Founder's Story
From Deepfakes to Burn Rates: The Hidden Dangers That Break Startups (And How to Outsmart Them) | Ep 218 with Sanjay Chadha Co-Founder of SAV Associates
Fri, 9 May 2025
Sanjay Chadha, co-founder of SAV Associates, brings over 25 years of global experience in corporate finance, cybersecurity, and risk management. From navigating boardrooms in Vietnam and Madagascar to safeguarding data in North America, Sanjay has advised more than 1,000 clients on building resilient, profitable companies. In this episode, he reveals the costly mistakes most founders make—plus how to prevent a deepfake disaster from taking down your business.Key Discussion PointsWhy He Left Corporate Life: The spark that pushed Sanjay to leave Big Four consulting and build a global advisory firm.Global Lessons from 7 Countries: What living and working across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East taught him about scaling internationally.How to Think Like a CFO: The most overlooked financial mistakes—and why founders must read the story behind their numbers.Cybersecurity & Deepfakes: Why AI is a blessing and a bombshell—and how one email nearly tricked his entire firm.Risk is the New Currency: Why protecting data matters more than profits in today’s tech-driven landscape.Cash Burn ≠ Growth: The trap of fast-spending founders and the secret to building companies that last.Key TakeawaysStartups don’t fail from bad ideas—they fail from poor financial fluency.If you can’t read your numbers, you can’t write your success story.Cyber risk isn’t optional anymore—one deepfake could cost your company everything.Global mindset, local agility: Scaling safely starts with structure, not size.Every number tells a story—and your CFO should know how to read it.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com
Chapter 1: What sparked Sanjay Chadha to leave corporate life and start a business?
Thank you for having me here, Daniel. I really appreciate your time today because I think it's a great forum. A lot of people should get inspiration from my perspective and how I started this journey. So I think a place stone does not gain mass. So I was at a position in my corporate life where I was not moving. I was in a position where I was not learning anything. I had a very defined job.
which was box 10. I couldn't, you know, I didn't have the vigor room to basically either brush up on my skills, learning new things that were happening around me and, you know, felt suffocated. So I think that's where the spark came from. And I think I'm very grateful that it came because, you know, looking back about 20 years ago when I was doing my MBA, you know,
when I spoke with my peers and friends and colleagues, we always had this question in mind. Is the corporate ladder the way to go or to start being an entrepreneur right after MBA is the way to go, right? Now, if you go to San Francisco and you speak to anybody from Stanford or any of the colleges there, the vibe is completely different. Yes. Full scale, 100% entrepreneur, right?
But about 20 years ago, I think Corporate Ladder was the place to be. And I was lucky enough to join and work at a couple of big four firms, audit firms, and then get into Fortune 500. But I think my spark came from the fact that I was not learning anything. I was not delivering value. I mean, I delivered value, but then I was boxed in to go beyond a particular company.
particular, you know, place where I was.
Yeah. I think we, we hear that a lot, right? You kind of max out your capabilities at the organization. You also realize that why are you making so much money for someone else when you could probably make more of that for yourself. And then you, you want to do more and the corporates, you know, corporations don't typically, uh, have that type of culture at some point. Do you find though that, uh,
that because you had that corporate job, a lot of the things that you learned, you were able to take away and move into business.
So I think I would say my consulting life gave me a lot of takeaways, not so much the corporate life. Now, you know, you talked about money, and definitely there's always this fear factor that, you know, you're getting a paycheck, and then you have to feed yourself and meet all your needs and desires. But don't forget that, you know, you have a very defined life,
And what I was doing is I was mitigating risk, solving complex problems, delivering value, big buzzwords, but within the boundaries. You know, even though I was I thought that I was taking decisions, but I had to take those decisions, keeping in mind a lot of other people that were around me or the people that were getting impacted.
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Chapter 2: What global lessons did Sanjay learn from working in multiple countries?
What were the things that you learned since you had lived in different countries? You had done things in different countries that you could then take back to your company to make sure that your company also meets global needs?
So I think, you know, COVID taught us a lot, right? I think in the early 2000s, there was a big push for, you know, working remotely, internet. There was a time when... you know, the larger organizations had stopped travel and they were talking a lot on, you know, Zooms and Zoom-like platforms in the past. But I think COVID really educated us very, very well.
Now, in our industry, we have both experienced people in the firm and then We have to just by the nature of it, because there's a lot of burnout. We bring in a lot of people who are just out of college or university or have very limited experience. So so I think we have tried a lot working as a firm. in a hybrid model or remotely.
But I think we try as much as possible to work as a team in the office. Having said that, what these technologies have done for us is that now we have literally stopped going to client sites. So if I look back about five or seven years ago, if you had to perform an audit, we would physically go to client location and we would, you know,
touch, feel the organization before we conclude, yes, it's a going operation and everything is working perfectly. Now, we have matured to a stage where we are assessing all the risks and obtaining all the evidences to support that, yes, it's meeting our objectives purely by talking to people on technologies like today that we're talking to each other.
Now, that has also helped us to have our teams in different geographic locations. So we, if it is possible, we try to deliver work from North America. So we have offices in Canada and in the U.S. But we do now have office in India as well, where we have few people that deliver work. Not a large part of consulting services for our clients, but they do.
So what has happened is that because we don't have to send our troops to the ground at a client location, we have been able to expand ourselves beyond the geographic location that we are in. So we have clients all over Canada. Literally every province we have our clients, and we have a lot of clients in the U.S. as well. We have some clients in Europe as well.
So, yes, we have been able to serve many clients in different geographic locations just purely because of the technologies that we have these days.
We could probably say that finances, money, these are the lifeblood of pretty much every company no matter what stage they're at. I know a bunch of people that went out of business because they either didn't have the right CPA, they weren't really paying attention to their finances.
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Chapter 3: How does Sanjay Chadha manage a global advisory firm?
We spent our 30% of our practice, 30, 40% of practices, traditional accounting firm, but about 60% of our practice is, uh, cybersecurity and protection of data and privacy. But, uh, To answer your question about the accounting and finance, so I feel what is important, there are a couple of things which are very, very important, right? So keeping a tab on your numbers is very, very important.
I find in my business, we come with amazing entrepreneurs who have a great idea, but they are not successful because either they have hired people who are, you know, are not delivering the same amount of value that an expert would and the cost is
Or they have not been able to focus on understanding the client needs, stakeholder expectations, and they are very focused on, you know, what they believe is, you know, they want to move the world the way they look at the world, right? So what it does is they overspend. And without really comparing the inflows and the outflows, you can definitely do it for a very short period of time.
And these days, you have a lot of venture funds and startup supporting agencies. But in the long run, you have to understand your math very, very well. So you might be the best cook in the kitchen, but you need to know how much that menu costs and how much should it be sold for. And then there is a sweet spot. You can't make it super expensive that nobody comes to your restaurant.
So I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't see the value that monitoring their finances brings to them because ultimately that's what makes them successful. And most of these organizations are not a not-for-profit. They are for-profit organizations. So I think that has to be one of the values that has to be kept in mind when you start something.
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Chapter 4: Why is financial fluency essential for startup success?
I think a lot of people don't want to face it and they don't want to talk about it. Money has this weird thing with a lot of people where they like you said, they want to, you know, OK, money is coming in. I'm going to spend money, but I don't even want to look at it. I don't want to look at my bank account. I don't want to look at my profitability.
These are things that I think a lot of people just for some reason they have a relationship with money that is sometimes negative. When you look at profitability for companies, is there a certain percentages or is it totally dependent on industry or is it EBITDA? What do you find some of the most successful companies, what are they looking at?
So before I answer that question again, I'm sorry, your conversation really brings certain things to my mind which are real-life examples. So we have seen in our practice, we do a lot of service evaluations. So one of the areas, because a lot of companies are now going into cloud and they go into technologies like AWS and Azure and GCP, which is Google. So without really realizing...
They subscribe to a lot of services they're not using. They're configuring a lot of services that they're not using. They have lots of capacity that they're not using. And before they know it, instead of paying probably $5,000 a month, they're paying $15,000 a month. And that's not, you know, it's not visible because your credit card gets debited for that amount.
And at the end of the year, if you see, you've burned a lot of money, which you could have saved. Right. So now this was one of the digressions I took. But every small piece of expense has to be monitored. Now, definitely there are certain industry benchmarks where your gross margin and EBITDA are definitely the drivers. But again, it also depends on in your life cycle where you are. Right.
So now these days, again, depending on the industry, if it is capital heavy industry, obviously your your your profit margins are thinner. If you're a technology company, the expectations are that your profit margins will be higher in terms of multiples. But again, where are you in your life cycle also defines what should be your appropriate benchmark.
But bottom line is, whatever you're doing today, you should definitely have a goal in mind that, you know, in the journey of one year, three years, five years, at what point do you think you want to stabilize your organization, stop bleeding money, and start making money? For yourself and for your stakeholders. And your employees these days are your biggest stakeholders as well.
So monitoring every spend, monitoring with KPIs as to every dollar you spend on advertising, whether you're making revenue. So I think it's not about just looking at the broad numbers. It's about looking into the story of each number, which is very, very important.
And for that, you need a good CFO or good virtual CFO, if you can afford a CFO, who can read the numbers and say, oh, this number is this, but it is telling this story. The story is that compared to sales, this is huge overspend. Or compared to the projections of next three years, this is not something where you want to spend your focus and energy.
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Chapter 5: What are the overlooked financial mistakes founders make?
So every number tells a story and you need a storyteller.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that because I think many of us that have companies, we want to exit someday and we want to get the most, the best multiple and all of these things. I can imagine if you're talking three, four, five, 10 years out could add up to a tremendous amount of money. So thank you for sharing that. I am very, very scared and very curious around cybersecurity risk management.
I think a lot of us heard about this story where a CFO's voice was copied, calls the CEO, tells them to send money. The CEO sends money, but it was deepfake. And I'm hearing a lot of this stuff could materialize as AI is getting better and better at copying video and audio data.
I imagine risk management and cybersecurity on top of hacking and all these other things, it's just going to become even bigger. How are you looking at this?
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I think this is a real, a real risk of, 100% a real risk because it's not about the agents and the enhancement in artificial intelligence itself, but pure speed of the new compute technology that you're getting. It's a good marriage. So you have
the technology which works with speed of light, and then you have the agents of the artificial intelligence and the data underlying, supporting all these activities available to you. And I think that with every growing day, there's going to be exponential risk which comes with it. So I feel... we all have to be very vigilant.
We have to, again, understand what is of greatest value within our organization, whether it is intellectual property, whether it is our data, whether it is our unique processes. So first of all, you have to kind of take account for all the important and valuable assets that you have, that you think if they go away, it'll be very hard for you to come out of that the best.
As much as sending a $100,000 check by somebody making a CFO, somebody calling an accountant saying that they're the CFO, you can still recover from that, probably from the damage. But if
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Chapter 6: How can startups manage data and cybersecurity effectively?
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Your client information is lost. You lose the credibility and you can go down in a day. You're working with a very large bank as a service provider and a huge amount of data is lost. Say, I don't want to name a bank just for the sake of it. But for example, if there's a leading bank and you lose a credible amount of information And they are on Wall Street Journal. You know, that is damaging.
That is like RIP, right? So bottom line is the organizations have to understand that this is a real fact. This is coming. You can't, you know, close your eyes and say it's not going to hurt or bother you because every organization has something which is of importance to them. So early on, try to put defense in depth.
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