Download our new Stripe Atlas guide: building your startup’s finance team
- How our guide is helping businesses optimize their finance function
- Our key findings
- Check out the full guide
As startups scale, financial responsibilities that were previously juggled by a full-time employee, often the CEO, become untenable. Growing teams need to delegate their financial responsibilities in order to move the business forward, but can often feel overwhelmed about how to do so.
We’re excited to address this vacuum of information by partnering with Stripe Atlas to create a resource that can help finance leaders navigate these challenges. In the “Startup guide to hiring and managing your finance team”, Ramp’s co-founder and CEO, Eric Glyman, delves into exactly what startups need to do to establish a thriving finance function. This advice is based on Eric’s two-time founder experience and Ramp’s work with thousands of finance teams.
How our guide is helping businesses optimize their finance function
Eric explains crucial insights such as what to look for in your first finance hire, sample interview questions to help you identify the right candidate, best practices for building a team, and a hiring plan blueprint for your first four years.
Our key findings
Key findings from the guide include:
- Investment experience is being prioritized as a critical skill for job candidates: Due to the rise of venture capital, companies are reassessing hiring priorities and searching for candidates that excel at investor relations and building models, rather than just having a solid accounting background.
- Startups are increasingly relying on fractional CFOs as a solution: Owing to greater acceptance within the startup community and technology decreasing the cost of outsourcing financial resources, fractional CFOs are rising in popularity for many startups.
- Focus on hiring specialists as you grow: A team full of generalists is fine in the beginning, but once you reach five hires, it’s time to search for specialists.
- Building a remote team? Make sure to invest in payroll expertise: A payroll specialist who can manage the technicalities of making hires from different states and countries can save you a world of headaches and stress.
Check out the full guide
Download the full guide today.
“I assumed I would have to choose between speed and control. What I found is that you can have both. A well-designed system takes friction out, for the finance function and for everyone else.”
Justin Webster
CFO, Denver Broncos
“A well-run district should not have to choose between getting work done at the school site and keeping control of the dollars behind it. We're not hiring more people to do more jobs, so we have to be smarter about the process. With Ramp, the purchase, the receipt, and the record stay together from the start. ”
Nick Brizeno
Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
“AI is moving faster than the finance context around it. Prices change, models change, and the value is not always obvious from an invoice. We needed enough detail to know which bets deserved more investment — and which ones did not.”
Greg Cooley
Controller, AngelList
“Invoices, cards, tokens. The categories change but the principle doesn't: know where the money is going, remove the work around it, and make sure the spend is worth it.”
Maciej Mylik. Finance
ElevenLabs
“There's just no surprises anymore. No more waiting two months to find out how a job did. We know how it's doing as it's happening.”
Erich Kuss
Financial Systems Manager, Infinity Home Services
“More token spend isn’t proof that AI is working. Less isn’t proof that it isn’t. What matters is whether we’re buying the right level of intelligence for the work. Ramp lets us make that judgment in the same place we manage every other type of spend.”
Cody Nutt
Senior Director of Business Systems, Daxko
“Most banks treat the back office as a cost to keep down. We treat ours as a return to compound, which is why we run it on Ramp. Now we put our clients on Ramp, too.”
Patrick Gaughen
President & COO, Hingham Institution for Savings
“Browserbase builds infrastructure so AI agents can do real work. Ramp is doing the same for finance. It’s not another tool. It’s a system purpose-built for AI-driven finance, and that’s why we chose Ramp as our financial operating system from day one.”
Paul Klein IV
Founder & CEO, Browserbase
