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Lovable’s CFO on Choosing Velocity Over Speed
Andy Toung, CFO of Lovable, on velocity, sequencing, and how AI is changing the speed at which companies operate.
August 12, 2026
Andy Toung has spent nearly 20 years as a startup operator. He thought he’d seen everything.
Then he joined Lovable.
“This team in Stockholm moves at a pace you’ve probably not seen before,” Andy said of his new employer, who he joined in 2025 as CFO after an 11-year run at Gusto. Andy says he was drawn to Lovable’s mission of giving the people closest to a problem the power to solve it, instead of waiting for someone else to build the solution for them. But being inside one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world has prompted him to rethink all the conventional wisdom he learned about startups in his career.
Salesforce Ventures is a returning investor in Lovable’s Series C, and we recently had the opportunity to sit down with Andy to hear how he thinks about operating in a moment when the old rules of startup execution are being rewritten in real time. Three observations stood out.
1. AI lets you ‘chase two rabbits’
Andy used to believe in the old saying that if you chase two rabbits, you catch none. That is, if you’re focused on too many things at once, you can’t accomplish anything.
After joining Lovable, he’s changed his view.
“I’m starting to believe that if you move fast enough, you can chase all the rabbits,” he said.
What changed Andy’s mind is the speed at which he’s seen AI-powered teams move. The gap between idea and signal is much smaller than it once was. At Lovable, Andy says teams are able to test, ship, and gather feedback in days rather than months. As such, the cost of pursuing a second or third opportunity in parallel drops significantly.
Andy cautions that startups still shouldn’t try to pursue everything at once. But with AI, more teams can expand their focus without slowing down their progress.
2. Speed is not the same as velocity
Chasing two rabbits is only effective if they’re the right rabbits to chase.
“Speed is good and it’s certainly better than moving slowly,” Andy cautioned. “But speed going in circles is not good. You want velocity — which has a direction of travel to it.”
For Andy, this means ruthless prioritization. With the pace of innovation in the AI age, the difference between startups that succeed and those that fail is knowing what the most important thing to work on first is. Working with speed doesn’t matter if that effort is being spent on projects that aren’t strategic.
In Andy’s framing, velocity is what keeps speed from becoming noise. It requires knowing not just how fast you’re moving but where you’re pointed — and being willing to slow down long enough to check.
3. Be wary of too many ‘right’ decisions
Andy believes the hardest part of a CFO’s job is understanding the consequences of success.
Even a team that chases the right rabbits with velocity can lose momentum and deviate from their mission if they’re not prepared for what happens if and when they achieve that next phase of growth. This is a dynamic Andy has witnessed time and again in fast-growing startups.
“I think one of the most dangerous things you can do at a startup isn’t necessarily to make the wrong decisions,” he said. “It might be to make too many of the right decisions just all at once.”
This is why Andy sees the CFO role as something more than just a finance function. Part of the job is also helping people think through all the potential ramifications of their decisions. “A CFO’s job isn’t necessarily to say no all the time or yes all the time,” he said. “It’s really to go ‘no, but’ or ‘yes, and’ — and help people think through what the second and third-order consequences are.”
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Despite its incredible momentum, Andy says Lovable still has a long way to go to realize its ambitions. “We’re still in the early innings of what we want to become,” he said. We’re proud to be with Andy and the entire Lovable team for this exciting journey, and can’t wait to see what they do next.
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