What business structure should I choose for my startup?

Most venture-backed startups incorporate as a Delaware C-Corp for QSBS tax benefits and investor familiarity. Bootstrapped businesses often start as LLCs with optional S-Corp tax election.

What is the best bank for a startup?

Mercury is the default recommendation for most seed-stage startups — no fees, FDIC coverage up to $5M, and strong integrations. Brex is best when you need cards and banking combined. Bluevine works well for service businesses needing credit lines.

How can AI help startup founders?

AI serves as operational infrastructure for small teams: content pipeline automation, outreach personalization, meeting preparation, document synthesis, and financial tracking. It lets a two-person team compete with a twenty-person team.

What security should a new startup have?

Minimum security setup: password manager (1Password or Bitwarden), MFA on every service, YubiKey for email and banking, email aliases for service segmentation, and domain registrar lock.

Chapter 16

Finance & Accounting

You do not need to be a CFO. You need to know your numbers well enough that you are never surprised by your own financial position.

The two numbers every founder must know

Burn rate: how much cash you spend per month. Calculate both gross (total cash out) and net (total cash out minus revenue). Net burn is what you manage against.

Runway: cash on hand divided by net burn rate. If you have $300,000 in the bank and net burn is $30,000 per month, you have 10 months. Everything you do operationally should be evaluated against its impact on runway.

Claude Code has leveled the playing field

Five years ago, the work in this chapter required a bookkeeper, a fractional CFO, or a finance-literate co-founder. Today, a founder with Claude Code on their laptop can build a working 24-month model, reconcile a month of transactions, draft an investor update, run a Delaware franchise tax calculation both ways, and stress-test their own pitch deck — in an afternoon.

It is not a replacement for a CPA at tax time or a real CFO at Series A. But for the 1–5 person company range this chapter is written for, it collapses the gap between "I do not know my numbers" and "I know my numbers cold." Point it at your bank CSV, your Stripe export, and your expense list. Ask it to build the model, flag anomalies, and write the narrative. Then read every line and challenge it. The leverage is real, but the accountability is still yours.

Anthropic recently went a step further and released a Financial Services Marketplace — a curated set of finance-specific agents and skills (DCF modeling, comparable company analysis, diligence checklists, IC memos, returns sensitivity tables) built for institutional investors at firms like Citadel and Carlyle. Most of it is overkill for a pre-seed founder, but the diligence and IC-memo tools are genuinely useful for stress-testing your own materials before investors do. The full marketplace is open source on GitHub.

Limited — 3 referrals available

Get a free week of Claude

I have three referral codes for a free week of Claude. First three readers to use the link get it.

Claim →

AI prompts

Financial model

Help me build a 24-month financial model. Product: [description]. Pricing: [structure]. ACV: [$]. Current paying customers: [number]. Monthly costs — salaries: [$], software: [$], other: [$]. Cash in bank: [$]. Build a monthly model showing revenue, expenses, net burn, and cumulative cash balance. Show my runway.

Burn rate audit

Here are my monthly expenses: [paste list]. Monthly revenue: [$]. Cash in bank: [$]. Calculate gross burn, net burn, and runway. Identify the three largest discretionary expenses and analyze ROI. Flag anything to cut or defer.

Delaware franchise tax

I incorporated in Delaware as a C-Corp. Authorized shares: [common] common, [preferred] preferred. Total assets: [$]. Issued shares: [number] to founders, [number] in option pool. Calculate franchise tax under both the Authorized Shares Method and the Assumed Par Value Capital Method. Show the difference.