As part of the Founder Institute’s series of free online startup events for entrepreneurs around the world, we were pleased to welcome Finmark CEO Rami Essaid on July 28, 2021 for a focused conversation on startup financial best practices.
Properly modeling, forecasting, and managing finances can make or break an early-stage startup. In this video, Rami Essaid shares best practices for startup CEOs to effectively manage and model their finances, from the pre-seed to Series A stages. Leveraging his experience in starting Finmark (a YC-backed financial modeling startup) and Distil Networks (acquired), Rami discusses financial topics including dilution, runway, reporting, key metrics, investor expectations, and much more. Watch to learn what to include in your startup financial projections at each stage, tips on financial modeling and reporting, the best ways to communicate finances to board members and VCs, and more:
One especially informative slide from Essaid's presentation included this chart of financials by stage:
About the Speaker: Rami Essaid
Rami Essaid is co-founder and CEO of Finmark. He also serves as Venture Partner at IdeaFund Partners where he focuses on investing in cyber, infrastructure, and fintech companies. Rami also serves as an Extended Team Member at Ubiquity Ventures. Prior to founding Finmark, Rami was founder of Distil Networks, the global leader in bot detection and mitigation. As CEO, Rami grew Distil to over 200 employees and $25MM in revenue. With hundreds of enterprise customers and 5 global offices, Forrester named Distil Networks as a leader in the Forrester Wave: Bot Management in 2018 and 2019. Distil was acquired in 2019 by Imperva, a leader in the application security segment. Prior to that, Rami was the founder of ChitChat Communications. An alumnus of the YCombinator and TechStars accelerator programs, Rami now serves as a mentor for current participants, advising the next generation of entrepreneurs and coaching them on how to scale their businesses while continuing to provide innovative and boundary-pushing products and services.
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