The accounting team at Looker showed up every day knowing their jobs might disappear within a year. The company was in limbo—acquired by Google but still waiting on European approval—so the deal hadn’t closed, integration hadn’t begun, and uncertainty hung over the office. Yet the team continued to deliver “absolutely excellent work,” taking pride in their craft even when the upside had faded, Razzak Jallow tells us.
That moment stayed with him. For Jallow, now CFO of FloQast, it crystallized a belief that professionalism and pride are not situational—they’re intrinsic. “We get to choose what we do,” he says, reflecting on how the team’s attitude revealed character when incentives were stripped away. It’s a lesson that echoes throughout his career, from Adobe’s subscription transition to Apple’s sales finance organization and into his first CFO role.
At FloQast, that mindset shows up in how he approaches scale. Early on, the work was about fixing what was directly controllable—the “low-hanging fruit,” as he puts it. Over time, the challenge shifted. As teams and systems matured, the hardest problems required multiple functions to change together, Jallow tells us. Speed gave way to coordination; individual fixes gave way to shared ownership.
The same discipline shapes how he thinks about growth. Efficient growth, in his view, starts with customer value, not the P&L. If teams are investing in the highest-ROI initiatives for customers, the financial results will follow—“maybe not in three months… but certainly long term,” he tells us.
Whether navigating acquisition limbo or platform expansion, Jallow’s throughline is clear: strategy is built on judgment, culture, and pride in the work—especially when no one is watching.
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CFOTL: We would like to learn a little more about FloQast and the journey it’s been on—and in 2022 you talked about expanding into new geographies to reach more customers. Tell us, what did you learn about geographic expansion along the way?
Jallow: I think the things we learned are the things most companies learn—nothing unique—but finding the right leader for the region is really important. It’s also about finding the right balance of local talent, who understands how that region works, along with a few people from the corporate culture who can help bridge the two—so you keep the same core principles while still respecting local norms. We talk about ourselves as one big company, and it’s fairly consistent across regions, but each region has its own flavor—both internally and in how customers and partners expect you to engage.
There are other benefits too. We’ve expanded to Europe, Australia, and now Asia, which enables round-the-clock customer support and development. It’s easy to set up a sales office in another country, but you also have to support those customers. You don’t want a customer saying, “This broke—how do I fix it?” and your only option is waking engineers at 2 a.m. on Christmas Day or July 4. It’s much better when you have a team already awake and working.
CFOTL: How does finance partner as this organization gets far flung? Have you put finance people out in other geographies, or is that something further down the line?
Jallow: That’s something coming up right now. Today, our finance team is U.S.-based. It does help that we’re geographically diverse within the U.S.—so the California team can cover certain regions, and the New York team can cover others. Having really well-thought-out processes, guidance, and training for remote regions reduces a lot of the questions and back-and-forth. And it’s not just finance—we work closely with sales enablement and partner enablement to make sure they not only understand everything, but they’re also effective at training their remote regions on how we do things. We lean heavily on those enablement teams, and they do a great job ramping up regions.
CFOTL: Let’s talk a little bit about growth now and how you view it. The phrase “efficient growth”—does that mean something particular to FloQast? How do you look at growth?
Jallow: That’s a question everyone struggles with—the ratio between how much you spend and how much you get—whether you’re expanding internationally or moving into new segments. Every company has its own answer, and we have ours. We’re spending very heavily on product and R&D because we want to build great products for customers over the long term. But I also see budgeting as a management test. In a first pass of the budget, a team might say, “I need this much to do this much—and if I had a little more, I could do this other thing.” The test is: if that incremental thing has a better ROI than what they proposed as the core plan, then why didn’t they prioritize it in the initial budget? Those conversations are helpful because they force everyone to invest in the highest-ROI initiatives first and the lowest-ROI initiatives last. Every company has more good ideas than it has budget to fund them. For us, efficient growth means doing the best things for the customer that drive the most customer value. How that shows up in the P&L is secondary, because if we’re truly helping customers succeed, that will make its way back into the P&L—maybe not in three months or six months, but over the long term.
FloQast | www.floqast.com | Sherman Oaks, CA