CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Keith Taylor, CFO of Equinix, brings 24 years of experience in data infrastructure management to the table. He discusses his career journey, emphasizing resilience built during financial crises. Taylor sheds light on the evolution of financial analytics and the need for teamwork in today's fast-paced environment. He shares insights from his early leadership days, including the essential qualities for success. Personal anecdotes reveal how literature shaped his perspective, while strategies for navigating economic challenges showcase his proactive approach to cash flow management.

Teodora Gouneva was enjoying one of the more satisfying chapters of a 25-year finance career when she began hearing voices again. She tells us that although for most of her work trajectory she had been able to ignore them, on this occasion the contentment that she had so carefully guarded began to give way. The year was 2013, and the role offered to Gouneva was to serve as CFO of PayPal’s Braintree Venmo operations, the enterprise resulting from PayPal’s recent acquisition of Braintree. “For me, it wasn’t an immediate or obvious ‘yes,’” recalls Gouneva, who already occupied a senior finance role overseeing a big slice of the company’s business after having adroitly climbed PayPal's finance career ladder for the previous 9 years. “I loved my current job, and there were still things on my road map that I wanted to improve and fix,” continues Gouneva, who notes that it was at this point that the voices once more surfaced—this time, not to be ignored. “Prior to that job offer, I would very often have people tell me ‘You should take more risks!,’ but I don’t think that I had ever really considered doing so before,” says Gouneva, who credits her divisional CFO tour of duty with adding some extra operational heft to her resume in light of Braintree having acquired Venmo only a year earlier. Comments Gouneva: “These were two completely different businesses in one, and we made a strategic decision to run those businesses separately.”   Still, in the months and years that followed, the organizations sought to achieve a better strategic alignment, a feat largely reliant on changing the behaviors of the different sales teams. “We had to paint a picture for them of what the ultimate goal was and what was important and why,” remarks Gouneva, who credits changes in PayPal’s sales compensation programs with helping to bring the new picture into focus. While Gouneva leaves little doubt that she’s happy that she ultimately listened to “the voices,” she tells us there’s no escaping the fact that risks will always be risks.    She asks: “Do I leave the certainty that comes from knowing exactly what the role is, or do I embrace something new that is not very clear and could ultimately be good or bad?” –Jack Sweeney

With regard to finance leaders who are counted among the ranks of today’s SaaS CFOs, it goes without saying that 20 years ago, most were somewhere other than at SaaS companies.In fact, many of them have no doubt arrived inside the SaaS realm only within the past 10 years or so as part of the software industry’s great migration from the model of perpetually selling software to the SaaS subscription model.However, for CFO Bas Brukx, the SaaS world has been home for more than 20 years, a fact that allows him to take a seat alongside other CFOs who can boast of pioneer roots inside SaaS-dom.“We had the benefit of not knowing what we didn’t know,” recalls Brukx, who notes that back in 2002, such a widely used metric as Customer Acquisition Cost was only then just being defined.At the time, Brukx was head of FP&A for Vocus, a SaaS software company specializing in solutions for the public relations and communication industries.“We did a lot of education with analysts and investors,” points out Brukx, who adds that Vocus went public in 2005. He would remain with the company for another 7 years before being appointed CFO of Clarabridge, a small software company aspiring to move to the SaaS subscription model.  According to Brukx, he didn’t hesitate to swiftly leave the perpetual model in Clarabridge’s rearview mirror.“We discontinued that perpetual business largely on my recommendation, so I was betting a lot on my reputation—but I felt comfortable about it,” comments Brukx, who says that the decisive move allowed him to position himself as a strategic finance leader at the very start of his CFO tenure with the firm.Subsequently, only 9 months after he joined it, the newly retooled SaaS company raised an $80 million equity investment led by Summit Partners and General Catalyst Partners.Reports Brukx: “That investment and some of their investor expertise gave us the backing that we needed to make the journey from $20 million in revenue to well over $100 million—at which point we were sold.” –Jack Sweeney

As we have been interviewing CFOs from different industries, many finance leaders have told us that they had bracketed the CFO office as their preferred career destination beginning from Day One of their professional lives.Still others have reported that it was only due to the intervention of a determined mentor that they were able to muster the resolve to aim ever higher and ultimately arrive in the C-suite.As it turns out, neither of these profiles depicts the experience of Don Bassell, CFO of ARKO Corp., a Fortune 500 company that is one of the largest operators of convenience stores and wholesalers of fuel in the United States.For Bassell, the CFO office would become “the destination” only after he received a particular job offer when he was in his early 40s.“Something didn’t feel right,” he recalls, reflecting back on the opportunity to fill a senior controller role.Bassell remembers being seated across the table from the CFO, who was trying to sell him by saying, “Don’t you understand? You are going to be preparing all of the materials that will be presented inside the boardroom.”“I said to him, ‘That’s the problem—I want to be inside the boardroom!,’” continues Bassell, “and that’s when everything became crystal clear to me.”However, while Bassell tells us that he was confident that his breadth of experience had left him well suited and qualified for top management, he still was not convinced that the CFO office was the best ultimate destination for him.“I didn’t think that I wanted to be a CFO,” remarks Bassell, who credits his eventual change of heart to a human resources consultant who pointedly cross-examined his hesitation to pursue the role.“She took me through this whole process of listing the different roles that I had had and things that I had done during my career, and she then put me through a series of questions,” explains Bassell, who adds that both he and the consultant ended up almost simultaneously saying the same words: “Okay, it looks like the CFO office it is.”    To better reveal the scope of Bassell’s experiences, the consultant had helped him to reformulate his executive resume by using a listing of the different functional roles that he had filled rather than the traditional chronological list—a change that helped even Bassell to better digest the fact that he now had a CFO resume.Says Bassell: “It was a crossroads for me—she really helped me to assess what it was that I wanted to do.” –Jack Sweeney

It was the type of CFO position that Gary Zyla probably would not have been able to find outside of Genworth Financial, a financial services company that he had first joined in 2004.Not that his resume didn’t already have some solid CFO prerequisites, but the leadership challenge that Zyla was about to take on was less about capital management and more about establishing the business functions required to run a business day by day.“Genworth said, ‘Look, this is a very broad role—we’re going to take a leap of faith with you,’” recalls Zyla, whose appointment as CFO of Genworth’s newly formed California-based subsidiary came 7 years after he had first joined the company.  Still, what happened next was arguably the most pivotal moment of Zyla’s career, as in 2013—2 years after he had relocated to California to better fulfill his CFO duties—Genworth announced plans to sell his division to a private equity firm.“Once it was sold, I was the CFO of this 350-person privately held business,” continues Zyla, who subsequently began reporting to the company’s private equity owner.“The new owners were very clear to me about what they wanted the business to be,” comments Zyla, who reports that the owners would ultimately earn four-and-a-half times their original investment before selling the business known as AssetMark to Huatai Securities Co. Ltd. in 2016.Besides the two private equity ownership transactions (2013, 2016), Zyla’s CFO career has also spanned an IPO (2019) and six different acquisitions within the past 7 years—which is not bad at all for a finance leader who has yet to look outside his company for opportunities. - Jack Sweeney

Looking back on their career-building years, few finance leaders ever forget the first time that they presented to a board of directors.For many, the stares of the individual directors around the table remain locked in time, forever evergreen.For Jim Young, the gazes that stay ever-present are some that were cast not from across a boardroom but instead by a room populated by hundreds of employees attending an offsite management gathering.“My job was to communicate some of the important trends—with a little bit of perspective on the investment community—and to highlight different aspects of what was going on with our business,” explains Young, who adds that his primary intent was to bring the company’s customer value proposition into sharper focus and better expose how it translated into customer retention.What happened next, Young tells us, left a lasting impression.  “There were a lot of questions, and I could see this high engagement as I scanned the audience,” remarks Young, who differentiates this experience from his more frequent discussions with the company’s investment community.  “The audience’s interest was not because I had brilliant insight or was presenting a great analysis of how we could create value in the business,” comments Young, who reports that following the gathering he completed a postmortem on the talk in order to better understand what was responsible for the gathering’s rapt attention.  “We had this very specific metric that in the past had gotten a few nods and maybe even been paid some lip service, and now at this session it suddenly became the focus of a discussion that revealed it to be something that was really quite valuable,” recalls Young, who today credits his talk with simply having “connected the dots.”“The average employee could now understand and translate the metric to his or her business area and to their salespeople and all the rest,” continues Young, who observes that the talk also helped to raise the profile of his finance team by enabling it to better engage with business managers intrigued by what Young had shared.“I make company leaders better at what they do by helping them to explain where we’re driving value and by making these connections visible all the way through to very tangible things,” notes Young, as he issues what might well be his CFO mission statement.     Reflecting back on the talk, he adds: “To this day, I use it as a lesson as far as how I should do my job goes—if I’m not connecting dots, I’m not doing my job.” –Jack Sweeney 

Featuring Special Guest Co Host Ben Murray As more businesses track customer product usage ever more closely, finance leaders are busy fine tuning the collaborative approaches that allow their organizations to identify and pursue expansion opportunities.   Ben and Jack discuss the collaborative organizational teams that are putting their companies on the path to greater net dollar retention as they seek to glean more customer insights and better expose customer intent. This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jonathan Carr of Armis, CFO Kevin Rubin of Alteryx,  and CFO Patrick McClymont of Hagerty.   About Ben Murray Over the course of his finance career Ben Murray has occupied the CFO office at a number of different companies. In addition to having a multichapter CFO career, he is today known as “The SaaS CFO,” a brand he established while creating and hosting the popular SaaS CFO podcast. What’s more, the TheSaaSCFO.com is today a source of Ben’s blogs, research, courses and templates based on his more than 25 years running finance teams . He is frequently hired by SaaS companies: from small, private technology firms to global multi-billion dollar public companies.  Find out more about Ben @thesaascfo.com

Eliran Glazer’s finance career journey began in the late 1990s at the Tel Aviv office of KPMG, where as a 20-something he spent 3 years auditing a portfolio of fast-growing software companies.   As the year 2000 approached, Glazer was suddenly being recruited by an Israeli-American CFO who was seeking to fill a controller position—and the gray-haired CFO left little doubt that the role that he had in mind could potentially offer much more.  Glazer tells us the that CFO’s pitch was expressed this way: “Look, I’m pretty certain that you know accounting well, but I can help you to develop a business view.”When a formal job offer arrived from the publicly traded BackWeb Technologies, Glazer didn’t hesitate to accept—and it wasn’t long before he saw evidence of what the CFO had promised.Comments Glazer: “He began taking me to meetings with internal and external stakeholders by simply saying, ‘Come along and join me.’”    In short order, Glazer received an invitation from the CFO to visit the company’s U.S. offices, where he was asked to sit it on a variety of finance and operational meetings.  Still, Glazer was no doubt alarmed when 12 months into his controllership role he received word that his CFO mentor was planning to move on, having accepted a CFO position at a telecom company known as Schema.“He took me with him,” explains Glazer, who upon his arrival at Schema received a promotion to finance director.Had the CFO’s involvement with Glazer’s career ended with this promotion, he still would have well merited the moniker of “generous mentor.” However, Schema’s CFO went one better.Three years after appointing Glazer finance director, the CFO exited the company and afforded Glazer the opportunity to step into an interim CFO position.“They threw me deep into the water,” remarks Glazer, who notes that among the responsibilities that his new interim role brought to him was regular communications with Schema board members.Nearly 20 years later, several additional CFO chapters in both the U.S. and Israel now separate seasoned CFO Glazer from his days of benefiting from mentorship at BackWeb and Schema.Still younger than his former mentor was when he took Glazer under his wing, Glazer is now increasingly thoughtful about the mentor mind-set, which he says comes only from experience and gray hairs.  Bringing his mentor back into view one last time, Glazer tells us: “He was in his late 50s and really at that phase of life and career where he just didn’t feel threatened by anyone.” –Jack Sweeney

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 lengthy tenure to launch one or two “If onlys,” as in “If only I had left 3 years sooner.”        Such is not the case for Wailun Chan, though, whose LinkedIn career spanned from 2010 to 2020 and overlapped a period during which the social media company’s workforce grew from 400 to 16,000 employees as its annual revenues grew from roughly $100 million (pre-IPO) to nearly $10 billion.Chan’s investment of career years at LinkedIn arguably represents a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right outcome, which eventually resulted in a CFO job offer that led the seasoned FP&A leader to exit the social media company.Still, what makes Chan’s LinkedIn career chapter worthy of note to finance career builders is not necessarily its length or ultimate outcome but instead how he was unquestionably up to the challenges ahead even as he arrived at the firm.In fact, the finance resume of LinkedIn’s new FP&A hire was already a dozen years long and included stints at GE Capital and Kraft Foods as well as a recently added business degree. Consequently, there’s little reason to doubt that the LinkedIn recruiters who first eyeballed Chan knew instantly that they found their future FP&A leader.First of all, Chan tells us, he was tasked with helping the company to address a lopsided membership model that featured LinkedIn members outside of the U.S. accounting for 60 percent of the overall membership numbers while paying only about 30 percent of the worldwide membership fees.To support the effort, Chan was deployed as the company’s first sales finance executive, a position that allowed him from the very start of his LinkedIn career to serve as a primary connection between the company’s FP&A and business operations teams.“We looked at the data together and came up with a playbook outlining that if certain membership thresholds were hit, the inside sales team would get a signal to be led in, to be later followed by the enterprise sales team as other levels were reached,” comments Chan, who credits the “playbook” with influencing the decision-making that led the company to open 20-plus local offices within the next 2 years.   Reports Chan: “This playbook became a primary driver of the speed at which we were able to scale, and this scale enabled the hypergrowth that LinkedIn experienced between 2010 and 2012.” –Jack Sweeney

A brief summary of this episode