On The Brink with Castle Island - Cyrus Shirazi (Haven) on Better Bookkeeping for Crypto Startups & Beyond (EP.648)

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Cyrus Shirazi, CEO of Haven joins the show. In this episode:  R&D tax credits and offering an attractive tax product to early stage companies What on-chain finance needs to fulfill becoming a better ledger for accounting What startups should look for in a tax & accounting partner

This is Wyatt, and today I sat down with Cyrus Shirazi, founder of Haven. Haven is a modern tax-accounting firm geared towards serving early-stage businesses with many customers in the crypto space and beyond. Cyrus has a deep background in and around startups and built Haven to address a pain point he saw across high-growth companies he's worked with. In our discussion, we touch on how accounting is evolving in the backdrop of new technology, serving the needs of startups, and working with companies in the crypto space. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions

and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The Federal Government Loans American International Group,

AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Cyrus, thanks for coming on, excited to chat. To kick off, I wanted to ask you, what got you into? building Haven and what is Haven today? Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So what got me into Building Haven? From the age of 12, I knew I was going to build my own company. Why? Because my dad worked in private equity for ballpark 15, 20 years, quit his job, became a full-time entrepreneur. And I would literally run home from school every day at that point and run up to his office and get to see firsthand him trying to take a company from zero to one. All different shapes and sizes of companies.

One was a pizza and salads business. One was a chocolate company. One ultimately became a a baseball biomechanic center, which now he's run for many, many years and has become super successful. But long story short, is from that day onwards, I knew I was going to build my own company. And pretty much every stint throughout my career was leading up until the point of launching something myself. So during a few early stage companies after college, one was an SMS marketing company for e-commerce brands. Another was an R&D tax credit company, which was part of the origination story behind Haven. And then one was a crypto yields shop turned neobank. And then for a short stint, helped a good friend of mine raise a $15 to $20 million secondary fund.

Ultimately, secondary investing was purely transactional and there was no actual fulfillment or enterprise value being created. I wanted the fulfillment of building something from scratch. And the origination story from Haven is funny in the sense that if you looked at me and asked if I was going to build something in the world of accounting and tax three, four, or five years ago, I would have laughed in your face. I did have the main story background of doing R&D credits, but even still, post that experience, I had no intention whatsoever of ever diving back into that space.

It just serendipitously happened. And so when I left my job at Meow, the crypto yield shop turned Neobank, I basically set out to chat with as many entrepreneurs as I possibly could, many of which were my friends. And a few of them early on, for whatever reason, as I was ideating with them around different things within the world of financial services that I wanted to build, they had never heard of the R&D credit. And I thought everyone had heard of it because Main Street spent an enormous amount of money on LinkedIn ads and Hagline was $50,000 and free money for startups, but they hadn't heard of it.

So I was lucky enough to help those few friends claim their R&D credits, basically spun a C-Corp up, got to 50, 60, 70K, and revenue pretty much overnight. And that was the beginning of Haven, but completely separate from what we ultimately became. I basically spun that up because I thought it was going to be like a nice little cash cow and turn it to something. But ultimately, that led to the origination of what we built today. And fast forward a handful of months thereafter after doing those Rney credits for those friends. after talking to all the founders that were in my network

and all the random founders that I was lucky enough to meet, just kept hearing the same tagline, which is everyone hates their accountant. And I was like, maybe there's something to do in this world. And then I had something funny happened, which is some of the businesses who helped claim their R&D credits, asked if we could do other parts of the tax and accounting stack for them, the books and the taxes.

And I was like, all right, man, I think there's something here. Let's see what we can do and went all in and decided to build a boring old services company doing bookkeeping and taxes and tax credits for startups. And fast forward to seven, eight months after that, we're right around a million dollars in run rate revenue, profitable, building a great company, had a rock star team, I think, somewhere around 10 or 12, including contractors, not just full-time folks. Then fast forward to today, we raised a bit of cash, heavily invested in R&D and a lot of the

different things that we've built. And Haven's now well over $6 million in AR slash run rate revenue. And we serve well over 500 companies, ranging from crypto startups to fintech, to ects, to e-commerce brands to AI companies. And at the end of the day, we just love getting to serve entrepreneurs and having a blast. I really like that framework of Go where there's scalability and operational headache for companies. Because I think your past company, Meow, had a similar framework to that of any startup knows they should be earning interest on their deposits, but getting that up and running is just an additional to do. And it's similar. Haven, you're capitalizing the fact that this is

something that people dread, but is in need for every company. 100%. At the end of the day, when I was thinking about what I wanted to build, I was talking to someone who actually met over the weekend, but they were one of the core members of the Alameda FTX team. And he basically said something which stood out to me, which is that I only ever wanted to build a business where I was solving a hair-on-fire problem. And when you think about someone hating their accountant, that's a hair-on-fire problem. Because as Benjamin Franklin says, the only things are constant in life or death taxes and maybe something else, but definitely death-and-taxes. You need to do them ever here. And if you hate your accountant, you obviously don't trust them. And it's just a

poignant problem that you really need someone who you can trust. So those words really stand true in my mind. And I think that we're lucky enough to do something where we're actually solving real problems for businesses. It's also one of those areas. I think if you're in a startup, but even elsewhere, this can be true. There are certain areas that you spend a disproportionate amount of time relative to the leverage that they create for your business or for your workflow. and like you said, it's a hair on fire problem where that inevitably happens. 100%. I think accounting is just one of those things where, in my personal opinion,

it's never going to be fully automatable by software. Talk more about that. I want to hear about the platform offering and what level of automation you can get to here. So I'll start with rev rec first, which is not automatable end-to-end and like a future state, unless you have very, very, very basic subscription-based revenue. Why? Because all these enterprise contracts, everyone's got different terms. Sometimes there's credits.

Sometimes there's usage-based billing. Sometimes there's addendums and side letters to contracts, which throw wrenches into being able to automate things. What you would need to do is parse a contract, which never looks the same. When OCR actually works today, it's parsing the same type of document over and over and over and over again. And there's some repetitive component to what they're doing,

which gives it the knowledge to be able to accurately detect which components need to be extracted. But when you're talking about these enterprise contracts, they're all different. And people go to Wilson, Cincinnati and Cooley and whoever else to draft these super sophisticated agreements with their customers. And at the end of the day, if you want to automate something, there needs to be some level pattern recognition. There needs to be some level of consistency and repetitive nature to what data you're trying to extract. But all of these pieces of information in these contracts are completely different. So as a result of that, it's not fully automatable,

and I personally believe it never will be unless enterprise companies agree to come together and standardize their contracts. But in no world is that going to happen. Sales reps need the leverage to be able to have custom components to contracts to win deals, it's always going to be a thing. But when you think about every other component of accounting, that is what we believe is fully automated. And when I talk about every other component of accounting, I'm talking about anything and everything related to expenses. So everything from transaction categorization to amortizing prepaid expenses, to adjusting the service period for legal bills, to adjusting the service period for contractors, adjusting the service period for vendors who

were paid on net 30, net 90, net 60 turns. The reason being, those pieces of documentation are all repetitive. You will see that this is on net 30. This is when the invoice date was. That is when the service period was, and this is when we need to book it to. When it comes to a prepaid expense, all you need is the invoice. Once you have the invoice, you can parse it accordingly, understand if it's an annual agreement that was paid up front or if it's an annual agreement that was to be paid monthly. If it's to be paid monthly, there's no accruals needed. It'll just automatically be recognized within the proper period. Then when it comes to expenses and basic expense pedigization for software vendors, everyone from Google and others, you're getting built for those

during the period where the services are rendered. So if you're using Google in June, you're going to get charged by Google in June. So there's no adjustment that you need to make to when you're accounting for that expense. And when you see Google once for one customer, you then know that it's probably going to be software and it's probably going to be software for every other client, period. It might be admin software, and then there might be sales software, like Salesforce, for example, but when you look at someone's chart of accounts, you'll be able to see the granularity that they have within their COA. So if you have two, three, four, five clients who are booking that expense as office software, you know that's where it would belong in that

new client's charter accounts when you're categorizing those transactions. So that level of pattern recognition and reinforcement learning when you're quote-unquote fine-tuning a model or training a model or providing data to a system to then auto-categorized transactions, gives it enough information to be able to do that for every business and I can go forward to cadence. And that's where we've spent an enormous amount of time when it comes to transaction categorization, when it comes to the automated detection of prepaid expenses and their amortizations, and when it comes to ingesting invoices for contractors and lawyers and other vendors who are being paid after the service period has happened.

because those all have repetitive components, which we can identify, and then be able to take action on in the future. And so as things stand today at Haven, we've been able to automate right around 60 to 65% of the entire accounting process for our business on a monthly cadence, and then the delta is handled by our team.

We believe that we'll probably be able to get close to like 75 to 80% in full complete automation, but the other 20% is going to be the revrek. And if you're a business who is a basic subscription-based software company, even if you have licenses and seats, it's pretty automatable. You can basically just neck the stripe, you ingest all the data, you'll need to break out fees and other maybe sales tax, etc. But when it comes to any business,

what's called enterprise-level contracts who are signing annual agreements or prepaid agreements or whatever it is, there's so much granularity to those agreements where it's really, really hard to know when they actually used that service. So you might pay for something upfront for the year. And let's say, like, it's Salesforce, for example.

but the customer doesn't set up their Salesforce instance until four months after the contract is started. In that instance, by a proper accrual and in accordance with GAAP accounting standards, you can't book any of that expense until the service actually began to occur. So these nuances throw a lot of complexity into fully automating accounting and to end

because there's something like bespoke and unique components about businesses, and some of them don't even live in contracts. Some of them have to do with business dynamics. You might sign up for a tool, but then you might not use it for like a few months. And those automations or optimizations ultimately bring cost down for clients. That's the main benefit there.

Totally. And enable us to not only bring cost down, but then ultimately deliver books faster. Are those immediately compatible with the workflows of a lot of the finance teams from companies that you work with, or are there cases where their bookkeeping practices don't fully align with the automation you guys are trying to bring to the table? So what I would say is our approach thus far has predominantly been, our ICP is on businesses who are employing, let's call it, sub-250 employees. And in those instances, they might have a head of finance,

they might have a controller, they might have an accountant, but they don't have a full-fledged finance function yet. So they're more amenable to changes and adjustments to their workflows if it means less work for them. And when Haven comes into the equation, there's already an existing team. Our goal is to decrease the amount of work that their team has to do. that's mundane, repetitive and laborious. But when we're coming in in a situation where they don't have any finance or accounting

function, our goal is to automate everything end-to-end, whether that's pure software, our AutoCat system, or by humans, the customer doesn't care. They just want it done end-to-end. So to answer your question, it's really a context-dependent situation. In the more established companies, especially because we're working with definitely like a lot of startups, they're more progressive and amenable to adopting. new things to make themselves more efficient and save them time. And when it comes to the smaller companies, they don't care. They just want it done in the most easy, stress-free manner possible.

That makes sense. How strong do you see the stranglehold or grasp of traditional tax and bookkeeping firms being? I imagine startups feel pressure to work with big names. So how did you guys start to win clients? And what does that look like today? I've been lucky enough to build a bunch of amazing relationships across the venture and startup ecosystem. And so when we pulled the trigger to get Haven off the ground and build the business and a bunch of pre-existing relationships who I was able to go and tap into to them become early customers and refers and evangelists and adopters, which definitely gave us a huge leg up when it came to being able to build a name for ourselves and break into the ecosystem. But in terms of, this goes to a different thesis that I have,

which is that some people think that with the adoption of AI, legacy software is going to become more entrenched. I personally disagree. Why? Because it's going to be easier to move data around, far, far easier. So what that means is doing the Klarna example of churning from Salesforce is purely an example of it being easier to manipulate and take your data out of disparate systems and legacy systems and put it into your own format to utilize in your own way. So when I think of legacy accounting firms, I think of them akin to legacy software players, where they might have all of your data today, but it's far easier to move this data than it once was. Even if you can use a legacy example of like QuickBooks desktop, that was a nightmare.

It was impossible to change, accountants. They had a data moat almost. Literally. Because they had the historical records and it was difficult to access. You had to physically go on site and collect hard drives and then that to someone else if you wanted to migrate. Today, in the modern context of ERPs, pretty much everything is digitally native. If you're migrating someone from one system of record to another, it's basically just a data collection problem. And our approach to this has been very unique in the sense that unlike other businesses who are trying to build new modern accounting systems,

whether it's like a campfire or a Rillit or even others, we're not trying to take customers away from their existing tools. we're trying to integrate with their existing tools, but then automate all of the processes involved in doing the work in accounting. So when you're working with Haven, you don't need to get rid of your QuickBooks account. But if you're going to go work with one of these new ERPs, you need to completely get rid of that and do integration. That migration is going to take you six months, which is years in startup time.

We don't have that luxury as a startup. So our approach is to meet customers where they are, automate everything by routing all of the data through our system, and then into your accounting system, i.e. like a quickbook. So I think that over time, the way that we win against legacy firms is enabling a frictionless experience for our customers when it comes to onboarding. And if they know that they don't have to undergo a six-month migration, all we have to do then is just build trust, build trust with the stakeholders at our respective clients companies. And that we've done a great job of doing. As a byproduct, I'm doing

an awesome job for all of our customers who then become our evangelist and testimonials and all of that. Yeah, the composability piece makes a lot of sense. You just don't have the ability to churn when you're trying to grow fast. We work with clients as they work with different tools. Literally, some of them take six months. It's crazy. The CFO doesn't have the time to do that. So, like, a lot of these new ERPs are doing the migration for the client. At the end of the day, the onus to some degree is going to fall on the client, and it's not the best use of their time. You guys are venture-backed, correct? Yeah, we've raised close to like 3.6 million, basically all of us still in the bank. So seed strap, venture-backed,

Do you get pushback that this is an unsexy business vertical or it's not really scalable or something like that? All the time. How do you deal with that or how do you think about it? We lean into that component. So when people flag the unsexy components to our business, the unscailable components to our business, the components that involve humans, we actually push back. And I say that you just don't understand the business. And people are going to be an integral part of our company forever. Why? Because if you go back to the rev rec thing that I was talking about, it's not fully

automatable. And the only way to provide a delightful end-to-end experience for customers is to have a team to step in and handle and fill in the Delta. If you think about a great financial institution, I'll use like Morgan Stanley as an example, they've got a big time unscalable component to their business, which is wealth management. A financial advisor can't manage 200, 300, 400, 500,000 clients. There's only one of them. And we've all got needs. I have a, FAA at MS. I'm not that annoying yet, but one day if I'm lucky enough to make a bunch of money, yeah, I'm going to be annoying and take a bunch of his time. Morgan Stanley's what, two, three hundred billion dollar company? At the end of the day,

to build a great financial institution, you need to have a great services component to your business. If you're touching any of the components in financial services that are more services than just finance, if you're touching more in the context of FinTech, if you're touching more like Finn versus tech, you need services. Savvy wealth is a great company who's building like a new financial wealth management platform. They've got advisors on their team. They just raised $100 million. We really, really lean into the services of software narratives, the AI services. And a lot of people have the opinion that, oh, if your AI services, you need to automate all of the service.

And then just software. No, because who's going to manage the relationship at the end of the day? That's the most important part. So in our vision, the relationship ultimately becomes managed by accountants. and the work is basically all done in an automated form with some level of human in the loop. I think the services side of software gets completely unnoticed. And I used to follow data software businesses, so like Bloomberg, CoStar, Gartner, and they do so much on the ground data gathering because there's no other way to do it.

And that's just human-based. And maybe that'll change, but there's certain things you can't automate in terms of calling companies, pitchbook style and asking for data. Think about scale AI. The only reason that these great LLM players are able to exist is because they have human labeled data. The only way that they continue to get better and better and better is with human labeled data. So it's a flywheel that all grows on itself that is all interconnected.

And there's almost a fallacy because if there's not a human proprietary element, anyone could do it. Period. At the end of the day, also like financial services, part of the moat long term becomes the relationship you have with your customers and the density of your customers and the success of your customers and a lot of people make irrational decisions in the world. People use HubSpot and Salesforce because they have a pre-existing relationship there. Whether or not it's a logical decision, HubSpot's better, Salesforce is better, doesn't matter. They end up using one of these tools because they have a relationship there, which is just stressing the importance

of that. Switching gears a little bit. You guys work closely with crypto startups. You have crypto-based clients. Yeah, we have a bunch. How are your workflow specific there? Or what do they look like and how do you work with those firms? Our crypto clients, the workflows, when everything is in Fiat, is exactly the same. The crypto component of the business, we are able to automate by partnering and working with different accounting tools like BitWave and Integral and CoinTracker, Crypto Tax Calculator, and a few others. And at the end of the day, all we need is ending balances to take from all of their on-chain

activity, whether it's ending balances for payroll, which break out fees and taxes and withholdings and insurance, and then we create a journal entry in their P&L balance sheet, cash flow statement to account for all of that. The workflow involved in doing accounting for crypto-related businesses honestly isn't that different from doing it for traditional fiat companies. I think our crypto clients probably involve a little bit more work than the traditional fiat business because of the on-chain component. But at the end of the day, we look at them as pretty much one and the same as the traditional companies that we're working with. And like, we love working with crypto businesses. We don't shy away from it at all. I've been in crypto for a long time.

One of my co-founders has as well, or I should say both of them, some of our team has as well. We look at it as like a not even challenge, just exciting opportunity to work with a bunch of amazing businesses. And one of our customers is Ancible Labs, who's helping facilitate on-ramps and all-ramps. Beam. Sorry, apologies. I know you changed the name. So a bunch of awesome companies like that. And I think crypto's back, whether it's a customer to like the new administration or not, I think the world is beginning to see far more of the use cases for crypto, specifically when it comes to cross-border payments, in my opinion, is one of the biggest use cases. The founder of Air Wallachs the other day tweeted about how it's more expensive to

move crypto around the world when you're talking about off-ramping and fees stemming from that than it is to move fiat around the world because they've built this network of partner banks across many parts of the world, which has made the FX fees pretty negligible. But if you think about all the bullshit involved in moving money around the world and how slow it is when it comes to FX, it's not even quantifiable, how much more efficient it is to move money around the world in the form of stables or in the form of crypto. Just less steps. Someone can subsidize the traditional FX payment on a temporary basis. 100%. One of our North Stars at Haven is clicks to value. So how can you turn every experience?

into one click. And there's no universe in which sending an international wire or international payment is one click. It's just not fundamentally possible. We were talking about this the other day. People will ask how stable coins work or really scrutinize that. And you also want to ask, how does a wire work? Can you explain to me how a wire works? Literally. I think there's some validity to what he's saying in the context of off ramping and the fee stemming from that. Which Beam tries to solve, for example, and a lot of these companies are trying to fix. My counter to him was that what happens when you don't need to off-ramp? And you can just transact anywhere in crypto, period.

When you're spending money on like a card and you can just settle on the other end in stables or in crypto, there's no off-ramp costs. It's literally just maybe the crypto-sononymous version of interchange if it were to ever exist. Do you work with companies that are taking on Bitcoin balance sheet strategies? And does that impact your workflow with them? We do. So we have a bunch of clients who hold Bitcoin on the balance sheet. I'm not up to speed enough on the context of their unique circumstances to understand or know if they're deploying any strategy to take advantage of cost discrepancies across different exchanges, what Sandbank McFried ultimately did in the FTX. That I'm not sure about. But a bunch of our clients have crypto,

I have Bitcoin in the balance sheet specifically. And it's a great store of value. But I'm not like super, super close to that part. But I'm sure there's some doing some unique things. Do you think that stablecoin workflows long term will just make this entire job easier in terms of having clear on-chain accountability of money flows and hopefully simpler tracking of balances, et cetera? Yes, if someone's able to build plaid for crypto. What do you see that business model looking like? Because we've gotten some pitches, but I'd like to hear where you see the white space there. So basically, you can go in to a financial platform and connect any and all of your accounts, wallets, everything, in a manner that is then broken out and displayed in dollars. Just a universal account, essentially.

Universal account, 100% for sure. But basically, everyone has so many different wallets, so many different exchanges that they use, so many different decks, etc. You basically need, and I know there's tools out there who do this like crypto tax calculator and CoinTracker and others where you can connect and it'll show all of the deficit and credits, so on and so forth, but it's still in a semi-difficult to digest form for accounting purposes. Why? Because there's no description or vendor name associated with these transactions. So maybe this isn't like a Plaid specific use case, But one of the reasons that doing accounting in the context of Fiat related businesses is every transaction has a vendor and a description.

But when you're doing on-chain accounting, there's no vendor and description associated with every single transaction. And so the reason I mentioned something like a plaid is some sort of financial institution to aggregate all of the data and help label it. Well, it sounds like someone on the data labeling side itself would be helpful too. It's almost like both sides of that coin would be helpful. 100%. Right now, like the only people who know what all wallets transactions are for is whoever owns that wallet. Once we have vendor name and description associated with any and all crypto-related transactions, accounting will be a thousand times easier and become far more akin to standard fiat accounting. But until we're at that place, it's going to be far more difficult to do.

But I think one of the ways to do it is a company called Rain, for example, where you can basically spend from any crypto wallet. they have all of the vendor data. So wherever you spend money on that card, they know who you're spending it with. So they have the data to be able to label all of those transactions. Basically, we need more institutions like that across different parts of the crypto ecosystem to help with labeling transaction level data to make accounting easier for these businesses. But to your point, Rain are expressly a crypto card payments company, and they've taken on this responsibility of doing the labeling.

But there's no one who's said, I'm just going to go and try and aggregate identity level data for the use of accounting and general traceability to massively scale. That's a business in itself, probably. Yeah, I completely agree, especially because as we get this crypto inflection that we were both talking about, for so long people thought of the anonymity as a feature,

not a bug. and I think now in a lot of cases it's a bug, not a feature. And if you ask a large subset of these stable coin users, the anonymity is no longer something that people index on or care that much about widely. They dislike it. They dislike it because it creates more work for them later on. Exactly. They want all the benefits of crypto without the anonymous components

because they want to use it like Fiat for the benefits that it has over Fiat, instant payments, fewer clicks to value, no bolt when it comes to like currency deflation and all of that stuff. Yeah, if anyone wants to build a labeling business in the crypto space, they should reach out to us. I love it. Yeah, that would be a great business. I would have to partner with them too. Will you guys ever turn down potential clients in the crypto space or otherwise? We've definitely turned down clients. We've actually fired clients as well. We've fired clients and turned them down for more often than not being unreasonable.

And when I say unreasonable, what I mean is redlining a SMB 10K ACV contract and asking us to bring in legal resources to help get the deal over the line and it's going to cut drastically into our margins. That just fundamentally doesn't make sense for our business. No offense to them whatsoever, but it's just not a good use of our time or our resources. We're already paying for the cost of acquiring the customer, whether it's through sales salaries or my co-founder salary or my co-founder salary or marketing salaries or marketing spend, whatever it is. We've had some people ask for some weird quote-unquote favors, which is if I get paid cash or via Venmo don't add it to my books, they immediately got fired.

That seems like a reasonable policy for you guys to have. Totally. And then there's a handful of customers we've worked with who just haven't operated with what we would call mutual respect. And I think in the professional services world, there's a lot of taking shit from customers because not everything is done via software. There's humans that people make mistakes for sure. But at the end of the day, you have to operate with a reasonable level of mutual respect.

we're doing everything we can to make sure we do an amazing job. And I like to think we do a 10x better job than all of the competition. You're more than welcome to go explore working with someone else if you're not having a great experience with us. And then you'll know what it means to have had a good experience with an accountant. They're not the most proactive. They're not the most customer-centric. They're not the most responsive individuals.

And I think that at the end of the day, we're trying to work with people who want to work with us for the long term. and to double back to your question, who will be turned down? We'll turn down people who want one-off engagements. If you want us to just handle something where it's a cleanup of your transactions historically and then nothing going to go forward, Cadence, we won't work with you.

It just doesn't make sense for us. If you want us to just handle your taxes, one-off for one year, we won't work with you. It doesn't make sense for us. We want to work with people for the next hundred years. So who's ever willing to come up to the table and take a crack at doing that and changing the future with us, we're here and we're ready to go above and beyond for you.

But everyone else, we're probably not the best hit for. And that's totally okay. What advice would you give to early stage companies as they're navigating these decisions? When it comes to accounting specifically, first and foremost, find someone you trust, find someone who you believe is going to be there for you when you need them, who is going to do everything by the book, accurately, correctly, so on and so forth. Don't look for someone who's going to try to help you solve and optimize all gray areas of the tax code.

At the end of the day, you don't hear about the filthy, rich. people, the super affluent, super successful people of our generation, spending their time trying to optimize every dollar from a tax standpoint. You want to find someone who's going to do an amazing job, follow every letter of the law, and help you save time and money in the process of it. If you are building a startup, your focus should be on building the business. And you want to find someone who's going to make sure that you have every T, every I cross when it comes to all the accounting and tax and compliance components of your business, and just trust them to put it on autopilot. You don't want to find the strategist or the guru who's going to help you save a few

pennies here and there. At the end of the day, you're shooting for like a billion, 10 billion, $100 billion outcome. And the few pennies that you save here along the way, they're not going to make a break your business. So you want to find someone who is prepped, primed and ready to help you scale for the next many, many years and who can grow with you. Who understands what it means to be like an early stage company and who's not going to price gouge you or try to milk every dollar out of you from the early onset of your relationship with them. Sage advice, well, appreciate it. We'll leave it there. And Cyrus, thanks for coming on. Hopefully you can join us again sometime. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you. Great to be here. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with

Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink-Podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.