You are listening to conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top

SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.

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As he cut his teeth at an operating company in the private equity firm, also at

PWC before that, now runs a newsletter focused on CFOs, of which he gets a 46% open rate,

which is about 16,000 opens and a 5% click-through rate, which is 800 clicks per post,

called mostly Metrics.com, hosted on substack,

7,000 of those readers are actual CFOs. In fact, it's so valuable. We've got companies like

Brex willing to pay him, one, two, three, four-k sort of per post from a sponsor perspective.

He's looking to scale that now, launched a podcast as well with Turpentine, still while cutting

his teeth as an operator as a true CFO at a company called Parts Tech, which he's working on.

Hey, folks, my guest today is C.J. Gustafson. He's a startup CFO who sat on both sides of the table,

the one who's doing the funding and the one who's receiving the funding. He's a fan of

business breaking down how businesses make money and writes about his learnings twice a week

in his newsletter, mostly metrics.com.

All right, C.J, you ready to take us to the top? Let's blast off, buddy.

All right. So my audience really respects, obviously, folks that cut their teeth in the operating

world. So what company were you sort of operating in learning that side of the equation?

Yeah, man. So I've been an operator for about 10 years now. I was originally on the, you know,

private equity and management consulting side where I learned a lot about business models,

...