The Startup Station Celebrates Ten Years

When I reflect on the past decade, I am very proud of the growth journey The Startup Station and I have been on. What started as a strategic and financial consultancy became a strategic finance hub spanning activities across multiple areas all making a difference for many entrepreneurs around the world.

I never looked at finance as just numbers. To me finance has always been a language with which a company speaks to its executives or founders, similar to how a child speaks to his or her parents. If you don’t understand what the child is telling you, you can’t fully meet his or her needs. Similarly, if you don’t set up proper financial processes, you can’t enable your company, your intellectual child, to realize its full potential, to let it fly, and to make your vision come alive.

The unique methodology for modeling companies created makes that communication seamless. It establishes a connection between what you are thinking, or each strategic decision, and what the company can do about it and what resources it will need to do it, or the expected financial outcome.

I think of a financial model as the company’s brain that takes your vision as the model assumptions and shows the impact of all those decisions across all the company’s functions, similar to how our decisions affect different areas of our life.

When you properly establish that connection and all interdependencies, you have a powerful communication and business intelligence tool that you can use to guide your company to the stars.

It gives me great joy to know that this approach has helped many founders I taught and worked one-on-one with to understand their vision a lot deeper, to really think through how it can be executed, and then feel confident to explain their plan to investors and later execute it.

Thank you to everyone who has trusted me to help them articulate their vision over the years. It has been a privilege to be part of your entrepreneurial journey. I am so happy some of you became friends and came back with more projects!

Helping others has always been a driving force behind anything I do. This is why education is a very important part of the Startup Station’s work. I remember creating my meetup in New York in 2015 and beginning to teach finance to founders. I remember how rewarding it felt to connect with founders directly and be able to help them in a very tangible way. Very quickly I was filling 40-seat boardrooms.

Based on the questions I was getting, my curriculum expanded to include accounting, startup finance, financial modeling, and valuation. My meetup grew to 3000 members and I created another in Boston. In 2018 I put all my courses online to make them accessible to anyone anywhere.

I continued to collaborate with different accelerators and hosted or co-hosted many workshops with other communities. I also began generating free content to help even more founders with the most frequent questions around fundraising, modeling, and valuation.

With Astra Global’s founder, Elena Gusakova we ran 20+ events bringing investors and founders together and making it easier to understand what investors are looking for. In 2020 we also ran the Investor Matching program where we matched founders and investors and hosted a pitch event.

In 2022 my long-time friend and colleague, Hamp Hampton, and I created PowerUp, a new program that is very meaningful to me, to address the gender funding gap and improve equitable access to capital for everyone who deserves it. The program targets seed-level female founders to help scale and raise the next round of financing.

In 2023 I got involved in fair access to capital advocacy to complement PowerUp, the ecosystem solution, with legislative support.

I am grateful to all of my partners, clients and collaborators. I know only together can we make change happen and I am excited to see what the next decade will bring.

• A strategic CFO Advisory with unique expertise in modeling pre-revenue startups or companies undergoing drastic changes in strategy. In that capacity we have worked with 150+ founders one-on-one across 15+ industries and helped them raise more than $50M in venture capital.
• A finance education platform where we offer online courses in accounting, financial modeling, valuation and startup finance to early-stage founders with no prior finance experience. More than 1000 founders have taken our courses since we launched it in 2015.
• Community: The Startup Station has a multitude of free resources such as a YouTube Channel with 100+ videos on financial modeling, valuation and startup finance. I have given complimentary workshops to 10+ accelerators and for almost 3 years taught 500 of entrepreneurs a month at the Bank of America Institute of Women’s Entrepreneurship at Cornell. I’ve appeared on 20+ podcasts, most recently She Leads the Way, the media partner of PowerUp. I love to talk about entrepreneurship, how to use finance to drive your business forward, tips on investor communication and fundraising, as well as the most common mistakes companies make in their financial planning.
• Advocacy efforts for bridging the gender funding gap worldwide:
  • PowerUp: A one-of-a-kind business development program for seed-level female-led ventures to help them scale and raise the next round of capital. The program combines training in strategic and financial planning, coaching, a global network of PowerUp Ambassadors who are either investors or have investors in their network to improve access to capital, and data for transparent evaluation of risk.
  • NSBA Leadership Council and SB54: National Small Business Administration advocates for the interests of small business owners. As a New York representative, I am dedicated to working with state and federal legislators on passing policies ensuring fair access to capital for women. My first focus is to pass SB 54 in New York. SB 54 is a bill passed in CA in 2023 which requires venture capital firms either headquartered in CA or invested in companies headquartered in CA to disclose how they allocate their capital, and which percentage goes to minorities.

We are planning several exciting events in 2024 to celebrate our ten-year anniversary and we will share information about them as they become available.