Director of Strategic Finance

Company Description

OleOle is building a global social, messaging and commerce platform designed specifically for the more than three billion football fans around the world.

The platform brings together social media, short-form video, encrypted messaging and calling, live scores, real-time translation and football content within a single global ecosystem. Our goal is to connect fans across clubs, countries and languages while creating an infrastructure that extends well beyond social media.

Every OleOle user receives a persistent Wallet ID that connects their identity across the ecosystem. Over time, OleOle will integrate payments, commerce, Mini Programs, ticketing and travel, gaming, digital assets and financial services. Mini Programs will allow clubs, brands, merchants and third-party developers to build services directly within OleOle, using the platform’s identity, social and payment infrastructure.

OleOleSport, our ticketing and travel business, provides an important early commercial opportunity through tickets, VIP hospitality and travel experiences around major sporting events. As the OleOle audience grows, additional businesses are designed to scale alongside it, including Mini Programs, payments, gaming and NewZeros, our planned financial infrastructure combining exchange capabilities with a broader payments and transaction network.

We are currently a team of approximately 20 people building across backend infrastructure, social, video, messaging, AI and translation, payments, football data, product and design.

OleOle is being built around a long-term thesis: football is the world’s largest shared passion, yet its global audience remains fragmented across social networks, messaging applications, sports platforms and commerce providers. We believe there is an opportunity to bring those experiences together in one global platform and build significant businesses around the resulting network.

OleOle — Where Fans Kick Off.

Job Description

OleOle is seeking a Director of Strategic Finance to build and own the financial model behind a global football platform with multiple interconnected businesses.

This is not a traditional accounting or controllership role. We are looking for someone who can take a complex platform strategy and translate it into a rigorous, investor-grade financial model that demonstrates how OleOle’s businesses develop individually and collectively as the platform scales.

Your first major responsibility will be building the OleOle master financial model. The model will examine the business at approximately 50 million, 100 million and 400 million global users, allowing assumptions around adoption, engagement, transaction volume, pricing, margins and penetration to change dynamically across the ecosystem.

You will build detailed economic models for OleOleSport ticketing, travel and VIP hospitality; Bad Monkey, our planned hybrid fixed-odds and prediction-market gaming business; Mini Programs and third-party commerce; sponsorship and commercial partnerships; and NewZeros, OleOle’s planned financial infrastructure encompassing payments, wallets, transaction processing and exchange capabilities.

NewZeros represents a particularly important long-term opportunity. The model must go beyond conventional exchange economics to examine what happens if OleOle’s financial infrastructure participates in payments and transactions generated throughout an ecosystem serving tens or potentially hundreds of millions of users.

OleOleSport requires a different approach. Because ticketing, travel and hospitality can potentially generate revenue before OleOle develops a large social audience, you will build a detailed bottom-up model for this business and help demonstrate its role as an early commercial engine.

You will also model OleOle’s capital requirements, cash utilization, operating expenses, unit economics, gross margins and long-term profitability. The objective is not to manufacture aggressive revenue projections. It is to create a defensible model in which management and investors can change assumptions and immediately understand their effect on the business.

You will work directly with the Founder & CEO and, as the company grows, with our CFO and business-unit leadership. The financial model you create will become a permanent management and fundraising tool and will evolve as actual operating data replaces assumptions.

Following funding, this role will continue as a senior member of OleOle’s finance organization, owning strategic planning, forecasting, budgeting, business-unit economics, KPI development, scenario analysis and financial reporting while helping build the company’s broader finance function.

We are looking for someone with exceptional financial modeling and analytical ability who understands how to model businesses such as marketplaces, payments, fintech, exchanges, gaming, consumer platforms or other transaction-driven businesses. Experience in investment banking, strategic finance, growth-stage technology, private equity, venture-backed companies or similarly rigorous financial environments would be particularly relevant.

The right person must be comfortable starting with ambiguity. OleOle is creating businesses that do not fit neatly into a conventional SaaS model. You will be expected to understand how each economic engine actually works, challenge assumptions, identify missing variables and construct the financial framework from the ground up.

This is ultimately the person who turns our vision into numbers sophisticated investors can interrogate.

OleOle is currently being built by a team working under deferred compensation while we complete our funding. This is not an unpaid or volunteer position: compensation is agreed upon in writing and accrues during the deferred period, becoming payable following funding. Once funded, this role will transition to a traditional compensation structure including a competitive salary, equity ownership and participation in the OleX token program. We are looking for someone who understands the realities of building an ambitious company before institutional funding and wants to remain with OleOle as the company grows.

Qualifications

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in strategic finance, investment banking, private equity, growth equity, corporate development, venture-backed technology, fintech, payments, marketplaces, gaming, exchanges or other transaction-driven businesses.
• Exceptional financial modeling skills, with demonstrated experience building complex, multi-business operating models from the ground up rather than maintaining models created by others.
• Experience building integrated financial models encompassing revenue drivers, unit economics, transaction volume, gross margin, operating expenses, cash flow, capital requirements, scenario analysis and long-term profitability.
• Demonstrated ability to model businesses at significant scale, including scenarios involving tens or hundreds of millions of users, large transaction volumes, multiple geographies and multiple interconnected revenue streams.
• Deep understanding of payments and financial-network economics, including transaction volume, take rates, basis-point economics, merchant payments, wallets, cross-border transactions, payment-processing costs and network effects.
• Strong understanding of marketplace and platform economics, including GMV, buyer/seller participation, merchant adoption, transaction frequency, take rates, contribution margins and network effects.
• Experience with exchange or trading economics, including trading volume, liquidity, spreads, transaction fees and the economics of operating financial marketplaces.
• Experience with gaming, sports betting or prediction-market economics is highly desirable, particularly an understanding of fixed-odds betting, hold, liquidity, market making, prediction markets, gaming taxes and jurisdiction-specific economics.
• Experience evaluating or modeling consumer internet/social platforms at substantial scale, including user acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, cohort behavior and monetization.
• Ability to build sophisticated scenario models in which assumptions can be dynamically changed and flow through individual business units and consolidated company financials.
• Demonstrated experience producing financial models and investment materials capable of withstanding scrutiny from institutional investors, venture capital firms, private equity firms, investment banks, family offices and sophisticated financial counterparties.
• Experience supporting significant capital raises, M&A transactions, strategic investments, IPO preparation or institutional financing is strongly preferred.
• Ability to translate an ambitious strategic vision into measurable financial assumptions without confusing opportunity with forecast. Must be comfortable challenging founders and senior executives when assumptions cannot be financially supported.
• Strong understanding of three-statement financial modeling, valuation methodologies, discounted cash flow analysis, comparable-company analysis, sensitivity analysis, capital structure and financing scenarios.
• Advanced Excel and/or Google Sheets modeling skills are essential. Experience using SQL, Python, BI platforms, financial planning systems or AI-assisted financial analysis is highly desirable.
• MBA, CFA, CPA or advanced degree in finance, economics, accounting or a quantitative discipline preferred. Exceptional professional experience may substitute for formal credentials.
• Previous experience at a leading investment bank, private equity/growth equity firm, major fintech/payments company, global technology platform or highly successful venture-backed company would be particularly attractive.
• Experience working internationally and modeling businesses across multiple currencies, regulatory environments and geographic markets is strongly preferred.
• Must be capable of working directly with the Founder & CEO and senior technical/product leadership in an early-stage environment where significant portions of the business are still being designed.
• Must be willing to personally build the model. This is not a role for someone who has reached the point in their career where all detailed financial analysis is delegated to analysts.

Additional Information

Solutions not problems .

• Creative problem solver who can courageously propose and support new ideas to our organization. Not interested in best practices, lets build something better!
• Ability to adapt. An ideal candidate will welcome the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities and general growing pains of an early-stage technology company
• An exceptional entrepreneurial judgment that fosters independence over micro-management
• Understanding of football and international sports a huge plus

Ole Ole is located in beautiful Austin Texas, however, this role requires some travel we are privately held and rapidly growing!