Yanni Papoutsi

The Story

I didn't start out wanting to write books. I started out trying to understand the numbers.

In 2009, I was building financial models for startups. Not as a CFO. Not as a consultant. As an operator trying to make sense of the business. Revenue projections didn't match reality. Unit economics told stories that founders weren't seeing. Cap tables told stories of who really controlled the company.

The pattern became clear: founders knew their market. They knew their product. They didn't know their numbers well enough to raise capital confidently or operate decisively. And the investors they pitched knew how to read those gaps in a financial model within five minutes.

So I spent the next 15 years closing that gap. I led financial strategy across multiple funding rounds and exits. I worked through multiple fundraising rounds backed by Creandum, Profounders, B2Ventures, and Boost Capital across the UK, US, and Dubai markets.

Those experiences weren't theoretical. They were the ground truth that comes from being the person in the room translating the business into the language investors understand.

In 2024, I started writing about it. Not because I wanted to be an author. But because every founder I worked with asked the same questions, and every answer came from the same playbook. So I wrote it down. The Ready Series is four books distilled from over 100 articles and 15 years of hands-on experience.

No fluff. No theory. Just the models, the metrics, and the decisions that actually matter.