Finance Hiring Priorities | Sruthi Lanka, CFO, Public.com

CFO GUEST: Sruthi Lankla, CFO, Public.com

CFO Sruthi Lanka: So public was a very young company, honestly, for the level of momentum that it had at the time that I joined. So it had only been started, uh, launched publicly as in its card form in September, 2019. So I had, I joined the company only a year later. So many of the finance functions were still pretty nascent. I walked in the door with really only a part-time team, um, and not as much information in data and infrastructure as I talked about. And so as I looked around, I realized that one of the first things I had to do was bring that team in-house. I can tell, I can talk ad nauseous about why it’s important to have in-house accounting teams, particularly in at periods of scaling. But my first hire actually was on the data warehouse side.

And this goes back a little bit to closely marrying finance and data teams. I think this may be, you know, surprising for some of your listeners. Uh, but I, the first thing I did, because it’s extremely important for the data warehouse to, you know, keep track of engineering evolution so that you’re not, you know, catching up from behind. My first hire was to build out the data warehouse. The second was to in-house the accounting functions. Uh, and also woman who I brought from a previous company. Um, and the third was the strategic finance, right? And I think that is the right kind of order for dominoes to fall. If you are building a finance team pretty much from scratch, uh, you need the house to be in order. So you need your infrastructure on the analytics and accounting side to be in order. And then you need a strong strategic finance person to marry those two things together and help drive decisions around the direction of the business.

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