What is it like to be CFO of a high-growth firm? Join us as Evan explains how RFID pioneer Impinj entered a new period of rapid growth after the market for RFID technologies at last found its mojo, allowing Impinj to gain new traction inside RFID’s rapid adoption cycle.
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Key Metrics
“We look at the adoption of RFID across different sectors. … We look at the volume of chips that go into RFID tags, and we look at the volume of chips that we ship on a quarterly basis … to see if RFID is being adopted more widely. We are a market leader … so, generally, if our volumes are up, it’s unlikely that we stole share because we are in a dominant market share position. It’s more likely that the market is growing. We refer to this metric as ‘TAM’: total addressable market. The second most important metric is the gross margin percentage. Because we are a hardware company that is shifting to become more of a solutions company, gross margin is very leveraged. We’ve worked very hard to increase our gross margin percentage by 9 points over last year.”
Mentoring Round
“I’ve had a lot of great mentors, and mentoring is just such an important part of personal career development — to embrace mentors and seek them out and try different mentors. … I value personal connections. … I try to visit people at their desk or in their workspace or office instead of emailing or calling them. I really believe in face-to-face communication. The more human relationships we have, the better we’re able to build successful business relationships.”
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Interview Links
- Evan’s Site