Taking a company public requires hitting $200M+ in revenue, demonstrating the Rule of 40 (revenue growth + profitability), building repeatable processes early, and preparing your entire team for sustained public market scrutiny. The biggest lesson: IPO day is just the beginning—the real marathon starts after you ring the bell.

TL;DR

• Scale matters: You need $200M+ revenue and Rule of 40 metrics to be taken seriously in today's public markets
• Process beats chaos: Companies that build financial foundations early avoid costly cleanup during fundraising or M&A
• Don't game your metrics: Switching KPI definitions to hide bad news backfires with investors—fix the business, not the dashboard
• Have a rainy day plan: Even in boom times, finance leaders should model worst-case scenarios (you'll need them)
• The IPO is just Day One: Being public means quarterly accountability, insider trading rules, and running a sustained marathon—not a one-time sprint
• FP&A is the path: Strategic finance and planning expertise increasingly trumps pure accounting background for CFO roles
• Early investments pay dividends: Founders who prioritize finance operations alongside revenue growth get better exits and smoother scaling

What I Learned From a CFO Who Took Two Companies Public (And Why It Matters for Your Startup)

It was one of those conversations that sticks with you.

I sat down with Eileen Tobias—a CFO who's been in the room when the bell rang at the NYSE not once, but twice. NetSuite in 2007. Dropbox in 2018. She's also steered unicorns like Komodo Health through hypergrowth, navigated the 2008 recession as a public company finance leader, and worked under legendary CFOs at companies you've definitely heard of.

I'm Eric Josovitz, founder of AdaptCFO, a fractional CFO and accounting firm for growth-stage startups in the US. We work with companies from pre-revenue through $50M, helping founders build financial foundations that actually scale. I started this company in 2018 in Atlanta because I kept seeing the same pattern: brilliant founders with game-changing products, hobbled by financial chaos they didn't see coming.

So when I got the chance to pick Eileen's brain about what really happens behind the scenes of an IPO, what separates companies that scale from those that stall, and what founders get wrong about finance—I took notes.

Here's what I learned.

The $200M Question: When Are You Actually Ready to Go Public?

"Can we just boil it down to one marker?" I asked Eileen. "Like, is there a revenue benchmark where you say, 'Okay, this company can go public'?"

She smiled. The kind of smile that says, I wish it were that simple.

"I don't know that we can boil it down to just one single marker," she said. "But there's a combination."

Here's the checklist she rattled off—and trust me, every growth-stage founder should have this tattooed somewhere:

The IPO Readiness Checklist

✓ Scale: At least $200M in revenue (this is table stakes in 2024+ markets)
✓ Rule of 40/50: Your revenue growth rate + profitability margin should hit 40-50%
✓ Profitability path: You can't just grow fast anymore—public investors want to see you're on the path to making money
✓ Healthy retention: If you're bleeding customers, revenue growth is a mirage
✓ LTV to CAC ratio: Unit economics matter—especially for SaaS and subscription businesses
✓ Repeatable go-to-market motion: It's not just about getting deals; it's about getting them in a "rinse and repeat" way
✓ Leadership readiness: Is your entire C-suite and board ready for the public spotlight?
✓ Employee buy-in: Your whole company needs to understand what life as a public company means

"You need to show that you've achieved scale," Eileen said. "A couple hundred million in revenue. And these days, you can't just enter the public market with high growth. Investors want to see profitability as well."

Translation for founders: If you're sub-$50M and dreaming of an IPO, you've got a long runway ahead. But the decisions you make today—about metrics, processes, and financial hygiene—will determine whether you ever get there.

The Two IPOs That Couldn't Have Been More Different

Eileen's been through this twice, and the contrast is wild.

NetSuite (2007): They went public right before the Great Recession hit. "We were still maturing as an organization," she told me. "We were getting our legs under us while in the public markets."

Picture this: You ring the bell, champagne is flowing, and then… the economy collapses. They went through six to eight quarters of basically treading water. Not shrinking, but not growing either. For a SaaS company that's supposed to be a rocket ship, that's a dark time.

"Those were pretty tough times," Eileen said. The understatement of the decade.

But here's the thing—they had the fundamentals. They believed in the business. And when the dust settled, NetSuite rattled off five consecutive years of 30%+ growth before Oracle acquired them.

Dropbox (2018): Completely different story. By the time Dropbox went public, they were already north of $1 billion in revenue as a private company. They had scale. They had sophisticated processes. They had waited.

"We were a unicorn and had waited quite a while to go public," Eileen said. "So there was a lot of pent-up demand and excitement."

Dropbox's IPO was a media event. NetSuite's was a bet on the future in the middle of a recession.

The lesson: Timing isn't everything, but it's a lot. And the companies that survive bad timing are the ones with rock-solid fundamentals.

What Actually Happens When You Take a Company Public?

I had to ask: What's it really like? What goes on behind the curtain?

Eileen didn't sugarcoat it.

"It's a really big undertaking," she said. "A lot of companies are very focused on getting to the day when you're ringing the bell on the stock exchange—and that's a whole body of work. But that's really just a one-time event. After that, you have to be ready for that sustained marathon of running a company in the public markets for the foreseeable long term."

The Hidden Realities of Being a Public Company

1. Accountability shifts overnight
When you're private, you're accountable to your portfolio of shareholders—people you probably know. When you go public, you're accountable to the public markets. Every quarterly earnings call is a performance review in front of thousands of strangers.

2. The quarterly hamster wheel
You're now tied to a 90-day cycle. Wall Street doesn't care about your five-year vision if you miss Q2 estimates. "It's a real challenge as a leader to balance short-term success with long-term strategy," Eileen said.

3. Insider trading rules become everyone's problem
You can't casually mention revenue trends at a dinner party anymore. Every employee needs training. "You don't want to get anybody into a situation of inadvertently doing something that violates insider trading rules," Eileen explained.

4. More governance, more scrutiny, more process
There are non-negotiable compliance requirements. Your financials are under a microscope. The IRS, the SEC, activist investors—everyone's watching.

5. The entire employee base has to be on board
"You really need to get the entire employee base behind this idea of transformation," Eileen said. "You're going to be operating under different rhythms, different quarterly cadence, more scrutiny."

If that sounds exhausting, it is. But for the right company at the right time, it unlocks capital, liquidity for employees, and validation in the market.

The Metric Trap That Kills Credibility

This is where Eileen dropped a truth bomb that hit close to home.

I smiled when she brought it up, because I've lived this.

"Sometimes companies will start with a metric set and they don't really like how those metrics are working. So they'll switch to a different definition of ARR or retention or gross margin or something like that."

She paused. "I think you should really ask yourself: Is it because this metric isn't relevant to my business, or is it that this metric is showing the business isn't doing as well as we'd like?"

I was smiling because in my first head of finance role at a SaaS company post-Series A, we had four or five different versions of LTV. When it came time to show investors, we'd cherry-pick the one with the best-looking retention assumptions.

"Let's show investors LTV with nine months of retention… or eighteen months instead of the true LTV with actual retention percentages," I remembered thinking.

It's creative. It's also a trap.

Here's what I learned: Investors aren't dumb. They've seen every metric game in the book. When you start changing definitions, you lose credibility fast. And more importantly, you lose the truth.

The better approach: Pick your core KPIs early. Stick with them. If the numbers are bad, fix the business, don't fix the dashboard.

Why Early-Stage Founders Need to Care About Finance (Even When They Don't)

Eileen now works with early-stage companies as a fractional CFO and advisor. She's drawing on decades of experience at NetSuite, Dropbox, Komodo Health—and helping founders plant seeds for a strong financial future.

"I really believe in making that investment in a solid financial function and processes as early as you can," she told me. "It really pays dividends later."

I asked her what she sees when she works with early-stage companies.

"Early-stage companies are very, very focused on revenue, for obvious reasons. They want to get as many customers as they can, gain share, book those deals. And they're often less focused on building processes around that. It's just, 'Let's go get that deal. We'll think about the contracting process later, the go-to-market motion later, the metrics later.'"

Sound familiar?

She continued: "As companies mature, the focus shifts. It's not just simply about getting revenue, but being able to do it in a 'rinse and repeat' kind of way."

What Happens If You Ignore Finance Early?

Eileen laid it out:

• Fundraising takes longer: Messy records mean longer due diligence
• You leave money on the table: Poor metrics = lower valuations
• M&A gets expensive: If an acquirer finds chaos in your books, the deal gets harder (or dies)
• You can't make good decisions: Without clean data, you're flying blind

"If you don't have your processes and financials in good order, it just makes those other things more costly and the processes get drawn out to get to an exit," she said.

The takeaway for founders: You don't need a full-time CFO on day one. But you do need someone thinking about financial hygiene, metrics that matter, and systems that scale. At AdaptCFO, we work with companies from pre-revenue to $50M precisely because this is when the foundation gets built—or ignored.

[Link: Service Page — Fractional CFO Services]

The Dark Moment Every Finance Leader Has Faced

I always ask podcast guests about their "growth under pressure" moment—the time when everything felt like it was going sideways.

Eileen shared two.

The first was those six to eight quarters at NetSuite when they were public, post-recession, and basically flat. "We had enjoyed a period of really rapid growth, and then the recession hit. We went through pretty high churn—not product-related, just a lot of our customers were suffering."

She described it as treading water. Not sinking, but not going anywhere.

"Those are pretty tough times, especially as a finance leader," she said. "It took a lot of resilience and just a belief that we had the right fundamentals and that when we got through that period of recession, we would return to growth."

And they did.

The second was a more universal experience: "I think anybody who has worked in finance at any company has faced a cash flow crisis. Where you're realizing, 'We really need to go raise, or we need to pull back on spend, or get creative about how we extend runway.'"

Cash flow scares = the universal language of startups.

Runway = the number of months you have left before the money runs out. It's the KPI that keeps founders up at night.

[Link: Pillar Page — Cash Flow & Runway Management]

The Rainy Day Plan You Should Have (Even in Boom Times)

Here's where Eileen gave me advice that every finance leader—fractional or full-time—should tattoo on their forehead.

"Even in the best of times, finance leaders should always have a rainy day plan. Even if your CEO or your board doesn't want to hear it, it's a good thought exercise to run a couple of different scenarios versus your current operating plan."

She walked me through it:

• What if cash gets tight?
• What if revenue growth slows?
• What levers can you pull to maintain margins?

"Often these things happen very rapidly, and you have to react very quickly. So if you've already thought through, 'These are some of the levers in the model we can pull,' I think that's a great thing for finance leaders to do."

The Scenario Planning Framework

Here's what Eileen recommended every finance team should model:‍

Best Case:

• Revenue exceeds plan by 20% or more
• Action: Deploy funded "parking lot" of investments you've been holding back
• Keep a list of strategic investments ready to go when you're overperforming

Base Case:

• Hit plan within 5%
• Action: Stick to operating plan, monitor weekly
• This is your default operating mode

Downside:

• Revenue misses by 15%, burn increases
• Action: Freeze hiring, cut discretionary spend, extend runway by 3+ months
• Identify non-essential expenses now, before you need to cut them

Crisis:

• Revenue drops 30%+, funding dries up
• Action: Skeleton crew scenario, furloughs or layoffs, renegotiate contracts
• Know exactly which roles are mission-critical and which aren't

"If times are really high growth, no one wants to talk about rainy days," Eileen said. "But as we've all seen, there are those business cycles. Having those worst-case scenario plans, I think, is a good thing to do."

COVID taught us this the hard way. The companies that survived had already done the math on what a skeleton crew looked like. The ones that didn't? Scrambling.

FP&A: The New Path to the CFO Seat

I asked Eileen how she broke into the office of the CFO in such a competitive environment.

"My path to the CFO role was through FP&A," she said. "My career was really focused on FP&A, and that was a great path."

FP&A means Financial Planning & Analysis. The strategic finance arm that builds models, forecasts revenue, analyzes unit economics, and partners with leadership on decisions.

"Over the past couple of decades, there's been a real push for more FP&A expertise and more strategic finance thinking from the office of the CFO," Eileen explained.

She also credited mentorship. "I was fortunate to work for two CFOs during my 12 years at NetSuite, and then another great CFO at Dropbox. I really got that benefit of long, sustained relationships where I could get a lot of mentoring."

For founders building finance teams: FP&A skills are increasingly the differentiator. You can outsource bookkeeping and even controllership, but strategic finance? That's where CFOs earn their seat at the table.

The Finance Tech Stack: From $100K Seed to IPO

I had to ask Eileen about tools. What does a startup at $100K in funding need versus a company prepping for IPO?

She laughed. "You're not going to recommend NetSuite to someone that just raised $100,000."

Exactly.

"Today, you can sign up for QuickBooks, Stripe, an entry-level CRM—you know, a handful of different SaaS products with your credit card. You don't have to talk to a human. You can basically replicate a lower-level, slimmed-down ERP and get started very quickly."

Finance Tech Stack by Stage:

Pre-seed to Seed (Revenue: $0–$1M)

• QuickBooks Online or Xero for accounting
• Stripe for payments
• Google Sheets for basic forecasting
• Gusto for payroll
• Maybe Expensify or Bench for bookkeeping support

Series A ($1M–$5M revenue)

• QuickBooks Online or Xero
• Stripe or other payment processor
• HubSpot or basic Salesforce CRM
• Bill.com for AP automation
• Gusto for payroll
• Consider Carta or Pulley for cap table management
• Maybe Ramp or Brex for spend management

Series B+ ($5M–$20M revenue)

• NetSuite (typically the transition point)
• Salesforce for CRM
• Avalara for sales tax compliance
• Bill.com for accounts payable
• Ramp or similar for expense management
• Runway, Cube, or Mosaic for FP&A
• Maybe Tallie or Certinia for advanced features

Growth to Pre-IPO ($20M–$200M+ revenue)

• NetSuite or Workday Financials
• Salesforce (definitely by now)
• Coupa for procurement
• Anaplan or Adaptive Insights for enterprise FP&A
• Workiva for SOX compliance and SEC reporting
• BlackLine or FloQast for close automation
• Vena for advanced planning

"As you continue to evolve, you may move from QuickBooks to NetSuite or another mid-market ERP," Eileen said. "And then there are lots of different point solutions that sit around those products."

Bottom line: Don't over-engineer your stack early. But also don't duct-tape your way to $10M ARR. There's a right tool for every stage.

The Rule of 40 (And Why It Matters More Than Ever)

Eileen mentioned the Rule of 40 as a baseline for IPO readiness, and it's worth breaking down.

Rule of 40 = Revenue Growth Rate (%) + Profit Margin (%)

If the sum is 40% or higher, you're in good shape. If it's 50% or higher, you're a rockstar.

Examples:

High-growth, low-margin company:

• 50% revenue growth
• Minus 10% profit margin
• Equals 40 (you hit the threshold)

Moderate growth, profitable company:

• 25% revenue growth
• Plus 20% profit margin
• Equals 45 (you're doing great)

Slow growth, unprofitable company:

• 15% revenue growth
• Minus 5% profit margin
• Equals 10 (you have a problem)

"These days, you can't just enter the public market with high growth," Eileen said. "Investors want to see profitability as well."

Why it matters for earlier-stage companies: Even if you're years from an IPO, the Rule of 40 is a North Star. It forces you to balance growth and efficiency. You can't just light cash on fire forever.

What Eileen's Working on Now (And Why It Matters to You)

After years as a full-time CFO at unicorns and public companies, Eileen has shifted to fractional work and advising.

"I've really enjoyed working with you and your clients at AdaptCFO," she told me. "I've sort of shifted my focus from full-time operative role to part-time. I'm really enjoying advising a portfolio of several earlier-stage companies."

She described it as drawing on her experiences at larger companies to help founders plant the seeds for a good financial foundation now—so they can move their company forward later, whether that's an IPO, an acquisition, or just sustainable growth.

"I really believe in making that investment in a solid financial function and processes as early as you can," she said. "It really pays dividends later."

This is exactly why we built AdaptCFO the way we did. Not every company needs a $300K-per-year full-time CFO. But they do need someone with Eileen's caliber of thinking—someone who's been in the room when the bell rang, who's navigated recessions and hypergrowth, who knows what good looks like.

What I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Sitting with Eileen reminded me of my own journey.

I started in public accounting at a regional firm. Then I jumped into a head of finance role at a SaaS startup—basically a senior FP&A position. I got molded under a CFO, made mistakes, learned what worked, and eventually started AdaptCFO in 2018.

If I could go back and tell 25-year-old Eric one thing, it's this: The companies that win are the ones that treat finance as a strategic function, not a back-office afterthought.

Revenue is sexy. Product is exciting. Finance? Finance is the foundation that keeps the whole thing from collapsing when things get hard.

And things always get hard.

Whether it's a recession hitting right after your IPO, a cash flow crisis at 2am, or an investor asking tough questions about your unit economics—the founders who survive are the ones who built the foundation early.

They picked their KPIs and stuck with them.

They modeled the downside scenarios even when times were good.

They hired financial leadership before it felt urgent.

They treated their finance function like the competitive advantage it is.

Ready to build a financial foundation that scales?

If you're a founder between $1M-$20M ARR, raising capital, or planning an exit in the next 12-24 months, let's talk. AdaptCFO is a fractional CFO and accounting firm for growth-stage startups. We've helped clients like PrizePicks (7,000% revenue growth) and EncompassRX (acquired by CVS for $400M) build financial foundations that actually work.

We're not here to sell you software or check boxes. We're here to help you make better decisions, extend runway, and get to your next milestone.

Schedule a free consultation or learn more about our fractional CFO services. Contact us.

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