Inside The Mentoring Round, CFO Sam Kemp emphasizes the importance of understanding the gap between a business’s formal operating model and the actual, informal ways it functions. Recognizing this gap is crucial for new leaders to gain leverage quickly within an organization or a new division. Looking forward, Sam outlined his top three priorities: ensuring […]
971: Navigating Growth and Transformation | Sam Kemp, CFO, Built Technologies
Looking back on his days with GoDaddy, Sam Kemp recalls a pivotal page in the domain registry giant's strategic M&A playbook. As he prepared to present to the executive team his analysis of a recent acquisition, he included a simple slide to convey data that would challenge the company's conventional thinking around acquisitions and how—free…
Listen to the Episode Below (0:48:23)
912: Designing Your Operating Profile | Sapna Kapur, CFO, Sensor Tower
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…
Listen to the Episode Below (1:04:19)
The Electric Services Opportunity, A CFO’s Priorities | Rex Jackson, CFO, ChargePoint
CFO GUEST: Rex Jackson of ChargePoint
Franklin Chiang of Aeris Shares His 12-Mo Business Priorities, IMA 2023
907: Leaning In to Operations | Rick Rosenthal, CFO, CLARA Analytics
Rick Rosenthal had been working as an investment analyst at Bear Stearns for some 3 years when the bank became a casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis. He remembers sitting in front of his Bloomberg terminal in March 2008 and watching a news conference at which a Wall Street expert was assuring viewers that Bear…
Listen to the Episode Below (0:47:30)
892: Understanding Your Customer From the Inside Out | Jason Quinn, CFO, Vendr
When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American finance executives being deployed by digital disrupter SMB printer Vistaprint of Boston, Mass. For the next 5 years, Quinn would be involved in a string of business acquisitions that would grow the digital printer’s European revenues from nothing to…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:51:03)
874: Completing Your Visibility to Predictability Framework | Wailun Chan, CFO, Grafana Labs
No matter how many chapters Wailun Chan’s finance career ultimately spans, the decade that he spent at LinkedIn will always stand out. It perhaps goes without saying that as a finance career investment, a 10-year resume stint is increasingly rare today, and it’s not uncommon for a “decade investor” looking back on his or her…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:43:34)
782: When Operations Came First | Lou Arcudi, CFO, Amolyt Pharma
To those well familiar with the career milestones that typically mark the path to the CFO office, Lou Arcudi’s resume at first may appear to be upside down. Or at least it could be said that the same operational projects and roles that frequently populate the tops of the resumes of aspiring CFOs are instead…
Listen to the Episode Below (01:08:41)
756: Start-Ups, SPACs, and Street Fights | Michael Levine, CFO, Payoneer
"The key to success is to build your team with people who have equal amounts of experience, intelligence, and passion, and the rest will take care of itself." –Michael Levine, CFO, Payoneer Start early, stay late, be prepared, and don’t shy away from the street-fight environments surrounding start-up companies. These methods have helped Michael Levine…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:48:02)
651: Remedying Your Metrics Disconnect | Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara
Ross Tennenbaum remembers that back in 2018, when he was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, he had conversations with a number of senior executives from Slack Technologies, Inc. At the time, the fast-growing workplace messaging and communication platform was preparing to go public, and the company was making a special effort to educate bankers…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:48:07)
574: The Age of the Real-Time CFO | Mike Ellis, CFO, Flywire
Knowing that Mike Ellis has been the CFO of several growth companies, we can’t help but ask him about his tour of duty at the Massachusetts Port Authority, where the experienced finance executive served as controller from 2006 to 2009. Although the Port Authority is not exactly the type of employer that you would expect…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:36:36)