Shows / CFO THOUGHT LEADER
CFO THOUGHT LEADER
CFO THOUGHT LEADER is a podcast featuring firsthand accounts of finance leaders who are driving change within their organizations. We share the career journey of our spotlighted CFO guest: What do they struggle with? How do they persevere? What makes them successful CFOs? CFO THOUGHT LEADER is all about inspiring finance professionals to take a leadership leap. We know that by hearing about the successes — (and yes, also the failures) — of others, today’s CFOs can more confidently chart their…
Episodes
CFO THOUGHT LEADER598: A Bank for Your Financial Health | Thibault Fulconis, CFO, Varo Money
Earlier this year, when the FDIC approved fintech start-up Varo Money’s application to become a national bank, Thibault Fulconis’s latest CFO career chapter…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER597: Why RPA is Attracting More Than Capital | Tomer Pinchas, CFO, Kryon
Last February, following his arrival on a flight to Israel, Tomer Pinchas recalls receiving a startling text from the Israeli government. Having recently…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER596: Optimizing Your Core Offerings Beneath 2020's COVID Haze | John Theler, CFO, Avetta
When John Theler stepped into the CFO office at SaaS developer Avetta last summer, among his list of priorities was the daunting task of better articulating…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER595: The Flight to Digital | Virpy Richter, CFO, Awin Global
It was supposed to be the type of introduction that would help to break the ice between a new business leader and her direct reports. However, the words spoken…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER594: The Art & Science of Raising Funds | Chris Mausler, CFO, PeerNova
When it comes to raising money from the investor community, finance executives often find themselves standing in line for job assignments that promise to make…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER593: Energizing Your Customer Borders | Jim Emerich, CFO, Narvar
For many future finance leaders, the year 2020 is destined to provide the dark moments of doubt that sweeten the upsides to be savored in years to come…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER592: Beyond Disruption, Capitalizing on New Opportunities | Sameer Bhargava, CFO, Clark Construction Group
Having built a successful career in private equity—including 13 years with formidable Carlyle Group—Sameer Bhargava was probably not the most likely candidate…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER591: Why CFOs Must Ask the Difficult Questions | Andrew Casey, CFO, WalkMe
Years from now, when Andrew Casey reflects back on his CFO career and seeks to make sense of its various chapters, he may want to title the mythical volume…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER590: The Art of Fixing What's Broken | Terry Schmid, CFO, Topia
Purchasing bananas and moving them through a warehouse in less than 24 hours is perhaps not a professional experience widely shared by today’s finance leaders…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER589: Builder, Fixer, Finance Chief | Bob Feller, CFO, Workforce Software
Last November, CFO Bob Feller achieved a career milestone of sorts when he celebrated his fifth anniversary as Workforce Software’s finance leader. “Prior to…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER588: FinTech Goes Beyond the Paycheck | Brian Whalen, CFO, Branch
Back in 2008, when auction giant eBay acquired Bill Me Later (BML), a Maryland-based payment credit company, Brian Whalen and his BML colleagues breathed a…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER587: Looking Around the Next Corner | Bill Koefoed, CFO, OneStream Software
When asked whether a new sales enablement hire would be a “direct report,” Bill Koefoed, CFO of OneStream Software, replied: “Organization matters only when…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER586: Why it's Time for B.I. to Turn the Page | Mohit Daswani, CFO, ThoughtSpot
When Mohit Daswani stepped into the CFO office of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ThoughtSpot this past January, he ascended to something more than just another…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER585: A Taste for Opportunity | Ankur Agrawal, CFO, Cooks Venture
As the newly appointed CFO of agtech start-up Cooks Venture, Ankur Agrawal lists one of his favorite duties as designing menus. Of course, we are referring to…
CFO THOUGHT LEADER584: Keeping an Eye on KPIs | Omar Choucair, CFO, Trintech
Along his path to the CFO office at technology firm Trintech, Omar Choucair’s segue from radio to high tech was among his most consequential career…
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583: An Appetite for Change | Tod Nestor, CFO, Energy Focus
Nestor: Energy Focus is an LED lighting and controls company. LED lighting is like comparing a smartphone to a rotary phone. LED lights are actually extremely…
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582: Fortifying Your FP&A Footing | Robert Richards, CFO, Centauri
CFOTL: Tell us about this business - what does it do and what are its offerings? Richards: Centauri is a government services business. We've been growing at…
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581: Applying Your Fresh Eyes to the Role| Anthony Coletta, CFO, SAP, NA
CFOTL: Share with us a finance strategic moment? Coletta: The most recent strategic moment that sticks with me goes back two years to when I moved to our North…
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580: Finding Your Groove inside the CFO's Evolving Role | Laura Onopchenko, CFO, NerdWallet
A brief summary of this episode
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579: When Your Two Worlds Become One | Shari Freedman, CFO, Room to Read
CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next 12 months? Freedman: Here at Room to Read, we've just launched our 2020–2025 strategic plan…
- CFO THOUGHT LEADER
578: The Awesome Power of FP&A | Jason Child, CFO, Splunk
Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to…
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577: Rethinking Sales Productivity | Carolyn Koehn, CFO, Boomi
When finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid…
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576: Finance & the Beat of the Drum | Guido Torrini, CFO, Celonis
It doesn’t take long for CFO Guido Torrini of Celonis to draw our attention to the burden of the growing pools of data within organizations and the great irony…
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575: The Benefits of Openness | Anup Singh, CFO, Illumio
Among the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was…
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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…
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573: CBD: Sizing Up the Opportunity | Alan George, CFO, Ojai Energetics
mong the different experiences that Alan George credits with having prepared him for a CFO role, one office meeting looms large. After he had spent days and…
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572: Measuring the Efficiencies of Customer Acquisition | David Burt, CFO, ServiceTitan
Years from now, when finance leader David Burt is reminiscing about his varied career chapters, you might imagine a captivated listener politely interrupting…
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571: Optimizing Your Pipeline's Velocity |Greg Wookey, CFO, Boulevard
Inside the world of retail businesses, Greg Wookey’s CFO career has advanced down a path that parallels the sector’s growing appetite for more sophisticated…
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570: Discovering What Makes Customers Happy | Sue Vestri, CFO, Greenphire, Inc.
In the past, Sue Vestri has told friends that she has achieved CFO success by routinely working herself out of jobs. Vestri is not alone. Certainly, many of…
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569: Growing Your Team's Knowledge Base | Raj Dani, CFO Ping Identity
Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a…
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568: It's the Narrative that Matters | Lanny Baker, CFO, Eventbrite
CFOTL: What are your priorities as finance leader over the next 12 months? CFOT:" Here at Eventbrite, my priorities are to bring focus and simplicity. We just…
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567: When Growth & Risk are Synonymous | Kevin Jacobson, CFO, LogicGate
Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two…
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566: Building Your P&L Culture | Scot Parnell, CFO DailyPay
We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a…
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565: A Fintech Unicorn Burnishes its Risk Management Brand | Michael Tannenbaum, CFO, Brex Inc.
Tannenbaum: At Brex, pretty early on, I was kind of familiar with the banking landscape from when I had been in investment banking. The group that I had been…
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564: Synchrony Steps Beyond the Shadow of its Historic Roots | Brian Wenzel, CFO, Synchrony
CFOTL: Having splitout from GE- we would imagine there were certain business processes already in place at Synchrony, while others processes had to be…
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563: Energizing Your Entrepreneurial Mind-set | Stephen Grist, CFO, Bohemia Interactive Simulations
It was back in 2002, Stephen Grist says, when he first punched through a surface of rigid assumptions to grasp the innovative levers that would propel him into…
- CFO THOUGHT LEADER
562: A Window Into the Future | Anna Brunelle, CFO, Kinestral Technologies
Asked to reflect on those experiences that she feels prepared her for a finance leadership role, a cash flow statement quickly comes to mind for Anna Brunelle…
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561: Identifying the Levers for Efficient Growth | John Evarts, CFO, Mediafly
Ten years or so ago, the expression “never waste a downturn” became a popular maxim among business leaders who viewed the economy’s downward spiral as an…
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560: When Your Tactic Becomes Your Strategy | Raman Kapur, CFO, Moogsoft
Years from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an…
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559: Establishing Your Work Ethos | Bea Ordonez, CFO, OTC Markets Group, Inc.
Perhaps, unlike most of her professional peers, when Bea Ordonez first interviewed for a CFO role, she got the job. At the time, perhaps no one was more…
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Holiday Bonus | A Career In Step with the World |Andreas Schulmeyer, CFO, Better Choice Company
A brief summary of this episode
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558: Achieving Ongoing Customer Value | David Ertel, CFO, Vizient
CFOTL: What metrics are top of mind for you? ERTEL: Largely defined, most of Vizient's revenue is—I'm going to put it in air quotes—"subscription-oriented."…
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557: Sharpening Your Finance Team's Growth Mind-Set | Bill Ruckelshaus, CFO, Extrahop
A brief summary of this episode
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556: Preparing Your Organization for Change | Amy Shelly, CFO, The OCC
CFOTL: What are the numbers or metrics that are always top of mind for you? Shelly: Ninety-five percent of our revenue is driven by the volume that we clear…
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555: Two Worlds One Career | Mike Kaseta, CFO, Aerami Therapeutics
Few megadeals within the past decade have received as many recurring kudos as the acquisition of Genzyme, of Cambridge, MA by France’s biggest pharmaceutical…
- CFO THOUGHT LEADER
554: Achieving a Strategic Capital Structure | David Moss, CFO INmune Bio
Among the many lessons that David Moss has learned along the trajectory of his 25-year finance career, the one to which he refers simply as “the $3 million…
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553: Rebuilding a Spin-off's Missing Parts | Ravi Chopra, CFO, SonicWall
Ravi Chopra has built his career inside finance functions designed to serve growth-minded management. Such was the case in the late ’90s when Chopra joined…
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552: Making Customer Outcomes Top of Mind | Valerie Burman, CFO, Guidespark
Had Valerie Burman entered the CFO office a decade ago, you wonder whether the role would be as good a match for the accomplished finance executive as it…
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551: Capitalizing on Efficiencies to Unlock New Value | Chris Sands, CFO, MineralTree
When Chris Sands accepted an investor relations position at a midsize health care firm, he did so with the understanding that he would be permitted to…
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550: The Funnel: Where Sales & Finance Meet | Andrew Hicks, CFO, Advanced
For every top sales leader who confides to friends that he or she is really a numbers freak at heart, there’s an Andrew Hicks, who, as CFO of Advanced, would…
- CFO THOUGHT LEADER
549: Stay the Course | Cort Townsend, CFO, Kofax Software
As is the case with many finance leader resumes, Cort Townsend’s reveals a repetition of professional advancement and achievement that allows casual readers to…
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548: Raising Your Finance Voice | Mahesh Patel, CFO, Druva
A brief summary of this episode
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547: Enters the Change Agent | John Karnes, CFO, Vertafore
CFOTL: What are your top of mind metrics? Karnes: I think about metrics sort of under three rubrics. The first is what I would think of as a customer-centric…
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546: When Speed to Market Matters Most | Richard Steinhart, CFO, Bioxcel Therapeutics
When asked what sets BioXcel Therapeutics apart from other clinical-stage biopharmaceutical companies, CFO Richard Steinhart doesn’t mention a specific drug or…
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545: Get in Gear with ARR | Ken Stillwell, CFO, Pegasystems
The way Ken Stillwell tells it, his career as a CFO can be divided into two distinct worlds: the world before ARR and the world after ARR. ARR, of course, is…
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544: Tales of a Finance Journeyman | John Pokorney, CFO, LeTip International
Few finance leaders have boiled down the take-aways from their career journeys into as many palatable, bite-size portions as John Pokorney, CFO of LeTip…
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543: Whetting Your Firm's FP&A Appetite | Paul Willson, CFO, Compeat
After years of careful finance career–building within the healthcare sector, Paul Willson came upon an opportunity inside Austin’s energetic technology…