Investors are stepping out of their traditional investment roles to take on front-line operational jobs: some of those who serve as CFO can get a stake equivalent to 1% of the company's market cap.

On September 21, Yan Wentao, former partner of GL Ventures, officially joined DeepSeek as CFO. He is the first non-technical executive of the company since its establishment three years ago, as well as the first CFO in the company's history.

Yan Wentao is not an isolated case.

Over the past three years, a group of investors have been leaving investment funds to join operating companies: Xue Zizhao left GL Ventures for MiniMax, Luo Tianqi left GL Ventures for Starfield, Zhang Yuan left GL Ventures to join Mixue Bingcheng, and rose from CFO to CEO; overseas, Will Gaybrick, the first CFO of Stripe, came from Thrive Capital, and Krishna Rao, the first CFO of Anthropic, came from the investment and financing team of Airbnb.

In the past, investors picked companies, but now some of them simply "invest themselves" into the enterprises.

The return of such a move can be huge. A relevant practitioner Li Tao (pseudonym) told Pencil News that in the IPO sprint cases he has contacted, the CFO in charge of financing and capital operations once obtained about 1% of the company's equity as equity incentive — if calculated based on a market value of 100 billion USD in the future, the book value would reach 1 billion USD.

Why are companies scrambling to recruit investors to serve as CFOs?

Yan Wentao was born in 1991, graduated from the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering of Fudan University. Since 2013, he has successively served in Tencent Investment and H Capital. He joined GL Ventures in 2020, and has handled projects including ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, J&T Express and others.

GL Ventures is not an investor of DeepSeek, and Yan Wentao did not invest in DeepSeek during his tenure at GL Ventures — what Liang Wenfeng valued is Yan Wentao himself, not the fund relationship.

According to reports from Investment Insider, many young partners from top-tier VCs once competed for this position. The time point when Yan Wentao took office is also quite notable: one week before he joined, some media reported that DeepSeek had selected CITIC Securities as its sponsor and started preparations for IPO on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board (the news has not been confirmed by the company). Three days after he took office (September 24), news came out that DeepSeek completed a 75 billion USD financing.

Why could a company go three years without a CFO, but suddenly need one now?

When a company reaches a certain scale, it is impossible for the CEO to manage products on one hand, and handle financing and IPO preparations on his own on the other. "At this stage, it is very normal to hire a CFO to get better financing terms."

A CFO with an investor background is equivalent to inviting the person who used to sit on the opposite side of the negotiation table to join your own side.

After the company's scale expands, capital-related issues become more complicated: how much to raise in the next round, who to get the capital from, how new shareholders enter, how much existing shareholders will be diluted, and when to enter the capital market. At this time, a person who is familiar with how investment institutions think is needed.

Zhou Shouzi is a typical example.

In 2015, Xiaomi poached Zhou Shouzi, partner of DST, to serve as CFO. Zhou Shouzi was precisely the key promoter of DST's investment in Xiaomi before that. At that time, the outside world speculated that Xiaomi was about to go public, but Lei Jun denied it. However, his reason for the recruitment is more noteworthy: Xiaomi's scale has grown, and it needs someone to help plan strategies, handle investor relations, and manage investments.

Three years later, Xiaomi was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In addition, there is Xue Zizhao. He was in charge of the primary market at GL Ventures from 2019 to 2023, and joined MiniMax in September 2023 as Vice President of Investment and Financing and Joint Company Secretary, responsible for capital market operations and financial affairs.

Payment giant Stripe took the same path. Will Gaybrick was once a partner of Thrive Capital, represented the fund to invest in Stripe in 2014, and joined the company in 2015 as its first CFO. At that time, Stripe only had about 300 employees, and the finance team had only more than a dozen people. After joining the company, Gaybrick began to expand the finance team with talents from Wall Street and large technology companies. When the COVID-19 pandemic just broke out, he helped Stripe secure 600 million USD in external funds as a buffer.

The Calculation of CFOs

Companies want the experience of investors, and investors are willing to join the enterprises also have their own considerations.

Li Tao said that in the years when mobile internet companies went public intensively, he contacted some CFOs in charge of capital operations, whose equity incentive reached about 1%. This figure is not the industry average, but it is very intuitive: with a market value of 10 billion USD, 1% is worth 100 million USD; with a market value of 100 billion USD, 1% is worth 1 billion USD.

The income of VC partners comes from salary, bonus and carry, and they follow dozens of companies at the same time. After jumping into an enterprise, their personal wealth is directly bound to one single company — if they bet correctly, their position, equity and net worth will all rise together; if they bet wrong, there is no fund portfolio to diversify risks for them.

Zhang Yuan has taken the most complete path. He used to work at Bank of America Securities and GL Ventures, joined Mixue Bingcheng as CFO in February 2023, responsible for financial management and capital operation; in 2025, Mixue Bingcheng was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; in the first half of this year, 35-year-old Zhang Yuan took over as CEO. What he took over is not a startup waiting for financing: Mixue recorded a revenue of 335.6 billion RMB and a net profit attributable to shareholders of 58.8 billion RMB in 2025, with nearly 60,000 stores around the world.

From an investment institution, to CFO, to CEO of a company with tens of billions of RMB in revenue, Zhang Yuan only spent three years. Therefore, the return of "investing yourself in the enterprise" is not only stocks, it may also be a ticket to enter the top management of the company.

In the AI era, this path is more attractive — the financing amount and valuation are larger than those of internet companies in the past, and once you bet on the right track, the change in equity value will be more dramatic.

Understanding Business Is More Important Than Understanding Finance

In February this year, Starfield completed 10 billion RMB Series B financing with a valuation of 100 billion RMB; two months later, it completed another 20 billion RMB Series B+ round, pushing the valuation to 200 billion RMB, with total financing approaching 50 billion RMB. One of the people standing in the foreground to explain the valuation is Luo Tianqi, partner and CFO.

The February round introduced industrial capital from the automotive and logistics sectors. Luo Tianqi explained that the company hopes to bring in the industrial scenarios behind the shareholders through shareholder relations; after the April financing, he continued to communicate the pricing logic to the outside world, talking about the Scaling Law as well as orders — he directly stated that the fact that a robot can dance does not mean it can work, if the technology can only run demos in the lab and cannot obtain real customer orders, no matter how high the valuation is, it may be a bubble.

This is no longer the traditional CFO who "only manages financial statements". He needs to translate technology into value: can the model capabilities be converted into paying customers? The company plans to burn tens of billions more RMB, why will the next round of investors follow the investment? These were the questions that investors used to ask founders, and now they answer them themselves.

Krishna Rao of Anthropic falls into the same category. He joined the company in May 2024 as its first CFO. Before that, he led the financing and listing at Airbnb, and helped the company complete more than 10 billion USD in equity and debt financing during the pandemic. He once said that computing power is the lifeblood of the company's business. In May this year, Anthropic completed 65 billion USD of financing, with a post-money valuation of 965 billion USD; the company's annualized revenue was about 14 billion USD at the beginning of the year, and reached 65 billion USD by the end of July, of which about 80% came from enterprise-level API. At the same time, the company's net loss in 2025 was about 42 billion USD — revenue is growing rapidly, and the computing power bill is also growing rapidly, which is exactly what the CFO needs to explain to the market every day.

Li Tao believes that investor-type CFOs are highly sought after because they have long stood on the capital side, and know which stories the capital market believes in, and which figures cannot be produced will immediately block the financing. Another realistic background is that the window of the AI industry changes very fast, and enterprises hope to push forward the financing and even the capitalization process while the financing environment, valuation and public attention are all favorable.

In the past, the most important skill for investors was to find the next valuable company. Now there is a new way to make money: after finding it, join the company yourself, and make it more valuable.

This article does not constitute any investment advice.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Pencil News" (ID: pencilnews), author: Songge, published with authorization from 36Kr.