Truly goated how @usehaven casually saves $200K for their clients!

wow i never do this but @usehaven just saved us like $200k in taxes that was the easiest thing ever. very rare that something is this easy for me. great product bro

.@usehaven is one of the best-executing teams out there. Intense, customer-obsessed. No signs of slowing down either. Happy customer (and small investor).

I love waiting 4 days for my accountant to respond. That's why I will never work with @usehaven, they are too fast. Never seen this level of customer support. @Cyrushshirazi, thank you for you and the team!

came from PE so i have a different bar for financial infrastructure than most founders at vista we had full finance teams, clean books, real-time visibility into every number that mattered then you start a company and it’s: random accountant you found on google, QuickBooks you barely log into, and a prayer @usehaven is the first time i’ve seen the PE standard at the startup stage – dedicated CPA, same person every month, dashboard with everything in one place just works

Scaling Tabs to $11M was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And for most of it, the finance side was a complete disaster. Random accountants. Slow responses. Zero visibility into where the business actually stood. I was trying to make decisions at speed and I didn't even trust my own numbers. Switched to @usehaven and it's a completely different world. Dedicated CPA who actually knows the business—books and taxes are handled. My dashboard shows me exactly what's happening. When I built Bustem, it's the first thing I set up. Before anything else. Not sponsored. Just strongly recommend.

So many founders that I meet are so eager to build the exciting elements of their business that they often overlook the boring stuff. Finding a good accountant, finances, bookkeeping... the list goes on. It's also why when I met @Cyrushshirazi, I started sending everyone to @usehaven because reliability is key. Dedicated CPA's, same person every month. Obsession wins, and this team has it. Yes, I'm a shareholder, and yes, if you can't stand your accountant like a lot of other founders, you should reach out to them.

as someone who builds data infrastructure for a living, bad data is genuinely one of the most painful things to work with for a long time our own financials were the worst data in our stack – inconsistent closes, numbers i couldn’t fully trust, no single source of truth hard to make good decisions when you’re not sure the inputs are clean @usehaven fixed that – same CPA every close, everything reconciled, dashboard that actually reflects reality i added them to my startup stack post a few months ago and meant every word if you’re making decisions off your financials – and you should be – the data quality matters more than most founders realize

Built Superconnector on a simple belief: the right relationship at the right time changes everything. Interesting how some founders don’t apply that to their finance stack. They switch accountants, get handed off to junior staff, and re-explain their business every quarter. The relationship never compounds. One thing I’ve appreciated about @usehaven: the same CPA knows your numbers, history, and goals. Trust compounds.

Amazing to see @usehaven cross 1,000 customers, barely touching their seed funding It’s been a compelling case study in AI native services: when so many fintech cos advertised being AI-first, this team made a conscious decision to promise outcomes, and ensure the customer has the same CPA touchpoint to build trust and peace of mind And now every portco / founder friend (and lately myself!) are happy customers who frequently cite the team’s sub-4 min response times This is just the beginning - excited to see what else you guys do in the days ahead! @Cyrushshirazi @adhoc97

This weeks Haven Newsletter covers: - How our cracked team sent almost 900,000 slacks last year - The third chapter of our Tax Code University - Another new case study - Fundraising news and investor insights - Wins from our customers - The antidote to AI Slop And much more. Give it a read so we can keep cooking these up for ya. hello-haven.beehiiv.com/p/pe…

Green Flags to look for in your accountant: 1. Replies to you within 4 minutes 2. Freak in the sheets 3. Knows the difference between Balance Sheet, P&L, and Cash Flow (and how they talk) 4. Always delivers books on-time 5. Accurate Runway Projections 6. Customer Support Forward 7. Trustworthy 8. Has a good group of friends (700 ) at VCs and Startups FYI - I know a ton of these at @usehaven

Each Haven Newsletter is designed to put our own spin on whats happening in and around finance, accounting, and the startup ecosystem. They all have: - News from Haven i.e. welcoming the legendary John Martin - One practical finance insight/takeaway for readers to deep dive into (this week it's cash flow) - Updates on recent funding announcements - Customer shoutouts (because we love gassing up our partners cc Harry Blumsack and Infera) - Content we're loving - Other quick hits Let me know what you like, don't like, and what you wanna see more of. This is for you all! hello-haven.beehiiv.com/p/ca…

Did he call us boring?

The chief of @sequoia is quitting b/c venture is toast and the math doesn’t work anymore. Everyone keeps asking why so many top operators are stepping down from big jobs, leaving prestigious firms, or skipping the “career ladder” entirely to start their own companies. People want some conspiracy theory answer. But there’s a simpler explanation: The most important thing you need to build a generational company is an exceptional team. And it has never been harder to assemble one. Not because talent disappeared. But because all the exceptional people left to build their own companies. Twenty years ago, if you were a cracked engineer, you’d go join Google or Amazon, get a ridiculous comp package, stack your RSUs, and coast. That was the playbook. The smartest people went to the biggest companies because that’s where the upside lived. Today? - You can raise a pre-seed from your kitchen table. - You can ship a product in a weekend. - You can find customers on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, hell even TikTok The distribution is global from day one. Starting a company has never been easier. But because of that, keeping exceptional people has never been harder. It’s not ego, or pride, or impatience. It’s access. The people who would’ve spent 5–10 years “earning their stripes” at a big company don’t need to anymore. They were always going to build companies. Now they can just do it way quicker. I left @meow after basically a year to build my own company. Other early staff left and did the same. We found problems in a market we were passionate about and were raising capital in no time. This is happening everywhere. There’s so much more capital and opportunity in the ecosystem that the best people no longer feel the need to “wait their turn.” They don’t need the credibility badge. They don’t need the résumé. They don’t need permission. Which sounds great for innovation… but there’s a consequence no one is talking about: Talent is now fragmented across thousands of small companies instead of concentrated inside a few great ones. This means that we'll see way more companies succeed…but far fewer companies scale to generational size. Not because the ideas are bad. Not because the markets are small. But because the talent density isn’t there. The best founders in the world still need other exceptional people around them. You can’t brute force a generational company alone. And if all the best people are building their own thing, the firms (VC or otherwise) that rely on assembling an A team inside a single institution are screwed (kind of). They won’t get the returns they’re used to. Their bets won’t compound the way they did in the past. Because when access increases, concentration decreases. And when concentration decreases, generational outcomes become rarer. Everyone celebrates how easy it is to start something today. Nobody talks about how hard it is to build something great in a world where your best possible cofounder, early engineer, or right-hand operator is already off running their own startup. It’s not good or bad. It’s just the new reality. If you want to build something with longevity today, you need two things: 1. A mission that exceptional people are willing to pause their own ambitions for. 2. A culture so high-standard and so aligned that talent density becomes your moat. Everything else is noise.

This growth hack that got Haven from 0 to 3 million in revenue. No ads. No automation. No marketing. Just a year of showing up, meeting people, and building a space founders actually wanted to be a part of. Here’s the full story: When I started Haven, I was already part of a bunch of founder communities. Slack groups, WhatsApp chats, little circles of people building real companies. I was spending an enormous amount of time talking to founders directly. Probably 10 founders a day. And I was meeting a ton of VCs too, not because I was raising, just organically getting to know people in the ecosystem. At some point I realized: Why don’t I just create my own group with the best people I’m meeting? So I did. The first 30–50 people were just my existing friends. Founders and investors I already liked, trusted, and talked to regularly. But after that, every new person came through one rule: The only way in was an introduction. And if you got in, you HAD to introduce me to one more founder or VC you thought should be there too. That was it. That tiny requirement turned into a compounding machine. From November 2023 through the summer of 2024, my calendar was slammed. I took every call. I met every person. I hosted small events in New York. I added every great builder I met into the group. And over 9–12 months, those introductions kept stacking. 50 people turned into 500. Founders met other founders. VCs met operators. Everyone got value from everyone else. The reason it worked wasn’t because we were plotting to turn all these people into Haven customers. It’s because we knew that while we couldn’t solve all of their problems, we could solve one of the biggest and most universal problems in entrepreneurship: Loneliness. The truth is, as a founder, you spend most of your time dealing with problems the people around you don’t understand. What you really want is to talk to someone who’s in the trenches like you are. By giving people a place to do that, the relationships became real. And because they were real, they compounded. We met founders before they were ready to become customers. They’d join the community, go back to building, raise money five months later, and then they’d come back to us asking to become a Haven client. The group became a flywheel for the business. Not because we pushed Haven on anyone. But because trust compounds faster than CAC. That’s how we got from 0 to 3M. Not by optimizing funnels. Not by running ads. Not by automating every touchpoint like everyone else. Just by showing up every day, talking to people, and creating a place founders actually wanted to be, long before they needed us.

One of our accountants tried the Gen Z challenge where they sit in complete uninterrupted boredom for 15 minutes. Safe to say it did not go well.