Amanda Whalen’s first CFO role began with a question. “You’re not a finance technical person,” her company’s president told her, “but you’re the strongest leader on my team. Will you be willing to be the CFO and help me transform the finance function?” She accepted.
Over the following year, Whalen tells us, her team tackled three major initiatives: fixing broken cost accounting at a dairy plant, realigning sales incentives to drive margin, and overhauling the P&L reporting structure to match the new parent company’s expectations. The team was skeptical—“They said, ‘You’re crazy. There’s no way we can do that all in a year,’” she recalls. But they did. The business became 10% more profitable.
Read MoreThat experience, Whalen tells us, revealed finance as a powerful lever to drive business transformation—“You get to work with every function… It’s highly quantitative and analytical, and it involves working with a lot of really great people.”
Now CFO at Klaviyo, Whalen brings the same philosophy. In three years, the company more than doubled revenue and improved margins by 20 percentage points. She led Klaviyo’s IPO, expanding the company’s readiness across technical, strategic, and investor-facing dimensions. “It wasn’t just about getting ready to go public,” she says, “but about operating successfully as a public company for a long, long time.”
Whether transforming legacy operations or scaling a fast-growing SaaS firm, Whalen’s approach remains constant: think long-term, go deep into execution, and “be kind to your future self.”
Made Possible By
CFOTL: What type of company is Klaviyo, and what’s its mission?
Whalen: Klaviyo is the only CRM that was custom built for consumer brands. Our platform brings together marketing, service, and analytics in one place by integrating all the data a B2C business knows about its customers. We use that data to power personalized insights and communications at internet-level consumer scale.
These days, the bar for personalization is much higher. Nobody wants to be just generically addressed as a “valued consumer.” They want to be seen as Sarah, who loves blue yoga pants. Klaviyo connects every dot in the customer journey—from the first time they enter a store or click on a website, all the way through to their hundredth purchase.
Read MoreWe serve over 169,000 customers, including consumer brands like Mattel, Glossier, CorePower Yoga, and Daily Harvest. What sets us apart is that while there are fantastic B2B CRMs out there—we have great respect for them—they weren’t built for B2C needs. B2B CRMs are designed for longer, more complex sales cycles, smaller teams, and manually entered data. They move at a slower pace.
In contrast, a consumer brand might have thousands—or millions—of customers, with thousands of touchpoints for each one. From browsing history to purchase behavior, B2B CRMs can’t keep up with that level of speed and scale.
Because Klaviyo actually started as a database company, we were able to vertically integrate that data foundation into the application layer. That allows us to stitch together every single moment of the customer lifecycle—and use it to drive retention, loyalty, and most importantly, revenue and ROI for our customers. At the end of the day, it’s about how much value we can help our customers generate.
Klaviyo | www.klaviyo.com | Boston, MA