I run my entire company from a terminal window, because every extra screen, click, and context switch between what I want and what actually happens is friction, and friction compounds. A founder asking "what is my cash position" should be a 30-second question. In most companies it is a 10-minute ritual with six places to be wrong.
I spent the first part of my career in institutional finance. The last ten years I have been on the operator side, building and running startups. Along the way I started building an AI version of myself, pointed at the part I know best: strategic finance. Cai sits in the terminal with me and has access to everything: the books, the bank data, the contracts, the models, the full context of the business. I tell it what I want in plain language and it does the work.
It runs on code where code belongs, keeps a clean and living record of the business, and asks me when it is unsure instead of guessing. Over time it grew past finance and became the operating backbone of the company.
Here is what I learned trying to turn that into a product.
There is a free "AI CFO" template going around right now. Nine agents, comment to get it. There are firms that will wire your bank into an AI and hand you a CFO update from one prompt. That is the easy part, and it is already free. The hard part is the clean, live, deterministic financial backbone underneath, and that is the part nobody hands you in a download. It takes someone to build it, run it, and stand behind the numbers.
So I am going the other direction from scale.
I want to embed with one to three founding teams and build their strategic finance function the way I built my own. I build it, I operate it, and I stand behind the numbers. You own the system and your data, from day one. No subscription that holds your books hostage. If I ever step away, you keep everything and I do not send you a bill.
I would rather take less cash and share in what we build, with a team that sees the same leverage I see. There is a short window right now where standing this up is unusually cheap, and it is already starting to close.
If you want finance to be a source of truth instead of a monthly fire drill, or you know a founder who does, I would rather have a conversation than send a deck.