Mechanism Ventures is a company focused on automating company building to create profitable startups. The Finance Operator, Business Partner serves as a financial thought partner for portfolio CEOs and executive leadership, advising on critical financial decisions and managing the financial narrative across multiple companies.
Responsibilities:
- Advise operators on their most consequential financial decisions
- You sit with CEOs on unit economics, cash flow, runway, and growth investment
- You ask questions they have not thought to ask
- You pressure-test assumptions before they become commitments
- You are the person they call when they need to think, not just when they need a number
- Own the financial narrative
- Understand and communicate actuals against plan at a driver level. You do not build forecasts that can only be interrogated by another finance person
- Provide forward-looking commentary grounded in what the business is actually doing with intellectual honesty over optimism
- Provide deliverables that can be acted upon, not just read
- Validate the analytical layer
- Work alongside the Finance Operator, Data to define what gets built and confirm it is financially correct before it reaches anyone
- You have the acumen to know when an output does not make sense and the credibility to say so
- Handle the full financial surface area
- For any given company, there are valuations, tax considerations, SPV distributions, inter-company billing, and funding proposals. This is not a narrow role
- You will encounter the full range of financial questions that arise across a growing portfolio, and be expected to navigate them with genuine competence, not just escalate them
- A finance person first
- You can read a P&L, understand unit economics, and know when a number is wrong. This isn’t because someone told you, but because you understand how businesses work
- The technical work, the advisory work, the accounting work all sit on top of this foundation
- Built For a Multi-company Environment
- You hold financial context across multiple businesses simultaneously without confusing them
- You find it interesting that one company has a seasonality problem while another has a CAC problem, rather than wishing you could just focus on one thing
- No passengers
- You get better fast
- You build systems rather than just doing the work
- You leave functions better than when you found them
- You do not wait to be told what needs fixing
Requirements:
- 6-10 years of FP&A, startup finance, or multi-company work
- Advised founders or operators directly
- Driver-based modelling is your default
- Comfortable holding financial context across multiple companies simultaneously
- Learn fast, build systems rather than just doing the work
- Worked across a portfolio, PE-backed roll-up, or multi-entity environment
- Built financial reporting infrastructure from scratch, not just inherited it
- Enough accounting literacy to QA a close without running it yourself
- Experience with modern FP&A platforms