Joanne Cheng’s career had already carried her through multiple successful exits and finance leadership roles when an unexpected opportunity arose. Having proven her ability to guide companies to liquidity events and beyond, Cheng had established a new benchmark for any next move: she wanted to steer a firm toward an IPO while serving as its CFO. But then along came Jellyfish, a company whose big day in the public markets would likely be years away.
At first glance, Jellyfish didn’t fit Cheng’s established criteria for her next CFO position. The company was still small—just about 90 people—and lacked a finance team. Yet there was something about Jellyfish that instantly drew her in. Before she fell for the company, she fell in love with its product. As Cheng puts it, “I’ve needed this product at every company I’ve been at. Measuring R&D impact and efficiency is something I’ve thought about for much of my career.”
Read MoreWhile the prospect of an IPO was an important consideration, Cheng realized that her passion for Jellyfish’s offering outweighed any reservations about the company’s stage. She saw, firsthand, the immense value this product could bring to finance leaders. It addressed a persistent pain point: quantifying engineering effort and impact.
So, Cheng followed her instincts and joined Jellyfish as its first finance hire—even before an accountant or controller was brought on. In doing so, she committed not only to building a finance function from scratch, but also to a product she believed in.
“There is a mix of luck and hard work involved in each success, but there is a lot of truth in the old saying, ‘Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.’ You don’t always have control over when opportunity happens, but you do have control over being prepared—so keep going, keep working hard, and keep making progress.” —Joanne Cheng, CFO, Jellyfish
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CFO Playbook
- Views the budget as a roadmap, aligning investments with measurable outcomes.
- Bridges cross-departmental gaps by serving as a connector and resource allocator.
- Advocates for data-driven decision-making in resource allocation and project prioritization.
- Balances long-term vision with operational discipline through collaborative leadership.
CFOTL: Tell us about this company—what does it do, and what are its offerings today?
Cheng: Jellyfish measures what engineers work on to ensure their efforts align with business priorities. We provide data to engineering leaders and executives about an area of the business that often feels like a black hole. Many companies spend over 40% of their budget on R&D, yet there are few metrics to measure engineering effectively. Jellyfish fills this gap, offering insights into the work engineers are doing and how it contributes to organizational goals.
Read MoreJust as Salesforce revolutionized sales forecasting, making data accessible and actionable, Jellyfish does the same for engineering. By providing visibility into what engineers are working on, our platform enables better communication and decision-making, ultimately improving outcomes for the company.
Jellyfish isn’t just for engineering leaders; it’s also a valuable tool for finance. For example, finance teams use Jellyfish to streamline software capitalization—a process that is often time-consuming and heavily reliant on manual input from engineering leaders. Additionally, our platform populates R&D sections in board decks with robust data. Before Jellyfish, these sections were often sparse, containing only basic information like roadmaps or headcount charts. Now, we can showcase where engineers are spending their time, the cost of that work, and the quality of the output.
This level of insight empowers boards and leadership teams to have data-informed conversations about engineering and product development—something that has traditionally been difficult to achieve.
Jellyfish www.jellyfish.co Boston, MA