CFO

“You know, I think that's a hire that people often put off, because they may know someone who kind of understands finance. You know, I would invest early on that side.”

“And I think the other sort of unspoken benefit of CFOs is that they're really the only other function that can look across the entire company in an unbiased way and help sort of measure performance and help advise the CEO on how to invest the company's resourc…”

“If you're budget additive to a company, you probably want to be bottoms up selling motion and a small unit value. These new CIO or CFO is going to wake up saying, I need your new widget. So you have to be a small unit value and kind of bottoms up and that's in…”

“I think that a lot of really the North star of where we're headed as a business is, can you actually go understand what things cost and build, let's say like a ways for all sorts of business expenses, a Shopify suite for the CFO.”

“The most important thing in an environment like this is that your sellers pull those people into deals much earlier. So the junior sellers approach in these kind of environments is I want to avoid the CFO at all costs. And like in the world of Vanta, I want to…”

“Because that's like the new, we have a new buyer in the cycle that was never there. That's the CFO. And they're probably going to get personally involved in an enterprise deal that's material. And if you haven't evaluated that and haven't like role played that…”

“For most startups, you don't want to just make your investment decisions based off of, like, pure economic and cost control.”

“I need to be able to make sure I can map back my narrative of what my product does and To that big thing. And unless I can do that, I'm not going to get in the room.”

“If the CFO is involved in your deal and they're spending time on that deal, that tells you that you are strategic to them.”

“Good discounting should originate from the office of the CFO. Meaning, the CFO knows the margins. They know what they're willing to what margins they're willing to give away on products at what volumes. What should happen in most companies is the CFO should pr…”

“I think it's a falsism to say my CFO is going to block. What that says is you haven't done a good enough job of showing the value and you haven't made it a priority for the organization.”

“For Databricks, the developers are, we, developers have to love us, right? Because they're going to be the ones influencing the decision that the CFO makes.”

“The response rate here is 12 to 15%.”

“The economic buyer could be the CFO, but the change agent could be a senior director of revenue operations who wants to be a vice president or a senior vice president who wants to make a mark on something because they believe it so much that they're going to d…”

“The CFO is the buyer now for every renewal. If you don't, if you're not showing them insights around business value, then you're not going to be renewed.”

“Renewals are, I do agree. Renewals are harder than they've been in the past and what creates these renewals to be more difficult. There is a lack of consensus. There's dysfunctional consensus when new personas enter that renewal process. I do agree with the se…”

“With the macro climate of the last 18, you know, months or whatever it's been, you know, delegation of authority certainly came down. Across the board and many, many organizations because they want to have the CFOs to see more.”

“Most of the CFOs I talked to are like, we're spending the same. We're just spending it on different things.”

“So we do have a budget, but it's the role of the CFO, the finance team, and we don't share that with the teams. So the budget is just about can we recruit, yes or no, or much, and that's it. The team leaders, they don't have to worry about that. Even the direc…”

“The CFO suddenly has an interest in absolutely everything. You know, there used to be a time where, you know, well, you're in your envelope of spend. I'm not really going to question it or, well, you know, you've presented a logical case for why we would need …”

“So I think the direction that we're headed is some amount of Token budgeting on a per employee basis. I think for CFOs in the future, like capital allocation will look more like how do we allocate OpEx and not just OpEx and then headcount and headcount will be…”