Ask HN: I see jobs for engineers, but rarely finance/accounting. Why?

[reteph]

As an accounting student, I've always been confused why there are rarely accounting/finance roles at startups. Is it that there simply isn't a 'need' that early in the game? Do the founders typically take care of it? Is it better to be outsourced initially/taken care of by investor-mentors? Something I'm entirely missing?

I'll be doing my time at a Big 4 starting in spring, but I've been intrigued with ycombinator and firms like Sequoia since high school, often trawling their job pages to see what kind of knowledge/experience would be required for someone with my interests (financial reporting, business intelligence, etc.) -- what to "do" for startups or small businesses is never to very rarely discussed in the top accounting education programs. It's almost always large corporate or Big 4/mid-size public accounting employer that are pounded into us, regardless of future interests after those experiences.

So, I guess... thoughts?

[nostrademons]

It's because the job of a startup is to find product/market fit, which requires building a lot of shit (much of which gets discarded) but involves very little handling of money, because it's not coming in yet. Typically startups will have lots of money come in in lump-sum capital investments, then it steadily bleeds out through salaries, and the founders have to worry very hard about how fast it's bleeding out and whether they'll have a viable product by then. Once the startup has money coming in on a regular basis and can worry about things like profitability, it's no longer a startup (and that's often when it hires dedicated accountants).

Oftentimes the finance/accounting role is taken care of by the "business" cofounder, along with market research, sales, lead generation, overall strategy, HR, ordering pizza, cleaning the bathrooms, and so on. It's intimately tied in with fundraising, which is usually also the "business" cofounder's role, and so it doesn't make sense for a separate person to do it.