Sifted: "Most early-stage finance advice is built for the wrong customer"

Sifted published a piece this week on the shift in Nordic early-stage finance advisory, and Erik spent an hour on the phone with their reporter for it. The full article is behind a paywall, but the part that got picked up in the headline was this:

"Most early-stage finance advice is built for the wrong customer. It's written by people who work with Series B and later companies, then scaled down for founders who don't have the same problems. A seed-stage founder doesn't need a 50-page financial model. They need to know their burn rate, their runway, and their assumptions well enough to talk about them under pressure."

The piece also covers a broader trend the Sifted team has been tracking: more Nordic VCs are recommending advisory-style relationships over full-time CFO hires at seed, especially as round sizes grow and founders try to stretch runway further. We wrote about CFO versus advisor in more detail a few weeks ago if you want the longer version.

Thanks to Emma Jensen at Sifted for the thoughtful conversation. If you're a Sifted subscriber, the full article is worth reading — she interviewed four other advisory firms and the comparison is useful.