Most finance advice is written for one of two people. The founder-stage CFO holding everything together with spreadsheets and instinct, or the enterprise leader running a machine that’s already built. Very few people have done both, and some of the most interesting lessons live in the space between them.
That’s the space I wanted to explore for the second episode of our series, Unscripted Conversations with CFOs. I sat down with Anjeza Gjino and Eduardo Arreaga, two finance leaders who both started in big, structured companies and then went small and built finance functions from close to nothing. Anjeza spun a group of assets out of Ironwood into a brand new public company called Cyclerion and took it from zero to publicly traded in nine months. Eduardo started as a mechanical engineer in Mexico, spent years in FP&A at MSCI, and then became the first finance hire at an early-stage fintech. While taking very different roads, they kept landing on the same lesson from opposite directions: building a finance function is a people problem long before it’s a systems problem. Here’s what I walked away with.
What the big company teaches you, and what you have to unlearn
To start, we talked about what taught them more, the big company or the small one? Both said the big company, but not for the reason you’d expect. Anjeza’s take was a large organization teaches you just as much about what not to do as what to do. At a big company you have to force yourself to stay uncomfortable and keep improving. At a small company you don’t have that problem, because you’re already uncomfortable every single day.
Eduardo added the piece I think is most useful. The discipline you learn in corporate does translate, the rigor of assessing a decision by its return and its economics. But a lot of what you learn in a big company, you have to unlearn when you go small. The multi-layer approvals, the slow march up the chain and back down, all of that has to go. In a small company you lean on the 80/20 rule and you move. Keeping the discipline while dropping the bureaucracy is the whole trick, and it’s harder than it sounds.
Finance is a partner, not the police
Somewhere in the conversation I used the phrase “bad cop” and Anjeza stopped me on it. The idea of finance as the police is a sore point for her, and she’s spent her career pushing against it. Finance should be there to help the company hit its goals, not to guard the budget like a bouncer.
I could not agree more, and it lined up with something Chris Sands said in our first episode. When people call it “your budget,” he corrects them. It’s the business’s budget. Finance helps build it and reports against it, but the whole company owns it.
The way Anjeza makes that real is by bringing the whole leadership team into the decisions instead of having finance sit as the sole adjudicator of who gets what. She gave a great example: at one of the companies she works with now, she saw the need for a project manager, championed the hire, and that one role ended up helping every function, which let them deprioritize other hires. That’s finance proposing an added cost that helps everyone, rather than “saying no to added spend”. As a CEO, this is exactly what I want from a finance leader, and it’s a big part of why I trust the one we have at Charted.
Eduardo framed the same idea around trust. His hiring bar for a finance person isn’t whether they can build a model or close the books, because he treats that as the basic entry ticket. What he looks for is whether someone will earn enough trust that a business leader picks up the phone at 7 pm and asks for a recommendation before making a decision. That phone call is the whole job.
Don’t buy the system before you understand the process
Anjeza’s most practical advice is the mistake she sees constantly being made. Companies over-engineer on the systems front before they’ve actually figured out what their processes are. A tool gets bought or an implementation starts, and she has to step in and say, let’s pause, let’s figure out how we actually want to budget, determine what problem we’re solving, and only then talk about systems. More often than not, whatever was already being built doesn’t match, and sometimes the honest answer is that Excel was good enough all along.
She named the deeper version of the mistake too, which is investing in systems before investing in teams. A team that has never been through the next phase leans on consultants to tell them best practice, but best practice at a huge company is not best practice at an early-stage biotech. Eduardo lived the same thing. He built a genuinely great operating expense model in Excel, tried to move it into an FP&A tool, realized they’d skipped the question of whether they were solving the right problem, paid for one year of the tool, and went back to Excel. He was proud of that model, because it kept the business running.
This is the part I spend my days on at Charted, so it truly resonated with me. We build software that automates AP, and this scenario shows up all the time. A company decides to automate because it’ll save time, implementation starts, we ask who approves what and at what threshold, and the team realizes they’ve never actually talked about it. The tool just brought the lack of process to the surface. We also see this on the NetSuite side—when a company wants to implement NetSuite and there’s no controller in place, that’s our cue to ask more questions and make sure they’re ready, because the system will only ever be as good as the operator behind it.
How lean is too lean
There’s lean that’s healthy and lean that’s one bad quarter from breaking, and I asked how you tell the difference. Eduardo’s clearest signal comes from the people around you. If you’ve built real trust with the leadership team, they’ll tell you when finance is starting to fall short, and your job is to listen. His example was forecasting. In a small company the forecast has to move fast, and the moment the numbers you’re handing people lag behind where the business actually is, that’s the signal something is about to break.
Anjeza’s version was about focus. She sees lean teams spinning their wheels on low-value work while the big value-creating things go untouched, usually because that work is more comfortable or nobody was clear on the priorities. Her rule is to strip it back to what the organization needs, reallocate off the low-value work, and only after you’ve genuinely done that and still can’t deliver do you add capacity, (and that doesn’t always mean a full-time hire). Sometimes the answer to “what if this person gets hit by a bus” is cross-training or a consultant, not another headcount. What struck me afterward is that neither of their answers involved a formula or a benchmark. One was about trust, the other about focus, which again, comes down to people.
There is no such thing as AI work product
Both of them are champions for AI, but neither trusts it blindly. Eduardo put himself at 80/20. Love the speed, love the granularity, but there always has to be a QA step, especially before anything goes to the board. Easy data access can quietly produce a fifteen-page report full of fluff, so someone still has to sit with it and make sure it says what it needs to say.
Anjeza compared AI to a very junior analyst. Fast, capable, occasionally confidently wrong, and something you sit with and poke holes in before you present it as fact. The difference, she said, is that what a junior analyst does in five days, AI does in five minutes. Her rule gave this section its title: there is no such thing as AI work product. If your name is on it, you own it, exactly as if you’d produced it yourself.
There’s a bigger shift coming underneath all this. We’re heading toward a world where anyone in the company can point AI at the financial data and build their own dashboard. That’s genuinely useful, and it’s also a governance question finance leaders should get ahead of now. When everyone can produce numbers, the person who can validate them becomes more valuable, not less. Even here, the tools change and the order doesn’t; the judgment stays with the people.
Hire people who can stretch, and get a strong second in command
By the time we got to people directly, the conversation had already been pointing there for an hour. Anjeza made the case that in a small company you hire jacks of all trades over narrow experts, people with the curiosity and initiative to do more than their job description, and then you build expertise around them as you need it. The number one quality she looks for is whether someone can learn, stretch, and grow.
She added one thing I think a lot of first-time CFOs miss. To be a strategic partner to the CEO, you cannot also be the person buried in the day-to-day journal entries, so a strong second in command is essential. In her first public-company CFO role, an experienced controller was critical, and she was quick to say she probably learned more from him than he did from her. The lesson underneath it is to hire people who complement you rather than people who think exactly like you.
The final takeaway
I closed by asking each of them for one piece of advice. Anjeza gave two. Focus relentlessly on what the organization actually needs rather than what your team happens to be good at, and never underestimate storytelling, because every stakeholder, from investors to employees to, in her world, patients, cares about something different, and you have to speak to each of them.
Eduardo’s advice was “make finance fun again”. Get the rest of the organization to see finance as a partner in the journey rather than the police, get them engaged with what the numbers actually mean, and the whole dynamic with your leaders, your employees, and your investors changes. The responsibilities don’t go away. But when finance becomes part of the company’s DNA instead of a checkpoint people have to clear, you get far better results. Anjeza liked it so much she said she might finally change her title to Chief Fun Officer.
If there was one thread running through the whole conversation, it’s that building a finance function is never just one job. You’re building what the company needs today, unlearning the habits that served you somewhere bigger, and growing the whole thing fast enough to keep up without stretching it to the point where it breaks. The leaders who do this well hold all three at once, and they check themselves constantly on which one the moment actually calls for.
This was the second of several conversations I’ve been having with finance leaders about the things they really wrestle with, and we have more coming soon. If you’re a CFO or senior finance leader who’d want to be part of one, I’d love to hear from you.
To watch our full conversation, view it on YouTube here.
To read the full article, check out the LinkedIn article here.
