What's real is family

"Everyone's looking for the thrill, but what's real is family.” — Dominic Toretto

Everyone has a thought or two about family. Whether it is a quote, a joke, or an emotional anecdote, we tend to establish our identities as people and professionals within some kind of meaningful familial social dynamic. And hopefully, that group reciprocates that meaning with you. It also gives me a little bit of license to quote Vin Diesel unironically. 

But family is also what jumped out to me in the first interaction I had with 295Greg Kautz, erstwhile CFO and current founder of startup fintech, Black Owl Systems. In fact, this is one of the first things he said to us at CFO:

“If you want to do a story on a father/son CPA team who have built a new lease accounting system that is going to change the world, let me know.”

A bold proclamation! 

But over the course of several conversations with Kautz, it helped me understand why Greg, and his son Derek Kautz, would be so confident. It isn’t simply that they’re both seasoned finance professionals with significant experience and cachet across industry, but that their skills and talents happen to so tightly align and complement each other. It’s that they’d want to do it together. 

"The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going." — George Carlin

While I’m sure father and son have gone through the growing pains of launching a new company in a competitive market, and it might at times be compounded by the intra-family dynamic, the unfolding story they’ve shared with CFO highlights the best version of all of it: building something from scratch with the people you care about most. 

A happy family is but an earlier heaven. — George Bernard Shaw