2023 was a great year for many people: Taylor Swift, Pedro Pascal, people who used AI buzzwords to sound smarter at parties.

If you were a startup founder or venture capital investor, though, chances are that last year wasn’t so hot. PitchBook’s release of its annual US VC Valuations Report showed that deal sizes fell for startups almost across the board, and for some stages to lows they haven’t seen in five or ten years.

Simply put, it’s gotten harder to land a solid exit as public offerings have been putting up smaller windfalls for founders and VCs. The median startup going public last year had its lowest valuation in more than a decade, the report said, another example of the divide between big tech and everyone else.

So huge was the success of the “Magnificent Seven” stocks in 2023—remember, Tesla didn’t start self-driving off a cliff until this year—that it obscured how poorly many of the largest public companies were doing. Nearly three in four S&P companies fared worse than the index, according to the report.

For more on the state of startup valuations, click here.—GD

Crushing the CFO game revolves around one big question: How can I boost my numbers to the moon? Well, you gotta know your KPIs like the back of your hand—and how to put them into practice. Harder than it sounds? Correct.

Fortunately, Oracle NetSuite is here to help. They published a guide by business owner + coach Bernie Smith to discover the essential KPIs that all-star finance teams use to fuel growth—all delivered with case studies, formulas, and definitions.

Want the full scoop? This game-changer has info like:

• formulas to get you started with your KPIs
• clear definitions of key finance KPIs
• applicable case studies detailing each KPI

Master the metrics.

Hey, no one said being an accountant was easy. Just ask anyone crunching the numbers for streaming companies and other entertainment behemoths, all of which have gone through seismic business shifts in recent years.

That’s only made accounting more complicated, and the industry has tried to keep up: In 2019, the Financial Accounting Standards Board issued an Accounting Standards Update (ASU) concerning the costs of films and license agreements.

The updated guidance contained a number of key revisions, notably proposing a new concept of “film groups” as “the unit of account used for impairment testing for films or license agreements.”

The new standard became effective for the majority of media and entertainment companies in fiscal 2020, as KPMG noted in a recent report about the ASU. Since the standards were largely a conceptual framework, the application of its key provisions hasn’t always been entirely clear, the report’s authors note.

Click here for more on how accountants feel about the new standard.—NP

Sam Kemp recently took his first CFO role at construction finance platform Built Technologies. He spoke with CFO Brew about what drew him to work for Built and how he prepared for a CFO role.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This is your first time as a CFO. How did you prepare for that role?

In the process of evolving toward what I always wanted to do, which was be a CFO, I left Wall Street and then joined GoDaddy, first in a corporate finance role and then more of a strategic and operational role. It was important for me to get outside of that traditional finance skill set and challenge myself to be influential.

What advice would you give someone who aspires to become a CFO?

Most people don’t realize that numbers have soul. If you want people to move in a direction, you need to bring the context along with the numbers. Be able to lead beyond having the right answers on numbers. There are CFOs that view their job as being a brute-force operator—somebody that forces people into structures. In that process, you lose belief in people that you’re leading, and you lose a lot of leverage.

Read more about Sam’s journey here.—CV

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Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 0.8%. That’s how much consumer spending fell in January—a bigger dip than expected. No word if the spending decrease is because someone was feeling a lot of regret over the very, very expensive luxury doghouse they may have splurged on for their special little furball who, despite what our financial planner says, totally deserves a doggy-sized Mediterranean-style mansion. (CNBC)

Quote: “Rising credit card balances reflect economic growth, population growth, and the fact that more people are using cards and fewer people are using cash.”—Ted Rossman, senior analyst at Bankrate, on the increase of credit card balances. Americans carried $1.13 trillion in credit card debt last quarter, which is a $50 billion jump from the quarter before. (the Washington Post)

Read: The pandemic has had a weird, unpredictable impact on the labor market. (the New York Times)

Metric moves: KPIs are everything when it comes to being a successful CFO. To help you get your numbers up, Oracle NetSuite put together the Essential Financial KPIs guide. Start crushing it.*

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