Among global management consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group—long recognized as one of the world’s top three “strategy houses” (along with McKinsey and Bain)—has remained an attractive early career chapter for many executives who wish to accelerate their learning by consulting to senior corporate leaders.
Such was the path taken by Sapna Kapur, who in 2007—after 4 years with Kurt Salmon and then 4 with BCG—exited management consulting in search of a corporate operations role that would allow her to apply the expertise that she had gleaned from years of serving a variety of corporate clients.
At the time, Kapur could not have known that she was about to make what will more than likely be her professional life’s biggest investment of career years with a single company—nor could she have realized that upon completion of this 12-year stint, she would in short order become a CFO.
Read MoreKapur’s sizable investment of career years with a single company is not unlike similar sojourns made many of the finance leaders who have shared their career journeys with us. However, what intrigues us is that she established this track record and fed her budding CFO ambitions while an employee of Google from 2007 to 2019, a span of time during which the company grew from $20 billion to $182 billion.
“I joined Google when it was just starting to take a bit of a breather in order to better think about the ways in which it could grow to the next level and explore questions like, ‘Should we go for growth by 2X or by 5X?,’” recalls Kapur, who notes that the original Google operations team that she joined was made up of executives with consulting roots just like her own.
“We were needed to really drive some of these types of growth explorations to better inform the leadership team at Google,” explains Kapur, who within 3 years of joining the company had begun to serve in the first of several finance roles.
Listeners will undoubtedly find Kapur’s insights into Google’s use of small teams of keen interest, as well as the collaborative nature that she regularly transmits—an attribute that she seems to take for granted.
While time limitations may not have allowed us to track the roots of Kapur’s “collaborative skillset,” we suspect that professional peers might tell us that not unlike Lady Gaga, she was “Born This Way.” –Jack Sweeney
“Define a vision for the operating profile of the business and create alignment across the org. Know the business and its key metrics and drivers, create scalable processes, hire the best that you can, be the source and voice of truth, advocate for the business with key stakeholders (board, investors, lenders, suppliers), and always identify leading indicators that can help to guide/navigate the business.” –Sapna Kapur, CFO, Sensor Tower
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CFOTL: Tell us about Sensor Tower … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Kapur: At Sensor Tower, we position ourselves as a leading analytics provider for app engagement and advertising metrics at scale. We have a SaaS platform that had its roots in gaming and mobile apps. Along the way in Sensor Tower’s journey, which we have been on for some 10 years now, we acquired another organization called Pathmatics, which provides advertising insights at scale across a multitude of ecosystems.
We have the unique ability to combine a lot of engagement advertising and purchase audience metrics at scale for a variety of use cases across the industry. A lot of our insights are utilized by financial firms that are making investing decisions.
Read MoreWe’re also used by agencies and brands that want to understand the landscape of advertising and how digital and other engagement commerce is evolving. We’ve always been very deeply involved with a lot of gaming providers, who’ve always been front-runners in this online digital space. I would describe us as late-stage—we’re about to hit a triple-digit ARR run rate.
This is certainly a very, very interesting time for us to be in this space. For me, personally, it’s also important and rewarding to be a part of helping not only the finance organization but also several of the operating teams within Sensor Tower to scale up and be ready to support our next phase of growth.
We know that the areas of digital, mobile, and so on have always been a huge part of any consumer’s time and engagement, and now they apply to commerce, too. It’s very exciting to be in a company that is able to use a large number of data science and AI applications, as well as first-party ownership of a lot of panel data, to be able to infer the landscape and evolution of this digital/mobile space on both the macro and micro levels.
We try to be the source of truth for this space, and we’ve had great success in that, doing so. We’re not only continuing on this journey but also hoping to accelerate its pace, given the assets that we have.
jb
Sensor Tower | www.sensortower.com | San Francisco, CA