Six months into Continua, the chief of operations left. That placed David, Continua’s founder and CEO, in the uncomfortable position of having to take hold of all the company’s operations and run the back office.
“I am a technical founder so I’m happiest thinking about the product and writing code,” he says. “I’d call myself ‘very’ ignorant of those processes. I was grateful for my chief of operations taking on that burden.” But now the burden was David’s.
That meant figuring out two-factor authentication access to Rippling, reviewing the company’s leases, updating the spreadsheet to track their runway, and dozens of other tasks. David recalled that his chief of operations had hired a fractional Pilot CFO before leaving, and that he’d limited that CFO to just five hours per month. David reached out.
“It was clear right away talking to Neha at Pilot that there was way more Pilot could be doing for Continua, but we’d been bumping up against that small number of hours,” says David. He cranked up the hours from five per month to 20, as a test. It resolved most of his pain, recalling, “It was immediate and incredible,” says David, “and it was apparent they had a great degree of sophistication around modeling, which was really, really nice.”
Looking at an AI startup’s back-office operation, there is little that distinguishes one from another AI startup’s operation. The best practices around how you pay bills, pay people, keep the books, reconcile payments, and measure runway are almost always the same. David felt certain that this was all something he could hand off.
“I would definitely recommend getting this type of support because there’s basically nothing a startup can do with these operational things to differentiate themselves,” he says. “You need to be focused on the product and engineering, not figuring out taxes.”
You need to be focused on the product and engineering, not figuring out taxes.
David gave his chief of operations’ parting list to his Pilot CFO, Neha. The tasks started small, like updating the business’ address and contact information—the prior team had registered the business using his home address, “which sucked for me because it was in the public domain,” says David. Then Pilot took on higher-order tasks like building a model for the cost structure of Continua’s consumer AI product.
“It was all useful to me because I’d frankly rather hurt myself than sit on hold with state agencies,” jokes David. “Especially since those bureaucratic things are never solved overnight. Someone has to stay on top of it week after week.”
The strategic models helped David make decisions at the highest level. “The operating model “is fantastic,” he says, and accounts for all the different SaaS products they use, their leases, their payroll—with everything broken out into easy-to-read charts. When David realized one of their back-end service vendors was eating up their infrastructure budget, Neha built that cost structure into the model. As a result, David can play with the various inputs and see how back-end tool choices impact their runway.
David can play with the various inputs and see how back-end tool choices impact their runway.
“That means I can focus and manage our runway,” says David. “A lot of what a consumer product like ours is trying to do is establish something users are willing to pay for but are not necessarily paying for yet. You want to be as free as long as possible to get the network effects of a larger user base. That introduces a really interesting dynamic because if the runway is going to end at a certain point, and you know you’ll have to raise a round at least six months before, then I’m asking, ‘How do we put the company in the best possible position to raise more funds?’”
The cost model directly helps. “If I have all these financials and can show really strong month-over-month growth and then cap users to tell the VCs, ‘Look, we have demand for more, but we just can’t support it with the funding we have now,’ that’s why we need to raise. So having Neha and Andrew at Pilot as thought partners for exactly what those user caps should be and how many resources to put into it is super useful to our company strategy.”
Having Neha and Andrew as thought partners for exactly what those user caps should be and how many resources to put into it is super useful to our company strategy.
David feels the Pilot team’s combination of handling rote organizational tasks plus bringing the strategic finance and model-building allows him to operate lean. It brings executive insight and guidance at a fractional cost that doesn’t wreck his runway.
“I could not do this stuff on my own,” says David. “I would have to hire someone to do it. That’s maybe the best way to quantify the value. This saves me an entire executive salary. And just from a skills perspective, a quality-of-life perspective, I don’t have the time. So Pilot CFO services make total sense.”
David says he’d choose Pilot again for any future startup. “If you’re thinking on it, I would say do it for sure,” says David. “Different founders have different levels of funding, but I don’t think there’s any seed- stage startup that can’t afford the five-hour level at least, and I mean that both ways. Pilot is an invaluable help.”
Just from a skills perspective, a quality-of-life perspective, I don’t have the time. Pilot CFO services make total sense.
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Continua is the first “social AI” tool that can join group chats and participate in group conversations. It can help groups plan, coordinate, remember, and act through chat.
