CEO & Founder at Fuelfinance / make finance easy for founders

I never planned to become a founder.

I spent most of my life as a CFO — building models, analyzing numbers, and helping businesses grow. I loved it. Still do.

But in 2019, something shifted. I built a simple Google Sheets MVP to help my first customer (Petcube, YC’18) understand their finances better. Five months later, they were profitable. A year later, that client became my co-founder.

That’s how Fuel started.
Today, Fuel is a financial management platform paired with a real CFO. 

We manage over $500M in customer P&Ls. 
We’ve grown from a no-code MVP to a full web platform used by hundreds of businesses.

Along the way:

→ Partnered with HubSpot, Carta and Brex
→ Helped 100+ agencies and SMBs become profitable: Petcube, ColdIQ, Oceans, Hampton & more

Outside of Fuel, I’m:

→ A cross-continental swimmer (4.04 miles from Europe to Asia in open water)
→ Dog mom to Haku, my husky (and Fuel’s unofficial Chief Food Officer)
→ Into skateboarding, wakesurfing, snowboarding (anything that reminds me to feel fear and move through it)
→ Exploring longevity — 1.5 years alcohol-free, lifting weights, and learning to cook for myself

My mission is simple: make finance easy (and sexy) for founders.

If you wanna have a founder-to-founder chat, shoot me a DM.

Alyona Mysko

My career journey:

2013: Thought I’d be a journalist, but changed my mind last minute and chose finance instead. Graduated with honors.

2014: Failed to get a Big 3 internship, so I went on to get my master’s degree.

2015: Landed an internship at PwC in corporate tax while still studying. Six months in, I was offered a full-time role.

2016: Realized the Big 4 wasn’t my thing. Started doing finance for different businesses and wanted something bigger.

2017: Became a CFO at a construction company. Built the team and set up all the core financial processes.

2018: Got bored and wanted more. Started consulting and helping friends build financial models.

2019: Took on so many clients that I couldn’t keep up. Quit my CFO role. The construction company became my client. I hired a team and became a founder.

2020: Realized I needed a system that could do finance the way I believed it should be done. Built the first Google Sheets MVP of the product. Signed Petcube (YC’19) as a customer. It became profitable within 5 months.

2021: Petcube’s founder believed in Fuel and became my co-founder. We built the product together. Fuel, as you know it today, was born.

2022: Planned to launch v1 on February 24. On that same day, the war in Ukraine started. Lost 60% of our customers. Within four months, we replaced all of that revenue by entering a new market and building from bomb shelters. Got featured on Masters of Scale.

2023: Raised $1M. The team and business were growing fast. Lived between the US and Ukraine.

2024: Launched v2 and the web product. Pitched Fuel at HubSpot INBOUND. Didn’t win. Worked 70-hour weeks.

2025: We started Fuel with the idea of building a solution with the brain of 1,000 CFOs - and with AI, I finally see it happening. This year, we partnered with HubSpot and built a product together. Went all-in on AI and finance agents. Launched our AI financial analysis agent. Hit $3M ARR. Joined Hampton. Worked 80-hour weeks (again).

2026: Betting big on AI agents for finance and planning a major scale-up - while learning to appreciate the process.

When I look back, that girl in college knew it all along.
It took me 12 years to get here. Some of the internships I failed to get back then are our customers now.

Keep pushing - but also remember how far you’ve already come while you’re chasing the next thing.

Alyona Mysko 

Founder of Fuelfinance | building the future of finance for SMBs

2022: lost 60% of our revenue overnight
2026: building toward $7M ARR

I told this story to Sam Parr at Hampton, and it still feels surreal to say out loud.

In early 2022, we were preparing what we thought would be a new chapter for Fuel.

We were moving from a service-heavy business to a real FP&A platform for SMBs.

We had a launch plan.
A Product Hunt date.
A fundraising strategy.

The day that chapter was supposed to start was February 24, 2022.
That morning, Ukraine was invaded.

About half of our customers were UA businesses. Our revenue dropped almost overnight. I went from planning a product launch to coordinating evacuations, checking who had electricity, who needed help, and who was safe.

It was the first time in my life when “I’ll just work harder and fix it” wasn’t an option.

But we rebuilt.

Customers outside Ukraine gave us patience - and pushed us to go deeper into the US market. Within 3 months, we fully replaced the lost revenue on the US side.

Ironically (and painfully) that moment also put Fuel on the global map.

I shared our story on Masters of Scale, we were featured in Business Insider, and suddenly Fuel had visibility we never could have planned for.

I’m deeply grateful for communities like Hampton - for the space to tell stories like this, and for people who understand what it actually feels like to carry a business through moments like that.

Today, we’re building the next chapter again - rethinking how finance works with AI agents.

Different plan, same resilience.

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I’m a CFO turned entrepreneur and I help startup founders making their finance function efficient. I believe that financial management is too old for a new economy, and it doesn't take pace with modern business. Monthly reports is not a solution and finance should be easy for founders in order to have a good financial result. So my mission is to make finance sexy.

At fuelfinance we helped dozens of Seed and Series-A stage companies with their financial models, pitch decks, business plans, but most importantly - helped them to reduce burn rates, achieve profitability and accelerate growth by doing one thing extremely well - finance. That’s what we’re passionate about.

Our goal is to save hundreds of thousands of SMBs from bankruptcies and unlock trillions of dollars in GDP growth.

She runs finance for a $540M company.
You’ve probably never heard her name.

And on top of that, she’s one of the kindest, most grounded people I’ve met.

Margarita Chavez, CFO of Endeavor - the global network behind companies like Glovo, ElevenLabs, and Brex.

She previously led finance at UNICEF.
She also has an engineering degree.
What. A. Combo.

To me, Margarita is a perfect example of a next-gen CFO. Here's just a couple of insights I got from her as we spoke:

1. She pushes GTM - with rigor, not resistance.
“When GTM says they’ll 3x, I say: Great. Show me the assumptions"

→ Milestones: “Let’s set checkpoints to course-correct.”
→ Scenarios: “Let’s model Plans A, B, and C - and stress-test them.”
→ Assumptions: “ What needs to happen in hiring, funnel, pricing for this to work?”

2. She runs finance like a product org (while leveraging AI).
Margarita’s team doesn’t just close books.
They:
→ Own company-wide data systems
→ Build internal tools to automate reporting
→ Use AI to summarize contracts, extract key data, and flag red flags

Old-school CFOs closed books.

Modern CFOs build AI-first stacks that give teams the two most valuable things they can have: clean data and time to think.

Who’s an unfairly unknown CFO or finance leader you admire?

How I met my co-founder.
Spoiler: He was one of our first customers.

In 2020, we had our GSheet MVP. You could call it a no-code solution. At the time, I didn’t yet know what that meant 😅

I remember our first meeting with Yaroslav Azhnyuk, when we discussed G Sheets, their automation, and financial challenges for hours.

I showed him a demo, and we decided to try it out at Petcube (pet camera products, $25M raised, YC'16), where Yaroslav was a co-founder and CEO.

🟩 After 5 months of using Fuelfinance, Petcube became profitable.

Thanks to the solid financial system, the executive team was able to quickly spot problems and address them. This also improved the decision-making process, as they had access to reliable data and real-time metrics.

Fun fact: We began working with Petcube right after I became a dog parent 🐶

The entire Petcube team’s culture shifted as they fully embraced a Plan/Actual approach.

Now, every employee understands how their decisions impact the company’s runway, valuation, and profitability.

After seeing these results, Yaroslav joined us as an advisor, and later as a co-founder of Fuelfinance.

Since then, Fuel has grown into a full FP&A platform used by agencies, service businesses, and SaaS companies. We’ve managed hundreds of millions in customer P&Ls, built deep integrations with accounting, banks, CRMs, and billing systems.

Over the last year, we’ve started transforming Fuel again - from an FP&A tool into a system of finance AI agents. 

We launched our AI financial analysis agent, followed by AI summaries, forecasting, and anomaly detection.

But that part - the product, the AI, the scale - really is another story.

Congrats to our partners Brex on the $5.15B acquisition by Capital One - despite all the industry rumors.

Yes, the headline number is ~$5.5B.
Yes, that’s almost 60% below the 2021 peak valuation ($12.3B).

But here’s the part that gets lost too often (and Peter Walker made a great point around this recently).

Context matters.

If you look at Brex’s actual journey (not just the 2021) this is a huge outcome.

– 2017: pre-seed, basically nothing, YC + angels
– 2018: Series B at ~$220M
– 2018-2019: unicorn → multi-billion valuation
– 2021: peak-market insanity 
– 2018-2025: $500M+ in non-dilutive debt raised
– 2026: $5.5B acquisition

For early employees, early investors, and the founders this is a real win.

Not every company gets to:

– survive multiple market cycles
– scale a complex fintech product
– and exit at multi-billion scale

I’m genuinely happy for Henrique and Pedro. Building in fintech is brutal, and they did it at scale.

Congrats to the whole Brex team. This one deserves respect 💚

Agencies are my favorite type of business to work with as an ex-CFO.
The biggest problems are rarely obvious:

They usually live in places that founders don’t always have time to look closely at: client profitability, team structure, and capacity.

(And for the record, around 85% utilization is often the sweet spot - though it depends on the type of agency.)

Throughout the year, we kept making internal cheat sheets, frameworks, and decks - mostly to explain the same things over and over again to agency founders.

At some point, I just put all of this in one place.
Everything we’ve built for agency finance - in one folder.

What’s inside:

– A simple intro to how agency finance actually works
– Planning frameworks we use from $0 → $30M
– Real GTM benchmarks for agencies
– A budgeting guide inspired by Profit First
– Bonus: a short deck with 3 quick ways to improve profitability

If you’re running an agency and this sounds useful -- the link’s in the comments.

And may the profit be with you in 2026!

My hot takes for finance in 2026:

1/ AI already killed the traditional finance org: fragmented tools + manual glue work don’t scale anymore. CFOs are becoming architects of AI-native finance stacks.

2/ 2025 was the turning point: finance teams finally started trusting AI after a year of skepticism in 2024.

3/ “Closing the books” is no longer the CFO job: that’s table stakes, not differentiation.

4/ CFOs are moving closer to CEOs: advising on GTM, pricing, and which customers segments to focus on.

5/ Board decks/reports will increasingly be AI-generated: faster, cleaner, and updated from live data.

6/ AI is already better than humans at anomaly detection.

7/ The biggest untapped AI use case is 13-week cash flow planning: especially for SMBs - and it’s still largely unsolved.

8/ A huge part of finance work will be delegated to agents: emails, Slack inputs, plan updates - humans will review, not execute.

9/ Non-finance teams (marketing, GTM, product) will do real financial analysis in plain English: copilots are changing who can ask “what if” questions.

10/ AI skills will become a hiring baseline in finance. Everyone in finance should learn to build at least one agent or automate 1-3 tasks this year.


That’s where I think finance is heading in 2026. What’s your take?

This founder runs a $5M software company.
Yet his salary barely exists.

Meet Nazar Gulyk.

Fun fact: we studied at the same college - at the same time!

He reinvests almost everything back into the business - not because he has to, but because that’s how he thinks about scale.

More on the mindset, six-figure mistakes, and the finance lessons he learned the hard way ↓

"When do I need to hire a CFO?"
"I’m at $10M annual revenue, what financial team do I need?"
First things first: you don’t need a CFO from day one.

In most cases, founders tend to label all financial tasks as CFO tasks, but in reality, that’s not the case. There are many different financial roles.

An accountant is not a CFO. A CFO ≠ a controller. FP&A ≠ CFO.

You’ll be surprised at how long you can go without needing a full-time CFO.

Even post-Series A, you might not need a full-time CFO.

> If you're just starting out ($0–1M ARR), an outsourced accountant should be enough. For more complex tasks, like financial models, you can work with a fractional FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis) manager.

> When you hit $5M ARR, your ideal financial team could include an accountant, a fractional CFO, a fractional or full-time FP&A, and a controller.

> Then, as you grow, expand your team.

But ALWAYS start with the key challenges you’re facing, not just the name of the role.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of some of the roles in the finance team.

And as always, may the profit be with you 💚

If you grow up learning how to save money, learning how to spend it is the hardest skill. I heard this from a founder doing $80M a year.

We met at 7am, driving race cars all day at one of the most iconic Formula 1 tracks in the world.

In between laps, I met Blake Hudelson, co-founder of BoomPop.

Quick context:

– 110 employees
– $80M in sales
– One of the fastest-growing event & travel platforms
– They literally help companies have fun together

They’re crushing it.
But that line had nothing to do with growth metrics or revenue charts.

And it stopped me.
Because a lot of founders (me included) grew up with the same rules:

– Don’t waste
– Be careful
– Save first, spend later

That mindset protects you early.
And breaks you at scale.

You can’t save your way into growth.
I learned this the hard way - pouring money into marketing, not seeing ROI right away (yes, I’m an ex-CFO, and yes, that hurts).

That’s the real job at a certain stage.
Not squeezing every dollar. Not operating lean forever.

But learning when to spend - and why.
The funny part: we were driving cars built to go 200 mph.

And the biggest lesson that day was about slowing down your instincts and rewiring your relationship with money.

If you grew up optimizing for safety, this part hurts.

But it’s the difference between a good business…
…and a scalable one.

Funny what can happen from a random LinkedIn DM.

A few weeks ago, Lindsay Rosenthal reached out.
We’d never talked before. No intro call, no pitch - just: “Hey, want to swap our top tips for turning data into real marketing decisions?”

Fast forward a few messages, and here's the main thing we both agreed on: 
Data isn't the answer. It's just the filter.

At the end of the day, founders are the ones who have to make the call. 
Numbers just help clear out the excuses.

Appreciate Lindsay for jumping right in, no fuss. 
Shows what can happen with a simple ask.

If you're a founder (or marketer) drowning in data, what's one move you're actually making this week?

Top 2 Tips for Turning Data into Decisions

I keep seeing companies treat revenue/employee as the new north star.

Henry Shi (ex-AI at Anthropic, now founder of a $220M AI-native company) shared a leaderboard based on research and conversations with founders.

It shows how close we already are to the “one-person billion-dollar company” reality:

Midjourney: ~$12.5M revenue/employee, ~40 people
Mercor: ~$2.5M revenue/employee, ~30 people
ElevenLabs: ~$2M revenue/employee, ~50 people
Lovable: ~$2M revenue/employee, ~100 people
Gamma: ~$1.9M revenue/employee, ~52 people
Recall AI: ~$400K revenue/employee, ~25 people

Based on his research, an AI-native company generates $2.5M per employee on average.

That’s a structural shift.
Headcount is no longer the default growth lever.

Real scale now means automating fast enough to increase output without adding people.

Take Grant Lee at Gamma.
They hire PAINFULLY slowly.
~50 people.
~$100M ARR.

Valued north of $2B.
Profitable for 15+ consecutive months.
More cash in the bank than they raised.

But:

All three founders still interview every new hire themselves.
They do the job before hiring for it.
Grant (a founder with a CFO background) personally ran marketing for a full year before making the first marketing hire.

Zooming out, this matches broader data.

CJ Gustafson recently shared in his private company benchmarks:

“Median headcount growth is just 3-5%, while revenue growth sits around 20-25%. Sub-$25M ARR companies aren’t firing - but they’re clearly in one-in, one-out mode.”

I see the same pattern very clearly in finance and accounting.

Companies are maintaining 20%+ revenue growth while keeping finance  headcount almost flat - by adopting next-gen AI tools instead of adding more analysts, accountants, etc.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to:

If revenue per employee is the real constraint now, what jobs will still justify headcount growth - and which ones will be expected to scale almost entirely through automation?

How do you know your business is actually doing OK?
(money edition, from a CFO & founder)

At some point in every founder’s life, there’s a moment where you ask yourself:
“Are we… ok?”

You look at revenue, new projects, happy customers.
And still - the anxiety doesn’t really go away.

I’ve been there. So have many of my friends who run multi-million-dollar businesses.

What I learned the hard way:
if you don’t build a system for checking financial health, your brain will do it for you.

Badly. At 2am.

There isn’t one perfect metric that answers “are we okay?” 
But there is a simple structure that works across most businesses.

This is the one I built for myself at Fuel - and the one I recommend to founders.

Can time tracking EVER be a good thing? 
A long answer from a founder and ex-CFO 👀

If this post somehow ended up on your feed and you don’t know me – hi, I’m Alyona. 

I’m the founder of Fuel, an AI FP&A tool for small and mid-sized businesses. Before that, I was a CFO, mostly working with service companies and agencies.

Lately, I’ve been on a lot of calls with agency founders who come to Fuel with one clear goal:

“We want to improve profitability.”

And almost every time, one topic shows up sooner or later:
Time tracking 👹

It’s usually said with a sigh. Sometimes with a joke. Often with resistance.
For many founders, it’s the scariest decision they keep postponing.

🟢 The short answer: yes, time tracking can absolutely be a good thing for service businesses.

🟢 The honest answer: both founders and teams usually hate the idea at first.
The most common objections I hear:

“It’s time-consuming”
“PMs will never track”
“We tried once and it failed”

And to be fair – sometimes PMs are usually the biggest blockers. Designers, developers, analysts – if leadership says “we track,” they track. PMs push back because their time often isn’t billed directly, so it feels pointless to them.

But here’s what I’ve seen again and again:

Time tracking fails because no one explains why it exists and what decisions it will drive.

Once founders actually use the data (not to micromanage people, but to run the business) the attitude changes fast.

I’ve seen agencies discover that their “best” project was running at 10% margin, while a boring one was printing 80%.

I’ve seen teams cut bench costs from ~$20K/month to ~$5K/month just by seeing unbilled time clearly.

I’ve seen PMs change staffing decisions once they could see margin while managing a project.

Time tracking doesn’t magically fix profitability.
But it removes a lot of guessing.

The rest is in the slides ↓

Can time tracking EVER be a good thing? 👀

I’ve worked as a CFO with 100+ agencies (including well-known ones like ColdIQ and RevGrowth) mostly in the $2M-$50M revenue range.

Different founders. Different growth stories.
But the strongest agencies all share one thing.

They can answer a very specific set of financial questions:

1/ What’s your gross profit margin (not revenue, margin)?
2/ What’s your LTV : CAC?
3/ What’s your utilization rate (% of billable time)?
4/ Which services or projects are most profitable?
5/ Do you track time - and do you trust that data?
6/ Do you have enough capacity to meet demand right now?
7/ Do you have enough demand to keep the team fully utilized?
8/ Do you know your true team capacity (not planned, real)?
9/ How much does actual revenue deviate from plan each month?
10/ How often do you experience cash gaps?
11/ What revenue model are you actually operating on?
12/ Do you have clear KPIs - and review them monthly?

From my experience, most agency issues aren’t growth problems. They’re profitability and capacity problems.

When founders finally see these answers in one place, decisions get easier:

– pricing
– hiring
– firing
– scaling
– saying no to bad projects

That’s why we benchmarked these questions across 100+ agencies we’ve worked with.

And turned it into a 10-minute financial health assessment:

– choose your agency type & size
– answer 12 questions
– get a score + concrete, CFO-level recommendations

It works for marketing & GTM agencies, design studios, consulting & legal firms, any service business selling time and expertise.

If you want to sanity-check where you stand → link in comments.

We won Google Search with “AI CFO.”
After 100+ demos, we realized it was a liability.

Our first AI at Fuel wasn’t called AI CFO at all. It was a simple AI financial analysis one-pager - an MVP we shipped quietly just to see if anyone would use it.

They did.

Then customers started screenshotting Fuel and pasting it into ChatGPT to ask “what if” questions.

That was the signal.

If users leave your product to think, you’re missing something - so we brought that thinking inside Fuel and built our AI financial copilot.

At the same time, “AI CFO” seemed to work. We ranked well. People clicked. The name stuck.

But then we launched.

And very quickly, we realized something wasn’t right.
Founders started asking:

“So… does this replace my CFO?”
“Who’s responsible if the AI gets something wrong?”
“Is this like an AI employee?”

Finance leaders were confused. CFOs were defensive.

Founders were curious but cautious. We had to explain (again and again) that this wasn’t a replacement.

It was financial analysis, faster.

We’d fallen into the same trap as a lot of AI companies: using loud, role-based names instead of being precise about what the AI actually does.

AI CFO.
AI CMO.
AI SDR.

They sound exciting, but they also create the wrong expectations.
So we started shifting how we talk (and think) about it.

What we’re really building isn’t “an AI CFO.”
We’re building finance AI agents.

Each one has a clear job:

– financial analysis
– scenario planning
– anomaly detection
– summaries and explanations
– dashboards and decision support

Agents that help finance teams and executives think faster, not hand over responsibility.

How other teams are thinking about this? 
Are role-based AI names helpful - or misleading?

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