Name: Finance Forward 2025 - Build for the Billions: Frameworks for Scale
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T04:01:04.182Z
Duration: 45 min 12 s
Description: Finance Forward 2025 - Build for the Billions: Frameworks for Scale

Transcript for "Finance Forward 2025 - Build for the Billions: Frameworks for Scale": We good? Yeah. I think you should start. Alright. Cool. Let's do it. Hey. Thanks for joining us everybody. My name is CJ. So I'm a recovering CFO. I now host a podcast. It's called run the numbers. It's kinda like we're doing one live here, everybody. And I have a newsletter. So I probably bug a lot of you in your inboxes. It's called mostly metrics. And I am honored to be up here with some distinguished finance folks. They're finance leaders who were the first one at their company in the finance function, and they built from zero. They've redefined what finance even meant inside the organizations that would go on to become multibillion dollar companies. And so I'm really excited to unpack how they built, their frameworks, their teams, and the systems to scale. And so at this part, I'm, I'm apparently supposed to ask for your name, your title, and your company, and what your company does, but I think think I everybody knows what your yeah. You guys are you guys are big time. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna do your name, your title, your company, and the first concert you ever went to. So Dan, I'm gonna start with you. Yeah. Good to meet you all. I'm Dan. I'm the CFO at Mercury. What was this third question? Oh, I forgot. Yeah. First concert that I went to, let's say, I think it was in college. It was a Jay Z and Mary j Bly concert called Heart of the Cities, for people who are hip hop fans from the nineties, February, that was the first concert. I'm Jenna. I'm the controller at Anthropic. My first concert was in sync. I'm Brad Flooring, s v SVP of finance at Snowflake. My first concert was a compilation of of people, but it was Narrows Barkley, think was the the first one. That's awesome. Alright. Thanks everybody for attending. I'm just kidding. Alright. So every company hits that moment where it realizes that we need finance and I think they put the back call out to you folks. You came in and had to figure it out. Wanna go around the horn here. So when you joined, what did the finance function actually look like? And what was the first thing that you either built or fixed? So Dan, I'll start with you. Yeah. I joined Mercury three years ago. You probably heard me, like, two years late. I think we were already doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue. We were in QuickBooks. The books had not been closed for probably six months or so. We had a ton of credit card transactions, stepped in high anxiety, and our CEO, who's actually, like, quite financially savvy, a Google Sheet with a bunch of hard coded numbers and randomly inputted growth rates as his forecast. And that's, like, how we were operating the company. So that's kinda what I stepped into. I think the first step for us is, like, how do we just get a solid understanding of where the business is today? I think that starts with hiring good people, right, particularly on the controller side. A controller is actually here in the crowd. She's fantastic. I think just having a really great team goes a pretty long way in terms of building out those foundations. But for us, it was really kinda starting to think about how do we actually better understand where our business is today, how do we plan for the company in the future as well given we're already a 300 person company. And then, also, how do we start building out lightweight processes? I think we were fortunate where we had raised a bunch of money in this series b of some stupid 2021 valuation. So we didn't really have to worry about hiring plans or budgets or anything like that. So starting to build a little bit of that rigor over time was also a big part of the learning curve for not just the company, but also for, like, the CEO, founder, especially for folks who've never actually worked with finance people. I don't know if anyone could commiserate with that. And and just to dig in there, are you comfortable giving any numbers in terms of either employees or revenue range of of when you came in and the first finance hire was made? Yeah. For sure. Again, I think we were a little bit too big by the time they hired us, But we were about 300 people. I think we were doing maybe Three Yeah. 300 people. Probably around $4,050,000,000 of ARR. Today, we're about 1,000 people doing multiples, much more in revenue. Awesome. All right. Jenna, what did the team look like when you came in? Yeah. So I joined Anthropic back in February 2024, and it was the week before Cloud three came out. So things have changed a lot in a year and a half. The team I was not the first finance hire. I was the third first full time accounting hire, which is still pretty early at the company. And when I joined, the books weren't really closed properly. So in terms of my priority to set up a foundation was, one, bring the accounting in house for the most part. All of it was substantially outsourced. I set up a thirty, sixty, ninety day plan before I even started. I was at Asana for almost nine years before this company and was using Asana to kind of prepare myself for building out the foundation of a team. The first priority for me was just make sure the chart of accounts is providing substantial good data for us to actually do our jobs, close timely so we can, again, do our jobs and provide analytics to leadership. Those are probably my first two baseline things is getting data quality, a lot better and timeliness of reporting. I I love how we now measure time in in, like, large language model names. The names have slowly improved over time. Yeah. People are putting out. But just to just to dig in there, you you were there was no in house accounting at all until cloud three? There were a couple of accountants, but most of it was outsourced. Wow. The company is only four years old today, like four and a half years old. So, yep, it was, I think, normal for typical startup hiring Yeah. Finance hires, but not a normal situation for. Totally. Brad, what did it look like when you came? Yeah. So I've been at Snowflake for over eight years now. So I joined when it was my my so I joined in 2017. That first year, Snowflake did 22,000,000 in revenue. We were closing on QuickBooks. Thankfully, we did not ever outsource our accounting. So we had a few people there that were helping close the books. Because again, as Jenna mentioned, in terms of the importance of having that sort of consistent and underlying data in terms of what your financials actually look like, it was important for me who's on the FP and A side to be able to actually use that to go forecast. And so the biggest problem that I first had to handle was the fact that Snowflake was a usage based model and the model that I adopted when I came in was one of a sort of a retread from a software company that sold a subscription. And so we were off by probably like 20% in terms of our forecast. And so that was my first focus was necessarily figuring out how to forecast usage based model since I didn't have to thankfully had a strong accounting team of a few people to help me on that part. And you said you were on QuickBooks when you came in. Yeah. Yeah. We were on QuickBooks. So yeah, my first year we were 22, second year we were a 100. And then at that point, we we thankfully had, you know, and we'll talk about it later in terms of, you know, build to billions. We migrated from QuickBooks to Workday right when we got to about a 100,000,000 on QuickBooks and and we've been on Workday, Financial since. Okay. And it sounds like you were on QuickBooks too, Dan? We were on QuickBooks. Yeah. Nice. I think it's an unofficial record, but on the podcast, I interviewed the CFO of Fitbit. He said that they were on QuickBooks through 300,000,000 in revenue, which is nuts, which and he said that wasn't the right thing to do, so immediately he came in. Yeah. So we'll That's official advice. Yeah. Don't don't get the 300. Yeah. It was it was like you didn't wanna be on that Mount Rushmore. We'll get them on campfire. Okay. Once the foundation is in place, the question becomes how do you scale from few to many? John had alluded to before we all forget to even hire for our own teams. It's like the shoe cobbler who has holes in his own shoes. How how do you hire for your own team, keep up the performance, and were there any frameworks that guided, like, how you went about layering the headcount? So the people, the roles, and the systems. Dan, I'll start with you. Yeah. I think it depends on the complexity of business and where you actually find it. This is my second time as a first finance hire, which is real painful to go through every single time. But my last company, we were a pretty simple consumer monthly subscription business. So not a ton of complexity on the accounting side. We were all in The US, single legal entity. So for us, a lot of the questions were how do we think about unit economics? How do we think about really scaling up growth spend and managing LTV CACs? We're doing a lot of forecasting around retention trends, behaviors across different types of channels and customer segments and so on. So a lot more complexity when you kinda think about the finance and strategy lens of partnering with marketing teams, go to market teams. That's where I decided to invest there. At my current company where we stepped in, we have probably five or six different revenue streams already operating in financial services where you have a ton of transactional data and volume that you have to be able to translate into financials. And I think that's where we really struggled right off the bat is just how do we get a clean sense of financials across a pretty decent sized operation at that point, across multiple revenue streams and legal entities where just getting accounting in the right place that we can do everything else was kind of, like, the first priority for me. Jenna, was talking to a couple people at breakfast, and they were saying that, hey. I'm the first, you know, in house hire, but we still are relying on third parties to help some of the work there. I had a similar experience where I came in as CFO. We were using a fractional firm for CFO work and also accounting. I'm not an accountant, so I'm like, don't rip that out, but I can do the FP and A part now. What was your framework for transitioning to bring everything in house? Yeah. I've seen this very different at each company I've been at. I think it depends on the needs of the environment. The the order of priority from my mind has always been bring it in house to stabilize and set the process and then potentially re outsource it again. And that really comes down to who do you hire next in house. And typically, in a startup environment, you need people that can really operate at a very granular level but also think more strategic at the higher level of where the company is going. So it's a really unique profile where you need to be in the weeds. You might not be a people manager, but you need to think about the long term growth of the company and build for scale and then potentially re outsource some of the work. But making sure that the process and the financial accuracy is there before you outsource is probably the key. Nice. So I'm gonna start with Brad. We'll work our way back backwards. Brad, do you remember what who the first person you hired was? What what was their role and function? The first person I hired was on the corporate FP and A side of things in terms of someone that was just going to allow me to get out of constantly updating the model. As I mentioned, we had QuickBooks and we had probably six or seven sort of international entities. And when you're doing that, you're logging into QuickBooks, you have a different account for each one of them, pulling the report, building sort of that financial model was a very time consuming sort of process in terms of actually just updating. And so my first hire was on the corporate FP and A side of things. I think what's also then relevant for this crew then is beyond that, my second hire, which was really like the highest leverage sort of hire that I made was actually a data scientist. So we went very early in terms of data. And so I treated that as a partner to me and my organization in terms of that's how I ultimately recruited it is like, hey, I want to leverage data within our company to make decisions. Finance data in itself can be very great for operational decision making, but it's so backwards looking as you're waiting for books to close. And so really what I wanna do is develop both like a real time visibility and a real time sort of forecast so that we can drive that data to the ELT or the executive leadership team to go make data driven decisions. And so that person was a huge partner for me for years in terms of just, again, thinking about how we construct our data models and and so that we can go support the business because I wanted FDNA to be true partners to the businesses that we supported. This may be an odd question, but how did you know the company was ready to support a data analyst? Because I've made the mistake of going out and hiring a shiny BI person. We didn't have data pipelines. We didn't have anything in place. And then they just end up being frustrated making dashboards all day. Yeah. Like, how did you know you were ready to support that person? Yeah. I mean, I I think it's gonna be unique to every sort of company. I mean, for us in terms of what what I figured out in terms of, and I mentioned already already trying to solve the problem of forecasting revenue in a usage based model. It was, you know, you're talking about a high level of variability. You're predicting when a customer is actually going to use the product. There's a lot of seasonality. Like our customers, employees are not in the office generally Saturday and Sunday. And so we recognize less revenue. So like we have weekly seasonality, we have holiday seasonality. It mattered how many days in a month there were then weekdays versus weekends, like all these considerations. And so really, and like how customers consumed was every customer was basically unique in terms of their own consumption. And so it was not scalable to do something in Excel because I just ended up building like cohort models because that's what finance people do. Oh, you get a cohort and like find segmentation and keep forecasting. And I started building more and more cohorts. Then it was like, suddenly this model won't open anymore. And so I was like, okay, how do I build a scalable sort of model for this? And it was like, okay, I need to use or leverage advanced techniques. I need to build probably a model in Python. And so for me, it was that realization that I needed to build, I needed to hire a data scientist. And I definitely wanted like to what you said in terms of like, if you were going to hire someone like that, you definitely, there was definitely a conscious decision on my part to make sure that the person was working on projects that were going to be of high value and not just dashboarding. And so like, we went from like understanding our COGS infrastructure, like data model, how do we forecast revenue? And like each one of those were kind of like one quarter sprints of building out that functionality so that he wasn't spending time just purely doing dashboarding. That's awesome. That's a good response. I love the quirky seasonality people do. I feel like every business out there has something weird about it, with seasonality that you have to forecast uniquely. I wanna talk about the art of scaling without slowing down all of your companies, hyper growth companies? And there's this tension in finance between the structure and the speed. And so, Jen, I'm gonna steal a really cool term from you. It's it's reframing is guardrails, and operating principles. So, like, what does that look like in practice? Yeah. It's kind of hard to explain. But I really don't like the term guardrails because I think it often just has a negative con Kind of negative. Yeah. And operating principles, one very easy example that I think has happened at every company is just new products getting launched and accounting or finance folks not being included in the initial design or testing of that. That that problem is not just for the accounting side. That is actually the customer's experience as well. So reframing the conversation on how this product and the values of the company and treating the customer's first priority and plugging in the finance team to be representing that experience is changing, like, the operating values, I guess, versus guardrails are you need to have controls around a new product getting launched. So you're saying sometimes the product team at companies hypothetically will launch a product without talking to finance first? Not I'm not saying that. Anybody? Yeah. Alright. Yeah. It could happen. It could. I'm just saying. Cool. I wanna, the scroll moved on me. CJ, make up a question. Dan, how about you? What guardrails did you put in place at Mercury in the early days to make sure that you knew what was going on in the org, but also you were launching things that were financially responsible? Yeah. For sure. Think there are two different frameworks that I put in pretty early on. I think at Mercury, we started off with the banking platform, but we quickly wanted to do a lot more than that. So we launched budget of finance software relaunch as a consumer banking guide. I think there's always a question of when do you decide to go multiproduct. And from a finance perspective, how do you actually just go manage that? Right? It's a lot more upfront investment that you have to go make. I think as you if you work for an ambitious founder, which hopefully, like, you do, like, they wanna do a 100 ideas. And for them, it's really easy to have a big bet brainstorming session, throw the ideas out there, the teams have to go execute, and there's, like, ongoing cost of doing that. Right? So for us, like, how do we really take a little bit more of a VC framework for managing a portfolio that's not everything? It could be a super risky, like, twenty year timeline that that we kinda constantly go make. Right? There are some like the, like, S and P 500 investments that we need to make along with the crypto investments and so on. So adopting more of a portfolio based approach for how we actually invest in r and d, being able to track that, measure it, and actually capture how we think about contribution profit over time was one framework. Just to put a little bit of, like, this operating principle around how we decide and invest in product and growth over time. Yeah. Nice. Sorry. Sometimes I'm like a a dog with a bone. I've been thinking about Jenna's response there. Have you socialized these guardrails or sorry. Operating principles. I'm not calling it that anymore. How do you socialize that and get people on board and make them not feel like you're the bad guy or bad woman who's putting these rules on them? I think that's the fun part of working in finance. Building out the business relationships is key to being successful in your role. So making sure that is there before you start socializing the operating principles. But then demonstrating the value of those principles, whether it be in the example of new products, like we identified something that the customers wouldn't be able to pay us correctly or their team would also be frustrated by this. So it's just showing that it's not just a control aspect. It's really about the best experience for the company and the end customer. I think it's tying it back to what each thing means for them. Right? Like, how they're impacting different financial outcomes. Brad, I wanna come back to you. What were some of the inflection points where your group had to reinvent itself? So you were early on there. Snowflake added headcount pretty quickly. How did the finance org shift? Yeah. So I'd say like when I first came in, the attitude and the culture of the company was really around like so 2017, we had tried to raise a round of capital. We had from external sources, had failed because of the concern in terms of ability to scale our product for enterprise level customers. And so we ended up doing an internal round. And so when you're sort of in that position, I think the culture of the company was how do we make sure that we're not getting too far out in front of our skis when we're actually investing in the business. And so a lot of you know, in the finance function, it's a lot of sort of measured calculated bets like what what are are bets where we can make where we can have direct measurement that we're going to be small bets to understand, hey, is this worthwhile to go into? Because at the end of the day, you're managing for cash flow at that point. Like you want to give yourself or your company the longest sort of runway. And then 2018, we switched from, okay, like Capital One was actually our first customer that we signed in 2017 that was enterprise level. 2018, we finally saw them scale. We had AT and T knocking on our door, looking to like buy Snowflake and like, okay, we product market fit here, right? Like suddenly the culture needed to change and finance needed to help sort of change that culture in terms of going from, hey, let's not get too far in front of our skis to like, how do we actually scale this business and build for billions? That's when the CEO had come to us. I mean, again, we've just finished 22,000,000. We're like, he was like, we want to be a billion dollar revenue company in three years. I want the whole company to think about your process and everything you do as if we need to be a billion dollar company. And so for finance that immediately switched from sort of like this concept of like, excuse me, like a budget to now these are financial targets. So like working with the business in terms of like the R and D organization in terms of like, okay, what is your product roadmap? Let's figure out what do we need in terms of resources to hit that product roadmap so that we're creating targets for the engineering organization, the hiring managers to understand, hey, this is actually our goal. This is part of your job is to go hire two or three engineers this quarter. Like before it was always like, oh, engineering has unlimited budget. That's our big constraint. And they actually were hired a lot slower. But now because you had an actual target with an idea of like, hey, you don't actually hire these people, we're gonna miss our roadmap and that's gonna delay our product launches. Suddenly that became recruiting became like a number one sort of item for engineers. And so like we basically laid out sort of like, again, we switched from budget to an actual target and actually increased the velocity at which we hired engineers. It increased the velocity that we thought about building out and go to market. And so finance kind of has to make that switch. I know like a lot of people like finance is viewed as like, hey, they're there to like implement process and like red tape and speed bumps and like, they're preventing us from really growing. And that's not what actually the case needs to be in terms of finance, right? You're helping them make the decision of like, hey, I can actually be aggressive across all these bets because I feel comfortable and I have an idea that, you know, some of these bets are are, you know, the low side, high side sort of case. Some of them will work out and we can actually go make those huge bets without sort of being worried and measured anymore. I see what you did there budget and target. Yeah. Yeah. Budget kind of implies like thou shall not pass or like stay below that whereas target is more collaborative. We're all we're all working towards something and hopefully we come close to it. Yeah. Think, when I come to these types of conferences, I benefit a lot from the, like, if you know that you know type moments. I'll throw it out to the group. Was there, an anecdote? Because I think there's a lot of power in anecdotes of a time where you said we need a new process for this because, I don't know, the engine is smoking here, the wheels are gonna fall off. Can you think of a moment in time or an anecdote where you said I need more process? Anyone? You you you go there. I'll get water too. There's one that's top of mind. It's not the sexiest one, but it's actually pretty impactful, for procurement. For us, at our scale, we're spending tens of millions of dollars on software every single year. Right? And I think things like headcount, marketing spend, it's really easy to spend a lot of attention there because they are the bigger ticket items, but all these other OpEx areas do kinda creep in over time. And it's an area where you need process where I think at one hand, you wanna give teams the autonomy to be able to move quickly, use the tools that they actually really need to do their jobs better, particularly in the world of AI where everyone wants to explore different tools and so on. But from a, like, compliance perspective, we also have to protect the company. I think no one wants to end up in the news about how there was some sort of leak because of some third party software that didn't go through info separate for you and was plugged into, like, your database, like Snowflake or something. Right? So I think for us, it's just how do we think about not necessarily having procurement act as a policing agent throughout that entire process, but really as an expedient so that our business partners throughout the organization could actually make faster, quicker, decisions while being able to do things in a controlled manner. It's not a sexy example, but I think it's, the type of things where Oh, it's totally good process, like, goes a really long way to set up the company for success. Yeah. We were paying for AWS on a credit card, and nobody knew who owned it for at least a year. So I had that moment too. Any other takers? I do feel like most of my job is trying to create process but as minimal as possible to enable speed. Some examples that happen are even new reorgs. How are we making a reorg? Who's getting informed? How does it impact our GAAP financials? Is there a workflow that happens when people are shifting departments? That's one that has often been at every company too. But I think most of accounting is around how do we make sure that the information isn't coming as a surprise and that has some element of process in it. It's just being creative with how you implement that I like to reframe. I think process ends up being sort of viewed as this negative or dirty kind of word. Because again, it's like this concept of you're going to introduce process and that's going to be red tape for the business to go do what they need to do to go grow the company. And you know, the way that I think about it is like process is really about when you need a process is when you have a repeatable sort of event or task that needs to be done. And so you're going to implement process to it because you need the velocity of that process to support the scale of the business. Right? And so at the end of the day, long term, when you think about the process that you're implementing, it is about sort of this repeatable scalable thing that you need to do to increase the velocity because if it is repeatable, you can't continually do this like manual sort of thing. And I think there is like this, you know, culture, especially as finance goes to the different organizations that they support. So like a procurement tool is viewed as like, hey, this is highly negative. You're, you know, before we were just paying our AWS bill on a credit card, like you're going to implement all this process with those procurement tool and it's gonna be terrible. And the way that we reframe that again is like the, you know, not only is process going to increase the velocity, but it's also gonna give us very consistent and great data that we can then use. And so you have to be willing to share that data back to the organization. And so the biggest sort of naysayer of like a procurement tool, just to keep with that example is probably marketing. They have a lot of transactions. They're doing events. Like, they're paying for that. They hate procurement tools. But at the end of the day, was like, guess what? We can implement this process, this procurement tool. And as you as the the VP of demand gen, we can actually give you a report every single month and you understand what your spend is, your committed spend is for the next twelve months. And so you have an understanding of like, hey, I actually have a lull in the month of August that I'm not going to be able to go hit my lead generation goals. And so like, he's now using it as part of his operating cadence and that becomes valuable data. And now he's actually championing amongst all of his individual contributors. Hey, make sure this goes into Coupa. Make sure it goes into a procurement tool because I need visibility so that I can make informed decisions off of that. So And I think really like when you're talking about process, it is about getting consistent data out of, you know, a task that you can then empower the organization to make decisions. I think you nailed it. You can't ask people for inputs if you're not gonna share the outputs with them. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think a lot of finance teams trip on that. They take it and they put it in their model, but then they never report back on how it helps the other side. Brad, I wanna stay with you for a second. So all three of these companies on stage have massive data and infrastructure considerations to them. Brad, you mentioned you built real time visibility into that infra spend and it changed how the business operated. How can finance turn infrastructure from a cost center into a source of insight? Yeah. It's has been one sort of use case that has been crazy in terms of, again, the operational power of it. Like selfishly, we built it to have an understanding of what does it actually cost us to deliver the product that we're delivering. And so we needed to do that to better forecast revenue. And we built this very sophisticated data model that ingests our infrastructure bills every four hours. So we have real time visibility into all the resources that we're using across three cloud vendors. And the complexity of that is every cloud vendor is different in terms of like the use, like this is our supply chain data, right? Like if you manage like a goods business, like this is all just like all the SKUs that we're buying, that's raw input. And so we ingest that and we make sense of it so that we can one zero down to like, hey, what is our overall sort of contribution margin by cloud? But then what is our individual sort of contribution margin all the way down to a customer level? And then again, the theme of sharing that information out, right? Like one, engineers aren't thinking about how they're building the tool, like the products in a cost efficient way. There's probably many different ways that they're going to perhaps there, they can build a product in terms of the resources that they're using on the back end. And so providing them visibility into like what that costs are ultimately drove how they built the product so that we as a company drove our gross margin. Like when I started, we were probably a 30% gross margin company and now we're at 75%. Some of that has to do with scale, but some of it also has to do with the fact that we built the product in a much more economical ways that we can ultimately help up investing in it. But it didn't stop there in terms of the information that we shared and the people that were getting it. Like we use it for automating all of our journal entries, which is probably one of our more complicated sort of journal entries to do because it's complicated in terms of OpEx and COGS and all that sort of stuff. We share it with our deal desk team. So they use it to look at again, individual contribution margin by customer. They can understand, hey, this customer is at this discount. If I offer them even more of a discount, the way that they're using the product is actually gonna be dilutive to our overall gross margin. We use it in terms of our sales organization, uses it in terms of how we think about opening new deployments and the craziest one that I never would have foreseen and actually there's someone in the crowd here that works on this team, but we actually again supply chain data, demand gen is how we meter the product and we can actually see when they don't align And that misalignment is actually like we built anomaly detection and that's actually an indication that we introduced a bug into the system. And so that will ping engineering that, hey, there's actually like the latest release probably did introduced a bug and that saves us like tens of millions of dollars. And so again, we use this data to buy a seat of the table in terms of driving strategic vision in the company and how we think about sort of building product and how we engage customers and all that. Just to double down on that, I mean, you talked about kind of sharing. Feel like a big role in finance is how do you articulate the impact that different teams across the company are actually having. For example, we are going through annual planning right now, which I'm sure a lot of you are as well. And know, finance spends a lot of time. How do we think about all the different levers and inputs and funnels when we think about growth? Right? We have a sales team. We have a marketing team. We have partnerships team. We have onboarding processes where we have the k y b, k y c, all of our customers, a lot of, like, operations that go involved with that. And all these different teams don't necessarily see the full picture for how all these things compound on top of each other. So we could actually set really clear targets and goals for these teams. You can make it really, really clear how, you know, what the sales team is kinda thinking about in terms of sales productivity, how that directly feeds into the way that we think about generating gross profit. Right? The way that the onboarding team could get more efficient and how much more throughput they could do, the exact, impact that could actually have the customers retention and activation as well. So I think the more that finance can actually get folks to view the problems from their side of the table, and I think a lot of people do crave that because people naturally do wanna feel like they're doing impactful work at the end of the day, and I think be able to quantify that in a very concrete way as part of, like, the job for finance so that everyone feels like they're rowing in the same boat and finance doesn't come in just feeling like a guardrail or feeling like, they're just, like, corporate setting these top style targets. I wanna tease out what you said there. People wanna feel like they're they're impactful for the business, that what they're working on is impactful. Just to double down on that, how any tips for people out there who are going through annual planning, working with product and engineering more specifically? I think a lot of us can walk the walk and talk the talk with a CRO or a CMO about sales capacity, but any tips and tricks for for working with the more technical side of the house? Yeah. For sure. I think people wanna build products so that people use them, and that people will appreciate using your products, which seems really simple. But Yeah. If you think about how do you go measure that. Right? It's things like activation rates, things like retention rates, things like willingness to pay. All these different concepts actually feed into how you think about, you know, financial forecasting and building a business over time. So I think more than you could kind of connect the customer point of view, but do that in a metricized way, I think that goes a really long way. Yeah. And you gotta speak their language. You can't just throw the numbers at them. You gotta tell them what it means to the customer because that's what they care about. Do it. That I think puts a higher burden on finance people. I think, like, we can't just live in spreadsheets or Campfire or whatever tools that we exist in. Right? Yeah. You also need to be able to appreciate, like, customer journeys, like, how product people think about problems as well. Yeah. Let's talk about future proofing the finance function. So looking ahead, AI, automation, it's changing how our teams operate. I'm gonna start with you, Jenna. How are you using automation or AI today to scale smarter? Yeah. So we are really doing as much as we can with with Clock. Are you drinking your own champagne? We are definitely drinking our own champagne. I want to ask someone if they're eating their own dog food, and they didn't like that the way that I phrased it before. Yeah. So really across the board in our team, not just in accounting, I think we're trying to leverage as much as we can. There's a ton of low hanging fruit out there now that the models have just gotten so much better. So when I think about just even starting over and if the models were at this level of advancement, I would plug in AI into the foundation of building up the team and building up process even more. Because right now, we have to essentially go through some change management, which is probably the hardest part of doing anything in terms of process reorientation. So for us, there are some really easy examples. It's just plugging Cloud into your data warehouse so you can leverage Cloud to get insights, building dashboards, asking Cloud to do a monthly update on an operational metrics that we run for, for example, for procure to pay. We can interact with Cloud on questions instead of having to do it in a more formal setting. So that's one easy example that also just is something you can do across the whole team. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that the Flux automation is Okay. Similar to that. Yeah. Anywhere that you can plug in Cloud to Snowflake or another data warehouse, and leveraging Cloud to get those insights has been a a huge game changer and time saver. Dan, give us a quick one. AI use case in finance and your team today. I would say we're probably not the most forward on AI, but we focus a lot on automation. How do we set up systems and, like, our data infrastructure to really automate that? I think that's where we're spending a lot more time. I mean, like, controller, Christine, she's, like, literally writing scripts for how do we get data out of we're on NetSuite. Sorry, John. Maybe in the future. Well, how to get data out in NetSuite into Snowflake, actually, so that we could actually run analysis, so that we could understand things like, you know, ops efficiency costs and so on where you have to marry financial data with operational data, which seems like a really easy thing, but they really do live in different silos of data. And the ability to actually marry those up gives you so much power in terms of how you actually do things like we do things like revenue accruals and, like, COGS accruals based upon transaction volumes, where you do need to marry those two things up. But then on the strategic finance side, it goes a really long way for how we think about LTV to CAC analysis, unit economic analysis, and a lot of other things. Okay. I'm gonna bring this full circle now. So Brad, I'll start with you. If you could give your first finance hire this is Brad's first finance hire. Stay on the job, man. If you could give him a piece of advice about building for today, what would it be? I mean, lesson learned at Snowflake. I wish I would've if if I could talk to my twenty seventeen self, it would be to have actually nailed down a process for dealing with head count, like, in terms of like, what's the reporting, what is the data structure, who owns it? Because it's one of those weird data sets that both HR own has an ownership stake. We have an ownership stake. And so when you have sort of two groups that have that, then there's sort of lack of accountability. And so we did it a lot for our top line metrics, but we didn't do it as much for managing headcount. And so I wish I would have spent more time necessarily defining our processes around reporting and data integrity and maintaining those pipelines. That's good. Jenna? Yeah, I think I want to elaborate on what Brad just said. But having the data warehouse have clean data is a really critical thing. So nailing that as a first priority from a foundational perspective is really important. And then in terms of just a mindset shift, always thinking further ahead and thinking bigger than you actually think is probably definitely something I would have changed if I were to restart. Dan? I think when you're in the scaling phase, it's easy to kinda think about, hey. Like, what feels right for you in the moment? And if you are on the good trajectory, I would actually say step skip ahead and go, like, two steps beyond, even if it means you might pay more for software that you might not need necessarily today. But building the processes for, like, a certain level of skill, you don't wanna overbuild either, but it goes a pretty long way. Don't wanna overbuild either. But, like, having to rip and replace and kind of re uplevel, like, processes over time, like, those could require a lot of change management. So just pick your battles in terms of where you wanna go through your change management or not. It's not always gonna make sense to jump ahead too far, but in certain areas, it actually does pay dividends, so it's less of a distraction for the team down the road. Alright. I've been sitting with my own thoughts through this panel. And, Jenna, I had the realization that my first concert was also the NSYNC No Strings at that time. Has been a blast. Thank you all for your insights, and thanks for joining us. Take care.