When Steve Sutter joined Celigo five years ago, he stepped into a company positioned not as another SaaS app but as what he calls “the infrastructure, the piping, the plumbing” of business automation. Celigo, he tells us, moves data between systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, and Snowflake so companies can “create very sophisticated business processes” without the friction of disconnected silos.
For Sutter, the real work of finance begins behind that plumbing. “As CFO, you have to build a sustainable business model,” he tells us, one rooted in clear unit economics—how each dollar of new recurring revenue is earned and what it costs to deliver value. That analytical discipline, he explains, gives finance a vantage point “no one else has,” allowing it to balance engineering ambition with go-to-market execution.
Read MoreWorking inside a privately held, fast-growth environment, Sutter views resource allocation as both art and accountability. Sometimes, he says, companies must “invest in sales and marketing at an excessive rate” to gain traction—but the test is whether the model still makes mathematical sense. He partners closely with the CRO and CMO to watch metrics like the quota-to-OTE ratio and pipeline efficiency, adjusting as conditions change.
Even at scale, Sutter keeps a simple mantra: acknowledge failure quickly. “As soon as you’ve acknowledged failure,” he tells us, “you can move on to something that will likely be successful.” It’s a principle that keeps Celigo’s growth disciplined—and its automation ambitions grounded in financial logic.
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CFOTL: Well, please tell us more about this company. Then it’s not quite the company you joined five years ago. Tell us about Celigo today—what’s it about? What is this company up to?
Sutter: Celigo is an intelligent automation platform—we’re an infrastructure technology company. We take data from one application and integrate it with another to support end-to-end business processes. SaaS adoption created data silos; to run an intelligent process, you might need customer data in NetSuite and Salesforce, plus product-usage data from (our) app, and perhaps aggregate it in a data lake like Snowflake or Databricks for BI. Celigo provides the “piping”—connecting cloud apps, databases, and EDI partners—so companies can design simple or sophisticated processes across those endpoints.
CFOTL: Looking at your five years, what were the financial priorities that underpinned growth over that period?
Sutter: As CFO, the job is to build a sustainable business model grounded in unit economics—what $1 of new ARR costs, new-logo efficiency, and the time to initial value. You allocate scarce resources across engineering, product, sales, and marketing from a whole-business vantage point that even a CEO doesn’t always have day-to-day. On paper, you prove the model—then execute to it—so the organization marches toward a scalable, thoughtful, intelligent business model.
CFOTL: You’ve been in private and public companies—how does being privately held shape your long-term strategy?
Sutter: You often invest in sales and marketing ahead of efficiency to establish traction, but you must define what “efficient GTM” looks like. I “plant seeds” with the CRO and CMO: maintain a healthy quota-to-OTE ratio (if we pay more, ASPs and quotas should rise), set the right SE-to-rep mix, and understand unit economics by pipeline stream. As you scale toward $100M, you will make mistakes—acknowledge failure quickly, shut down what isn’t working, and redeploy to what will scale. That discipline is how you make the model sustainable and profitable.
Celigo | www.Celigo.com | Redwood City, CA