By the time Russell Lester landed inside Intuit’s department of analysis in 2009, the unremarkable career path on which he had first set out nearly 10 years earlier had become brimming with possibilities. Back in the early 2000s, Lester tells us, he was hired by the company Harland Clarke (now Vericast) as an analyst specializing in customer information and insights. “This was not traditional finance, and I was sort of tiptoeing around what we would broadly call ‘analytics’ today,” remembers Les...
May 14, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast For business leaders these days, a thoughtful response to customer queries concerning AI is indispensable. As CEO Planful Grant Halloran demonstrated this week at Planful's Perform23 customer conference. CEO Halloran emphasizes the need for caution and thoughtfulness when it comes to AI, noting that while it presents an exciting opportunity, there is still a lot of uncertainty and potential legal and security implications that need to be addressed. He also discusses the speed of change that...
May 12, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last October, when it was announced that Bobby Leibrock would become the next CFO of IBM subsidiary Red Hat, finance team members no doubt understood that the open-source developer was coronating not just any IBM veteran but a strategic finance executive who for years had been entrenched along the front lines of IBM’s software acquisition activities. Leibrock’s M&A resume began around 2006, when IBM acquired content management software developer FileNet for $1.6 billion. “They a...
May 11, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back in 2010, when the flow of hiring by investment banks had been reduced to a meager trickle of new faces in the wake of the economic downturn, Aneal Vallurupalli walked through the doors of San Francisco’s Union Square Advisors. For Vallurupalli—a recent graduate of a Bay Area college not necessarily known as a feeder school for investment banks—the job offer from Union Square seemed to validate the notion that banking was meant to be his career lane. Still, Vallurupalli te...
May 07, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back in 2006, when Paul Sheriff had only recently been named group financial director for a midsize banking business based in the United Kingdom, his team noticed that the profit margins of a certain banking product were experiencing a steady decline. What’s more, the customers being drawn to the product were deemed to be at “higher risk” than the bank’s other customers. While Sheriff tells us that he helped to put an end to the product’s life, he also wants us to know that the numbe...
May 03, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast By the time the general manager of Intel’s data center chipset business parted ways with the company, Julie Swinney had already advanced into one of their coveted business unit CFO positions. To Swinney—who had already served in a series of senior finance roles—the GM’s departure seemed to leave a startling void in a business that served as a key enabler for Intel’s server business at large. The unexpected opening prompted Swinney to raise her hand and issue what perhaps was a bold proposal to b...
Apr 30, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Among the keepsakes that Craig Conti collected during the more than two decades of his finance career, the item to which he refers simply as “the list” remains one of his most prized career souvenirs. Having graduated from General Electric’s Financial Management program in 2001, the 20-something Conti had only recently been assigned to GE’s corporate audit staff when he was dispatched overseas for a 5-year tour of duty. It was during the first 12 months of Conti’s years abroad that he received a...
Apr 26, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Jason Quinn landed in Europe back in 2008, he was the youngest of five American expats 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 more than $500 million annually. Based in Barcelona, Quinn spent roughly 3 weeks of every month traveling to other parts of Europe to evaluate the operations of different busine...
Apr 23, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Planning Aces Guest Host Brett Knowles, an expert in FP&A and planning realm, suggests that GPT can be used as an extra member at the planning table, providing a catalyst for exploring ideas and expanding horizons. By generating scenarios and validating strategies against them, planners can identify environmental and situational factors that need to be true for a strategy to work. But the true power of GPT lies in its ability to test a plan through the eyes of different stakeholders, such as inv...
Apr 21, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back in 2008, when Jim Cox was controller for investment management software company Advent Software, he was invited by that firm's founder and CEO, Stephanie DiMarco, to accompany her to an investor meeting. “I just sat there smiling and hoped that nobody would ask me a question,” comments Cox, recalling one of a number of experiences that he credits with helping him to step beyond his accounting career roots. The meeting’s biggest take-away, Cox tells us, was about repetition. He explains: “Gu...
Apr 19, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2011, after Chris Halpin had rejoined his colleagues back at Providence Equity Partners’ New York offices at the completion of a 3-year stint in Hong Kong, he found himself being confronted by something he had rarely experienced before: boredom. “I had this kind of existential angst—that I didn’t want to die and have my obituary say that I had worked 40 years at Providence Equity,” recalls Halpin, who notes that it was at this point that he began to think about different operating roles in bu...
Apr 16, 2023•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast When Ben Chrnelich tells us that the banking sector’s recent unrest is the third period of disruption that he’s “cycled through” during his finance career, we can’t help but wonder about the other two. Of course, they are hardly a secret. As did that of many of his CFO peers, Chrnelich’s early career appears to have weathered no shortage of economic hijinks, thanks to the dotcom bubble (2002) and Wall Street’s subprime mortgage crisis (2008). “The opportunity to be sort of at the epicenter of th...
Apr 12, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paolo Poma is uncertain how many times he met with bankers and investors during the first 6 months of 2009. The steady string of phone calls and conference rooms that once demanded the management of Ducati Motors Holding’s rapt attention, Poma tells us, have now blurred into a single, heart-pumping conversation. “I had to go in front of them and calculate for how long we were going be able to service the debt and comply with covenants without breaking any rules—despite the plummeting markets,” e...
Apr 09, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast After Galit Yaakobovitz relocated from Israel to the United States back in the mid-2000s, there was little question that the move had given her career a boost. Still, it was the next relocation—the one that would move her and her husband from New Jersey to California—that ultimately allowed her to place both feet on a finance career path. Back in 2006, Yaakobovitz was a technology implementation consultant living in Israel when she was hired by M-Systems to oversee the implementation of an ERP s...
Apr 05, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast One key takeaway from Gainsight CFO Alka Tandan’s career journey is the importance of being open to new opportunities and pivoting when necessary. Tandan started in investment banking, transitioned to media, and then vectored again to the SaaS industry. Looking back on the first move of her career, Tandan says that she “came to a decision” and quickly became focused on the best way to execute it. “Investment banking gave me incredible exposure to a range of business models and industries, but af...
Apr 02, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this Planning Aces episode, host Jack Sweeney and guest host Ben Murray discuss the collaborative organizational effort behind generating business intelligence (BI) and the different places BI resources may reside within a business, with reference to an episode featuring Gary Zyla, CFO of AssetMark. The hosts also discuss the role of finance in enabling sales, the challenges faced by sales teams, and the importance of financial discipline and visibility in a company’s financials, regardless o...
Mar 31, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robert Mitchell had been sizing up new venture opportunities for PayPal for roughly 3 years when the door to an operations role swung open. Impressed by his financial modeling know-how, Mitchell tells us, PayPal’s credit bosses “handpicked” him to create a framework for launching and monitoring new credit offerings. For Mitchell, there was no turning back. “They just told me that I was a smart guy and that I could figure things out,” recalls Mitchell, who adds that the fact that the new position...
Mar 29, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Finance leader Betsy Ward wants you to know that she doesn’t have an itchy trigger finger—but she does have an inner trigger and knows when it’s been set off. There’s no doubt that few professional colleagues would ever think to associate the time-tested gunslinger trope with the exponentially mild-mannered Ward, who has led insurance giant MassMutual through a string of strategic transactions since her arrival in its CFO office in 2016. Still, as Ward seeks to help us to better understand the u...
Mar 26, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast A brief summary of this episode
Mar 25, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Heathrow CFO Javier Echave tells us that one of his greatest career lessons was learned from being passed over for the airport’s CFO position, we wonder whether we misunderstood him. He continues: “It was then that I learned in the most painful way that securing my own succession to the CFO office was dependent on me making myself redundant.” It was a little more than 8 years ago, when a sudden CFO departure, prompted Heathrow's CEO and executive board to appoint one of Echave’s coll...
Mar 22, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Brianna Gerber tells us that during earnings season at Mattel, Inc., she was once known as the investor relations person most likely to be “knocking on doors,” we can’t help but want to learn more about her IR tour of duty for the toy giant. “I’d be calling on the marketing team and the commercial team, talking to treasury and tax, and asking them all ‘What’s really going on?’ because I would need to understand the numbers before I could explain them,” recalls Gerber, who occupied Ma...
Mar 19, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast As our finance leader guests well know, we seldom hesitate to ask where they spent their career-building years. Moreover, if we learn that a CFO spent more than 5 years with any one company, we’re apt to ask, “Why? What kept you there?” On the other hand—and somewhat oddly—finance career investments spanning a decade or more are likely to lead us to leapfrog more perfunctory queries in order to let the grilling begin. Such was the case with CFO Keith Taylor of Equinix, the $7....
Mar 15, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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,...
Mar 12, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 tha...
Mar 08, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Mar 06, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 01, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 27, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 24, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 w...
Feb 22, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, t...
Feb 20, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
