CFO

“Eventually a bunch of these public market CFOs are going to show up to Wall Street and they will have missed earnings because they're up at some point if things are 21 xing every few months, somebody's going to miss a quarter.”

“If you kind of look at the credit card industry which is where we started even just seven years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was through these points and rewards Go spend more money. You can earn points and multipliers will have …”

“I think in a world where before it was fine for a CFO to go and say, I'm just going to, you know, manage my payroll, and I have a philosophy about how I'm going to decide how much to spend on that. I'm going to manage my vendors. I think there's going to be a …”

“We did this survey of developers, and we asked them how many of them had a CFO who was telling them to spend less on Consumption versus more, and we actually found that seven times more companies are being told to, like, let it rip and spin more.”

“At Brex, it was from the beginning. One of our first hires was our CFO.”

“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…”

“When you build something, you typically build with the CTO in mind, thinking I'm going to build this and I'm going to go and sell to the CTO. The CTO is where you sell, but then you actually get a check from CFO, where it's used by the CAO. So all of that mapp…”

“You're seeing a lot being built, but then the bill comes to the CFO and it's actually really brutal and way worse than they expected. And even if they got double the productivity, they might not have had double the budget for headcount and they, you know, Spen…”

“For CFOs, they care a lot more than just time savings. We have to show for every dollar you put into a bridge because you have more compliant documentation or because you have fewer queries coming from your billing team we actually save or add real dollars.”

“I think the highest turnover job of any executive at Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like, you know, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs. You don't see a lot of turnover CTOs”

“This is going to be, like, the new big question that every CFO, CIO, et cetera, is running around trying to, with their hair on fire, trying to figure out.”

“You are a CFO of a 200 employees company. You use Excel for 15 years to run your finance. You will never leave Excel. So all these web-based FP&A solution, FP&A web-based financial system, you will never Even think to move from Excel to the web.”

“Because the thing about finance teams is they're responsible for 100% of the spend in the company, right? If you're overspend, you go fire your CFO. But then at the same time, they only make five percent of the decisions. So the question becomes, 95% of the de…”

“And what I always tell people about this is you should think about your CFO's function Not as a policeman, but actually as someone who basically sells standards that forces you to make sharp decisions.”

“Today, our customer is the CIO. I think over time, our customer becomes a partnership with the CIO and the CFO.”

“Turns out companies don't really like firing people. Companies do fire people if they have to, but I've actually never met a CFO that got excited about firing 30% of the workforce.”

“Your internal evangelist, your internal sponsor, like at some point they're going to have to have a conversation with the CFO. And the first thing the CFO is going to do is open up a spreadsheet and see if there's an existing budget one item. So if you can att…”

“How do we tell our story to a non-technical buyer? Because it moved a lot from the CTO to the chief compliance officer at that certain point. And that, you know, went up to the CFO when there was audit pieces.”

“We think maintainers are the ones that are going to get disrupted in this like AI revolution.”

“The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to flow is from the, is the CFO office. Like the CFO should be resistant to disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, t…”

“If you have technology or a stack that makes your business, some business twice as efficient, like you can't go to the CFO and be like, look, I'm going to make you twice as efficient, but you're going to give me half the upside. No CFO will do that deal. Right…”

“This happened to us in our prior company, that we were very slow to get a CFO or a fractional CFO into our company, and we did do a big raise. We raised the money, and Later after this had been concluded, they came to us and said, you know, we told you should …”

“I think one of the biggest challenges was just like selling into finance and accounting teams is pretty rough. And so there became a pretty large glut, especially in the CFO market in You know, 15 different SaaS tools, all targeting CFOs for Series A through C…”

“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 …”

“Even the most cutting edge organizations typically have a very archaic, call it analog CFO function.”

“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…”

“I think if you just had a team of engineers and you know, somebody had a question, like a very specific sales tax question, or they're like, Hey, where did you get this rule from? And a lot of times you're talking to controllers on the other side, CFOs, financ…”

“I was with the CFO of a company this morning who walked me through, you know, over ten billion dollars in revenue, but quite literally, Hundreds of finance tools in order to keep their books, make payments receive payments.”

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

“Now, there are more approvals in a cycle. The CFO would be interested, why should I spend money on this? So every dollar is like, ah, actually, the numbers we see orders, we have 37 seats. Right. Odd numbers, right? Not 50, right? 37. Oh, these people are not …”

“You need a way better CFO if you're building a hardware company.”

“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.”

“For the ones who are saying, no, no, that's my baby, like, when you start talking in these terms, when you can see the emotional attachment, I always encourage them to have a very, very direct conversation with the potential buyers, understanding that promise,…”

“Our thesis is what the, you know, you can sort of get by with a lot of things, but in the end, it all falls down into the lap of the CFO and they have to figure out the solution. But if you're in sales, you can do something and then you can just push it downst…”

“So let's say you have let's say you sell it into CFOs. Don't pitch your CEO for that podcast, pitch your, you know, get a CFO and then pitch your CFO for that podcast. I'm very for companies hiring. Folks are hiring for the roles that they sell into. It helps …”

“When we started at Brex, We were a financial tool for smaller companies. We would go after founders because they didn't have finance people just yet. And for more mid-market companies, we could be purchased by folks in finance or accounting. And we generally s…”

“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…”

“The symptom is very simple. You go to a board meeting or QBR or management meeting, and the only two people who ever asked numbers, answer numbers questions are the CFO and the head of rev ops.”

“Even layer one has taken me with certain companies I work with quarters. And I walk in every time I have this kind of entrepreneurial blind spot going, this is going to be easy. Me, head of FP&A, CFO, we'll get this nailed in 30 days, 60 days. Every time I do …”

“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.”

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

“You're not going to go, Hey, you had too many coffees. I noticed the line item on coffee. There's a lot of coffee or, Oh, you, I saw a lot of drinking going on in that dinner. If you know, you make the commitment, you have an operating plan that you're working…”

“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.”

“This is the first company where I actually know everything after we do an earnings call and our windows open and our CFO goes on the roadshow. I understand what they're saying and not just me. He sends out a slack to the entire company of the sentiment, the ov…”

“CFOs aren't going to just buy something because you did one banner ad in one post. You have to be willing to buy like at least a month or like six posts or, you know for the podcast, we do three month sponsorships because it's best for both of us.”

“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.”

“I think it's a best practice and a very cool thing if the CFO Of the private equity gets the data in a different way, because then when they meet, they should be speaking the same language. And sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the CFO will get different informati…”

“It's like the fictitious rep driven financial model that first time CFO like builds. I was like, oh, if you hire 50 reps, like you're gonna be good. And that's where you need to push back. Right. And it's like, how do you build like a bottoms up driven model, …”

“CFOs, I think, we're operators you know, we don't know where maybe to place that money, and that's where usually you need to partner with A good bank in their treasury function to help, have that guidance to help you.”

“Usually I say above ten million in revenue is when I think you should have your own CFO are in that range. And it just depends. But less than ten million can definitely take advantage.”

“So CFOs need their own product roadmap for their finance and accounting organization.”

“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…”

“That fractional economy as a whole, you know where it's been able to do something in the CFO world that is hard to do with like design or content creators, or those are all, you know, gigs. They're not. And so we're just doing a gig at a time and fractional is…”

“As you can see from the Gartner data, it's not like the budgets disappeared, but those folks that could just buy your app without the CFO's approval, that's just been, that's just gone in most businesses, but it's just like it used to be. It used to be this wa…”

“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.”

“I expect our leaders to meet at least 10 clients a quarter. It doesn't matter if you're a CFO, it doesn't matter if you're a teammate, you know, teammate success, HR.”

“At Guild. We report to the CFO.”