Every startup on earth is valued on ARR. Almost nobody inside those startups agrees on what the number actually is.

Luke McKinlay is Head of Finance at Nuvo — the Sequoia and Spark-backed B2B trade network that raised a $34M Series A and now sits underneath trade relationships for more than 200,000 businesses. Before Nuvo he was the first finance hire at Fountain, where he helped scale the business from roughly $2M to north of $40M in revenue and had a hand in raising over $200M along the way. Today he runs the entire finance function at a company heading into its Series B, essentially by himself, with a modern stack absorbing about 85% of the work.

In this conversation with LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico, Luke works through the ARR cases nobody has a clean answer for — the ramping multi-year contract, the AI usage line with no contractual commitment, the enterprise logo you close with a zero-dollar floor, the pilot you want to count during a fundraise. Then it opens up: comp plans when half your revenue is variable, why the right answer for most companies is fewer sales reps rather than more, how finance and RevOps should operate as one closed loop, and what a modern finance team actually looks like when AI is doing the work three people used to do.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

Why four people in the same room have four different ARR numbers — and the meeting that fixes it

Why FinOps is becoming its own discipline — and why you should not merge it into RevOps

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Cold open + intro

01:49 — Why everybody at your company has a different ARR number

06:41 — The ramping contract: 20K, 50K, 70K — what do you report?

10:31 — AI and usage revenue: nothing forces the customer to pay you next month

13:27 — Anthony's JP Morgan story: a huge logo with zero commitment

26:17 — Comp plan design: pay on commit, then true up

30:47 — Fewer reps, not more — why stacking headcount fails

37:37 — How finance and RevOps should actually work together

47:22 — The modern CFO: a finance team of one

50:38 — Running Claude in the background all day

59:59 — Is FinOps the next RevOps?

01:02:06 — Wrap

ABOUT THE GUEST

Luke McKinlay is Head of Finance at Nuvo, the B2B trade network backed by Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, Founders Fund, and Index Ventures, which has raised $45M to date including a $34M Series A. A senior finance and operations leader with more than 14 years of experience, Luke started his career in consulting and hedge funds before becoming the first finance hire at Fountain, where he helped scale the company from roughly $2M to over $40M in revenue and contributed to raising more than $200M in capital. At Nuvo he built the finance function from scratch, migrating off QuickBooks onto a modern stack and running the entire discipline as a team of one heading into a Series B.

ABOUT THE LEANSCALE PODCAST

The LeanScale Podcast is the show for GTM operators building the next generation of revenue infrastructure. Hosted by Anthony Enrico, co-founder of LeanScale, we go deep with the operators, founders, and executives shaping how modern go-to-market teams are designed, scaled, and transformed.

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KEYWORDS / TAGS

ARR, Annual Recurring Revenue, What Counts as ARR, ARR Definition, Usage Based Pricing, NRR, GRR, RevOps, FinOps, GTM, CFO, Head of Finance, Startup Finance, SaaS Metrics, SaaS Finance, Series A, Series B, Fundraising, Investor Reporting, Sales Compensation, Comp Plan Design, Clawback, Quota Retirement, Capacity Model, Growth Model, Rillet, Ramp, Rippling, AI in Finance, AI Agents, Claude, Nuvo, Fountain, B2B SaaS, LeanScale, Anthony Enrico, Luke McKinlay

HASHTAGS

#ARR #SaaSMetrics #RevOps #FinOps #GTM #AI #StartupFinance #CFO #SaaSFinance #B2BSaaS #SalesCompensation #Fundraising #UsageBasedPricing #LeanScale #LeanScalePodcast

Nobody Agrees What ARR Is | Luke McKinlay on the One Number Every Startup Is Valued On

The LeanScale Podcast with Anthony Enrico

Nobody Agrees What ARR Is | Luke McKinlay on the One Number Every Startup Is Valued On