OFF BALANCE - Things I learnt in 20 Years as a CFO & CEO in startups.

Aarish Shah

In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!

  1. 03/11/2023

    061 - ZERO TO ONE OR ONE TO MANY

    People are great at zero to one, others at one to many. There are two types of people in business, people like founders, who are great at taking an idea and executing it, and then iterating on that till they find product market. They're great with that experimentation stage of a business where you are taking something that is pretty ephemeral, like an idea, and actually getting it out to customers and testing it out in the marketplace.

    2 min

  2. 03/10/2023

    060 - 1000 CRAZY IDEAS IS NOTHING

    Having a thousand batshit crazy ideas means nothing if you can't execute. I'm someone who loves the creative process. I love ideating. In fact on this podcast, I'm often told my, by my producer, to stop winging it because the reality is that execution means everything. Ideation is only important at the very earliest stage.

    2 min

  3. 03/09/2023

    059 - PRIVILEGE EXISTS

    Privilege exists. Recognize yours and check it. So without going into a huge amount of detail, I come from a massively privileged background. I went to the right schools, the right universities came from the right family and grew up in the right area. I have friends and family members who are well off, and I am very fortunate to have been able to travel the world and see things that many people haven't been able to.

    3 min

  4. 03/09/2023

    058 - START A PODCAST, WRITE A BLOG

    Start a podcast or write a blog to learn and to share, not because of what it might get. So over the last couple of years I've been podcasting and I've recorded well over a hundred episodes across the podcast that I currently have. When I first started them, I did it because I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn from people with whom I have great relationships and great respect for, and who have been through things and challenges that I have not seen in my own life.

    2 min

  5. 03/09/2023

    057 - XERO ISN'T FOR EVERYONE

    Just because Xero says that everyone can do their accounts doesn't mean that everybody should. So SaaS tools like Xero have democratized access to finance or certainly accounting. For many small businesses, it's meant that with very low effort, one can get their accounts up and running. But there is a reason why accountants trained for many years.

    2 min

  6. 03/06/2023

    056 - AI IS COMING ACT NOW

    Assume your job will be replaced by AI within the next decade and act according. So we're going through a bit of a golden age of AI right now, but over the last several years we've seen AI grow at an immense pace. It went from being able to beat chess Masters to then being able to beat go masses to today where we have things like chat, GPT, and Dalle, able to provide conversational AI and even generate images for you.

    3 min

  7. 03/05/2023

    055 - VC FRIENDS DON'T ALWAYS INVEST

    Just because a VC is your friend doesn't mean that they'll invest in you. I have scar. It'll come as no surprise to you that I have a huge number of relationships and even really strong ones with people within the venture capital industry. And when I went out to raise for my business last year, whilst I was able to get in the door, I wasn't able to raise.

    2 min

  8. 03/05/2023

    054 - YOU MAY DESPISE POLITICS

    You may despise politics, but any organisation over a certain size is gonna. Now we've all seen the sitcoms and dramas that deal with off office politics and the reason that they are great fo, no wait, start again. 63. You may despise office poli no, 63. You may despise politics, but any organization over a certain size is gonna have it.

    2 min
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In December of 2022 I released a list of 100 lessons I'd learnt the hard way operating as a CEO & CFO across multiple ventures from startups to scale ups to SME's. I had more than a million impressions on that post, thousands of comments and re-shares and many messages asking me to expand on these points. I'll be releasing a new episode every day for 100 days touching a little further on the headlines. Only a minute or two a day, and at the end you'll know my full list!

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