Navigating Data Challenges in Forecasting

Kat Orekhova is Co-Founder & CEO of Vareto, a planning and analytics platform for enterprise teams. In her own words Kat has an “unusual backstory” leaving the world of math academia to build Facebook’s first-ever data science team within FP&A. At the social media giant she was Responsible for financial reporting, forecasting, and planning activities for Facebook’s core business. This was followed by stints as Head of Product at IronClad, a $3billion legaltech company, Sequoia Capital Scout, General Partner at Darkmode Ventures and co-founder & CEO of Vareto.

In this episode Kat reveals:

• The challenges of long range planning as Facebook scaled massively and trying to predict growth across countries from the US to India with more than 100 people contributing to the planing process) 
• Being at the beginning of data Science at Facebook
• The move  from data science and product into finance
• When should companies start looking at FP&A
• Being a Sequoia scout and what it entails and what she looks for in investment opportunities
• How (now) Meta CFO Susan Li “an absolutely outstanding” mentor insisted on a  finance team with data science skills led by Orekhova
• The right blend between data science and FP&A who are “Living in Different Tools”
• Her take on the amount of data science that FP&A teams need to boost their career
• The impact of AI in finance

Follow Kat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katorekhova/