Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco’s Union Square Advisors.
For Vallurupalli—a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks—the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane.
Still, Vallurupalli tells us that from his early banking days forward, he always viewed investment banking as a place to learn but not necessarily his ultimate career destination: “Investment banking, to me, was kind of like a physician’s residency—it put the foundation in place.”
Read MoreAt the same time, the firm’s unmitigated drive to serve its clients provided him with many “learning moments,” including one client assignment that remains particularly salient.
According to Vallurupalli, a private equity client with an appetite for leveraged buyouts asked Union Square to provide a rundown on 30 different companies and brief its investment committee on the results when it met 4 days later.
“Over those 4 days, we literally did not go home—I slept under my desk for a total of 2 hours and worked straight through in order to try to meet this deadline,” recalls Vallurupalli, who after 2-1/2 years with Union Square joined Guidewire Software to start up the developer’s post-IPO corporate development team.
Along the way, Vallurupalli became increasingly interested in the day-to-day operations of the company and began to seek out opportunities beyond corporate development in order to ease his growing operations itch.
Says Vallurupalli: “I’ve never thought about titles, to be honest. I always asked myself: ‘Where could I go next? What would be interesting? How do I take my prior experience to the next opportunity and allow it to be leveraged?'” –Jack Sweeney
“You’re going to learn something every day in this role, and a natural curiosity and ability to solve problems will be the difference between just doing a job on the one hand and growing/de-risking a company on the other.” –Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO, Airbase
Made Possible By
CFOTL: Tell us about Airbase … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Vallurupalli: As finance professionals in the midmarket—which is often thought of as firms with anywhere from 50 to 100 to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 employees, we have been underserved. There have been good general ERP solutions like NetSuite and Intacct that could be used by the midmarket segment, but beyond those there hadn’t been a lot of tooling. Hence on the FP&A side along came tools like Adaptive Insights and Pigment that can help with planning. But the controller in the accounting side of the house has been pretty much underserved.
I began to become interested in filling this gap a number of years ago, but my experience has always been at software firms and I’ve never worked for a company other than a software company. Eighty percent of the deals that I did in investment banking were for software companies. Obviously, I’m biased toward software—whether you call it “lending solutions” or something else— and not so much oriented toward the “fin” side of fintech.
Read MoreSo, Airbase was coming at this challenge from a software perspective: “You’re going to get value out of our software because you’re going to save a bunch of money using it.” What does it do? Airbase consolidates all of a company’s nonpayable spend into a single software solution.
Companies spend money in four ways: payroll—how you pay your employees every other week; accounts payable—how you pay your vendors; expense reimbursements—how you reimburse employees for dollars they spend on company’s behalf; and corporate cards—your American Express, your wallet, the card that you have in your wallet.
Airbase takes all of the nonpay spend and consolidates it—the accounts payable automation software, the expense reimbursement software, the software for the physical and virtual cards. They’re all integrated into a single software solution.
We also have recently announced a really cool product called Guided Procurement, which enables every employee at a company to log into Airbase and say, “I want to spend some company money.” They just click on a tab and submit what they want to spend money on, and Guided Procurement will automatically bring in the legal team to review legal terms, the IT InfoSec team to review SOC 2 compliance or any other details in that regard, the accounting team to look at payment terms, and finance’s FP&A team to approve budget for it.
Another way of looking at the benefits and success of our offerings is to realize that even though we are highly integrated with the leading midmarket solutions, accounting and finance professionals in firms with Airbase now spend about 80% of their time in an Airbase solution versus in an ERP solution.
jb
Airbase | www.airbase.com | San Francisco, CA