Brian Kostka, CFA, FPAC

Brian Kostka built Catalyst CFO Advisors on a 25+ year career that braids Wall Street equity research, asset management, and hands-on CFO/COO operating leadership. He helped grow a boutique institutional long/short equity asset manager from $3B to $15B in AUM as the firm's youngest named partner, then deliberately crossed the table to operate AI-driven ventures—co-founding an AI-powered compliance platform and serving as CFO of a healthcare/telehealth platform—while running Catalyst as an embedded fractional CFO practice since 2013.

The second half of Brian's career was a deliberate crossing of the table: founding and operating AI-driven ventures, sitting in CFO and COO seats through capital raises, and leading crisis response. The explicit goal was learning the difference between modeling a business and running one—a gap that separates most Wall Street operators from effective CFOs.

That combination—institutional finance pedigree, operator scars, and ~10 years of AI in production—is what Catalyst was built around. It's also what most fractional CFO firms launched after 2023 cannot replicate. The market is full of recently-laid-off controllers who rebranded as "fractional CFOs" the same week. Catalyst exists for the sophisticated buyer who can tell the difference.

“We don't pontificate. We sit in the seat, do the work, and leave you with systems and discipline you can run after we're gone.”