AG Accounting refers clients to AZ Finance as an independent partner. This post is a profile, not financial or tax advice, and past client outcomes are not guarantees.

The first thing Arman Zand taught me was how to eat kashk-e bademjan.

We were at a Persian restaurant in the Bay Area that his family has been going to for forty years. Same walls, same furniture, possibly the same tablecloths. He built the little sandwich for me himself, bread, eggplant, then held up a slice of raw onion and said “depending on how courageous you are.” I took the onion.

Arman runs AZ Finance, a boutique CFO firm for tech and life science companies, and he is a venture partner at Tribe Capital. I bring people up in my writing when I would put my own clients in their hands. He is one of about three of those. This is the case for why.

Twenty-Seven Years That Actually Compound

Arman graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1999 and went to work at Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara. Not the SVB of 2023 headlines. The original one, the one that lent to early-stage venture-backed companies when nobody else would.

He spent his first four years there learning to make those loans and, right after the dot-com bust, learning to write a lot of them off. That is a specific education. Most people who advise startups on capital have never had to book the loss on a company that did not make it.

Then he did something unusual for a banker in his late twenties. When SVB decided to open in India, he volunteered. He spent 2004 to 2006 there introducing Indian founders to Indian VCs. Then the Middle East, standing up a new office from zero. Then Shanghai, where he helped run SVB in China for almost seven years and got his Mandarin to the point of executing loan documentation in Chinese characters. Fifteen years, five markets, one bank.

He came back to California in 2016. He started making angel investments, got introduced to a few venture firms, and co-invested alongside them. One of those investments was an early-stage grocery delivery company that turned around and hired him as CFO. That is where the second half of his career started. Since then he has been CFO at five companies, including Prodigy (acquired by Upstart) and Zeni.ai, and most recently interim CFO at Ingenuity Foods, which was acquired by Bel Group.

Last year he started AZ Finance. It went from a handful of clients to more than a dozen, and he now runs a team of seven finance professionals. The client wall includes SiPhox Health, Column, Melio, and ROAR.

The reason the international years matter is not that they are interesting on a bio page. It is that he built financial infrastructure from nothing in four different countries before he ever built it for a startup. When a seed-stage company has no close process, no chart of accounts worth the name, and no idea what its revenue actually is, that is a familiar problem to him rather than a crisis.

”Finance Is a Support Function, Not a Driving Function”

This is his line, and it is the thing I would put on the wall.

His practice covers CFO strategy, FP&A, board work, fundraising, equity and debt, and also the unglamorous half: accounting, bookkeeping, AP, AR, payroll. Everything and anything finance for early-stage venture-backed companies.

But the way he described his approach to me was this: we are not here to do finance, we are here to help founders hit their goals. Finance is a support function. The number of fractional CFOs who get this backwards, who show up and make the company’s operating rhythm revolve around the close calendar, is high.

He is also specific about who he wants. Early-stage companies that need the most help building out finance from scratch. He is deliberately less interested in later-stage companies, because by then the processes exist and there is not much to build. That is a preference most consultants would never admit to, since it turns down bigger checks.

He Takes Equity, and He Says No

Two signals I pay attention to when I evaluate anyone I might refer work to.

The first is whether they have skin in the game. Arman asks for advisory shares in his clients, usually structured as warrants, and he typically also invests his own money. His reasoning is simple: if you hired a full-time CFO, you would give them equity, and if he is sitting in your board meetings he should be aligned the same way. It also means he only takes companies he actually believes in, because he is buying into them.

The second is whether they turn work down. He told me about a guy in e-commerce who asked for help with his Shopify accounting. Arman told him he did not need a CFO, he needed a low-cost bookkeeping service, and pointed him at one. He can afford to say no because twenty-seven years of VC relationships keep new business coming in without any outbound at all. He does no cold outreach. Zero.

An advisor who will tell you that you do not need them is the only kind worth having.

What He Screens For

He works with companies doing good, or at minimum not doing harm. That is not a values statement bolted onto a website. It shows up in the roster: biotech companies working on next-generation medicine and diagnostics, IoT companies building safety systems for healthcare workers, AI aimed at making government more efficient.

He put it plainly. He wants to help companies that are helping the world become a better place. Coming from someone who spent fifteen years in banking and now structures his comp in warrants, I found that more credible than I usually do.

He Builds His Own Tools

Arman is a CFO who codes. He has built himself a finance dashboard, and he rolls out new features to his own team fast enough that they have stopped being surprised by it.

What I find interesting is his read on why that is hard. He says the build is not the difficult part. The spec is. Anyone can generate the software now. Almost nobody can write the requirements, because that takes someone who understands both the finance and the system, and those people are rare. When a client asked him why her engineers could not just build it themselves, he told her they could, if she could find a finance and accounting person who codes and would maintain it forever.

That is the correct answer.

How He Builds the Team

This is the part I asked the most questions about, because it is where most boutique firms break.

Everyone starts as a contractor on one client. If that goes well, he adds a second, then a third. When they can carry a certain amount of work per month, they go full time. And he shares equity with them through a phantom model, where anyone working on a project his firm holds equity in earns into that equity.

His view is that hiring good people is not the hard part. Keeping them is. Every boutique founder I know has had the experience of handing someone a client book and watching them leave with it.

What he tells his own team is remarkable: “There is no reason you cannot do exactly what I did. The only difference is twenty-seven years of VC relationships that generate new business without effort. If you had that, you would never need to work for anyone. If you do not think you can win your own clients, then think hard about how you would sustain your own firm.”

Nobody says that to their staff unless they mean it.

The Father Part

I want to include this because it is the thing that made me trust him, and it is not on any website.

When his daughter was born in Shanghai, he quit his job two months before the due date and did not work again until she was four months old. Every friend he had with kids told him the first months are not really the father’s job. Wash dishes, clean the house, support the mother. He decided that was bad advice. His reasoning was: long term, am I going to remember the first months of her life, or am I going to remember the work I missed?

So he changed the first diaper.

And because he is who he is, he charted it, measured it. In the hospital they weigh every diaper to confirm the newborn’s systems are working, and they measure head circumference and length every twenty-four hours. Arman plotted all of it. Dots on a graph, tracking the weight loss and then the weight gain. He said he was so absorbed in the process that he could not imagine what those months would have been like if he had a job.

She is ten now. She dances, and he turned part of her room into a dance floor. She bakes. They play Battleship on a physical board and invent their own rule variations, and right now they are building those variations into an app so they can play across two iPads. He is using it to teach her to think like a product manager. What does the user want. How is the user going to play this.

He also teaches. He is professional faculty at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and when I asked why, he was honest: it is the only way to stay on campus, and he likes being on campus and enjoys teaching what he works on every day. Some of his old students are now his clients. Others refer new business and investment opportunities.

Why I Am Writing This

Arman is the person I go to when a founder needs a CFO who has actually run finance rather than advised on it, and I do not have anyone in-house to hand them to.

He pushes back on me, which is rarer than it should be. When I pitch him something he thinks is wrong, he says so. He also tells me the ideas he is stuck on before they are finished, which is a form of trust. Our last dinner ran three hours and produced two joint offers we are now building.

If you are an early-stage venture-backed company and your finance function is either nonexistent or held together by a founder who should be doing something else, he is worth a conversation. If you are later-stage with the processes already built, he will probably tell you to go elsewhere, and you should believe him.

You can find him at AZ Finance. If you would rather talk to me first about whether a fractional CFO is the right call at your stage, book a call.

Anelya Grant is the founder of AG Accounting Inc. (anelya.net), an accounting firm serving tech startups and healthcare organizations. She is also co-founder of Loopfour.ai.

Partner Spotlight: Arman Zand on What a Fractional CFO Should Actually Do for Your Startup