From Bulgaria to Harvard and Beyond

Mariya Valeva didn’t grow up around entrepreneurs.

She grew up in Bulgaria, where building your own business was seen as reckless—a choice you made when you didn’t have any better options. It wasn’t something you were encouraged to do. It was something you did if you had no safety net.

“Entrepreneurship in my family wasn’t celebrated,” Mariya says. “It was frowned upon because it was seen as insecure. There was no safety net.”

But that didn’t stop her from trying.

At seven years old, Mariya and her friends started making rings out of chestnuts—drilling holes with broken glass, stringing them together, and setting up a tiny stand outside their neighborhood. They sold them to parents walking home from work, saving their coins to buy comic books.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t a “real” business.

But it was the first spark.

By the time she was a teenager, she was handmaking handbags out of old jeans—selling them to friends and family to pay for English classes. Not because it was easy. Because it was necessary.

“My family was lower middle class,” she says. “If I wanted to study English, I had to figure out how to pay for it myself.”

That decision changed everything.

At 17, Mariya started learning English from scratch. By 19, she had passed the TOEFL and earned a full-ride scholarship to Smith College in Massachusetts.

Coming to the U.S. wasn’t easy. Studying economics with the dream of landing an investment banking job, she graduated at the top of her class—only to find herself locked out of the traditional finance world.

“I thought I was going to land a job in investment banking,” she says. “But I didn’t.”

She took a job at a small investment consulting firm. It didn’t fit. Finance felt too rigid. Too non-creative.

One night, she wandered into a startup mixer in New York. Back then, startups weren’t glamorous. They were what you did when you didn’t make it into banking or consulting.

But Mariya saw something different: an opportunity to build something real.

Through that mixer, she landed her first job at a scrappy startup in Chinatown—working alongside a founder who had no resources, no fancy office, and no safety net. Just an idea and a table.

“I loved it immediately,” she says. “You’re the customer service, the finance person, the hiring person, the tech QA. You do everything.”

Over the next decade, Mariya worked side by side with founders—growing teams from two people to hundreds, raising rounds, surviving layoffs, navigating exits.

She wasn’t just seeing the highlight reel. She was living the real story of what it takes to build a company from scratch.

In 2019, she planned to move to a new company. COVID crushed that plan.

Instead of sitting still, she went back to school—earning her master’s degree from Harvard while working full-time.

And when she graduated in 2023, she made herself a promise:

She was going to bet on herself.

“After seeing everything—the emotional, financial, and operational bottlenecks founders go through—I knew I could help,” Mariya says. “And I knew it was time to start something of my own.”

That something became FounderFirst—a fractional CFO firm built specifically for startups and scaling businesses.

Not another advisory shop. Not a cookie-cutter finance agency.

FounderFirst meets founders exactly where they are—whether it’s pre-funding, post-funding, or somewhere deep in the messy middle—and gives them the financial clarity they need to move faster.

Mariya didn’t scale immediately. She tested. Talked to founders. Figured out where the real pain points were.

In the beginning, she tried to do everything: operations, finance, strategy.
But within a few months, she realized the business would grow faster if she focused.

She niched down into productized financial modeling, reporting, and embedded CFO support. And everything changed.

“When I decided to niche down and productize, it became much easier to scale,” she says. “I could create packages that were scalable, repeatable, and truly valuable.”

Today, FounderFirst has a team of five, serving startups across industries like fintech, health tech, and SaaS.

Mariya’s not trying to be the flashiest finance partner.
She’s trying to be the one founders actually trust.

“When you hire someone in finance, you don’t just need reporting,” she says. “You need someone who acts like an owner. Someone you can rely on. Someone who understands the weight you’re carrying.”

That founder-first mentality shapes everything she builds—from partnerships with accelerators to how she approaches content and lead generation.

It’s not about being everywhere.

It’s about showing up where it matters.

Mariya’s next big goal: crossing $1 million in revenue—and doing it without sacrificing the trust and execution that got her here.

“The customer experience has to come first,” she says. “That’s how you build something real.”

She didn’t wait until she felt 100% ready to launch her company.
She didn’t wait for perfect timing or permission.

She started where she was—with the experience she had—and built the confidence along the way.

That’s the real story.

That’s how you build something that lasts.

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