Can Jirav be your CFO?
I have to be honest about something.
The first time I heard about this week’s company, it was on the @techroastshow on Instagram, joking about weirdly spelled startup names. Yes, this is how I source companies.
But when I saw that Jirav (spelled like a name, but pronounced “Giraffe”) had closed $20M in fundraising from Cota Capital. I knew the universe was sending me a sign.
Jirav: A Short Overview of the Tallest Animal on Four Legs
So what does Jirav do exactly? That is, besides save several million dollars on domain name costs.
They provide small to medium companies with financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software that fills the gap between clunky spreadsheets and daunting enterprise solutions.
Briefly, Jirav charges $10,000 a year for its entry plan. $15,000 for the next step up. And “Contact us for quote” for its enterprise solutions. ; )
Their target customer is a business with under 350 employees. Companies that need to manage operations closely, but don’t have a full finance team. There are ~1.5 million companies that size in the US, for a total TAM of ~$15 billion.
They’re going after a big market. So, at a glance, $33M in total fundraising implies a reasonable valuation. And enables headcount to get after it.
CFO in a Box
(Scruples sold separately)
In testimonials, Jirav promises an easy fix for growing teams that rely on Excel to do everything from inventory management, to cash flow projections, and closing the monthly books.
One writeup touts that “Startup Delays FTE CFO Hire for 18 Months with Jirav”. Which sounds great for that startup. But when did we stop looking out for CFO’s in this country?
(This is a joke)
People often describe FP&A as a tedious, “bean counter” sort of job. Jirav tries to automate as much of that process as possible. Building in checks to validate data, correct human error, generate automated reports. Generally just improve quality of life, and speed of operations.
My friend Adam Kuebler is Director of Finance at a growing aerospace startup. We talked a few months back about his experience building business processes from the ground up.
The way he tells it, a lot of the job is:
Making sure the financials are accurate
Making sure financial operations don’t slow down the business (while protecting assets)
Making sure the founding team has the info they need (runway, burn, fundraising support, analysis, etc.)
Making sure the founding team can worry about financials as little as possible, and focus on what they do best
Basically, no founder starts a company because they love to amortize costs over time, or allocate headcount on a project basis.
Or at least, no one other than Jirav CEO and Co-Founder Martin Zych. Before starting the company, he worked in the FP&A space for years, helping CFO’s manage fundraising, organize their businesses, and get their startups to the next stage of viability.
Everything I’ve read tells me Zych is exactly what you want in a Founder/CEO. He knows the space extremely well, knows the problems his customers face, and built a specific solution to solve those problems. He and the rest of the executive team are a big part of what makes this company compelling.
Why FP&A Matters (really tho)
It may have sounded like I think FP&A is boring. Let me be clear. I’ve worked in venture capital, studied economics, and finished an MBA where I took every finance class I could. I’m a numbers nerd.
And I’ve realized, I kinda love finance. And not just because “Finance = Money”
I initially fell for economics because I was fascinated by the idea these inherent forces govern society. And how we all come together to live our lives.
Eventually I realized that finance is just the practical side of those larger theoretical underpinnings. Finance is the way that businesses gather resources, analyze problems, devise a way forward, and create something new and real in the world.
In this article, Robert Freedman of CFO Dive explains how FP&A helped Amazon decide “Free Shipping” was something customers would value more than just another deal. So if you’re drowning in Prime Day packages rn, you have FP&A to thank (or blame) for it.
The Market (is dense and full of competition)
So I started to love FP&A, and the idea that with easily accessible analysis, maybe we’ll see a more effective economy. But whether or not that’s just wishful thinking. Jirav is hardly the only company in the market.
When I first started digging, I came across a list ranking the top 10 FP&A companies. Jirav came in at #9. Worse, when I Googled the company’s founding date, this is what came up.
An ad from Datarails, flexing on the competition.
Ouch.
And the deeper I dug into the strange and beautiful world of FP&A, the more complicated things became. Financial analysis influencer (yes really) Paul Barnhurst “The FP&A Guy” put out a 35-page market guide detailing 15 different companies offering very similar products.
As I learned about the competitors, everything started to blur together. I’m currently in the middle of looking for an apartment in a different state. And analyzing Jirav’s competition feels exactly like that. One apartment has in-unit washer/dryer. Oh, that one does too? What about visualization tools and integration with Quickbooks? My studio apartment might not have it. But seemingly every player in the FP&A space does.
Reviews for Jirav’s offerings were also unimpressive. The issues were mostly surrounding narrow feature fixes or specific tools that need to be added. But that’s exactly the problem with a crowded market.
When everyone is trying to gain share at the same time, winning comes down to who can build and sell fastest. Who looks like they’re winning. And who can raise the most money to get the flywheel of growth and fundraising spinning the fastest.
Martin Zych and his team seem to know their customers. Maybe they can build a winner, and become the big dog that swallows the competition. But until they do, the rest of us will just have to wait and see.
Until next time. This has been,
The Weekly One Pager
A brief postscript on “The Process” and some thoughts on venture capital
(This doesn’t count towards the 1000 words, so don’t @ me)
I was grabbing drinks last night with a friend (Samad Reed) who works in venture capital. We were talking about what it takes to be successful as a VC. And he reminded me of the age old venture maxim:
“You invest in people, not companies”.
I’ve had that philosophy drilled into me by podcasts, professors, and GP’s alike. And yet, here I am, having spent the first three weeks of this blog talking almost exclusively about the “strategic positioning” of startups in industries that (frankly) I know very little about. After all, you can only learn so much in a week.
And isn’t that exactly the mentality that makes founders and technical operators hate MBA’s and everyone like them? We’re the ones who join the party late, assume we know everything, and try to tell founders how to run their business. And here I am, playing the stereotype perfectly.
Of course, there’s always going to be a sort of “Monday Morning Quarterback” aspect to what we do here. I’m writing (often critically) about companies I didn’t build, haven’t invested in, and (in most cases) will never fully understand.
Frankly, my dream with this project is that someday a One Pager will go viral. And I’ll wake up to a passive aggressive email from a Founder or C-level exec at a company I’ve analyzed. Hopefully with just a subject line (no body text) in true “I’m too busy for you” fashion.
The email will read something like:
“Enjoy your little blog buddy. I have $30M in Seed funding”.
But of course, that email will never come.
Because any founder worth their weight in equity has better things to do than listen to the haters.
I very much accept my fallibility. And I also accept that the job of a venture investor is to take multiple factors into account. Try and weigh them together. And make an informed guess based on what we know, and what we don’t.
People matter. Strategy matters. The market matters. The specifics of fundraising matter. And frankly, it’s almost impossible to know how it’s all gonna shake out.
So let’s just be honest about something:
Even if there’s market saturation, a hundred other dogs in the fight, and a broken macro environment. If the founder is a badass who knows what they’re doing, can raise money like Elon on a good day, and understands the particulars of their ecosystem. Then yeah, maybe you ignore the strategic situation. And you take a swing. That’s when you invest in people, not companies. Because even in the most crowded market out there. Someone has to win.
Alright. Rant over. See you next week
