Cooper: Startup CEOs need a finance leader as soon as go-to-market begins
Scott Kupor · a16z Podcast | Cash, Growth, and CEO ❤ CFO · Jan 2, 2019 · at 13:04
Scott Cooper of Andreessen Horowitz explains how unit economics, marketing spend, and sales quota calculations require a dedicated finance partner during go-to-market execution.
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“As soon as you think about go-to-market, right, and you start to think, okay, now I'm going to spend marketing dollars. Do I understand what my lead generation costs? Now I'm going to hire sales. What's the throughput and conversion rate and quota and all that stuff? I think then you've got enough moving parts where you're probably doing yourself a disservice as a CEO if you don't have someone whose job it is to actually put all that together and say, okay, you know, if we spend this amount of marketing dollars, it ought to yield this amount of lead generation, which means I need X number of sales to go prosecute those efforts.”
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