The best time in history to be a CFO - Damon Hauenstein (Weel)

“I didn’t have a CA or a CPA, and I hadn’t used Xero before.”He spent 12 years in investment banking, then became a startup CFO who had to learn bookkeeping from scratch.Damon Hauenstein is now CFO and COO at Weel, but before that he was at Citi working on deals like the Masters wind-down, the biggest inventory liquidation in Australian history.He then left, took an extended break and spoke to about 100 people to work out what he actually wanted next.It landed him a first-time CFO seat at a startup that had just raised its series A.Because he hadn't studied accounting formally, he learned bookkeeping and bank reconciliations from first principles, then hired a financial controller to take the systems to the next level.If you apply Maslow’s hierarchy to finance. Transactions at the bottom, strategy and M&A at the top, you can only do the top once the bottom is sorted.With AI and automation taking out a lot of that, Damon argues that this is the best time in history to be a CFO.If you’re in finance and wondering whether the path you’re on, is what you thought it would be, this one is for you!Highlights:Hear how a 12-year investment banker became a first-time startup CFO with no CA, no CPA and no experience in accounting systemsLearn his Maslow’s hierarchy of finance, and why he thinks it’s the best time in history to be a CFOUnderstand how he found his next move by taking time off and speaking to around 100 peopleGet the GFC story of watching Citi cut 52,000 jobs from the other side of the world before he had even startedSee inside the Masters wind-down, 100 sites and half a billion in stock, run under live litigationExplore why a career in banking flips 180 degrees, from worker bee analyst to business originatorFind out the real AI numbers inside Weel, from 2 to 5 times the output per engineer to automated receiptsHear how he built a company-wide AI culture with hackathons, lunch and learns and a habit of celebrating failures Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au