CFOs2GO Partner

Douglas Burnet is the person in the room who has already seen your problem — in three other industries, at twice the scale, and on a tighter timeline. He is a fractional and interim CFO whose career spans four decades, a dozen industries, multiple company foundings, and the full spectrum from pre-revenue startup to $1 billion post-merger integration. He has served in additional executive roles as COO and interim CEO, and logged more than two decades in the boardroom (Board Chair, Treasurer, Finance Committee Chair).

Nonprofit Practice Leadership

Douglas leads two of 2GO Advisory Group’s largest and most active practice groups. As co-leader of the Nonprofit Practice Group — the firm’s largest practice by revenue — he has helped build the team from two to 7 partners. His client engagements include organizations ranging from $600K food security startups to $60M university-to-foundation transitions to $100M capital campaigns. He co-founded and managed four nonprofit organizations and is one of the few fractional CFOs who understands the tension between mission and margin because he has lived on both sides of it.

Manufacturing & Industrial Practice Leadership

As Co-Leader of the Manufacturing & Industrial Practice Group, Douglas brings hands-on financial leadership across union print shops, $100M packaging operations, mid-market label manufacturers, and billion-dollar consumer goods rollups — with a supply chain credential that extends to firsthand engagement with China’s manufacturing ecosystem in Shenzhen. (link to my manufacturing profile page?)

For-Profit Depth & the Truth-Teller Advantage

His for-profit experience is substantial and varied. Douglas has served as CFO, COO, Deputy Finance Director, and interim executive across manufacturing, consumer products, technology, insurance, biotech, and financial services — including a $300M post-merger integration at Mother’s Cookies/Parmalat, a pre-IPO financial infrastructure build at Codexis (subsequently Nasdaq: CDXS), and an ongoing fractional CFO engagement at a 44-year-old Bay Area union print shop that includes parallel oversight of the founders’ commercial and residential real estate portfolio.

He is known as a truth-teller: someone who builds the case with data, presents findings that leadership may, or may not want to hear, and sees solutions through to implementation over the objections of the skeptical.

A Genuinely Unusual Background

What makes Douglas genuinely unusual is the breadth of domains in which he has developed real depth. Douglas co-founded Aerial Sports League as CFO and COO — a pioneer of drone sports, entertainment, and STEAM education that he helped propel into the Highway 1 hardware incubator. He originated the dual-entity structure that paired ASL’s for-profit event production with Museum of Future Sports, a 501(c)3 nonprofit he co-founded dedicated to technology access and STEAM education for underserved communities. Together, the two organizations produced the Xfinity California Drone Speed Challenge at Golden 1 Center — the largest drone race in California history — generating over 500 million media impressions including multiple NBC Sports broadcast specials, and drawing corporate clients including Sony, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Comcast, and Airbnb. The advisory board included Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese.

Earlier in his career, he co-founded Cooperative Type, a Berkeley typesetting and desktop publishing service bureau — mastering design, client management, and technology transitions across a twelve-year run that included being among the first businesses in the Bay Area to adopt the Macintosh LaserWriter and pivot to desktop publishing. He went on as a partner at M3b, a web development and UI design firm — arriving at the commercial internet with a five-year head start on the thinking required to work in code-based visual languages, which made HTML feel like a familiar dialect rather than a new skill.

Douglas worked in corporate finance at Robertson, Stephens & Company in the early 90s, developing the investor positioning and financial narrative skills he still applies today. He holds a degree from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business with a dual emphasis in marketing and finance, and brings an aesthetic sensibility and communications fluency that are rare among CFOs. Over the past 18 months, Douglas has been in deep, active engagement with AI tools as a working methodology — applying them to cost analysis, scenario modeling, and pattern recognition in ways that meaningfully expand what is possible to find and fix.