founder of My Startup Consulting and a fractional CFO | Financial Consulting | Financial Planning | Financial Analysis | Pricing Strategy | Investor | Mentor
The Setup:
Most early-stage founders know exactly what is in their bank account. They check it the way the rest of us check the weather, reflexively, constantly, as if the number itself is the forecast. Patrick McCarthy has spent the better part of a decade watching that habit quietly destroy companies. The bank balance is not the business. It is not the runway. It is not the truth. And by the time a founder realizes the difference, the window to act has often already closed.
The Man Behind the Number:
Patrick McCarthy is the founder of My Startup Consulting and a fractional CFO whose client work spans pre-seed startups through Series B companies, with a track record that includes supporting Paperspace through its $111 million acquisition by DigitalOcean. He is also, by deliberate design, on a mission to support 1,000 founders in the next ten years. He is 350 in.
From M&A Floors to Founder Rooms:
The version of Patrick McCarthy who shows up in founder boardrooms today was built in layers, and none of them were accidental. He graduated from Fordham University in 2015 with a finance degree and moved almost immediately into investment banking at Park Sutton Advisors, cutting his teeth on M&A work in financial services, sitting across the table from asset managers, hedge funds, and financial sponsors. It was precise, demanding work. It also showed him exactly what investors look for when they open the books on a company, and more usefully, what they find when the books have not been kept properly.
He did not stay in banking long. SpokenLayer, a digital media startup working out of the Grand Central Tech Accelerator, had brought him in as a business development intern while he was still finishing his degree. Something about the operator’s seat held his attention in a way the analyst’s chair did not. By 2016, he was back at SpokenLayer as VP of Operations and Business Development, and a year later had stepped into the combined VP of Operations and Finance role. He was running the internal mechanics of a growing startup, not modeling deals from the outside. That shift mattered.
Over the years that followed, McCarthy moved through a range of roles that, taken together, read less like a career and more like a curriculum. He served as a private equity analyst at Traction and Scale while still in school, building LBO models and drafting investment memos. He advised 25K Startups, a Long Island-based incubator, for four years. He became West Coast General Manager at Revivn. He worked as a Venture Partner at Action Ventures and as an Expert Operator at KnowCap Interactive. Each role added a different vantage point on the same fundamental question: why do companies with real potential run out of money?
The answer he kept arriving at was not bad products or bad markets. It was bad financial visibility. Founders making consequential decisions without clean numbers. By the time he launched My Startup Consulting in 2021 and co-founded Baseline Financial in 2023, he had built a precise diagnosis for the problem and an equally precise framework for fixing it.
350 Founders and Counting:
The mission to support 1,000 founders is not a marketing headline. It is a structure. McCarthy counts every founder he has meaningfully helped, whether that means a single conversation that changed a decision, a one-off fundraising model, a pre-seed investment, or a full fractional CFO engagement. The depth of the intervention varies. The standard does not.
“Supporting a founder doesn’t always mean a retainer. Some of the highest-leverage support I’ve given took an hour, not a year.”
That philosophy is also the scaling mechanism. Light-touch advisory and introductions at one end, project work in the middle, and deep ongoing fractional CFO engagements at the other, reserved specifically for early-stage SaaS and tech companies where McCarthy believes he can move the most important number within the first 90 days. If he cannot identify that number on the introductory call, the founder gets advice and a referral for what they actually need.
The results across the client base are specific. More than $35 million raised across the companies he has supported. Paperspace, where he served as fractional CFO from April 2022 through its acquisition, sold to DigitalOcean in July 2023 for $111 million. The revenue recognition work he did in the lead-up to that deal was not incidental. Clean numbers do not just protect the runway. They protect the deal itself.
At the core of his client work is a belief he holds without apology: “A founder can survive bad news. What kills companies is bad news discovered late.” His job, as he sees it, is to say the uncomfortable thing clearly and early. Extending runway instead of chasing a vanity growth metric. Repricing a product even when the sales team pushes back. Telling a board the plan is behind before the board figures it out themselves. Sugarcoating, in his view, is not kindness. It is negligence.
The most common blind spot he encounters today is the one that inspired the mission in the first place. Founders manage their bank balance instead of their zero cash date. Annual contracts paid upfront make cash look better than the actual run rate. Signed hires who have not started yet are not in the burn number. Revenue is booked in ways that will not survive investor diligence. The account looks fine. The company is not fine.
“Sloppy numbers don’t just threaten the runway. They threaten the deal.”
His first 30 to 60 days with a new client follow a consistent sequence. Clean the books and separate cash from accruals. Build a 13-week cash view and a budget-versus-actual bridge to surface the real burn rate and the real zero cash date, which is almost always shorter than the founder believed. Then baseline the unit economics: gross margin, CAC payback, contribution margin. A growing top line can hide a broken engine. Investors will find it. McCarthy prefers to find it first.
By day 60, the founder has one page they trust. Cash, burn, runway, and the two or three metrics that will drive the next raise. Everything else builds from there.
One engagement captures the shift he is after. A scaling organization came to him with what looked like a reporting problem. Actuals lived in the accounting system. The budget lived in a spreadsheet no one trusted. The two never met. Every decision was a gut call, and surprises showed up at the end of the quarter instead of the beginning of it. McCarthy built a budget bridge connecting the approved plan to monthly actuals, line by line, with a variance owner and an explanation for every gap. He wrapped it in a five-phase operational cadence: clean the chart of accounts, stand up the monthly close, run the bridge review monthly, then layer in forecasting once the foundation held.
Variance review went from a quarterly scramble to a 45-minute monthly conversation. Leadership caught overruns in the month they happened. And the founder stopped asking McCarthy where they stood. They started telling their board where they stood, with numbers they could defend.
“The cadence isn’t deliverable. The founder’s confidence in their own numbers is.”
What 350 Looks Like From the Inside:
Patrick McCarthy is 350 founders into a goal that most people would consider either audacious or impractical. He considers it neither. He considers it a system, one built on the understanding that financial clarity is not a luxury for well-funded companies. It is the thing that determines whether an early-stage company gets the chance to become a well-funded one.
The bank balance will always lie, at least by omission. McCarthy has made a career, and now a mission, out of making sure founders know the number that actually matters.
Patrick McCarthy is the founder of My Startup Consulting, based in New York, New York. He serves as a fractional CFO, investor, and advisor to pre-seed through Series B startups, with a focus on early-stage SaaS and tech companies navigating fundraising and financial operations. To connect with Patrick or learn more, visit linkedin.com/in/patrick-mccarthy.
