Before his first cup of coffee, Alex Melamud opens Slack—not to scan revenue charts first, but to read customer feedback. “The first one that may surprise you as a CFO that I look at is actually NPS,” he tells us. At Engine, every survey drops into a shared channel so “every executive can see” what customers said, he tells us.
That habit fits a finance leader who didn’t grow up in the CFO seat. Melamud started in investment banking and then spent 16 years in private equity, learning to build theses, chase signal, and “sell… the product of private equity,” he tells us. Sitting on boards, he watched the CFO role evolve from “corporate governance accounting” into “executive first and maybe CFO second,” he tells us—someone who can talk like product, sales, or operations and earn board trust.
Read MoreEngine became the moment he stepped inside. After leading the company’s round “18 months ago,” joining the board, and helping with a CFO search, he looked at founder “Elia” and asked, “what if I joined you as CFO?” he tells us. The draw was a focused mission: serving SMB travel, where customers book “like a consumer” and lose corporate rates and visibility, he tells us.
Now his investor lens shows up in the unglamorous work. During annual planning, he dug into the “top 50 costs” outside headcount and pushed leaders to treat each contract “as a brand new relationship,” he tells us—an inspection that produced “10, 15%” savings and “tens of millions of dollars,” he tells us.
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CFOTL: For the audience who might be unfamiliar with Engine, tell us about the company. What are the offerings, and what made you take the leap?
Melamud: Engine, in a nutshell, is a modern business and group travel platform. On our platform, you can book, manage, and pay for travel. We save time and money—those are the core value propositions of the business. We have an extensive network of virtually every airline, hotel, and rental car company in the U.S., and it’s as easy as going to (a consumer travel site) to book on Engine.
Read MoreWhere we differentiate is our focus on the SMB. Over the last 30 years, corporate travel management technology has focused on the enterprise—Concur in the late ’90s, Amex GBT, and more recently Navan. But businesses in the sub-1,000 or sub-500 employee range never had a focused platform. They were booking like consumers through OTAs. That’s transactional. They don’t get proprietary corporate rates, fintech tools, or visibility.
We save over 26% on average per hotel room, but it’s really about time. Travel coordinators, founders, or finance teams spend enormous effort wrangling expenses and ensuring policy compliance. Employees are often out $500 or $600 waiting for reimbursement. That noise and complexity—that’s what we’re on a mission to solve. We say we’re looking to power connection through supply and travel and make travel less work.
CFOTL: As CFO, where are you most focused right now? Growth acceleration, margin discipline, capital efficiency—or something else?
Melamud: It’s all of them, depending on the day and how we want to win. We exited January growing 60% year over year. We’re over 1,000 people, and the opportunity is significant. Corporate travel and expense is a $1.6 trillion global market; 25% is SMB, and two-thirds of SMBs are unmanaged. That’s enormous white space.
For us, it comes down to incrementality—allocating the next dollar at the highest possible ROA. We’ve booked over 30 million hotel rooms, serve more than 25,000 businesses, and saved customers over $270 million last year. Now the question is: where can we go deeper and grow faster within our base?
That requires high-signal data. We’re investing in data science and AI automation to understand micro-level behavior and improve unit economics. The investor in me is always asking: where do we have conviction to steer the ship and improve returns?
Prompt for Jack’s Minute TASK: Create “Jack’s Minute” — an opening segment for the podcast. Context: This segment comes before the Guest Introduction. Its purpose is to create intrigue and anticipation around the CFO guest interview. Unlike the Guest Introduction (which highlights career chapters and current priorities in 100 words), Jack’s Minute should: Run roughly 100 words (not less than 90, not more than 110). Be host-driven — Jack’s perspective, voice, and reflections should frame the segment. Spotlight why this conversation matters now — connect the CFO’s background, company, or current industry trends to themes of strategy, leadership, or transformation. Tease the audience with what they will learn or discover, without repeating the biographical details from the Guest Introduction. Aim to be thought-provoking, slightly provocative, or curiosity-sparking — leaving listeners wanting to hear more. Reference for differentiation: Here is the Guest Introduction (already prepared): [Insert Guest Introduction text here] Hello, CFO Alex Melamud is with us. After years as a technology investor evaluating companies from the outside, Alex made a rare move—stepping into the CFO seat for the first time. What prompted the shift? Conviction in Engine’s leadership, business model, and growth potential.
Before we begin, I want you to consider something: it’s one thing to evaluate CFOs from a board seat—it’s another to become one.
Today’s guest made that leap. After years spent assessing leadership teams, underwriting growth, and allocating capital from the investor’s side of the table, he chose to step inside the arena. That shift alone raises a compelling question: What changes when the pattern-recognizer becomes the operator?
In this conversation, we explore what it means to move from advising strategy to owning it—where capital allocation becomes daily discipline, where customer signal shapes financial focus, and where the CFO must be fluent not just in numbers, but in business momentum.
If you’ve ever wondered how an investor thinks once they’re in the CFO chair, you’ll want to listen closely.
Engine | www.engine.com | Denver, CO