Finance sets the culture
What does a great finance team actually do?
Most people will tell you it’s budgeting, forecasting, and keeping the lights on. But after building and leading multiple teams, I’ve landed on something less obvious:
Finance sets the culture.
That might sound strange until you step back and realize that finance touches everything. Every hire, every campaign, every product SKU, every expansion plan. The finance function is ultimately a reflection of the company’s entire operating system.
Which is why the number one goal of a finance team—at least the way I’ve always seen it—is to empower leaders across the organization with data. Not just to inform, but to clarify. To create alignment, transparency, and forward motion.
Finance doesn’t just track the business. It shapes how the business operates.
Culture is a currency
I’m now at my third high-growth tech startup, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no two are the same.
At Instacart, major financial decisions happened daily. You could shift the financial trajectory of a month in a single week. That environment required a deeply analytical and reactive finance function—one that could move fast and with precision.
But at many software companies, including Notion, the cycle is different. So when I joined, I didn’t start with the numbers. I started with the interpersonal:
- How are decisions made?
- Who’s in the room?
- What information do they have? What information do they need?
That work led us to a new operating rhythm:
- Weekly business reviews for pulse checks
- Monthly checkpoints to assess trajectory
- Quarterly retros to re-anchor strategy.
Our “Business Weekly” now includes 40–50 leaders and drives alignment across a 1,000-plus person company. This meeting is where strategy turns into execution—and where the work of finance actually shows up.
But it only works if context is shared.
One of the hardest parts of scale is communication. At a company with a hundred employees, everyone might know about every major decision. But by the time you hit a thousand, it’s just as likely someone says, “Wait… I didn’t know we were doing that.”
Finance can help close that gap. We’re not just here to publish dashboards. We’re here to make metrics legible, universally accessible, and tied to real decisions.
And then share them far and wide.
It starts with hiring
In high-growth environments, it’s easy for finance to default to the way things have always been, but that mindset doesn’t scale well.
But when people see the tension between risk and opportunity and can reframe constraints can unlock the entire company. I look for people who ask, “what would make this possible?”
That’s one of the reasons I interview every final-round finance candidate. My role in the process centers around culture, not proficiency. I’m there to understand how they think, especially in ambiguity.
Finance should be a partner in building the business, not just keeping score. And, no surprise, that kind of thinking also extends to how I believe a finance team should operate.
More than the department of “no”
I think finance teams can easily fall into this trap where they become the department of “No.”
No, that wasn’t discussed in our budget. No, that’s not a priority right now. But usually, the answer shouldn't actually be no. It should be, “That’s interesting. Let’s talk about how to make it work.”At Notion, we push hard to be seen as partners, not police. That means we work across the company to understand the ‘why’ behind ideas and help make them real. We embed in teams. We try to show up with solutions.
Finding the right balance can be tricky, which is one of the reasons I have frequent 1:1s with my team. We’ll meet as many times as two or three times a week if we’re working through a project that’s particularly cross-functional or has a lot of potential gotchas.
I’m not doing that to check up. I’m doing that to ask, “how can I help you? This feels hard…how do we get through it together?”
At least for me, I find that kind of management structure leads to folks coming to you early when there’s a blocker or a problem.
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There’s more than one right way to do things. Sure, accounting is accounting and you can’t really change that. But Notion is different than Instacart, and your company’s probably pretty different than Notion.
Modern finance is about more than reconciling the past. We’re shaping how decisions get made, how people communicate across functions, and how teams learn to navigate uncertainty together.
At a certain point that’s not just finance.
That’s culture.