Luke McKinlay is Head of Finance at Nuvo, the B2B trade network backed by Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, Founders Fund and Index Ventures, which has raised $45M to date including a $34M Series A. He has more than 14 years in finance and operations, starting in consulting and hedge funds before becoming the first finance hire at Fountain, where he helped scale revenue from roughly $2M to over $40M and contributed to raising more than $200M. At Nuvo he built the finance function from scratch, moving off QuickBooks onto Rillet, Ramp and Rippling, and runs the whole discipline as a team of one with outsourced help and Claude running in the background, heading into a Series B.
“Your sales leader says it's a bookings number. Your founder wants whatever the highest number is, generally. Your finance person is going to look at it and say, 'No, the math says this.'”
“What I find is the best path is to get everybody in a room and align on what we're calling ARR.”
“A dashboard of some sort or a tracking sheet as a single source of truth that everyone looks at and everyone trusts is like the ultimate. That's the ultimate cheat code.”
“That's why I like to present ARR as this kind of ethereal number. And then you have very clear GAAP financials, cash flow financials as part of your package that you're sending to investors.”
“Guiding people towards, 'Hey, this is what's going on. This is how we're reporting it.' It actually helps build trust, if anything.”
“Sure, you can take that monthly revenue times 12 and say, 'Oh, this is ARR.' There's nothing legally forcing the customer to pay you for the next 11 months.”
“Now you've got to hold the entire team accountable to delivering that number.”
“They want the bigger number, of course, but your job is to protect the downside.”