Finance

Finance mission

We exist to make your life easier. You should spend time shipping great products, instead of wrestling with restrictive financial controls. We want to keep things distraction-free for you, and remove admin obstacles from your path. If you are spending your afternoon arguing with an expense system, we have failed.

We aim to build a system that works for you, and not the other way around. The deal is that we take on the messy, admin heavy-lifting behind the scenes. But we ask that you don’t skip the small steps (like uploading a receipt) because when you bypass the easy steps today, it snowballs into a painful cleanup job later.

When we design processes, our first question is “how can we make this disappear for the team?” or “will this ensure fewer Slack pings for us?” We don’t use restrictive approval flows. We operate on high trust and give you the context to make good spending decisions rather than block you with red tape. We consider your time very carefully, 15 minutes distraction per person is days of productivity lost across the company. Sometimes we do have to consider the lesser of two evils, eg. asking everybody to do a small task now, to unlock less distractions later.

We also give you financial insights to make PostHog even better - we don’t gatekeep the numbers. We want you to have visibility into monthly, quarterly, annual financial performance and SaaS metrics. We benchmark ourselves against public companies and peers in the industry so we know where we’re headed!

Finance principles

This is how we think about financing PostHog as a business:

• We’re efficient because it allows us to build more products.
• We want to always be default alive.
  • Losing control means becoming inefficient, because we would need to raise more money from VCs, who would push us for more aggressive growth to meet their goals. This means building fewer products and spending more on shorter-term bets, like large sales teams.
  • Being default alive means that profitability is always an option we can take, even if it is not a goal right now.
• Going from inefficient to efficient is really hard, so we always want to default to being efficient. When we think about our products, this means:
  • Hiring efficiency always matters.
    • New products start with just 1 or 2 people - we don't spin up a whole team on day 1.
    • Products at scale should stay efficient as they'll be able to ship faster without worrying about coordination costs.
  • COGS only matter at scale.
    • New products shouldn't have to worry about this - they should optimize for speed.
    • Products at scale have to be profitable - if they aren't, we won't stay default alive.
• We trust the team to spend money sensibly in the best interests of PostHog, and not to waste money.

Finance runbooks

These can be found in the company-internal repo within the finance directory.