In this episode, Jack is joined by Sarah Taylor, CFO of MCNC. For an organization operating a 5,000-mile fiber-optic network across North Carolina, deciding where to invest involves more than identifying communities that need connectivity. It also requires understanding the long-term economics of serving them. Taylor describes how she’s helping MCNC bring greater scrutiny to […]
Rebuilding the Revenue Engine at SolarWinds | Sam Monti, CFO, SolarWinds
In this episode, Jack is joined by Sam Monti, CFO of SolarWinds. Monti challenges a familiar assumption about the evolution of the CFO role: that finance leaders have only recently become strategic partners to their CEOs. He argues that earlier generations of financial executives often held significant strategic influence and that technology is helping the […]
1228: The New Economics of SolarWinds | Samuel Monti, CFO, SolarWinds
Sam Monti was working in finance at Rockwell Automation when a conversation about charging customers for technical support took an unexpected turn. A salesman suggested collecting a fee for access to the company's engineers. Monti had another idea: Why not make it a membership, like a country club? The resulting subscription business generated $150 million…
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1225: Nix the Clicks: Building a Finance Function That Manages by Exception | Steve Fox, CFO, Every Man Jack
When Steve Fox joined Every Man Jack in 2021, the men's personal care brand had a new private equity owner and an ambitious growth agenda. Carlyle Group saw an opportunity: a widely distributed brand that had never invested heavily in marketing. The challenge was finding the operating leverage to fund that investment. For Fox, the…
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1223: Scaling Sokin: Beyond the First $100 Million | Tom Steer, CFO, Sokin
When Tom Steer joined Sokin as CFO, he already knew the international payments company unusually well. As an investment banker at FT Partners, he had advised Sokin through a capital raise during a difficult period for fintech funding. He knew its leadership, its financial projections, and the ambitions behind its growth. What he had yet…
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Inside the Economics of Consumer Lending | Perry Beberman, CFO, Bread Financial
In this episode, Jack is joined by Perry Beberman, CFO of Bread Financial. For a financial services company built around consumer credit and retail partnerships, growth is inseparable from decisions about risk, customer behavior, and the use of capital. Beberman explains how Bread Financial manages these competing considerations while reshaping its balance sheet, funding structure, […]
1221: Rebuilding Bread Financial’s Capital Foundation—And What It Made Possible | Perry Beberman, CFO, Bread Financial
When Perry Beberman arrived at what is now Bread Financial, the company had a balance sheet problem. It was carrying too much leverage, had insufficient capital, and needed a more disciplined approach to funding its lending business. For a finance executive who had spent decades navigating consumer credit cycles, the assignment was familiar territory. The…
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How Hippo Learned Which Risks to Keep | Guy Zeltser, CFO, Hippo Insurance
In this episode, Jack is joined by Guy Zeltser, CFO of Hippo Insurance. One of the more consequential decisions in Hippo’s recent history involved deliberately reducing the size of its homeowners insurance business. Following a difficult period in 2023, the company needed to rebalance its exposure to risk—even if that meant temporarily moving backward on […]
You Can’t Have Probably Right Revenue | Sam Chung, Chief Customer Officer, Salesforce
In this episode, Jack is joined by Sam Chung, Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and former CFO of Salesforce.org. For finance leaders, the transition from subscription revenue to consumption-based and hybrid models introduces a fundamental challenge: the predictability that once made recurring revenue attractive can no longer be taken for granted. Chung brings an unusually […]
1220: At Hippo, Growth and Risk Work Together | Guy Zeltser, CFO, Hippo Insurance
In 2023, Hippo faced what CFO Guy Zeltser describes as perhaps the worst quarter in the insurance company's history. The response was not to chase growth harder. Instead, leadership made a decision that would have seemed counterintuitive during the company's earlier expansion: shrink part of the business. Between 2023 and 2024, homeowners insurance premiums declined…
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1219: Building a Health Plan Around What People Actually Do | Tami Wilson-Ciranna, CFO, Curative
When Tami Wilson-Ciranna joined Curative in April 2020, the assignment came with what now looks like a spectacularly optimistic assumption: three months. “I met with Fred on a Tuesday and I started on Thursday,” she recalls. Fred Turner, Curative’s co-founder and CEO, was leading the company’s response to COVID-19, and Wilson-Ciranna—who had retired and become…
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1209: Finding a Larger Voice in the Room | Ross Grainger, CFO, Nasuni
Ross Grainger remembers an early chapter of his career when finance was only one part of the job. After stepping outside a traditional finance path to own and operate a Maako auto-body franchise, Grainger tells us he learned what it meant to “act like an owner.” That sometimes meant cleaning toilets, learning to paint cars,…
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