What it’s like to work together.

I’ve had the privilege and good fortune of working closely with Christin on multiple occasions, including on a complex transaction for a unique (and very difficult to finance) distributed energy asset fleet. There are many consultants and advisors who live squarely in the domain of financial modeling and metrics or spend their time in the strategic planning realm but lack the attention to detail or technical expertise to think about modeling and structuring implications. Christin excels at both!

She was a terrific thought partner in iterating on multiple, detailed approaches to model and mitigate risk as well as positioning considerations as we pitched investors as part of a complex syndication process. I would absolutely recommend Christin as a swiss army resource who can help work through the hard problems and set your business for future growth.

Shortly before I was hired, our founders, who both have backgrounds as scientists, brought Christin on to help with the CoS hiring process and act as an advisor to me and the company. Christin has been invaluable to me throughout my time in this role. She has been a sounding board for ideas, a collaborator on projects, and someone who asks the tough questions to make me re-think scenarios I’m faced with. She was instrumental in our early ICP definition workshop, building our financial model, and providing guidance around how we can make the most of our limited resources. Christin embodies the qualities of the most successful start-up people I’ve ever worked with --- a bias towards getting things done paired with long-term strategic lens.

Earthmover is building the cloud platform for weather and climate data. As a team of scientists and engineers, we started out pretty clueless about startup finances and lacked a clear framework for answering questions like, “can we afford to hire more engineers right now?” Thanks to Christin’s help, we now have a solid financial model and plan we can use to make strategic decisions about when to hire and when to fundraise. As a founder, this allows me to focus on product and stress less about finances.

Over the first couple of weeks, Christin earned the full trust of the team by committing to our vision and getting to know us and our work with impressive curiosity and fervor. She then started building a financial model for our business that for the first time helped me see a full picture of what it would take for Stow to succeed. I then began spending much of my time refining our business strategy with Christin, which culminated in me emerging as a cool, confident fundraiser with a truly impressive data room for investors.

Christin and I worked as leaders on Mode’s executive team, hustling together through many quarters of growth and scaling. She was an excellent business partner holding a unique skillset as a finance and operations leader. Opinionated while being flexible. Driven but also thoughtful. Action oriented and accountable to longer term impact.

The biggest challenge we worked on was managing through the COVID-19 shutdown. Millions of dollars revenue was at stake for companies that had shut down operations. She launched standups with our teams to adjust our forecast and health scoring models. Supporting each customer that asked for discounts or cancellations was a collaborative effort. We made it through those quarters with positive growth and a stronger revenue operating system. She went high to low - from headcount planning and discount strategies to playing bad cop in challenging customer conversations.

A typical question when building a business is who you’d want in the trenches with you during a zombie apocalypse. Christin is resourceful, determined, funny, bold, and sharp - hands down on my squad.

We brought Christin in when we were looking at launching a Saas product to leverage our internal analytics platform. She jumped right in and was able to understand our business quickly. Christin brought deep experience on Saas pricing models and best practices for relevant financial metrics, which she was able communicate clearly and succinctly to our team, seamlessly filling key gaps in our team’s knowledge base. While her engagement with us had a more limited focus around the Saas product exploration, I could tell she had a wealth of knowledge and keen intuition around many aspects of the finance function for a growing, young business like Nithio. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Christin again in the future if the right opportunity presented itself.