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Back in 2001, as the dotcom bubble imploded and the U.S. economy took a downward spiral, Anisha Sood, a recently hired consultant for Accenture, felt fortunate.

\u201cThere were rounds of layoffs happening and Accenture was trying to manage it well, but I got lucky because I was in healthcare,\u201d explains Sood, who reports that other practice areas such as technology and media were not so fortunate.

Seven years later, just as Sood had finished logging her first 48 hours as an investment banker with Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers collapsed\u2014but once more, Sood felt fortunate.

\u201cHere again, I could credit healthcare as being the stabilizing factor, although there were no deals happening, no IPOs or M&A, for about 12 months after I started,\u201d recalls Sood, who in the years that followed would lead a variety of health sector transactions for the bank before moving back to hometown Seattle to begin a multichapter career as a venture investor in healthcare. \xa0

\u201cWhen I left Seattle in the \u201990s, it was kind of a small town known for its alternative rock, and now I returned to find this bustling world of startups and spinoffs and large players that had made a reinvestment in healthcare and seeded this entrepreneurial biocommunity,\u201d observes Sood, whose venture investing career chapter\u2014unlike those that preceded it\u2014appears to have opened unaccompanied by the peril of economic collapse.

There were other differences as well, for it was during Sood\u2019s venture investing days that she first began to acquire the escalating desire to build things that over time fueled her ambitions to become a CFO.

Along the way, Sood says, she came to realize that most often it was finance that was first to expose whether or not a company was going to be successful. As she likes to put it: \u201cFinance is the canary in the coal mine.\u201d

According to Sood, the welfare of the bond between venture investors, boards, and entrepreneurial founders often depends on a single deliverable that is usually framed by more or less the same query: \u201cCan you provide us with a unit economic model that shows us how profitable or sustainable your clients will be over time as you start to grow?\u201d

It was just such a deliverable that later tripped up the management team of one of Sood\u2019s portfolio companies.

\u201cWe realized over time that the company was not tracking toward its numbers\u2014the incremental margin, the incremental sustainability, just wasn\u2019t materializing, and it became clear that there was a flaw in the strategy and underlying business model for the company,\u201d remembers Sood, who adds that the company was ultimately sold for far less than what had previously been projected by venture investors.

For Sood, the experience reveals why finance must always be the canary\u2014and sound off with tough questions that are sometimes difficult to ask.

Says Sood: \u201cHow much do we need to pay attention to these numbers? When must we start to call it? If we let things play out, it may lead to an exit that no one wants to see.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney