LinkedIn Branding for tech founders and CFOs to grow revenue and authority | Posts to help you build a brand that gets attention & clients...

👋🏼 Hey, I'm Ali.

I'm a brand advisor and writer helping SaaS founders of high-growth B2B startups build powerful brands through un-ignorable content to grow influence and attract customers 10x faster.

I use the latest branding and content marketing strategies to help FP&A & FinOps founders & CFOs grow and get well known. 

The internet is loaded with content. So how will your brand and content stand out in the sea of sameness? That's where I jump in to help you stand out with my high-end branding and content strategies to accelerate your growth, reputation, and revenue.

I've written thousands of pieces of compelling and trustworthy content for tech founders, VCs, and SaaS companies. Hundreds of my written posts have gone viral on LinkedIn.

⚡I have spent the last 3 years helping VCs, founders and tech companies bring value in the digital world through branding strategies, content writing, and social selling to skyrocket their growth.

I have helped:

→ GPs scale their online brand to generate investment opportunities.
→ B2B SaaS companies with brand messaging, positioning, and content writing to attract customers. 
→ Founders generate $30 million in revenue while growing their LinkedIn following with 50 million+ views.

I'm highly skilled at personal branding, ghostwriting, and creating brand & content strategies. I believe learning never stops, so I'm always optimizing. 


📚 I have a master's in marketing & management, and on a personal level, I am someone who:

‣ Motivates people.
‣ Deals with empathy.
‣ Loves to solve problems.
‣ Focuses on bringing value.
‣ Always happy to consult with and navigate people.
‣ Love to lead an intentional life to leave a positive legacy behind.

Ali
alibilawal.com 

📧 hello@alibilawal.com

Ali Bilawal

Wouter Born

GP at Born Capital | CFOTech Investor, Advisor & Entrepreneur. Follow me for posts about finance transformation, FP&A, startups and entrepreneurship.

I’ve spent the last 25 years at the intersection of finance and technology, helping CFOs move beyond spreadsheets to AI-driven, strategic leadership. 

My career has taken me from consulting for Fortune 500 finance teams to building, scaling, and investing in CFOTech companies that transform the way finance operates.

I co-founded CXO Software, a CFO-focused performance reporting platform that served clients like Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Experian, and Facebook. After an 11-year journey, CXO Software was successfully acquired by insightsoftware, a global CFOTech leader backed by TA Associates.

At insightsoftware, I led M&A strategy, guiding acquisitions and helping the world’s top CFO software firms scale. Now, as General Partner at Born Capital, I invest in the next generation of CFOTech startups, backing founders who are reshaping FP&A, financial close, and CFO automation.

I write CFOOffice.io, a fast-growing newsletter read by thousands of CFOs and finance leaders, where I break down AI’s impact on finance, FP&A, and automation. 

As a speaker at high-profile CFO events, I help finance teams cut through the hype and take practical steps to leverage AI today.

Beyond finance, I’m a competitive open-water swimmer, endurance athlete, and adventure-seeker. 

Let’s connect to discuss AI, finance, and where the CFO role is headed next.

Founding & Managing Partner

Specialized investor in CFOTech.
As an entrepreneur with a successful exit, I am passionate about helping founders to succeed. I have been in their shoes, and want to help them to thrive.

Financial storytelling is broken. CFOs don't lack insight but storytelling is hard for finance. Here are 5 states of financial storytelling every CFO must focus on:

1. State: Where are we right now?

Revenue: $42.3m (73% of FY target)
Net Income: $6.3m
These tiles anchor reality.

They answer, What’s the current position?

2. Delta: What changed?

EBITDA bridge: Actual $6.1m vs Plan $6.8m (–$0.7m)

This is movement. What improved? 
What deteriorated? Why?

Boards care more about this than the absolute number.

3. Trajectory: Where are we heading?

Cash Forecast Q4 2026: $18–21m
Runway: 19 months
This tile shows direction, not certainty.

It answers, If nothing changes, where do we land?

4. Exposure: What could break the plan?

Customer concentration risk
Top 3 customers = 38% of revenue
Impact: High | Probability: Medium

This is tension in the story. Unspoken risk destroys trust.

5. Choice: What should we do about it?

Hiring Plan scenarios
Freeze: +$3.2m cash
Selective: +$1.4m
Accelerate: –$2.1m

This is leadership. 
Options. Trade-offs. Consequences.
No choice = no decision.

TAKEAWAY

72% of investors back companies that tell clear financial stories. So every dashboard must follow the 5 states of financial storytelling. 

1. State
2. Delta
3. trajectory
4. Exposure
5. Choice

Finance decks fail because they mix these states.

Boards don’t want more numbers.

They want to know where they are in the story.

That’s financial storytelling.

Stories > numbers 

♻️ Save this post and share it with your network.

Let's help finance become storytellers.

P.S. Join 30,000 CFOs and FP&A operators learning how to use AI in finance at cfooffice.io

GP at Born Capital | cfooffice.io | CFOTech investor, advisor & founder of finstory.ai

MIT warns CFOs:

1. 95% of AI is dangerous 

95% of AI projects don’t deliver ROI. For every one success, 19 fail. Why? Because most companies stop at pilots. They build AI that works in a demo but breaks in the complexity of month-end closes, messy ERP data, and shifting definitions of KPIs. In finance, almost 'works' isn’t good enough. If your AI can’t handle exceptions, it can't survive.

2. The problem is the system design

CFOs understand controls, testing, and audits. Yet many treat AI like magic: one query in, perfect answer out. It doesn’t work that way. The 5% who succeed build loops: AI generates, AI checks, AI tests, and humans sign off. Just like you’d never release financials without review, you can’t deploy AI without system-level rigor.

3. Finance is where AI breaks fastest

In marketing, if AI gets it close, the copy still ships. In finance, if AI gets it close, you lose trust. Forecasts, reconciliations, and board packs demand repeatability. But generative AI is nondeterministic. It can give different answers every time. That’s why projects fail. Unless you engineer consistency into the process, your finance AI fails on arrival.

4. The GenAI Divide is real

MIT calls it out: 95% stuck, 5% pulling away. The stuck companies keep buying static tools that don’t learn or adapt. The winners build systems that plug into workflows, improve with feedback, and compound value over time. In finance, that divide shows up as cycle times, cost leverage, and strategic influence.

TAKEAWAY

The question is simple:
will your finance team be in the 95% or the 5%?

AI is not plug-and-play. It’s infrastructure.

Treat it like you treat financial controls.

- Test.
- Design.
- Improve continuously.

That’s how you turn AI from hype into ROI.

Yes, 95% of AI projects fail. But the real story is in the 5%: https://lnkd.in/ecdnhmYD

Just landed in Dubai and checked in. Hosting a private CFO dinner with a curated group of CFOs and finance founders at a Michelin-starred restaurant:  https://luma.com/qcwcg1yf

There's going to be focused conversations on how AI is actually being used in finance... controls, decision-making, and where it creates real leverage today.

We’ve capped it at 15 people to keep the discussion honest and useful. 

If you’re a CFO or finance founder in Dubai and want a serious conversation with peers, you must be in the room.

I sat down with a CFO Jan-Pieter van Winsen and a storyteller Ali Bilawal. Here are 3 steps to build a financial story every CFO must read atleast once: 

Step 1: Prepare the inputs (and let AI ask)

A board story is unsafe if any pillar is missing.

Aggregate the data

• History (trends, not just this month)
• Plain data (raw facts)
• KPIs & volumes (real drivers)
• Hierarchies (entities, regions, cost centers)

Build the context

• Scenario (what situation are we in?)
• Date (what period actually matters?)
• Context (what changed and why?)

This is where AI should ask questions, not generate text.

Define the purpose

• Mindset for the meeting
• Decision required
• Depth of detail

What must be editable, interactive, and validated. Most teams skip this. They give AI numbers and expect judgment. Judgment only appears after questions.

Step 2: Structure the story

This phase is cyclical, not linear.

• Engine: loop data, context, and intent
• Rulebook: what gets included vs cut
• Tools: enforce structure and consistency
• Goal: one coherent storyline

This is exactly what strong FP&A does with a CFO. AI can do it too, if the system forces reasoning, not writing.

Step 3: The output

A board story isn’t a draft. It’s a claim.

Before sharing:

• Look: board-ready formatting
• Visuals: decision-clarifying charts
• Content: accurate and relevant
• Flow: logical narrative arc

Then it evolves:

First suggestion

• Improved story through iteration
• Final board-ready storyline

That’s how humans work.

That’s how AI should work.

TAKEAWAY

You can’t solve a context problem with a prompt.

You need a system that:

• Stores context.
• Asks the right questions.
• Remembers past decisions.
• Connects actuals, budget, and forecast.

That’s how financial storytelling becomes leadership and not reporting.

If this resonates, you’re already thinking like a CFO.

P.S. Sell a good financial story to the CEO and the Board: https://lnkd.in/ed34ne_F

AI is changing the CFO role... but how? Every expert is screaming that AI will change every role. But if you’re a CFO looking at your P&L, you’re probably asking: 

When?

AI is on the balance sheet, but the value is missing. 

And MIT also published a study with a headline-grabbing stat: 95% of enterprise AI projects fail to deliver ROI.

That means for every success story, 19 projects fail. Burning budgets, wasting time, and leaving leadership wondering if AI is just hype. But inside the company, the truth is harsher:

Adoption stalls.
Workflows stay brittle.
Nobody trusts the output.

The pilot never scales. 

The project never leaves the lab. 

And the ROI never arrives.

To understand how AI is actually changing roles in the $18.6 trillion labor market, the market must be analyzed through a 3-layer framework: 

1. Exposure
2. Adoption
3. Response

This model explains why different observers see different realities. Some focus on what the tech can do, while others focus on what it is doing.

Let’s dive in at the AI CFO Office.

taplio

The Battle

Ali Bilawal

Wouter Born

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taplio

The Battle

Ali Bilawal

Wouter Born

Followers

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Wouter Born's LinkedIn Performance

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