VP of Finance
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The right “VP of Finance” doesn’t need this job description, and won’t wake up in the morning with the thought “I am the VP of Finance at Invisible,” but with the thought: “Have we taken over the world yet?” The right person already called me, and told me these words:
Francis, the conservative forces in society will kill any financial or legal innovation, no matter how genius it is — unless you are ready to fight fire with fire. You cannot merely defy the system, you must beat the system at its own game.
By some miracle of an intellectual and spiritual journey, I have come from the system, but not been corrupted by it. I am ready to fight the lawyer-accountant-bureaucrat industrial complex, like the monster it is — I want to slay this dragon, I want to protect Camelot.
The only way to build the most capitalist company ever, is to make sure that everyone — everyone — in the company understands the incentives, the mechanics, and the principles of alignment that you have designed.
And there is innovation yet to be done, indeed, we have yet to begin. Your revenues are being taxed by a payments provider. Your payments are being made only monthly. You should have frictionless, instant inflows and outflows.
I want to explore using the blockchain both as a replacement for equity — invisible equity coins — and as a replacement for cash — invisible labor coins. There may or may not be an immediate application, but you need somebody capable of thinking through both the first principles and the mechanics to make sure you don’t miss out on a multiplier.
I may be neither a lawyer or an accountant or an admin or security-expert, but I can play all of these roles — I am a stem-cell, and I can hire specialists better than me at each thing, but no one will be better than me at this.
I will give you a reliable financial dashboard to see all of your business metrics in one place, and this will give you an advantage over every other company in your investor’s portfolios. They will trust you because you will systematically provide them with information that matches business reality nearly instantly, and you will consistently outperform your targets.
I am not a speaker of one language. By talking to every part of the business, I will help you think through the every factor in the business model, identify financial barriers to scaling, and sell the strategy to the capital markets.
You need a consigliere, an eminence grise — someone to stand in the shadows behind you, to listen, to watch, to think — and to intervene in moments of opportunity and threat, but otherwise, to subtly guide. You need your indispensable aide to make the friction of the office disappear.
Of course, all of your clients will want to have what you have — and so I will be thinking about how to automate every part of our own financial operation, so that I am freer and freer to be strategic myself.
On the subject of risk, there aren’t many in the risk prevention businesses who, ironically, understand it. You need to take risks. You need to take many risks, and some big ones. So you need someone in my role who won’t just be an obnoxious pest. My job is not to say no. It is to make a yes possible, and to structure the yes to optimize for a huge outcome. I need to understand technology and business to do this, not be a glorified administrator, or a bureaucratic functionary.
You are going to break the rules. You need someone to help you break the rules in style, and to invent new, better rules.
You are going to have to fight inertia from the establishment. You are going to need someone to help you fight those battles.
For the risks that can be hedged, you need someone to think carefully about every preventative measure that can be taken.
But you need someone who understands that armor has a cost. You need to be agile enough to fight, not weighed down to oblivion. I will give you the lightest, densest, most form fitting armor ever an army had to wear.
