that, and a value that they had in Airbnb was "Add a zero." So whenever anything was pitched right, the framing was, "What resources do you need, what does this look like if it had, if we needed it to have 10 times more impact, if it was 10 times bigger?" right. And I absolutely love that as a framework. So when we talk about where we want to take CFO Advisors, how we're coordinating our strategy, what we want to focus on, it always starts with "How can this be 10 times bigger? How can we be 10 times better? And what resources do we need?" Um and when you think about all problems in that context, it really allows you to let go of all of the baggage right. Making sure that you're making the bigger bets from a six-month to multi-year time frame that will really position the company well versus slightly incrementally improving a tiny process but not really moving the needle of where you stand in the industry.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know Steve Jobs used to walk around the campus with you know fellow friends to problem solve, think about things. What activity best helps you solve problems?
Alex Wu: You know I think one of the things that... so learning [and] development is a very critical component of the culture of our firm. And one of the insights that I've really resonated over my career is when you're working at a company it's so easy to get right, and you're not having any external input from your day-to-day work. So for me we kind of frame it as, how can you spend 10% of your time getting that external inspiration? Whether it's reading a book, whether it's listening to a podcast or going to a startup event and hearing other founders speak right. Or even we have like an education stipend or even like taking a local class. For us that's so critical, because we kind of see this as like a stream, a constant stream of inspiration from the external world. And how can we apply these new frameworks that we're just getting externally to solve the challenges that we have internally in our companies? Um so that has been really transformational, so it's not just you know we're in a dark room and then it's like our firm and we're just banging our head against the wall, but each of us really invest the time to get that external stream of inspiration um which really helps us tackle a lot of the challenges that we have in more innovative ways than otherwise.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Last one here: how do you stay mentally positive when going through challenging times?
Alex Wu: That's a great question. Um you know thankfully we haven't wait, I got it, to be honest like we really haven't have any, much challenges so far!
Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's not for you, it's probably not a question that uh...
Alex Wu: Let me think, let me think what would be a good answer to this. Um I would say given that we're you know, our ambition is to really build a tremendously large firm, that we're like the de facto advisor for startups and we can h- we can halve the default rate for startups and double their success rate, therefore doubling the amount of innovation that we're seeing in this country. So with that large ambition and given how relatively early we are in that stage, the mental mindset that we have is any challenge point is right now it's just an opportunity for us to improve process and continue to iterate. And I rather have all the worst situations happen to me right now where it's easy to control, it's easy for us to pivot, it's easier us for us to learn, than when we're a 10, 20, 100 times larger company and it will be a lot more challenging for us to be this agile.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well Alex, a lot of wisdom uh for a young man, and as you look into 2024 what's on the roadmap for CFO Advisors?
Alex Wu: So one of our goals earlier this year was to be an AI native firm. I think you're seeing a lot of professional services firms talk about that right, making sure they were on the leading edge. I think it wasn't until we got this new wave of influx of AI companies and started being educated by our customers, did we truly understand how little that we know, we knew about what being AI native really was, right? Because for us we thought we were at the leading edge of the market by testing all the new A- AI-enabled workflow tools that are available right now. Well I'm going to tell you, that is 6 to 8 months behind um in terms of like the GitHub community and where people are publishing like you know personal projects and playing with agents and etc. But it's not yet kind of commercial, commercially ready at scale. And then that community is 6 to 8 months behind the actual research community is you know at the forefront, PhDs writing really insightful papers and additional frameworks.
And as we saw with OpenAI Dev Day right, the huge tremendous difference a year can have within this industry. So for us we have really leaned in to our customers and really who have helped educate us and started playing with that one click down of what the agents look like. And we all have like now you know program environments set up and you know on a bi-weekly basis we're like looking at different GitHub projects, reading different AI papers and really with the goal of how can our future workforce look like? 25, 30% AI agents and 70% people or even more. And we're very, very close to for our next quote unquote "hire" to just be a full AI agent.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow that's amazing. So you're going to be an AI company as well as a service provider to AI companies.
Alex Wu: I mean the benefit is a lot of our clients are helping us build these internal tools.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah that's great. Well super excited to see how it goes Alex in the future, love to have you come back on and give an update of going from a service provider to incredible companies to becoming an AI agent yourself maybe. You never know, I'll be talking to an agent. Um uh thanks so much for joining here today and, and thanks to all of our followers for listening. If someone wanted to find CFO Advisors or you Alex where would they go?
Alex Wu: www.cfoadvisors.com. And again we're always happy to help inspiring founders working on interesting problems, so just shoot an email to alex@cfoadvisors.com.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great, well there you have it. Thanks everyone for listening today. It means the world to me that you've chosen your time to spend with us. I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, the host of the show, and can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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