📬 VC CFO to PE: Can you make the leap?

Pricing turf wars? Snowflake called a truce.

Finance says they own it. Product swears it’s theirs. GTM just wants answers. Snowflake ended the “who runs pricing?” drama with a Monetization Operating Model.

On October 2nd, Snowflake’s Director of Finance, Ryan Campbell, and Metronome CEO Scott Woody share how they built pricing that scales and actually plays nice across teams.

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🚨 Show off your AI skills to the CFO Secrets audience 🚨

I’m building something new inside the Secret CFO Lab, and a few of you are going to be part of it.

If you’ve used AI in your finance team and seen real impact (saved time, improved output, or just made life less painful), I want to talk.

This isn’t for vendors, consultants, buzzword bandits, or god forbid … IT people. It’s for real finance pros who’ve done something worth showing off.

What’s it all about? Can’t say just yet 👀

But it involves recognition, prizes, and a bit of glory.

👉 Drop your details here if you’re curious. You’ll be the first to know.

Anyway… on to today’s Mailbag

We’ve got some great topics today. Here’s what’s on tap:

Now, let’s get into it.

Joe from Denver asked:

I recognize you’re not in public accounting anymore, but what is your take on PE entering the industry? How do you see this playing out over the next 10-15 years?

Thanks, Joe. This is a fascinating question.

Public accounting has been dominated by the partnership model forever. In the 1980s, you had the Big 8. Then consolidation and collapse left the Big 4, and it’s stayed that way ever since.

But things are shifting. Regulators are clamping down harder on independence rules, which makes it harder to cross-sell audit and advisory. That undermines one of the Big 4’s core economic engines. And that’s why private equity smells blood.

Their thesis is simple: take the fragmented tier below the Big 4, consolidate it, professionalize it, drive operational leverage with tech and offshoring, and grab market share. High margin, recurring revenue, and underinvested infrastructure. Classic roll-up play.

The mechanics are fascinating. Under the conventional partnership model, you get a profit share while you’re in the seat as a partner, but you never crystallize any real equity value. Sell to PE, and suddenly, incumbent partners get a payday. But that’s a one-time win, and the model that comes after is a whole different game.

And here’s the problem: incentives.

Pay in public accounting is traditionally poor. People stick it out for three reasons:

A PE-backed firm kills off reason #2. There’s no partnership track in the same sense. Which raises a big question: How do you attract and retain talent when the long-term carrot disappears?

If the talent pool dries up, the whole model wobbles. And remember, this isn’t just a public accounting issue. These firms are the primary training ground for corporate accounting & finance pros. They’re where a portion of future CFOs cut their teeth.

If the accounting firms get hollowed out, it won’t show up in the P&L right away. But three to five years later, when the pipeline thins out… finance teams will start to feel it.

Looking 10 to 15 years into the future, here’s how this could play out:

And looming over all of this is AI. God knows what impact it will have in that timeline, but it will be seismic. Whether it automates grunt work, rewires entire workflows, or reduces demand for junior headcount altogether, we just don’t know yet. But whatever happens, the profession will not look the same in 2035.

PS – This is exactly the kind of issue we’ll be diving into in the Boardroom Brief. If you’ve got a strong view or a front-line perspective, drop me a note. I want to hear it.

CFO is just a title from EMEA asked:

First things first, thanks for your invaluable content. For those FD/CFOs working for VC-backed startups and scale-ups but eager to break into the PE world - aka PE-backed CFO - which steps or recommendations would you be able to give from your experience or your network?

Thanks for the question.

You should start from the place that this transition is harder than you think. To some extent, VC and PE represent opposite challenges for a CFO.

Let me explain…

It’s not just that PE is more finance-intensive and demanding. It’s that the skillsets, incentives, and stakeholder expectations are structurally different. What makes you great in VC - fast growth, fundraising, storytelling - may leave you exposed in PE, where it’s all about cash, control, and compression.

In a VC-backed world, the heroes are the product and the go-to-market engine. Your job is to ride those coattails, raise more equity than the balance sheet really deserves, and ration it carefully enough to hit the next milestone. Finance isn’t the hero, but it’s the steward, keeping the company alive until growth hits escape velocity.

In a PE-backed world, it’s the reverse. The business is intentionally thinly capitalized. Less equity than is comfortable, stacked with as much debt as the sponsor thinks it can get away with. Financial engineering and the value creation plan are the heroes. The CFO has to keep the machine tight: cash, covenants, reporting, performance. But that’s just the entry ticket. You aren’t just managing the model, you’re on point to deliver the value creation plan: bolt-ons, synergies, pricing, procurement, working capital, and exit readiness.

I’m not saying the transition isn’t possible. Plenty have made it. But it is hard, and it’s a very different playbook.

My advice:

Final macro point: The boundaries are blurring. VCs are holding later, PE funds are investing earlier. Over the next decade, I expect to see more CFOs who can run both playbooks. But to get there, you need at least one clean example of having made the leap.

That’s the move: finish the VC cycle, land the PE transition, and then you’ve got a credible resume in both worlds.

And here’s something exciting … this Saturday I’m starting a month-long Playbooks series diving into how to succeed as a PE-backed CFO!

Dmitrijs from Riga, Latvia asked:

Hi Secret,

In a recent post, you wrote: “CFOs, if you are lucky enough to have a great controller, treasure them. As Joni Mitchell once said: You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

Could you please elaborate on how you see the role and functions of a Controller in a business, particularly compared to the Head of Accounting and the Head of FP&A?

In my experience (I’m a CFO based in Latvia), I often think of my finance function as having “two arms”: one past-looking and transaction-oriented (accounting), and one forward-looking (FP&A).

I’d be really interested to hear your perspective on where the Controller best fits in that structure, and how you’ve seen the role evolve in practice.

Dmitrijs – great question.

The first thing to say is that terminology varies a lot. In the US, “Controller” usually means chief accountant, the senior lead on books, records, and reporting. In Europe, you’ll often see “financial controllers” in that same sense, but also “business controllers” who are much more commercial. A business controller in Europe is closer to what a US company might call commercial finance, FP&A, or a senior business analyst.

So titles can be slippery. What matters is the fabric of the role… focus more on that.

When I wrote about great controllers being a gift, I meant the accounting and reporting side. The person who makes the engine room run. They own the close, the reporting, and if they’re strong, much of the budget cycle, the board pack, and the commentary. They are the heartbeat of the function, imo.

I generally agree with your framing of finance as two arms: backward-looking accounting vs forward-looking FP&A. But in practice, there’s a messy middle: budgeting, performance commentary, and variance analysis. In less mature functions, that middle ground often sits with FP&A because you need specialist skills to get the capability up and running.

But as the accounting and reporting function matures, strong controllers should be able to take on much of it. At their best, controllers stretch forward into FP&A territory, but that requires commercial understanding and the ability to think beyond the close.

My last VP of Accounting & Reporting could easily have held her own in a senior FP&A or BU CFO role. And vice versa. That’s the sweet spot, when your functional leaders can lean across to create bridges with each other’s functions and into the business. That’s when the magic happens.

And one more point: the best controllers evolve with the business. Early on, they’re hands-on in the details. Later, they’re designing processes, building teams, and embedding systems. They scale finance as the business scales. That’s why great ones are worth their weight in gold.

So don’t get hung up on titles. Ask instead: Who’s running the engine room? Who’s connecting the past to the future? And who’s building the next layer of capability?

If you’ve got a controller who does that well, treasure them… Like I treasure my 1971 copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on vinyl. I know it’s a little early for Christmas songs, but this is something you can enjoy all year round (like the movie Diehard)…

A few of the biggest stories that every CFO is paying close attention to. This is the section you might not want to see your name in.

This study found that workplace relationships are worth a 20% salary premium.

Let’s be honest, the Big 4 have been dining out on this principle for all of eternity… ‘the pay is shit, but you’ll make some friends for life.’

One of my best friends is someone I met in the Big 4. She was like a work big sister who stopped me from making all kinds of horrifying mistakes in my early years. Some of those mistakes are still too embarrassing to share a quarter of a century later.

Fair to say, I’d probably have been fired and thrown on the graduate shit pile without her overwatch… definitely worth more than 20% of a Big 4 graduate salary.

We are going to see more of this. Rapid retooling of human resources to use AI. This is a clear message from the top here at Accenture… learn or go.

I mean, did anyone following this ever think this was anything other than just a Ponzi scheme?!

Finally, Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez are in hot water with the SEC, which said, “In order to pay interest, dividends and maturing note payments, Defendants resorted to using a combination of loans from outside lenders, merchant cash advances, money raised from new and existing investors, and transfers from other portfolio companies to cover obligations.” Translation? Ponzi scheme.

ICYMI, here are some of my favorite finance/business social media posts from this week. In the words of Kendall Roy, “all bangers, all the time.”:

Makes sense, we have about 15 of these bears at home …

The best career advice you will read this week:

Let me know what you thought of today’s Mailbag. Just hit reply… I read every message.

I recently launched the Boardroom Brief newsletter. I brought on a (real) journalist to help tackle the topics that are top of mind for CFOs and boards. In the first-ever edition, we dove into how the CFO role has actually evolved and what AI means for the future of the role. Read the first Boardroom Brief right now.

On Saturday, I wrapped our Playbook series on crisis management with a newsletter dedicated to how great CFOs handle a crisis when finance is directly involved. Check out the newsletter here.

Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.