Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Sam Monti was working in finance at Rockwell Automation when a conversation about charging customers for technical support took an unexpected turn. A salesman suggested collecting a fee for access to the company’s engineers. Monti had another idea: Why not make it a membership, like a country club?

The resulting subscription business generated $150 million in revenue in less than three years. For Monti, it was an early lesson in how rethinking a company’s operations could fundamentally change its economics.

More than two decades later, that experience has particular relevance at SolarWinds, where Monti is CFO. The IT infrastructure software company has recently moved from public to private ownership under Turn River Capital while completing a transition from license-and-maintenance revenue to subscriptions.

Monti views net revenue retention as the critical measure of progress. His framework combines customer retention, annual price increases, and expansion into what he calls the ARR triangle. SolarWinds, he says, is advancing on all three fronts.

Meanwhile, the company is investing in agentic AI, including its Avior technology, while working to improve the operational processes that support sales, product development, and future growth.

Monti’s career has included large industrial companies, private equity investments, and a difficult turnaround as CEO of Crownpeak. Those experiences have reinforced a conviction about the CFO’s role.

“Wars are won by logistics, business is won by operations,” he says.

At SolarWinds, that philosophy translates into two priorities: improving operational efficiency and helping the company deploy capital against a clearly defined strategy.

At Greyson Clothiers, opening a new store can mean committing capital long before the first meaningful returns arrive. For CFO Neely Rosen, that gap between investment and payoff has become one of the defining challenges of helping a growing apparel company scale.

Greyson's business began in wholesale before expanding into e-commerce and company-owned retail stores. Its Detroit flagship, Rosen notes, has become one of its strongest performers. Now, following a capital raise in late 2024 and a NetSuite implementation, the company is preparing to introduce its own footwear line while expanding its retail presence.

The question is how to fund that growth without losing sight of profitability.

Rosen's perspective reflects an unconventional career. At Campbell Soup, she moved beyond auditing processes to helping build them during an SAP implementation. At Urban Outfitters, she led a major Oracle systems transformation. Later, as CFO of the Greater Philadelphia YMCA, she developed a leadership philosophy rooted in collaboration and service.

Those experiences now inform her approach to technology, talent, and financial decision-making.

At Greyson, Rosen works closely with merchandising, production, and supply chain leaders, particularly as tariffs and shifting trade conditions complicate operating decisions. She also sees AI changing what finance teams must deliver: not simply forecasts, but insights that anticipate what comes next.

For Rosen, the challenge is deciding when to invest in stores, systems, products, and people—and when those investments should begin producing returns. As Greyson shifts its attention from infrastructure to customers and profitability, capital allocation remains the question occupying her CFO agenda.

For Anaplan CFO Hemant Kapadia, one of the more revealing measures of the company’s transformation isn’t revenue growth alone. It’s the fact that Anaplan has nearly the same number of employees it had when it was taken private in 2022—even as annual recurring revenue has grown from approximately $600 million toward $1.4 billion.

The company has also become materially more profitable, generating free cash flow margins in the mid-30s. That financial flexibility has helped fund a $500 million investment commitment spanning infrastructure, platform development, new applications, and artificial intelligence.

Yet Kapadia’s ambitions extend beyond Anaplan’s product roadmap.

Drawing on an engineering background and 14 years at General Electric, he has long viewed financial performance through an operational lens. Today, that perspective informs Anaplan’s internal AI Readiness program, an initiative he leads to identify opportunities for redesigning processes across the business.

Rather than treating AI as another cost-reduction exercise, Kapadia wants employees to reconsider how work gets done—and which activities deserve their attention.

“Our approach is not to say we’re gonna implement AI and we’re gonna cut, you know, thirty percent of the organization,” he explains.

There’s a similar philosophy behind Anaplan’s own financial operations. By connecting sales forecasts, customer bookings, workforce costs, and cloud expenses, Kapadia says he effectively has a daily financial close, allowing investment decisions to be made during a quarter rather than after it ends.

Looking ahead, his challenge is whether Anaplan can double or triple its business while keeping employee growth far below historical norms.

For Kapadia, AI’s promise isn’t simply doing the same work faster. It’s changing what the organization can accomplish.

At SuiteWorld 2026, NetSuite’s founder outlines how AI is transforming business software—and what the shift means for CFOs.

When Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite, declares that ERP as we know it is over, the statement carries particular weight. Goldberg helped pioneer cloud-based enterprise software in 1998, challenging the conventional wisdom about how businesses should manage their financial and operational systems.

Nearly three decades later, he sees artificial intelligence driving an equally consequential transformation.

Speaking with CFO Thought Leader at SuiteWorld 2026 in Las Vegas, Goldberg described a future in which ERP systems do more than organize information, automate transactions, and generate reports. Increasingly, they will anticipate problems, recommend solutions, and execute work—with human oversight.

Read More

To Goldberg, the transformation rests on three developments: AI becoming the primary user interface, ERP becoming tailored to individual businesses, and software gaining the ability to perform more work autonomously.

The implications extend well beyond technology.

Goldberg believes finance teams will increasingly apply their analytical capabilities across the enterprise, identifying operational issues before they affect financial results. He also sees the traditional month-end close giving way to more continuous financial visibility.

Rather than focusing exclusively on achieving a zero-day close, Goldberg argues that CFOs should consider how accurately their systems can reflect the business throughout the reporting period.

That shift could fundamentally change how finance contributes to decision-making.

“We’re really trying to free up the CFO from firefighting mode to strategic analysis mode,” Goldberg explained.

For CFOs, the emerging opportunity is not simply to automate existing responsibilities. It is to redirect financial expertise toward decisions that shape business performance—while increasingly intelligent systems handle more of the underlying work.

When Steve Fox joined Every Man Jack in 2021, the men’s personal care brand had a new private equity owner and an ambitious growth agenda. Carlyle Group saw an opportunity: a widely distributed brand that had never invested heavily in marketing. The challenge was finding the operating leverage to fund that investment.

For Fox, the answer increasingly lies in technology.

At Every Man Jack, a company known for its outdoor-inspired grooming products, the finance team has remained at five employees even as transaction volume has tripled. Fox credits investments in technology and a growing emphasis on automation.

The initiative even has a name: “Nix the Clicks by 26.”

The goal is to eliminate manual transactions and replace traditional workflows with functional command centers where employees supervise automated processes, investigate exceptions, and monitor business performance.

The transformation gathered momentum after Every Man Jack implemented NetSuite in September 2025. A month later, at SuiteWorld, the company’s IT manager connected the new ERP platform to emerging AI capabilities.

Still, Fox recognizes that easier access to technology brings its own complications. With roughly 70 employees suddenly capable of creating software-driven solutions, the company established an AI oversight committee to prevent duplication and keep experimentation aligned with strategy.

It’s a distinctly operational approach from a CFO whose career began in public accounting before taking him into retail management and high-growth businesses.

And while Fox is enthusiastic about what technology makes possible, his guiding principle remains decidedly human: successful adoption begins with investing in people.

When Joe Iantosca arrived at Cyera as CFO, his first hire wasn't an accountant or an FP&A professional. It was a data engineer.

For Iantosca, the decision reflected a conviction formed over years of working inside technology companies: Finance cannot help steer a business without reliable access to the information driving it.

That conviction first took shape at Palantir, where he witnessed the impact of centralizing financial and operational data. At BetterCloud, where his responsibilities eventually expanded into the COO role, he carried the lesson further, connecting product, marketing, and business information into a common analytical foundation.

At Cyera, that experience has become especially relevant.

The five-year-old cybersecurity company operates across 15 countries, employs approximately 2,000 people, and has completed seven acquisitions. Its ambition is to build a comprehensive AI security platform that helps enterprises adopt artificial intelligence while protecting sensitive data.

For Iantosca, financing that expansion involves more than allocating capital. It means understanding how customers are acquired, how products reach the market, and how new offerings become commercially successful.

His operating background has also made him unusually comfortable entering customer conversations and examining the friction that can slow enterprise sales.

Meanwhile, the company's investment in centralized data is helping finance pursue AI-driven automation, including potentially significant changes to the month-end close.

The challenge ahead is balancing experimentation with financial discipline. Cyera encourages employees to test new ideas and move quickly, but major investments require evidence.

Iantosca's priorities reflect that balance: adaptability, discipline, and the successful commercialization of new products.

When Tom Steer joined Sokin as CFO, he already knew the international payments company unusually well. As an investment banker at FT Partners, he had advised Sokin through a capital raise during a difficult period for fintech funding. He knew its leadership, its financial projections, and the ambitions behind its growth.

What he had yet to experience was the challenge of building a finance organization capable of keeping pace.

Sokin helps multinational businesses manage cross-border payments, currencies, and treasury operations across fragmented banking systems. Its infrastructure supports payments to 170 countries, while a growing embedded-finance offering allows other companies to bring Sokin’s capabilities to their own customers.

For Steer, the challenge is deciding where to place the next investment. North America has emerged as Sokin’s fastest-growing market, while embedded payments and AI-enabled treasury tools present additional opportunities. Each requires capital, talent, and organizational attention.

The assumptions behind those decisions can change quickly. An anticipated shortage of engineers, for example, became less pressing as AI improved productivity, shifting attention toward sales and partnerships.

Inside finance, Steer encountered a different constraint: a lean team trying to accomplish too much. Three months into the role, he and his finance director stepped away from their daily responsibilities to map the work ahead.

“We can’t get this done on our own,” he recalls.

Today, Steer is building systems and teams designed for substantially greater transaction volumes. His guiding question is less about what finance can accomplish today than whether its infrastructure will still work when the business doubles in size.

At Vensure Employer Solutions, completing an acquisition is only the beginning. The company has acquired roughly 120 businesses in eight years, and each new addition enters an integration process containing some 1,400 steps. For CFO and President Kara Childress, the challenge is not simply bringing more companies into the fold. It is making certain the organization can absorb them without multiplying its own inefficiencies.

That challenge has become familiar territory for Childress, whose career took an unusual turn when she left public accounting to join Vensure as COO. Having previously served as the company’s outside auditor, she knew its finances. Operations offered something different: an opportunity to remove roadblocks and help people perform better.

As Vensure expanded into global payroll, HR technology, and human capital management services, Childress’s responsibilities broadened to include finance and the presidency. Along the way, she confronted a finance organization whose regional and divisional structure was duplicating work.

The acquisition engine was not slowing down. The finance organization needed to change before further growth made its existing structure untenable.

“We need to think about this differently,” Childress recalls.

The resulting reorganization reduced duplication and positioned finance to support additional acquisitions without continually adding staff. Meanwhile, a dedicated integration accounting team now brings acquired businesses into a common reporting framework beginning in their first month.

Today, Vensure is also expanding its AI capabilities while Childress concentrates on client retention, organic growth, and sales investment.

For a company accustomed to acquiring businesses, the next test is making its growing organization work better.

When Perry Beberman arrived at what is now Bread Financial, the company had a balance sheet problem. It was carrying too much leverage, had insufficient capital, and needed a more disciplined approach to funding its lending business. For a finance executive who had spent decades navigating consumer credit cycles, the assignment was familiar territory. The scale of the transformation, however, would demand patience.

Today, Beberman points to a substantially different financial foundation. Bread has paid down more than 70% of its parent-company debt, built capital beyond established targets, and shifted direct-to-consumer deposits from less than 5% of funding in 2020 to more than half.

The changes have given Bread greater capacity to invest in technology, support growth, and return capital to shareholders.

Still, Beberman is quick to explain that financial discipline is not simply about strengthening a balance sheet. At Bread, whose products include co-branded credit cards, private-label cards, and installment lending, the daily challenge is balancing the ambitions of retail partners with the economics of consumer credit.

Retailers want more approvals. Credit executives must manage losses. Finance must determine where the returns justify the risk.

“They collide all the time,” Beberman says of those competing priorities.

For him, such disagreements are not organizational failures. They are essential to making better decisions.

That philosophy also shapes Bread’s adoption of AI, its continuing finance transformation, and its approach to capital allocation. Technology may accelerate analysis and automate routine work, but Beberman sees little reason to surrender judgment.

After nearly four decades in finance, his operating principle remains remarkably consistent: growth matters, but only when the economics support it.

In 2023, Hippo faced what CFO Guy Zeltser describes as perhaps the worst quarter in the insurance company’s history. The response was not to chase growth harder. Instead, leadership made a decision that would have seemed counterintuitive during the company’s earlier expansion: shrink part of the business.

Between 2023 and 2024, homeowners insurance premiums declined approximately 30% as Hippo recalibrated the risks it was willing to carry. For Zeltser, the decision marked a turning point in a broader transformation—one that would move the company toward profitability and a more diversified business model.

Today, Hippo supports more than 60 insurance programs, generating fees and commissions alongside underwriting and investment income. That mix matters. Fee revenue offers greater predictability, while improved underwriting performance gives the company confidence to retain additional insurance risk.

Zeltser’s approach reflects an unusual career path. Before McKinsey and corporate finance, he worked in his family’s toy business, where customer complaints and everyday transactions made the consequences of business decisions tangible.

At McKinsey, another lesson emerged: even a board-approved strategy could stall when short-term financial targets overwhelmed longer-term investment.

Both experiences inform his current agenda.

Hippo is also deploying AI across claims and finance operations. Zeltser reports that AI now handles more than 80% of initial loss notifications, while finance has shortened its quarterly reporting timeline.

With Hippo targeting a threefold or fourfold increase in profitability between 2026 and 2028, Zeltser faces a familiar tension: delivering quarterly results without sacrificing the investments required to build a larger business.

Revenue models are becoming more complex—and for finance leaders, the consequences extend well beyond how a company bills its customers. As businesses combine subscriptions, consumption-based pricing, and other models, CFOs face new questions around predictability, visibility, cash flow, and the infrastructure needed to manage revenue from beginning to end.

Salesforce Chief Customer Officer Sam Chung brings an unusually broad perspective to these challenges. Over more than two decades at Salesforce, his roles have spanned revenue operations, finance and strategy, CFO of Salesforce.org, enterprise transformation, and customer leadership. In this conversation, Chung explores why CFOs must move further into operations, product, and technology; how AI and agents are changing the economics of finance; and why greater automation does not diminish the need for financial controls, precision, and human accountability.

• Consumption changes the finance equation. Usage-based revenue can strengthen the connection between what customers pay and the value they receive—but it also reduces predictability. Finance needs greater visibility into usage, billing, collections, and ultimately cash flow.
• The CFO is moving upstream. Today’s finance leaders cannot simply report the financial consequences of decisions made elsewhere. Increasingly, they need to participate in product, pricing, innovation, and operating conversations as those decisions are being made.
• AI needs an economic baseline. Rather than beginning with sweeping transformation, Chung advocates starting with use cases where companies already understand their operating metrics. Establishing a baseline makes it possible to determine whether AI is actually improving productivity, quality, and ROI.
• “Probably right” isn’t good enough for revenue. AI models can be probabilistic, while critical finance processes demand precision. The challenge is determining where AI can create value while maintaining the controls and deterministic outcomes that finance requires.
• Agents don’t transfer accountability. AI agents may increasingly perform work once handled by people, but responsibility remains with finance leadership. Controls, visibility, and oversight must evolve to encompass work performed by humans and agents alike.

The conversation draws on Salesforce research examining the growing complexity of revenue models, the expanding mandate of finance leaders, and the adoption of AI and agents across the enterprise.

Among the findings discussed: 65% of finance leaders report managing more than one revenue model, 71% say their companies are selling through more channels than a year ago, and 87% expect to add more consumption-based products.

Explore the Salesforce CFO report at Salesforce.com/CFO-report.

When Tami Wilson-Ciranna joined Curative in April 2020, the assignment came with what now looks like a spectacularly optimistic assumption: three months.

“I met with Fred on a Tuesday and I started on Thursday,” she recalls. Curative was helping respond to COVID-19, and Wilson-Ciranna—who had retired and become bored—figured she would help with the pandemic. Three months became three years. Curative ultimately administered 36 million COVID tests.

Then came the harder question: What was phase two?

Curative wanted to remain in health care, but its leaders concluded that influencing care meant becoming the payer. The result was an employer health plan built around zero deductibles and zero copays, with members encouraged to complete an early baseline visit and engage in preventive care. Curative rolled roughly $500 million into starting the insurance business.

For Wilson-Ciranna, now president and CFO, the experiment is increasingly about what the data says. Medical loss ratios, provider costs, network economics, member behavior and wellness programs all come under scrutiny. Assumptions are expendable: Curative originally thought one health plan would suffice; market feedback convinced it to offer three.credentialing that Wilson-Ciranna says went from six months to 24–48 hours.

Perhaps that helps explain her operating philosophy: build, measure, fix—and keep moving. For the coming year, that means supporting Curative’s capital needs, expanding its provider network, entering additional states and adding members.

When Pegasystems began building its cloud business, the economics were hardly what investors would expect from a mature software company. Cloud gross margin was below 30%, recalls CFO and COO Ken Stillwell. The destination was roughly 80%. Getting there, however, required accepting that the path would not be straight.

At one point, Pega deliberately stepped backward on margin to make investments needed to scale the operation. “It put us probably off our margin targets by a year or two,” Stillwell says. “But it was a necessary investment for us to continue to scale.” Today, he says, cloud gross margin is approximately 80%.

That willingness to examine economics without losing sight of the customer runs through Stillwell’s thinking about Pega today. Growth comes largely from expanding existing customer relationships, making adoption—and the transaction volumes that follow—an important early signal. Stillwell looks for patterns across verticals, regions and customer cohorts to understand where expansion is taking hold. 1218 Ken Stillwell

AI introduces another economic puzzle. Pega chose not to build its model around maximizing token consumption. Stillwell argues that customers should use AI where it actually fits the work, selecting the appropriate model—or no AI at all—rather than treating consumption as the objective.

It is an approach consistent with the Rule of 40 discipline Stillwell helped spread throughout Pega: growth matters, but so do the economics behind it.

For the coming year, his priority is less about predicting every turn than preparing Pega to absorb them: staying agile, managing change and, as Stillwell puts it, remaining “calm and process focused” when the seas get rough.

For years, Middleby executives arriving at investor conferences faced a storytelling problem: 30 minutes wasn’t much time to explain three different businesses, each with its own brands, markets, investments, and stage of development.

Today, CFO Brittany Cerwin has a different story to tell.

Over the past 18 months, Middleby separated its food-processing business into a standalone public company and sold 51% of its residential kitchen business to private equity firm 26North. What remains is a more commercially focused Middleby—and, Cerwin says, a clearer capital allocation story.

The change arrives after Cerwin spent 15 years inside the company, moving from financial analyst through controllership and chief accounting responsibilities while Middleby continued acquiring businesses and building its platform. Early on, she deliberately sought work that would keep her from being siloed.

That breadth now meets a narrower portfolio.

Middleby’s first capital priority, Cerwin explains, is investing in core operations, followed by returning value to shareholders, with acquisitions occupying a more opportunistic third position. Meanwhile, operational excellence—lean manufacturing, SKU rationalization, product teardowns, and margin improvement—has moved squarely onto the agenda.

Perhaps the bigger shift is one of visibility. Middleby wants closer connections to customers, equipment, and service networks while expanding IoT capabilities and using AI to support both customer-facing platforms and internal finance work.

CFO careers are often described through titles, companies, and accomplishments. But another force can quietly shape the journey: place.

In this themed episode of CFO Thought Leader, five finance leaders reveal how geography influenced the opportunities they encountered, the relationships they built, and the choices they made.

Mike Brower explains how Wyoming’s close-knit business community allowed relationships to carry him across industries and into new finance roles. Boston Red Sox CFO Tim Zue recalls an unconventional path through MIT, Bain, and the Boston public schools before an email to the Red Sox opened an unexpected door at Fenway Park. Gregg Clevenger describes leaving the demands of international investment banking for Rochester, New York—a move that became both a career and personal reset. Dallas Clement reflects on arriving in Atlanta for what might have been another career stop, only to repeatedly choose to stay with Cox Enterprises as other possibilities emerged. And Michael Bannon recounts expecting his move into an operating role to happen in the Bay Area before an opportunity in London redirected both his career and his family.

Together, their stories suggest that geography is more than background. Sometimes where a career unfolds helps determine what that career becomes.

At Zapier, the rise of AI is changing more than the automation products customers build. It is reshaping how the company organizes, invests, prices its offerings, and thinks about its next stage of growth.

COO and CFO Ryan Roccon describes Zapier’s emerging role as the place where AI-built work actually runs. As tools such as Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT make it increasingly easy to build applications and agents, he sees a different challenge emerging: keeping those automations reliable, observable, auditable, and cost effective once they enter production.

That challenge is influencing Zapier’s product and financial agenda. Roccon points to the combination of deterministic workflows and agentic components as an important part of the company’s future. An internal review found that rebuilding certain agents with rules where possible and inference where necessary reduced costs by about 75% while improving reliability.

Zapier’s financial model adds another dimension. The company has remained cash-flow positive under Roccon’s finance leadership, giving it room to make aggressive investments while maintaining discipline around ROI and net present value. His challenge to the organization is to find opportunities compelling enough to justify breaking that rule.

Meanwhile, Zapier continues moving upmarket while reorganizing around AI and expanding its enterprise business. For Roccon, the finance agenda increasingly extends beyond financial results: ensuring the product delivers, sharpening the go-to-market message, and making certain that customers understand the value of what Zapier is building.

AI is rapidly changing not only what finance technology can do, but how CFOs should think about the technology stack itself.

In this bonus episode of CFO Thought Leader, David Den Boer, CEO of Column Five and Darwin Analytics, joins Jack Sweeney to explore how AI is reshaping enterprise performance management—and why finance leaders may need to rethink long-held assumptions about EPM platforms, data systems and analytics.

Den Boer describes a market in which capabilities once associated with EPM are increasingly emerging from multiple directions. Large language models, data platforms, business intelligence tools and EPM vendors are all extending their reach into finance. For CFOs, the challenge is becoming less about selecting a single application and more about understanding how different technologies can work together.

That changing landscape is also behind Den Boer’s EPM Summit, taking place November 16–19 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Rather than centering on a single vendor, the event brings competing EPM providers, consultants and customers together, giving finance leaders an opportunity to compare approaches and question vendors side by side.

Den Boer argues that AI will also lower the cost of experimentation. Instead of making technology choices that effectively lock finance organizations into decade-long commitments, teams may increasingly be able to test new capabilities, evaluate new data sources and quickly determine what creates value.

His message to CFOs: AI is expanding the choices available to finance—but realizing its potential will require leaders who understand the entire technology landscape and know which questions to ask.

At Aledade, CFO Jessica Somers is helping finance navigate a business where investment decisions can take years to fully reveal their value.

The technology-driven, physician-led company works with more than 3,000 primary care practices and touches more than 3.6 million patients, using data and technology to support proactive, preventive care. Its value-based model also creates an unusual finance challenge: connecting better patient outcomes with healthcare savings and, ultimately, financial performance.

That long-term orientation shapes how Somers approaches capital allocation. Aledade has built its own technology platform rather than relying on another company’s roadmap, reflecting what Somers describes as a desire to “control our destiny.” Today, that same thinking is influencing the company’s approach to AI.

Rather than viewing investments as isolated projects to be stack-ranked strictly by ROI, Somers wants leaders to understand how different investments interact and compound. That became particularly important as Aledade weighed continued progress toward profitability against the opportunity to make larger AI investments. The result was a willingness to make bigger bets where leadership saw the potential to extend the company’s advantage.

Somers’ perspective is shaped by an earlier career in investment banking, private equity, and corporate development. Moving from advising on transactions to operating inside the businesses themselves taught her that financial results reflect countless everyday decisions—and that finance creates the most value when it deeply understands the business behind the numbers.

Her agenda now extends that philosophy to AI: not simply using technology to make finance faster, but reimagining work so the team has greater capacity for judgment, insight, and strategic partnership.

For Jack Gordon, the CFO role at Harri increasingly extends beyond finance—and into the mechanics of how an AI-powered business scales.

Harri, a workforce operating system focused on hospitality, has evolved from a point solution into a broader platform spanning talent acquisition, workforce management, and employee engagement. Gordon says the company’s opportunity rests partly on years of data accumulated across mission-critical workflows, an advantage that becomes increasingly important as AI reshapes workforce technology.

That evolution is also reshaping Gordon’s finance agenda. As Harri rolls out its AI platform, understanding the changing unit economics has become a priority. AI introduces new questions around usage costs, margins, pricing, and monetization. Inside finance, meanwhile, Gordon is pursuing “automations everywhere,” with the goal of eliminating much of the routine work performed by his team and creating more capacity for insight.

His operating philosophy begins further upstream. Rather than waiting for financial results, Gordon watches customer satisfaction, usage patterns, support activity, and customer outcomes. “Financials are outcomes of a good product and happy customers,” he explains.

That emphasis on leading indicators is accompanied by an acute awareness of downside risk. After a planned Series B financing unexpectedly collapsed in 2023, Gordon restarted the process and ultimately helped secure new funding four months later. The experience reinforced a principle he carries forward today: understand the downside and build contingency plans.

Now Gordon is stretching the CFO remit again—working as a product owner alongside Harri’s product and engineering teams. For a finance leader who has deliberately accumulated new operating experiences throughout his career, building and launching a product represents another capability still to be added.

When Martin Uhrik compared the margins of two visual-effects brands at Technicolor, one appeared far more profitable than the other. Uhrik tells us the reported difference prompted him to investigate. One brand showed project results only to the direct-margin level, rather than revealing fully absorbed profitability.

Uhrik says he asked the business-unit CEO why the company was not showing creatives “the true state of the business.” The response was resistance: management feared that exposing weaker bottom-line results could cost the premium brand its talent and luster.

Uhrik insisted. According to him, the business began showing creatives the profitability of roughly 3,000 projects a year. Teams then examined pricing, rate cards, utilization, client requirements, and whether changes requested during projects were being captured and passed along to customers.

Within six to 12 months, Uhrik tells us, margins improved substantially. The feared loss of creative talent did not materialize. Instead, he says the information “lifted the energy” inside the organization because employees had not realized their work was less profitable than they believed.

For Uhrik, the experience reinforced the value of challenging the status quo. He says finance leaders should not stop when they encounter pushback; tension, opinion, and conviction are part of reaching better outcomes.

It also challenged management’s assumptions about people. As Uhrik observes, leaders should not be too quick to predict how others will respond. Given the unvarnished economics, the creative teams did not retreat. According to Uhrik, they surprised the CEO—and then helped improve the business.

Shortly after Dan Barzily became CFO of Tipalti, a go-to-market transformation altered the company’s working-capital profile. One quarter later, Barzily tells us, the company missed its forecast across multiple parts of the P&L.

The surprise reached back to a subject he had barely considered since his university accounting class. “It really hit me,” Barzily recalls. “I’m now the CFO, and I’m in charge of those things.”

Until his appointment, Barzily says, he had never expected to become a CFO. He studied engineering, where he developed skills in analytics, accuracy, modeling, forecasting, and making assumptions about the future. According to Barzily, consulting then taught him to work with people ranging from individual contributors to company executives, while business development exposed him to dealmaking, legal matters, contracts, and the many participants required to bring something to life.

At Tipalti, Barzily says, the chief-of-staff role initially involved running executive-team agendas, surfacing important decisions, assigning action items, and sometimes playing “bad cop.” As he learned the business, he began initiating programs and eventually owned pricing, the data organization, and strategy for centers of excellence outside the United States and in Tel Aviv. That expansion, he explains, moved him into the chief strategy officer role.

Barzily describes a career as something that is “not linear.” People build, try their best, produce results, and—if the right people notice—receive larger opportunities. His working-capital surprise added another turn to that path: the moment when a strategic operator encountered the full weight of the CFO’s agenda.

Jonathan Ma recalls being at his parents’ home in Nebraska one Saturday when his Morgan Stanley boss called with advice: pursue an opportunity at Sutter Health. After nearly 15 years, the mentor believed the retiring treasurer’s position could be Ma’s next step.

Ma tells us he had not considered the opportunity. Although he knew Sutter Health’s mission and some of its people, he says the call “planted” the seed. His mentor had seen something in him that he had not yet recognized.

That moment echoed the way Ma describes his development at Morgan Stanley. He credits leaders in San Francisco and New York with teaching him to take his work seriously without taking himself too seriously. According to Ma, that meant remaining curious, asking questions, and admitting when he did not know an answer.

Ma says trust arrived gradually rather than through a breakthrough. Clients gave him room to learn because they saw that he would work hard, uphold values and ethics, and protect their interests. He moved from mentoring interns to leading financings and presenting before boards.

At Sutter Health, Ma applies that same emphasis on trust. He tells us finance must balance growth, expenses, and margins so the not-for-profit system can continue reinvesting in its communities. Budgets, he says, should represent shared accountability across the organization rather than a finance exercise.

For Ma, leadership emerges incrementally: through questions asked, credibility earned, support accepted, and difficult decisions made while an organization still possesses both “the means” and “the will.”

Six weeks before Lehman Brothers went under, Shiv Verma tells us, he joined a hedge fund as the world felt like it was falling apart. After building structured-credit and CLO models at J.P. Morgan from 2006 to 2008, Verma says he helped buy back assets originated at par for five cents on the dollar.

A mentor there supplied a rule Verma still carries: “The best trade you ever make is often the trade you don’t make.”

For Robinhood’s CFO, the line offers a double meaning—and a little fun. In the interview, however, Verma applies it to corporate resource allocation. According to Verma, it is easy to make an investment, become excited, and sell yourself on the idea. The harder work is asking the right questions and “knowing when to say no.”

That standard reaches beyond securities. Verma says he applies it when Robinhood considers funding an investment, approving a marketing campaign, or pursuing an acquisition. Restraint is not timidity: Robinhood wants to grow and say yes to many opportunities, he tells us, while balancing business enablement and controllership.

According to Verma, acquisitions must offer technology, talent, or greater speed to market, generally accelerating Robinhood by 18 to 24 months. They must also pass the company’s IRR, NPV, and internal thresholds.

The title may wink playfully at Robinhood’s trading platform, but Verma’s underlying finance lesson is serious: sound capital allocation is ultimately defined not only by the opportunities a CFO pursues, but also by those finance has the judgment to decline.

Ross Grainger remembers an early chapter of his career when finance was only one part of the job.

After stepping outside a traditional finance path to own and operate a Mako auto-body franchise, Grainger tells us he learned what it meant to “act like an owner.” That sometimes meant cleaning toilets, learning to paint cars, welding, doing body work, handling customer service, and making outside sales calls. But the experience also taught him another lesson: even if a leader can do everything, “you shouldn’t do those things forever” if they pull you away from where you can provide the most value.

That owner’s mindset later followed Grainger back into finance. At a healthcare software company, he tells us he was passed over for a CFO role he wanted. The executive hired instead brought a different perspective—one that showed Grainger how finance could move beyond “the debits and credits” and help shape company direction. Grainger says he ultimately became “extremely happy” they hired someone else because the experience accelerated his development.

Years later, that broader view surfaced again when Grainger helped lead a pricing overhaul at a prior company. According to Grainger, management initially proposed a 7% increase after nearly 10 years without one. Challenged by the board to reconsider “the art of the possible,” the team ultimately achieved a 22% to 23% increase in average ACV.

For Grainger, finance leadership repeatedly returns to the same idea: understand where value is created, and focus your effort there.

Cal Brouilette recalls a sleepless night in Houston, speaking at 3 a.m. with someone from Blackstone about a purchase-and-sale agreement and transition-service agreements. It concerned a power-plant portfolio sale at Direct Energy, a Centrica subsidiary, that Brouilette places in 2013.

According to Brouilette, the assignment arrived in late September, when the CEO wanted the portfolio sold and announced before year-end. That left at most 120 days. Brouilette says he was managing finance and accounting, functioning as a business-unit CFO and loading up on MBA classes at Rice because his job had seemed stable.

The new assignment changed that calculation. Brouilette says he ran its finance work “soup to nuts,” covering the valuation taken into negotiations, management presentations, purchase-and-sale terms, and transition-service agreements.

The transaction presented him with what Brouilette describes as a $700 million “go or no go” decision. “Yes, this was hard,” he recalls thinking, but the experience prompted this realization: “I can do this job. I can make these decisions.”

Brouilette says the moment gave him confidence to make high-stakes decisions quickly while recognizing that he could “still keep learning.” He describes it as his shift from operator to strategist.

At Flatiron Health, Brouilette says his focus as CFO is not to “make a decision and let it ride,” but to consistently track results before the organization travels too far down “the wrong path.”

His remarks present strategic confidence not as certainty, but as the discipline to decide, keep learning, measure results, and correct course.

Jamie Schroeder’s finance career began on the shop floor at Ford Motor Company. As part of Ford’s rotational development program, Schroeder tells us, he spent a month working in the paint shop at an assembly plant outside Cleveland. The experience was designed around “learning the business and getting your hands on the business” so that finance could become an informed partner to operations.

That operating mindset followed Schroeder to Scotts Miracle-Gro, where unfamiliar assignments became a recurring source of development. According to Schroeder, he was repeatedly placed in situations involving ambiguity, collaboration, and the need to “create something brand new that didn’t exist before.” Over time, embracing discomfort became part of his professional identity.

One experience taught him what it meant to be a growth CFO. According to Schroeder, stagnant category growth had led finance into a “profit preservation” posture when leadership changes at a major retailer created an opening for Scotts to pursue a more aggressive commercial program.

The proposal involved aggressive pricing, promotions, and products—and considerable risk. Instead of retreating, Schroeder tells us, finance supplied data and scenario analysis, quantified the risks, and developed playbooks for possible responses. Transparency ensured that operating partners understood both the opportunity and the guardrails.

According to Schroeder, the resulting market-share battle produced category growth that Scotts had not seen in ten years, while sales and profits rose across the category.

Now CFO of Premium Guard, Inc. (PGI), Schroeder brings that lesson to another transformational setting: Finance can help a company pursue disruption without ignoring risk. The discipline lies not in avoiding uncertainty, but in understanding the business well enough to move through it together.

At Timken, it was generally known that Phil Fracassa knew he would become CFO after the company separated its steel business. But first, he tells us, the board gave him a different assignment: lead the project management office and set both resulting companies up for success.

The separation followed pressure from an activist investor and extensive board consideration of strategy, stakeholder impact, operating performance, capital allocation, risk, and long-term shareholder value, according to Fracassa. Once the decision was made, his team had just under a year to carve out a business that had been part of Timken for 85 years.

That meant standing up and staffing a company, capitalizing it, unwinding entanglements, separating systems, establishing processes, and developing public-company protocols. Fracassa tells us the work reached virtually every function, including legal, HR, IT, operations, finance, treasury, and tax.

His own position carried a particular tension. Although Fracassa knew where he would land after the spin, he says he had to remain “independent, fair, impartial.” His decisions had to serve both companies—not just the one where he would soon hold the CFO title.

According to Fracassa, the experience brought together the disciplines he had accumulated across his career. It also left him with a durable conviction: “Strategy really lies in the execution.”

Great ideas and thoughtful analysis were not enough, he tells us. Value emerged only when people came together, worked through the issues, and executed. For Fracassa, that is where finance becomes most powerful: beyond the numbers, serving as “an architect of execution” inside the business.

Matt Ostrower remembers losing sleep over a decision that carried consequences for employees, lenders, and shareholders.

At Site Centers, Ostrower tells us, the management team was confronting two challenges. Investor fears about the internet’s impact on retail real estate were depressing stock and bond valuations. Then Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, leaving a portfolio of company assets out of commission for months.

The immediate pressure was to reopen properties and navigate the crisis. But Ostrower says the team forced itself to “pull back” and consider how the company could emerge positioned for growth.

Working with CEO David Lukes and capital markets leader Conor Fennerty, Ostrower says the team developed an answer that had not been executed repeatedly elsewhere: Separate the portfolio, create a liquid pool of assets for public-market investors, and establish a remaining company positioned for greater growth.

Because the approach was untested, Ostrower says the team had no certainty about how investors would respond. “I had sleepless nights for months,” he tells us, describing the market’s acceptance as an “existential question” for the company.

According to Ostrower, investors ultimately embraced the decision, and the strategy received positive press. He says it allowed the company to realize value in one place while setting up another company for growth.

For Ostrower, some of finance’s strongest strategic moments emerge during crises, when leaders are tempted to pursue whatever is most expedient. His experience suggests another possibility: Use the pressure to step back, ask harder questions, and make the decision that addresses not only the immediate disruption but also the company that must exist afterward.

Andrew Korn tracks growth first. EliseAI had surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue when he spoke with us, and Korn tells us the company had maintained year-over-year growth above 100% throughout his four and a half years there—“correlation, not causation,” he adds.

That growth gives finance a clear assignment. According to Korn, EliseAI monitors gross margins and burn while ensuring its spending remains prudent and directed toward investments capable of moving the business forward.

The company operates in housing and healthcare, two industries Korn describes as representing about 40% of U.S. GDP combined. He tells us both depend heavily on labor while contending with regulation and legacy technology. The result is overwhelmed teams, administrative work, and consumers waiting too long or paying too much for essential services.

EliseAI enters primarily through the communication layer. According to Korn, its technology handles communications and repetitive work around the clock while providing accurate, compliant answers to renters, residents, prospects, and patients.

But awareness of AI has also created a different challenge. Korn says customers increasingly arrive interested in the technology, yet EliseAI must ensure they understand what they are adopting. The objective is not AI “just for AI’s sake” or something a company can place on its website.

Instead, Korn tells us, AI must improve operations, performance, and business capabilities in tangible ways. EliseAI therefore tracks leases, occupancy, rent collection, maintenance requests, resident renewals, patient calls, and scheduled appointments.

For Korn, the technology earns its place when customers can recognize its impact in the work being completed and the results being produced.

In April 2020, Laura Miller stepped into her first CFO role at Pampered Chef. According to Miller, she was pregnant with her second child, working with a new CEO and joining an executive team that had never worked together in the building before the pandemic sent everyone home.

Demand was anything but predictable. Miller tells us that Pampered Chef’s independent consultants could hold parties online while consumers, confined to their homes, purchased kitchen equipment and looked for ways to earn money. That summer brought a business boom—and immediate pressure on working capital, supply chains and forecasting.

Miller says the company quickly replaced its rolling forecast with a daily forecast. One of her first CFO assignments was determining what would happen if the warehouse could not remain open as an essential business. Finance modeled scenarios “from zero to quadruple” while weighing when to continue accepting orders, when to stop, and how to manage back orders without overwhelming the business.

The professional challenge unfolded alongside a personal one: Miller tells us that she had her baby in June. Navigating both made the period “the fastest crash course into being a CFO.”

The experience also overturned much of her preparation. Miller says she had spent “16, 18 months prepping and planning to be a CFO,” yet none of the issues she had anticipated became her greatest challenges after taking the role.

Her lesson emerges from that collision between preparation and reality: the CFO’s work is not simply executing a carefully developed plan. Sometimes it means rebuilding the forecast daily, considering outcomes at opposite extremes and learning the role while the conditions surrounding it continue to change.

In the early months of Francisco Partners, Samantha Greenberg sat in a room on folding chairs with the firm’s cofounders and one other colleague, planning the business.

According to Greenberg, the private equity firm was pursuing an idea that many considered impossible in the late 1990s: executing leveraged buyouts of technology companies. Greenberg tells us she was drawn to the vision because it challenged the belief that technology businesses could not be predictable or capitalized with debt.

During the firm’s first year, Greenberg says, the team closed its first fund. She helped build operating processes, worked on the first transactions, and participated in fundraising—experiences that she says made her a better operator years later.

That builder’s instinct eventually pulled Greenberg away from investing. After 18 years as a technology investor, she had come to appreciate the discipline of “separating signal from noise,” surfacing insights, and allocating capital. But Greenberg tells us that running her own hedge fund revealed something more personal: She found operating more engaging than investing because it gave her “a seat at delivering the value creation.”

She became a CFO in 2021 and deliberately chose an earlier-stage company instead of a more mature organization. According to Greenberg, the decision allowed her to develop the skills she lacked—leading finance transformation, implementing systems, driving operational maturity, and running an accounting department.

The transition also challenged an investing instinct. Investors can wait for the “fat pitches,” Greenberg explains, but rapidly scaling companies cannot wait for every decision to be perfect. Her operating lesson is more immediate: “Velocity matters too.”

What happens when a company has money—but its CFO cannot reach it?

Over one extraordinary weekend, finance leaders found themselves confronting a threat few had anticipated: cash locked inside a failing bank, payroll approaching, and no certainty about what Monday would bring.

This episode brings together the experiences of Ben Gammell, Larry Roseman, Dan Murphy, Stacy Tumarkin, and Sarah Spoja. Their stories capture the crisis from different vantage points—from companies scrambling to protect their own liquidity to finance teams helping customers regain access to theirs.

The discussion is less about the collapse of a particular bank than about how CFOs respond when ordinary financial controls suddenly prove insufficient. It explores the decisions made under pressure, the communication required to steady employees and leadership teams, and the treasury practices reconsidered afterward.

The larger lesson is one CFOs understand well: resilience isn’t built during a crisis. It is built long before the crisis begins.

In high school, Gary Vecchiarelli received day-old copies of Investor’s Business Daily from a business teacher. Stock prices still appeared in fractions, and the teacher told him that he would know he had made it when he rang the bell on Wall Street.

Vecchiarelli tells us that the remark stayed with him for decades. He later rang the Nasdaq bell—an experience made more meaningful because his family knew the story. Long before that moment, however, he had begun ordering boxes of annual reports and reading financial statements he did not yet fully understand. He was drawn to CFOs who carried financial responsibility while dealing with Wall Street.

That early interest eventually became a career defined by complex businesses and difficult financing choices. At CleanSpark, Vecchiarelli recalls confronting one such decision during a Bitcoin bear market. Debt was prohibitively expensive, and an at-the-market equity program was effectively the company’s only source of growth capital.

According to Vecchiarelli, CleanSpark faced an opportunity that required issuing shares at approximately $2.50. The decision was painful, but the capital funded land and power that the company now expects to convert into billions of dollars of shareholder value.

The experience gave Vecchiarelli a lasting appreciation for “optionality.” He tells us that CleanSpark can now consider high-yield debt, convertible securities, equity, and borrowing against its Bitcoin holdings. That range matters because, as he puts it, markets can be “real fickle.”

For Vecchiarelli, strategic finance is not simply raising and spending money. It means connecting execution, valuation, and capital so that today’s difficult decision creates more choices tomorrow.

What does it take for a CFO to restore credibility?

Every finance leader eventually encounters a defining moment when confidence has been shaken—whether by slowing growth, a financial crisis, or years of eroding investor trust. In those moments, success depends on more than financial expertise. It requires disciplined execution, transparent leadership, and the ability to deliver on commitments when every decision is under scrutiny.

In this special compilation episode of CFO Thought Leader, we revisit three conversations that reveal how credibility is earned—and, when necessary, rebuilt.

Aidan Viggiano, CFO of Twilio, reflects on stepping into the role during a period of sweeping change. With growth slowing and difficult decisions ahead, she shares why rebuilding confidence began with one simple principle: do what you said you would do.

Eric Brown, now CFO and COO of Cohesity, takes us back to the near-existential crisis at MicroStrategy, where he and the leadership team were forced to stabilize the business, make painful decisions, and lead through extraordinary uncertainty. His story underscores the critical partnership between a CEO and CFO when an organization's future is on the line.

Finally, Paul Lundstrom, now CFO of Copeland, looks back on his tenure at Flex and earlier leadership at Aerojet Rocketdyne, explaining how stronger financial controls, operational discipline, and consistent execution can gradually restore investor confidence and reshape how the market values a company.

Together, these conversations form The Credibility Playbook—a practical look at how exceptional CFOs navigate some of the most challenging moments in corporate leadership and emerge with something every organization depends on: trust.

Mark Khavkin often finds his best ideas somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Rula CFO tells us that he bikes from San Francisco across the bridge and into Marin County—not to compete, but to clear his mind, enjoy the view, and stop for a latte in Sausalito. “A lot of times great ideas come somewhere just before or after the bridge,” Khavkin says.

That preference for space and perspective also appears in how he leads. Compared with a decade ago, Khavkin says that he has become more comfortable trusting people to reach the right result, even when their path differs from the one he might have chosen. Rather than intervening with detailed instructions, he now tries to provide context. “I’m less prescriptive than I was ten years ago,” he tells us.

The shift does not mean avoiding hard decisions. At Rula, Khavkin says that new investments require clearly defined checkpoints and agreement—made in advance—about when the company will increase its commitment or stop an initiative. Once teams, careers, and expectations form around an experiment, he explains, ending it becomes difficult at a human level.

The same discipline shapes his view of AI. Khavkin cautions finance leaders against evaluating the technology primarily through cost savings. According to Khavkin, the greater opportunity is enabling people to perform higher-level work, make decisions faster, and access more organizational context.

For Khavkin, leadership is not about directing every turn. It is about creating the conditions for others to navigate—then knowing when to provide context, when to challenge assumptions, and when to let the road produce the answer.

John Kinzer still remembers sitting in a closed meeting at MCI, presenting revenue results, when something unexpected caught his attention. It wasn’t the numbers he was reporting—it was the questions coming from the FP&A team. Listening to their discussion, he realized, “I also want to see that side of it,” Kinzer tells us. That moment led him from revenue reporting into business planning, where a manager helped shape the analytical skills that would define his career.

Looking back, Kinzer tells us those early experiences proved invaluable. Long-distance telephone plans behaved much like today’s subscription businesses, exposing him to churn analysis, lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, and cohort analysis long before SaaS became commonplace.

Equally important was another lesson from a mentor: always look 18 to 24 months ahead. If you’re no longer learning, growing, or able to see your next opportunity, it’s time to start thinking about what’s next, Kinzer tells us. That advice influenced several career decisions, including his move into the dot-com world, where he participated in his first IPO by helping write an S-1 and develop the company’s long-term financial model.

The same long-term mindset later shaped an even more difficult decision. After being passed over for his first CFO opportunity, Kinzer tells us he resisted the urge to react emotionally. Instead, he focused on developing new skills, particularly investor relations, believing the experience would prepare him for the future whether the opportunity came internally or elsewhere.

For Kinzer, career progression has never been about chasing titles. It’s been about continually putting himself in positions where learning comes first—and trusting that leadership opportunities eventually follow.

When Shane Hostetter arrived at Chemours in 2024, he stepped into a company facing liquidity challenges while also pursuing important long-term growth opportunities. His goal was not to replace decades of institutional knowledge but to complement it. Chemours CEO Denise Dignam brought nearly forty years of experience with DuPont and Chemours, while Hostetter brought an external perspective. Combining those viewpoints, he tells us, helped create “the best of both worlds.”

That approach reflects much of Hostetter’s broader leadership philosophy. Rather than viewing finance solely through the lens of reporting, he focuses on building a stronger foundation for future growth through disciplined capital allocation and balance sheet management.

Hostetter tells us the company developed a three-year strategy designed to strengthen Chemours over both the near and long term. Portfolio optimization became one important pillar, including shutting down selected production lines and divesting non-core assets to improve cash flow. Underlying every decision, he tells us, was a disciplined capital allocation strategy intended to improve financial flexibility.

At the same time, Hostetter has become an advocate for helping others better understand what Chemours actually does. Although many people still associate the company with its legacy DuPont products, he explains that Chemours today serves critical industrial markets ranging from next-generation refrigerants to semiconductor manufacturing, AI infrastructure, electric vehicles, and advanced cooling technologies.

Looking ahead, Hostetter’s emphasis remains consistent: strengthen the balance sheet, allocate capital thoughtfully, and position the company to create sustainable long-term value. For him, finance is ultimately about creating the platform that allows strategy to succeed.

Three accomplished CFOs. Three candid conversations. One revealing look at how finance leaders think about acquisitions before the headlines ever appear.

In this special CFO Thought Leader edition, we revisit conversations with Jonathan Carr, former CFO of Armis, James Redfern, CFO of Reltio, and Toby Driver, CFO of IdeaGen. Each discusses acquisitions from a different vantage point—planning, integration, organizational readiness, and the people challenges that ultimately determine whether a transaction creates lasting value.

What makes these discussions especially compelling is their timing. Carr and Redfern shared their perspectives months before their companies were acquired. ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Armis in April 2026, while SAP completed its acquisition of Reltio in May 2026. Their remarks offer an unfiltered look at how experienced CFOs approached M&A before those transactions became public realities.

Driver complements those perspectives by explaining why successful acquisitions depend on disciplined integration, thoughtful execution, and finance leaders who understand that value is created long after the purchase agreement is signed.

Together, these conversations reveal that successful M&A extends well beyond valuation models and deal negotiations. It requires aligning people, integrating operations, managing risk, and establishing clear decision-making processes across the organization. Whether discussing integration playbooks, organizational change, or strategic planning, each CFO highlights a different dimension of the finance leader's role in helping acquisitions achieve their intended objectives.

For finance leaders navigating growth, transformation, or acquisition activity, these three conversations provide a timely look at the strategic thinking that often precedes—and helps shape—successful deals.

Sinohe Terrero still remembers the timing. He joined Envoy in January, only to see the workplace transformed just two months later as offices around the world shut down because of COVID. The company had been building products for offices, but suddenly, almost no one was going to the office, Terrero tells us.

That abrupt shift forced Envoy to rethink its future. The company quickly introduced a product called Protect to help organizations safely welcome employees and visitors back into their facilities. From there, it expanded into desk management, room scheduling, deliveries, analytics, and ultimately a broader suite of workplace security solutions.

Today, that evolution has reshaped the business. Envoy now helps organizations across industries such as aerospace, defense, biopharma, and manufacturing secure their physical workplaces. Emergency notifications, visitor management, identity verification, and real-time visibility into who is inside a facility have become central capabilities, Terrero tells us.

Looking back, Terrero sees a different challenge driving the company’s growth. During the pandemic and the inflationary period that followed, organizations struggled to determine whether they would operate remotely, in hybrid environments, or fully in person. Now that most companies have settled on their workplace strategies, the demand for operational data has increased significantly, he tells us.

That demand extends beyond simply managing office attendance. Organizations want software that can verify identities, monitor facility access, manage security risks, and provide real-time information rather than relying on manual logs or random sampling. For Terrero, Envoy’s journey reflects how quickly a company can evolve when changing customer needs require an entirely new way of thinking about the workplace.

Taking a Company Public: What CFOs Know

What does it really take to prepare a company for life as a public company?

In this special CFO Thought Leader compilation, we revisit three conversations with finance leaders who helped guide some of the technology industry's most recognizable companies through the IPO journey. Rather than focusing on the transaction itself, these CFOs share what happened behind the scenes—the operational changes, leadership decisions, and financial discipline required long before the opening bell rang.

John Kinzer, former CFO of HubSpot, explains how preparing for an IPO required transforming finance from a back-office function into a strategic business partner. He discusses the importance of balancing growth with profitability and creating the operational discipline expected of a public company.

Kelly Steckelberg, former CFO of Zoom Video Communications, reflects on building the people, processes, forecasting capabilities, and financial infrastructure necessary to support a successful transition to the public markets. She also shares lessons from leading Zoom through its first earnings call as a newly public company.

Drawing on his experience helping lead IPOs at Salesforce, Pandora, and Yext, Steve Cakebread offers a broader perspective on why companies go public, how management teams should prepare, and why governance, investor communication, and long-term vision are essential to building enduring public companies.

Together, these three accomplished CFOs offer a practical look at what it really takes to take a company public—from preparing the organization and strengthening financial operations to communicating with investors and leading through one of the most significant milestones in a company's evolution.

When Martino Cadoni joined DeepL, he arrived with an unusual perspective—he already knew the company’s product firsthand. Earlier in his career at Klarna, he had helped introduce DeepL as a translation solution, making the transition from customer to CFO especially meaningful. Today, DeepL is backed by investors including HV Capital, Benchmark, Index Ventures, ICONIQ, and Atomico, Cadoni tells us. Working alongside those firms, he says, continually pushes him “out of the comfort zone.”

That mindset mirrors the company’s trajectory. DeepL supports “almost 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies,” Cadoni tells us, while continuing to grow and mature for its next stage of development.

Rather than viewing language translation as a commodity, Cadoni emphasizes its strategic importance in critical business workflows. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, rely on accurate translation of regulatory documentation before commercializing new drugs, he tells us. Legal firms, airlines, manufacturers, and multinational organizations face similar challenges where translation quality directly affects operational outcomes.

Customer adoption reflects those varied use cases. DeepL monitors daily and monthly active users, translated character volumes, language pairs, and traditional financial metrics, Cadoni tells us. He notes that demand often extends well beyond English, highlighting significant activity between Japanese and Korean as well as Portuguese and Spanish.

Enterprise relationships frequently begin with a single geography or department before expanding across functions, Cadoni explains. One airline customer, for example, uses DeepL to translate aircraft maintenance documentation before selling planes internationally, illustrating how specialized AI can solve highly practical business problems while supporting global growth.

When Jean Compeau joined Sonar as CFO in March 2025, AI coding was not yet dominating industry conversations. By the summer and fall that followed, however, the landscape had shifted dramatically. Today, AI agents are producing software code at a pace that humans cannot easily verify, creating both opportunity and risk.

That shift sits at the center of Sonar’s mission. The company is the global leader in AI code verification and governance in what it calls the agentic-centric development lifecycle, or “ACDC, just like the band,” Compeau tells us. The scale is significant. Sonar is trusted by 7 million developers, processes 750 billion lines of code daily, serves 25,000 paying customers, and counts 75 percent of the Fortune 100 among its customers, Compeau tells us.

For Compeau, growth is measured through both financial and operational signals. ARR, NRR, GRR, and EBITDA remain core metrics, she tells us. But she also watches utilization, adoption, lead generation, pipeline activity, and free-to-paid conversion rates because these indicators can reveal future performance before financial results arrive.

That perspective shapes how finance participates in strategic decisions. As Sonar invests in new AI-driven products, finance evaluates not only bookings potential but also the company’s long-term position in the AI market, Compeau tells us. The finance function remains involved throughout the process, helping operationalize everything from product introduction and revenue tracking to order management and cash collection.

For Compeau, finance’s role is not simply to measure growth—it is to help shape it.

Each day, Stacey Jenkins watches a different set of indicators than the quarterly financial results that eventually appear on a report. Candidate applications, recruiter activity, and other throughput measures help tell the story of where Aerotek’s business may be headed. Financial results are “the lagging indicator,” Jenkins tells us.

That perspective reflects how she views both finance and leadership. While Aerotek remains focused on helping clients solve talent challenges and build flexible, specialized workforces, the company has steadily expanded its approach. Today, it is helping clients rethink how work gets done through workforce solutions, data insights, and new delivery models. Aerotek is also building capabilities in fully outsourced industrial services, Jenkins tells us.

The common thread is a willingness to look beyond traditional definitions of the business. Jenkins says she remains proud of the organization’s ability to help clients grow while helping people build their careers.

The same mindset appears in her approach to capital allocation. Rather than viewing investment decisions primarily through the lens of cost, she begins with curiosity. Drawing on both operational and strategic experience, she listens carefully to business leaders, asks for supporting data, and seeks to understand the expected outcomes behind each proposal.

The work does not end once funding is approved. Jenkins emphasizes the importance of measuring whether investments actually deliver the results that were anticipated. For her, resource allocation is about more than short-term spending decisions. It is about positioning the business, its people, and its clients for success over the next three, five, seven, and even ten years.

When Jesse Waldron describes Thyme Care’s work, he begins with the patient experience. Cancer patients, he explains, are often thrust into a healthcare system that can feel overwhelming both financially and emotionally.

That reality sits at the center of Thyme Care’s mission. As an oncology care navigation company, Thyme Care helps patients move through their cancer journey while also partnering with health plans and oncology providers. The company works at the intersection of those relationships, helping coordinate care and improve outcomes.

Waldron tells us that Thyme Care partners first with health plans, which identify members undergoing active cancer treatment. From there, the company works directly with patients and collaborates with oncology practices and health systems delivering care. The goal is to help patients navigate treatment while helping health plans manage rising oncology costs.

A key part of that model is Thyme Care’s virtual care team. The organization employs approximately 550 nurses, social workers, and health navigators, Waldron tells us. Those professionals support patients between appointments, helping ensure they stay on track with medications, receive timely care, and have access to guidance when questions arise.

The company’s virtual approach also expands its reach beyond major population centers. Thyme Care serves patients across the United States, including rural communities where access to large academic medical centers may be limited, Waldron tells us. He points to community oncology practices in places such as rural Tennessee as examples of where the model can make a meaningful difference.

Today, Thyme Care serves more than 120,000 members actively undergoing their cancer journey, Waldron tells us.

Five weeks into her role as CFO of Catalant, Christina Spade is helping guide a company that she believes is positioned for a different era of consulting.

Catalant was founded out of Harvard Business School in 2013 and began as an independent consultant matchmaking company, Spade tells us. Today, she describes the firm as a “Consulting 2.0” business built around agile, fit-for-purpose consulting designed to help organizations solve problems and create value more quickly.

The company’s evolution mirrors broader changes in the consulting industry. Independent consultants were often viewed skeptically a decade ago, Spade tells us. But as organizations sought greater efficiency during and after COVID, many finance leaders began looking for more flexible ways to access expertise.

That shift helped Catalant move beyond matching individual consultants with projects. The company now works with Fortune 500 organizations, assembling teams of experts tailored to specific business challenges, Spade tells us. Technology and AI play an increasingly important role, helping match consultants to projects and supporting consultants as they execute client work.

Spade’s strategic mindset is reflected in one of her favorite quotes from golfer Sam Snead: “Only play against par.” Rather than focusing primarily on competitors, she believes organizations should concentrate on the business problems they are uniquely positioned to solve.

That same philosophy informs her view of consulting economics. While billable hours remain important, Spade tells us that clients increasingly prefer outcome-based engagements. Success, she argues, should be measured by whether a project achieves its intended objectives, whether that means improving efficiency, strengthening customer understanding, or developing an executable AI strategy.

When David Forlizzi describes Salsify, he begins with a simple observation: “We all use it every day.” Unlike some of the highly technical software businesses where he previously spent his career, Salsify’s value proposition is visible to anyone who shops online.

Product content sits at the center of the company’s platform, Forlizzi tells us. Whether consumers are browsing a brand website, Amazon, or another online retailer, they rely on product descriptions, photos, videos, and specifications to make purchasing decisions. When that information is inconsistent or incomplete across channels, it can undermine confidence and influence buying behavior.

Salsify helps brands manage and distribute that content across major retailers and commerce platforms, Forlizzi tells us. By serving as a central hub for product experience management, the company enables brands to deliver a consistent message while helping retailers improve conversion rates through stronger product information.

As CFO, Forlizzi sees continuity in the company’s strategy. The fundamentals of the SaaS model—“land, expand and retain”—remain unchanged, he tells us. What has evolved over the last two to three years is a stronger emphasis on profitability as access to capital has become more challenging in a less certain economic environment.

At the same time, AI is reshaping the software landscape. Salsify has embraced that change, and Forlizzi tells us the company views its position positively.

When asked what drives success today, his answer begins with the product itself. More than 800 participants attended a recent user conference, primarily customers, and their enthusiasm was evident, Forlizzi tells us. Strong customer experiences, dedicated employees, and a shareholder base that includes both venture capital and private equity investors have helped create what he describes as a unique situation that is “working quite well.”

When Jaylene Kunze was asked to help rebuild a struggling subsidiary in the United Kingdom, she packed up her family and moved overseas with her nine-month-old daughter. The assignment was one more example of the type of challenge that would come to define her career. Rather than following a traditional finance path, Kunze gravitated toward what she calls “the fixer” role, stepping into situations where businesses needed operational repair, process improvement, or organizational change.

That mindset began to take shape through compliance and Sarbanes-Oxley work. While many viewed the documentation requirements as burdensome, Kunze tells us the process forced her to understand “the intersection of people, process, and systems” behind the numbers. It gave her visibility into how businesses actually operated and prepared her for increasingly complex leadership roles.

Her appetite for transformation became especially valuable when Tendril transitioned from venture-capital ownership to private-equity ownership. Kunze tells us the company ultimately combined six businesses into what became Uplight. As CFO, she oversaw diligence and integration while helping absorb five acquisitions within seven months.

The experience delivered lasting lessons. Culture, she tells us, matters more than many leaders expect. Different organizations often make decisions in entirely different ways, creating friction that financial models cannot predict. She also learned the cost of pushing too hard. Her team successfully completed aggressive integrations, but Kunze tells us she underestimated the human toll and would invest more heavily in staffing and support if given the opportunity again.

Today, those lessons continue to shape how she approaches leadership, growth, and change.

A conversation from years earlier still stands out to Bruno Annicq. While working at AOL, he was supporting business leaders and helping tell the story of the business through data and analytics. Then a senior executive, Holly Hess, approached him with an unexpected suggestion: Why not become the CFO of AOL’s platforms business?

Annicq’s reaction was immediate. “Wait, me? Are you sure?” he recalls. Until that moment, he had never envisioned himself as a finance leader. Hess, however, saw something different—a broad skill set developed through engineering studies, consulting at McKinsey, and operational leadership roles inside AOL.

That willingness to build capabilities outside a traditional finance path has shaped Annicq’s career. He studied engineering not because he intended to become an engineer, but because he believed the skills would prove useful later. After McKinsey, he deliberately sought operational experience, joining AOL during a period of significant change that included Verizon’s acquisition of the company and AOL’s involvement in the Yahoo acquisition.

Those experiences reinforced lessons about adaptability and uncertainty. They also sharpened a principle he continues to emphasize today: distinguishing the “important” from the “urgent.”

As CFO of WellHub, Annicq applies that mindset to forecasting and capital allocation. Seeking greater precision, his team reimagined its forecasting process using multiple models inspired by the Windy weather application. The effort improved forecasting accuracy from roughly 10% error to 2%, Annicq tells us. More recently, the team expanded those capabilities with AI-powered tools, enabling greater forecasting depth across markets and customer segments.

For Annicq, finance’s strategic value is clear: better information creates the confidence to invest, move faster, and help the business grow.

Kevin Hettrich walked into a conference room with a whiteboard full of numbers and a problem no one had fully articulated. QuantumScape’s leadership team was discussing how to scale an expensive R&D tool used to produce early battery materials. Hettrich had spent two weeks gathering data, talking with engineers, and analyzing manufacturing economics. Then he laid out the comparison: QuantumScape’s current performance, the best anyone had achieved in any industry, and what would ultimately be required to succeed in automotive production. There were “six orders of magnitude” separating the industry benchmark from what the company would eventually need, Hettrich tells us.

That moment became an early proving ground for a finance leader who had entered QuantumScape from a background shaped by McKinsey & Company, Bain Capital, and Stanford’s joint business and engineering program. Rather than staying confined to finance, Hettrich immersed himself in the company’s technical environment. He tells us he would contribute to at least one patent application each year and spent time “changing targets out of that tool” and mixing chemicals alongside engineers.

The broader strategy behind QuantumScape has remained equally ambitious. The company’s goal is not incremental improvement, but batteries that are “smaller and lighter,” “faster charging,” “longer lived,” “safer,” and “lower cost at the same time,” Hettrich tells us. Today, the company has commercial partnerships with Volkswagen and collaborations with Corning and Murata Manufacturing as it works to commercialize its solid-state battery platform.

In early 2009, Paolo Poma found himself navigating what he recalls as a “really tough” period. At the time, he was helping steer Ducati through a leveraged buyout negotiated before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Debt obligations had arrived just as markets were “plummeting,” Poma tells us, while lenders closely monitored covenant compliance and private equity owners pressed ahead with the deal.

Poma remembers sitting with bankers and shareholders through repeated discussions about liquidity, budgets, and cash generation. “Planning cash was crucial because covenants on cash were really tight,” he tells us. The experience forced him to balance operational performance with financial discipline while uncertainty spread across global markets. Ducati ultimately avoided breaking its covenants, Poma tells us, and the period became one of the defining stretches of his finance career.

The challenge also reinforced the leadership style that would later shape his tenure at Lamborghini. Trained originally as an engineer, Poma tells us he built his finance career by combining analytical rigor with business understanding. He later expanded his responsibilities from controlling to investor relations, treasury, and accounting before formally becoming CFO in 2011.

Today, that long-view mindset influences how he approaches Lamborghini’s growth. The company grew from roughly €200 million in revenue to nearly €2.4 billion over the last decade, Poma tells us, while maintaining a focus on profitability, product discipline, and sustainable expansion.