By George Saperas, Partner & CFO

Every founder I meet has a ranking in their head.
Product. Engineering. Sales. Marketing. Customer support. Hiring. Maybe ops.
Finance? Somewhere near the bottom. Right next to “admin.” Something you’ll figure out later — once you’ve raised the next round, once you’ve hit product-market fit, once you have time. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: by the time you decide finance matters, it’s usually because something has already gone wrong. And by then, your options have shrunk dramatically. I’ve watched this movie too many times. Let me show you two scenes.

Case Study I — KPIs and Operating Plans not in place

Situation
– Multi-billion-euro TAM opportunity
– Triple-digit annual growth, five years running
– Raised €7m across Angels, Seed and Series A

Problem
– Unsustainable unit economics: low LTV/CAC, high churn
– Pricing eroding as competitors with low barriers to entry piled in
– Fast expansion domestically and abroad
– Aggressive hiring — 60+ employees at peak
– High burn rate, continuously cash-negative

Outcome
– Investors lost interest
– Company ran out of cash
– Closed down after 4 years

A strong finance function alone wouldn’t have saved this company. But it would have flagged the unit economics 18 months earlier while there was still time to fix the model, slow hiring, reprice or pivot. Instead, the founders learned the truth from their bank account.

Case Study II — Wrong management of working capital

Situation
– Healthy marketplace with strong growth
– No finance team and no operating plan
– Suppliers paid the moment customer receivables came in

Problem
– DSO (collections from customers) at 90 days vs DPO (payments to suppliers) at 0 days
– Serious, unforeseen cash crisis; runway continuously deteriorating
– Burned through cash in 12 months instead of the planned 24

Outcome
– No time to demonstrate progress and KPI traction for a healthy fundraise
– Forced into a bridge loan (CLN) to reach the next round, unnecessary dilution
– Closed the round under heavy stress, on someone else’s timeline

A finance person worth his salary would have built a 13-week cash flow model in their first week and raised the alarm on the DSO/DPO mismatch in their second.

The Pattern

Founders don’t deprioritize finance out of stupidity. They deprioritize it because it doesn’t feel urgent. Product is on fire. Sales has targets. Engineering is shipping. Finance is… numbers in a spreadsheet nobody is asking about today. Until they are and then it’s the only thing anyone asks about.

Here’s the reframe: finance isn’t an admin function. It’s your radar. It’s the system that tells you, in real time, whether the strategy you’re executing is actually working or whether you’re flying confidently into a mountain.

Υou don’t have to hire a CFO on Day 1. You probably shouldn’t. But you do need to decide, early, that financial visibility is a first-order concern, not a back-office chore.
That means:
– An operating plan that connects commercial reality to cash KPIs that are measured, not assumed
– A finance function, outsourced or in-house, that runs alongside the business, not three months behind
– Someone whose job it is to challenge the numbers, not just report them

The startups that survive aren’t the ones with the best pitch decks. They’re the ones who knew, on any given Tuesday, exactly where they stood and what they had to do about it.

Coming in Part 2: Stop confusing your bookkeeper for a CFO. The four roles every founder confuses and why the cheap hire is the expensive one.

Building a company and not sure if your finance setup is fit for purpose? That’s a conversation we have every week at Uni.Fund. Reach out — happy to compare notes.