The first seat decides the second: 75% (39 of 52) of CFO-first startups hired below, and 68% (19 of 28) of accountant-first startups hired above.
The second hire comes a median 16 months after the first, and each hire after it comes sooner
- First to second
156 companies16 months - Second to third
120 companies11 months - Third to fourth
107 companies8 months - Fourth to fifth
83 companies7 months
View as a table
| Between hires | Median months | Companies |
|---|---|---|
| First to second | 16 | 156 |
| Second to third | 11 | 120 |
| Third to fourth | 8 | 107 |
| Fourth to fifth | 7 | 83 |
38% (69 of 183) of companies had a second finance hire within a year of the first, and 58% (100 of 173) within two, counting only companies whose first hire is at least that old. So a year in, most companies were still on one; by two years most were not. Of the 158 whose first hire started three or more years ago, only 11% (18) are still on one.
The timing does not tell you the direction. Second hires that went above the first came a median 15 months after it, and those that went below came at 16. The seat you filled first tells you far more.
The first seat sets the direction: CFOs and heads of finance hire below, the rest mostly hire above
| First finance hire | Below | Same level | Above |
|---|---|---|---|
| CFO first | 75%39 of 52 | 25%13 of 52 | 0%top seat |
| Head of finance first | 66%21 of 32 | 16%5 of 32 | 19%6 of 32, all CFOs |
| Financial controller first | 42%10 of 24 | 4%1 of 24 | 54%13 of 24, 11 CFOs |
| Finance manager first | 35%7 of 20 | 20%4 of 20 | 45%9 of 20, 6 CFOs |
| Accountant or analyst first | 0%0 of 28 | 32%9 of 28 | 68%19 of 28, 7 CFOs |
| All companies | 49%77 of 156 | 21%32 of 156 | 30%47 of 156, 30 CFOs |
A senior first hire builds underneath: 71% (60 of 84) of the companies that started with a CFO or a head of finance hired below, and half of those 60 hired an accountant or analyst. That is the shape I describe in my guide to hiring a head of finance: the head of finance handles oversight, decision support and governance, someone underneath runs the transactional processing, and a brief that asks one person to do both is two jobs in one.
A junior or mid-level first hire usually gets someone above them: 57% (41 of 72) of those that started with an accountant, finance manager or controller hired above, 24 of them a CFO. Controller-first companies went straight to a CFO most often, 46% (11 of 24). As I wrote about senior finance candidates, a controller background runs deep in accounting but is often limited on strategy and capital, and those are the first things a raise tests.
Above or below your first hire?
Four yes-or-no questions about the finance function as it is today. One yes is enough.
- You still own the forecast and the board pack?
- Your first hire waits to be told what you need?
- A raise, an audit or a lender in the next 12 months that nobody on the team has run before?
- Your first hire is an accountant, finance manager or controller?
0 of 4 answered. Your answer appears here after the last one.
Not sure which way your next seat goes? Send me who is in the seat, what they own today and what the next round needs, and I will tell you.
Get a read on my finance hireIf you are being told to promote, or to skip the hire below
“Promote your first hire into the CFO seat.” Sometimes that is right.5 When I asked Tim Bensley on The CFO Track about his own step up, I put it this way: “obviously, it’s a good thing, right? But at the same time, there’s certain challenges when you are promoted from within a business to that.” Then I asked whether the biggest was “the management of peers”. If you promote, your second hire goes below and becomes the first person they manage. That shift, from delivering the numbers to looking after the people who deliver them, is one most finance leaders learn later than they should.
“AI means you will not need anyone underneath.” It is shrinking the seat, which is still the most common second hire: an accountant or analyst, in 33% (52 of 156) of companies. On AccountDads I said “your transactional roles or your early stage roles will definitely be impacted”, and recalled one team that automated accounts payable and “went from three or four AP officers and an AP manager to just one or two staff.” What stays is the checking. As I said on Celia’s Corner, whoever reviews the output needs to know the space, or “you have to just trust it because you don’t know what good looks like.” Hire the person below for that.
When the second hire is a CFO over the first, the first hire usually stays: 80% were still in the seat
In 30 of the 156 companies the second finance hire was a CFO put above a first hire below CFO. The first hire was still in the seat when the CFO started in 80% (24) of them, and 79% (19) of those 24 were still there a year later; 4 left within the year, and one CFO started too recently to tell. So the CFO over the top rarely cost the company its first hire.
If you go this way, tell the person already in the seat before the search starts, and brief the CFO on how the two of them will split the work. The same holds when the CFO comes later than the second hire: across every CFO added over a below-CFO first hire, the first hire was still there in 54% of cases (35 of 65), which I cover in what happens to the first finance hire.
A same-level second hire is usually a replacement. In 44% (14 of 32), the first person had left by the month the second started.
If the next search is a CFO over a sitting finance lead, I set out how to run a CFO search in Australia.
How Pathzero and ATEC Global made their second finance hire: an accountant below, and a 19-month wait
Pathzero
A head of finance, then a senior accountant three months later
- Business
- Carbon emissions accounting software for investors, founded 2020
- First finance hire
- Head of finance, Nov 2021
- Against the first roundVs first round
- 13 months after the seed
- Next finance hire
- Senior accountant, Feb 2022, below
- Now
- Accountant in role since Jan 2023 (Sep 2026)
Pathzero hired a head of finance a month after its US$5 million Series A. The second finance hire came three months later, a senior accountant underneath, and an accountant three months after that.
That is the head-of-finance-first pattern at speed. A third accountant joined in January 2023, after an A$8.6 million Series A extension. The head of finance left in November 2023 after two years; the latest accountant is still there. Public records show no finance lead since.3
A head of finance first usually means the second hire goes underneath, and early.
ATEC Global
A CFO first, and 19 months before anyone joined underneath
- Business
- Smart electric cookstoves and emissions reduction in Asia and Africa, founded 2016
- First finance hire
- CFO, Sep 2024
- Against the first roundVs first round
- 2 months after the Series A
- Next finance hire
- Senior FP&A manager, Apr 2026, below
- Now
- Both in role (Sep 2026)
ATEC started at the top: a CFO two months after its US$3.75 million Series A. The CFO was the whole finance function for 19 months, through a US$15.5 million raise in September 2025.
The second finance hire arrived in April 2026, a senior FP&A manager underneath, three months past the 16-month median. 75% (39 of 52) of CFO-first companies hired below; the rest hired another CFO.
Start with a CFO and the only direction left is down. The question is when the work outgrows one person.
By industry
This page covers all funded Australian startups together. Each industry has its own version, with its own figures and companies: tech startups, fintechs and deep tech companies. The other all-startup benchmarks: before or after the raise, how long after a raise and what to hire first.
Common questions
Should a startup's second finance hire be more senior or more junior than the first?
More often more junior, depending on the first seat. Of the 156 funded Australian startups we tracked that made a second finance hire, 49% (77) hired below the first person, 21% (32) at the same level and 30% (47) above, 30 of them a CFO. 75% (39 of 52) of CFO-first companies hired below; 68% (19 of 28) of accountant-first companies hired above.
How long after the first finance hire do startups make the second?
A median 16 months (n=156), with the middle half between 7 and 30 months. 38% (69 of 183) of companies made it within a year and 58% (100 of 173) within two, counting only companies whose first hire is that old. Later hires come sooner: 11, 8 and 7 months.
What happens to the first finance hire when a CFO is hired above them?
Usually they stay. In 30 of the 156 companies the second finance hire was a CFO over a first hire below CFO. The first hire was still in the seat when the CFO started in 80% (24 of 30), and 79% (19) of those were still there a year later.
How many startups stop at one finance hire?
Few, given time. 18% (35 of 191) of the startups we tracked have made only one finance hire so far, but among the 158 whose first hire started at least three years ago, 11% (18) are still on one.
Notes
- It does not show that hiring finance earlier or later causes a better outcome. It records the order things happened in. The only outcome test so far was run on the first 102 companies in the study, before it grew to 194. There, the share that raised again within 24 months of the first finance hire ran 55% when the hire came before any round (27 of 49), 47% at Series A (7 of 15) and 33% at Series B or later (2 of 6), and none of those differences could be told apart from chance (Fisher exact test, p=0.77 and p=0.41). Outcomes have not been collected for the full 194, and companies that hire early and companies that raise again are often the same well-organised companies, so no timing figure in this series is an argument for a timing.
- It is a survivor set. Every company announced a round and has at least one finance employee we could find, so the study describes companies that did build an internal finance function. In the 93 of the first 102 companies with a usable status there was not one insolvency, administration or wind-up. It cannot say what share of Australian startups have no finance lead at all.
- Outsourced and fractional finance is invisible. A virtual or fractional CFO supplied by a firm does not list the startup as an employer, so it never appears in public employment records. 16 of the 191 first hires we tracked (8%) were visibly fractional, part-time or interim, and that is a floor. Every “had no finance hire” figure means no internal hire we could find, among the companies we tracked.
- There is no headcount at the time of the hire. Only today’s headcount is public, so nothing here says “they hired a CFO at 40 staff”. The companies run from roughly 2 to 500 staff today.
- Titles are counted once. Each person is recorded at the earliest finance title they held at the company, so a controller promoted to CFO in the same business reads as a controller. Every “later added a CFO” figure is a floor.
- Rounds are dated by announcement. An announcement usually trails the close by weeks, rounds that were never announced are invisible, and grants and research funding are not in the round series. Round amounts are the least reliable field and no figure in this series rests on one. For 12 companies with names too common to search cleanly, past-staff coverage is a floor.
- It is not the market report. Story’s earlier market report on the first finance hire measured something different, the share of recently funded companies with a finance leader at each stage, so its figures and these do not compare directly.
The full method, including how rounds were double-checked and how same-named companies overseas were excluded, is in the study’s methodology section.
These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we work with. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.