Today we’d like to introduce you to Oz Merchant.
Oz, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve been helping build SaaS startups for the last 20 years. I’m on startup 7. I mentor lots of other startup founders. I run an accelerator program too. The current startup came out of working with yet another startup struggling with 3 year pro forma statements. I got curious about how AI could help solve this. This led down to further exploration regarding finance and founders and the challenges they face. After founder interviews I had a good idea of what was needed. Hence we started building out a financial operations platform to take a lot of the administrative stuff off of their plate and give them visibility into the metrics that matter at the stage they are in. The startup journey is hard enough as it is. Founders are always drinking from a firehose. They keep cycling through priorities and the fires of the day. Building trust with something as crucial as their finances is the foundation upon which we can help solve more financial operations problems they’ll face on the journey. And that has become the mission to help stack the deck in the favor of founders as we become their financial partners towards their success.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It’s never a smooth road. Smooth roads make me nervous. It goes back to choosing your hard. Anything worth doing thoroughly will come its own set of challenges. It’s part of the package. That’s why you bought the ticket. Even with 50 interviews, we have made lots of mistakes. Missteps in building. Missteps in hiring. Missteps in positioning. Missteps in pricing. Most problems can be resolved as long as you have a dialog with your customers. Solving their problems is the north star. That doesn’t mean a faster horse. It means understanding the problem deep enough to anticipate the next thing they will be asking for and build something that solves the problem more holistically and generatively.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Futureproof is a financial operating system for startup founders.
We unify bookkeeping, forecasting, cap table management, and investor reporting into one platform. Most founders cobble together QuickBooks, spreadsheets, Carta, and data rooms, then spend hours context-switching whenever an investor asks a question. We eliminate that.
What we specialize in:
Giving pre-Series B SaaS and ecommerce founders financial clarity without requiring them to become finance experts. Our AI handles transaction categorization, cash forecasting, and equity modeling so founders can focus on building.
What sets us apart:
We’re not another point solution. The market is full of tools that solve one slice of the finance problem. Bookkeeping here. Forecasting there. Cap table somewhere else. Founders don’t need more tools. They need fewer. Futureproof is built to be the financial command center founders actually want, not another tab they forget to check.
What I’m most proud of:
The origin story is real. This came from sitting with a founder manually building a 36-month pro forma and realizing how broken the whole system is. Finance is the invisible engine behind every growth decision, but most founders are flying blind. We’re changing that.
What readers should know:
The startup journey is hard enough. Founders are drinking from a firehose every day. Building trust with something as crucial as their finances is the foundation. From there, we become their financial partner through the entire journey, not just another vendor. The mission is simple: stack the deck in the founder’s favor.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Relentless curiosity paired with founder empathy.
After 20+ years and seven startups, I’ve learned that most failures aren’t technical. They’re failures of understanding. You built something people didn’t actually need. You solved the wrong problem. You got so in love with your solution that you stopped listening.
I’m a big fan of the saying, “strong convictions, loosely held.”
The characteristic that matters most is staying genuinely curious about the problem, even after you think you’ve figured it out. Fifty customer interviews in, we still made mistakes. The difference is we kept the dialog open. We kept asking questions. We stayed humble enough to hear what founders were actually struggling with versus what we assumed they needed.
Founder empathy is the other half. I’ve been in the seat. I know what it feels like to stare at a spreadsheet at 11pm wondering if you’re going to make payroll. That’s not theoretical for me. When we build Futureproof, we’re building for a version of myself from past companies. That empathy keeps us honest. It keeps us from shipping features that look impressive but don’t actually reduce the anxiety founders carry.
Curiosity keeps you learning. Empathy keeps you building the right thing. Together, they’re the difference between a product people tolerate and one they rely on.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.runfutureproof.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/runfutureproof
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/runfutureproof/
- Twitter: https://x.com/runfutureproof
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@runfutureproof
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@runfutureproof
