Matthew Chang(@MatthewChang):Founders, let me take you through a simple process so audited financials don’t wreck you before your company’s Super Bowl: Years 0-2: bookkeeping by @friendlybooks by @RobertMSterling Years 3-4: CPA reviewed financials Year 5: CPA audited financials + QOE (I use EV Partners by @RobertMSterling) Year 6+: GAAP Financials, AICPA audit Year before major transaction: PCAOB audit, for the rest of your life The gradual step up in discipline also keeps your cost and organizational drag to a minimum. Being empowered by knowledge of high level accounting informs the founder / CEO how to think about decisions and contracts so it’s in alignment with your financial strategy. You’ll also know exactly when you have to professionalize on things like ERP. Can changing one paragraph in a contract be the difference or not with auditors? Absolutely. Will your customer or lender care about that paragraph? Probably not. You’d be surprised how many brilliant founders, especially in high growth situations, have no clue how the cash flow, balance sheet, P&L, sources and uses, and taxes inter-relate. By the way, I learned the hard way. We went from no audit to PC audit cold turkey. It was painful. What I wrote above is what I wish I would have known when I started. In life, and in all things, be audit ready. Good luck out there. Paging @mcobler11, @barbinbrad, and @paulswaney3

2026.09.16 13:42

Founders, let me take you through a simple process so audited financials don’t wreck you before your company’s Super Bowl: Years 0-2: bookkeeping by @friendlybooks by @RobertMSterling Years 3-4: CPA reviewed financials Year 5: CPA audited financials + QOE (I use EV Partners by @RobertMSterling) Year 6+: GAAP Financials, AICPA audit Year before major transaction: PCAOB audit, for the rest of your life The gradual step up in discipline also keeps your cost and organizational drag to a minimum. Being empowered by knowledge of high level accounting informs the founder / CEO how to think about decisions and contracts so it’s in alignment with your financial strategy. You’ll also know exactly when you have to professionalize on things like ERP. Can changing one paragraph in a contract be the difference or not with auditors? Absolutely. Will your customer or lender care about that paragraph? Probably not. You’d be surprised how many brilliant founders, especially in high growth situations, have no clue how the cash flow, balance sheet, P&L, sources and uses, and taxes inter-relate. By the way, I learned the hard way. We went from no audit to PC audit cold turkey. It was painful. What I wrote above is what I wish I would have known when I started. In life, and in all things, be audit ready. Good luck out there. Paging @mcobler11, @barbinbrad, and @paulswaney3

Matthew Chang@MatthewChang

2026.09.15 23:14

Allow me to interpret what’s happening. Anthropic is being audited. Anthropic desires to file an S-1, as they would like to go public. Therefore they need an audit. And by “they”, I mean the VC’s who invested in them. So “they” can exit their position and pass the bag to firemen, nurses, teachers and policemen. How does this go from the VC’s to the working man and woman? Because the size of the IPO will automatically qualify Anthropic for the Fortune 500 and the Dow Jones 100. Therefore, every working person with a 401k or pension will end up owning a little bit of Anthropic in their mutual funds. Teachers hold the bag, VC’s take the cash. Thank you, come again. Now back to the audit. The audit required is a PCAOB audit, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. This audit is what all public companies must comply with be on the stock market. Revenue recognition, expense classification, depreciation, related party transactions, etc. It’s there for consumer protection. This audit is TOUGH. It is INVASIVE. There is no way to lie your way through it. Any company that passes a PCAOB audit automatically earns my trust on finances. How do I know? Because I’ve been through it before. @ChangRobotics is 2 year PCAOB audited and currently underway for a 3 year audit. It’s brutal. The same as showing up as the valedictorian to your high school graduation, except you’re naked, and you have to walk on stage and deliver the speech. It’s rough. And I know many incredible founders that can’t pass one. Now, why would Anthropic be leaking all kind of weird statements lately about “self pacing” a slow down on AI (e.g. they are WAY behind on revenue), and profitable if they didn’t have expenses (e.g. we just learned for the first time what our expenses are, because we’re being audited). Because they were claiming NVIDIA discounts and Microsoft cloud credits as revenue. Because they had no clue what their expenses were, or why it even mattered. Because they had unlimited investor capital and their job was to burn it to make an LLM. Well, they did a great job with that! That’s the same as my wife coming home with Bed Bath and Beyond coupons and telling me it’s her paycheck. Ummm, not the same, sweetheart. So by now hopefully you can see that Anthropic is in a PCAOB audit right now, in order to file an S-1 and go public, and pass the bag to teachers so the VC’s get profits. And hopefully that explains their “crazy” behavior. In reality you can be grateful to KPMG, PWC, or whoever is auditing Anthropic, because it’s the first time Dario learned that: 1) we are not profitable 2) expenses matter 3) coupons are not revenue 4) we have no clue how to be “profitable” 5) growth is hard when revenue numbers are in an audit and not a power point -your neighborhood engineer

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