Pennylane, the bookkeeping startup valued at $4.25 billion, has announced that every accountant on its client roster will be removed from their desks and marched to a network of alpine CFO academies, where they will spend eighteen months learning to stare meaningfully at spreadsheets before returning to their firms as executives.
The company has already leased four former ski resorts in the French Alps and converted the chairlifts into a continuous vertical commute for trainees, who begin each morning at the summit with a single ledger and are required to descend on foot while explaining depreciation to an instructor walking backwards ahead of them. «The accountants feared automation,» said a Pennylane co-founder at a press conference held at the base station. «So we automated the fear out of them. What remains is a CFO.»
Firms that signed up have been told to expect their staff back in the spring, wearing fleece gilets and refusing to discuss anything smaller than a capital allocation. One mid-sized practice in Lyon has already replaced its reception desk with a standing table and its coffee machine with a whiteboard, on the grounds that the returning partners will no longer tolerate either.
By the second week, the academies had run out of instructors and began promoting the fastest walkers to teach the slower ones, a system Pennylane describes as «peer-to-peer executive acceleration». The company says the first cohort will graduate when it reaches the valley floor, and that the graduation ceremony will consist of a single question about cash flow, asked from a helicopter.