CFO THOUGHT LEADER

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802: Making an Industry Lane Change | Mike Catelani, CFO, Anixa Biosciences, Inc. May 18, 2022

Show notes

When Mike Catelani seeks to identify the objectives and career milestones that have helped to advance him into the ranks of Bay Area biotech CFOs, he mentions that although he had a deep interest in biology during his high school years, upon entering college he decided to swap out a biology curriculum for an accounting one.

More than a decade later, Catelani decided to make a career “lane change” to accept a CFO role for a manufacturer of instruments and tools used in drug discovery.

While the company, whose stock was traded on the ASX (Australian Securities Exchange), was not directly involved in drug discovery, Catelani believed that the CFO stint would put him one step closer to opportunities inside the biotech realm.

Still, he can’t help but marvel at the randomness of the circumstances that ultimately opened the biotech door.

“It was complete dumb luck: A recruiter was looking for a CFO who had Australian Securities Exchange experience for a biotech firm in the Bay Area, and—not surprisingly—mine was like the only name that popped up,” explains Catelani, who was named CFO of Benitec, an Australian public company that at the time specialized in drug development for hepatitis C and HIV.

Seventeen years and multiple biotech chapters later, Catelani looks back on his original door of entry as “a bit of a turnaround.”

“It had roughly 6 weeks of cash when I came on board and at the time was involved in a number of patent infringement lawsuits,” reports Catelani, who lists cash management as every biotech CFO’s mission-critical skillset tool. –Jack Sweeney

801: The Founder & The Future | Ryan Van Hatten, CFO, Prophix May 15, 2022

Show notes

Perhaps few CFO career paths better reveal the advantages a founder-led firm may offer career-minded executives than that of Prophix CFO Ryan Van Hatten.

Back in 2016—when the firm’s previous CFO exited the company—Prophix’s founder and CEO, the late Paul Barber, asked Van Hatten, an 11-year company veteran, to step into the CFO office until a CFO hire could be made.

Recalls Van Hatten: “I knew all of the people on the finance team, and they knew me, and we respected each other, so it was like, ‘Calm the troops, assess where we’re at, and while this may take a few months, you can then go home to operations.’”

However, Van Hatten never did return to operations, and his ascension into the CFO role was finally set after Barber sold the software company to Canadian private equity firm HG Capital in early 2021.

Comments Van Hatten: “I was suddenly thrust into a different world. It was very different from having Paul and a bunch of friendly managers asking the questions.”

Still, few CFOs likely would have been better prepared to answer sticky operational questions than Van Hatten, who had spent the balance of his 16-plus years at the software company zigzagging across the organization as Barber and COO Alok Ajmera (now CEO) summoned him to take on new and different roles.

Reports Van Hatten: “I had been around the company a long time. I knew the people, and if I had fallen flat on my face, they would have been there to help me and pick me up.”

Asked what advantages a founder-led firm might offer to aspiring CFOs and what exactly sets apart the company that Paul Barber founded, Van Hatten says that this comes down to learning and relationships: “It’s having the openness to learn from each other.” –Jack Sweeney

The Hard Truth About Retention | A Workplace Champions Episode May 13, 2022

Show notes

Brett & Jack discuss how growing numbers of businesses are facing an employee retention crisis as they battle escalating workforce attrition and struggle to fill job vacancies. As the crisis grows in certain industries, more finance leaders are sounding the alarm on escalating business risk and dedicating more time to solving the current talent equation.

Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Efrain Rivera of Paychex, CFO Anisha Sood of First Choice Health, CFO Will Johnson of Iterable, and CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse.

800: When the Road Rises to Meet You | John Herman, CFO, Movable Ink May 11, 2022

Show notes

Had the opportunity to work in the treasury department at American Express arrived 6 months earlier, there’s a chance that John Herman may never have landed in a CFO office.

“Treasury was an area that I was fascinated by,” remembers Herman, who—after having spent a decade at American Express—was given a “package” in 2009 when the financial crisis mercilessly bore down on the card services giant.

However, in April of 2010, Herman punted the Amex treasury opportunity in order to accept an FP&A position at Yodle, an online marketing company that was generating roughly $50 million in annual revenue.

“I decided that I wanted to work in an organization where I could make an impact, and I felt that it was time to take a risk in my career,” recalls Herman, who would report directly to Yodle’s CFO and for the next several months be “a department of one.”

“There was this opportunity to build out my team and take on new roles and learn really quickly,” recounts Herman.

Along the way, Yodle would make multiple acquisitions and grow to more than $200 million in annual sales before being acquired by Web.com in early 2016. Herman had steadily advanced upward and eventually into the CFO office, where he ultimately led the due diligence and oversaw the sale process for the Web.com sale.

“It ultimately came down to the fact that it was the right time to sell,” comments Herman, who within 6 months of the Yodle sale closing garnered his second CFO appointment at early-stage SaaS developer Movable Ink.

Six years later, Movable Ink has surpassed the $100 million mark in annual recurring revenue and was recently valued at $1.3 billion—joining a select class of marketing technology brands.

Asked whether he had ever contemplated becoming a CFO during the first half of his career, Herman replies, “I definitely didn’t grow up saying, ‘Someday, I want to be a CFO’—it’s really been a journeyman’s trip to where I have now arrived.” –Jack Sweeney

799: When Metrics Do the Talking | Adam Ante, CFO, Paycor May 08, 2022

Show notes

When Adam Ante first arrived at Paycor in 2017, the seasoned finance executive was tasked with prodding Paycor management to begin monitoring daily performance metrics.

“At first, it was about building the relationship with the executive team so that they understood how important it was to understand how the company was performing on a daily basis,” explains Ante, who equates his task with shortening the distance between management and the company’s data.

“At the time, we were just piling a set of numbers and metrics into Excel spreadsheets daily and distributing them,” continues Ante, who upon his arrival was given the title of vice president of analytics.

“We didn’t know where all of the data was, and we didn’t know always what it meant,” reports Ante, who notes that sometimes one manager might be sharing certain data that contradicted numbers being disseminated by another.

For Paycor, the solution was to adopt a new data management framework, a process that began with first clarifying what the company wanted to know about its performance and then identifying which metrics would best reveal this information.

According to Ante, “You begin by asking, ‘What should this metric really show?’ And then you say, ‘Okay, now, where does this data come from? How do we access this data?’’”

Back in 2017, Ante recalls, most of Paycor’s data resided within a single SQL server.

“At every turn, this meant that somebody had to go in and figure out how to write SQL queries and pull the needed data together,” remembers Ante, who adds that the company subsequently upgraded its data infrastructure.

“The most important thing is the ability to bring the data together into a place where people can access it and measure it and put the right level of governance around it,” comments Ante, who observes that as more managers have gained confidence in the data and grown to better understand the information being provided, they’ve also grown accustomed to monitoring the metrics daily.

Says Ante: “It can take a long time—it’s a cultural shift.” –Jack Sweeney

798: A CFO Links Past to Present | April Downing, CFO, Khoros May 04, 2022

Show notes

It was in the late 1990s when public accountant, savvy networker and future CFO April Downing decided that it was time to leave Dallas.

“I had cultivated my network there really early—there was a group of friends from PwC whom I regularly attended a book club with, and later we would all go on to different tech firms,” remembers Downing.

However, unlike those of some of her tech-minded PwC colleagues, Downing’s future plans did not include Dallas or Silicon Valley.

“It used to be that I had to say Austin, Texas—but everyone knows where Austin is now,” comments Downing, who accepted an assistant controller role at Motive Communications, an Austin tech firm—only to lose it upon her return from maternity leave.

“I thought that my life was going to be as an accountant, but they said: ‘You can be the finance person,’” recalls Downing, who credits the early job pivot with opening the door to a succession of senior finance roles that included the position of acting CFO.

In many ways, Downing’s Motive chapter exposes the historic connection between Austin’s high tech pioneers and its wide-body tech hub future, for it was at Motive that Downing first crossed paths with notable Austin investor and former Dell CFO Tom Meredith, who for a time served as chairman of Motive’s audit committee. It was also at Motive where she first connected with Kip McClanahan, whose firm Silverton Partners is credited with having helped to lead the next wave of Austin technology investment. Years later, McClanahan would help to recruit Downing to fill the CFO role at WP Engine.

Comments Downing: “One of things that I’ve been trying to do lately is to foster connections with some of the people who are new to Austin in order to share our heritage that says, ‘We’re all here to do better together!’” –Jack Sweeney

797: Achieving a More Perfect Exit | Melinda Smith, CFO, ChaosSearch May 01, 2022

Show notes

Back in early 2014, the management of Paydiant, a 4-year-old mobile payments start-up, believed that it was still several years away from engaging with acquisition-minded bankers.

Nevertheless, when PayPal came calling, the Paydiant team decided that they were worth a listen.

“Even though it was still an early stage for us to be in to be thinking about exiting the business, it was just a super interesting opportunity,” remembers Melinda Smith, whose CFO resume today lists the 2015 sale of Paydiant to PayPal as her third early-stage exit.

“If you had asked me when we first got acquired whether I was likely to stay inside a big, publicly traded firm like PayPal for long, I would have said ‘No,’” continues Smith, whose postmerger career with PayPal lasted more than 5 years and opened doors for Smith in surprising ways.

“What we determined was that our team, with all of its early-stage experience, could be really helpful in-house,” remarks Smith, who notes that at the time PayPal had only recently begun operating as a public company. It was felt that “noise from the Street” could become a distraction for PayPal’s smaller businesses like Paydiant, she adds, as well as for their mobile payment unit Venmo, which had joined the family in 2013 as part of PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree.

“We ended combining the teams, and I got the opportunity to be CFO of Venmo,” comments Smith, who would serve as Venmo’s finance chief for the next 3 years. –Jack Sweeney

Getting In Deeper | a Planning Aces Episode Apr 29, 2022

Show notes

Steve and Jack discuss how successful financial planning teams are always looking to "get in deeper" and bring new insights to the surface. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse, CFO Kent Kelley of Unanet and CFO Brandon Maultasch of Moloco.

796: Gene Editing's Next Frontier | Elaine Sun, CFO, Mammoth Biosciences Apr 27, 2022

Show notes

Having grown accustomed to charting the careers of our finance leader guests from their early professional days up through their entry into the CFO office, we did not change course for Elaine Sun, an accomplished investment banker turned finance leader who last month stepped into her third successive finance chief position at Mammoth Biosciences of Brisbane, California.

For Sun, the third time is undoubtedly the charm, for it would be difficult to imagine a more compelling start-up for a CFO of any pedigree to have joined than Mammoth, the celebrated unicorn cofounded by Jennifer Doudna, the University of California professor who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work on CRISPR-Cas9, a method of editing DNA.

No matter what the tenor of Mammoth’s future achievements may be, the intersection of Sun’s professional life with Doudna’s will likely come to dominate Sun’s professional narrative as the finance leader summons her past finance experience to build and scale a financial function capable of helping Mammoth to fully realize the commercial application of Doudna’s work.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, when Sun floats a recommendation for The Code Breaker, the book written by Walter Isaacson that charts the path to Doudna’s scientific breakthrough. Still, her reference reminds us that another exciting chapter is currently being written—the one where science and finance meet. –Jack Sweeney

Elaine Sun: Mammoth Biosciences is based in the Bay Area—Brisbane, California. We were cofounded by Jennifer Doudna, Nobel laureate for her fundamental work in CRISPR gene editing. The other cofounders were Trevor Martin, Janice Chen, and Lucas Harrington.

It is a very exciting company. I could not be more thrilled to be partnering with them and coming on board as COO and CFO of the company.

Anyone who’s followed the biotech industry knows that there have been these different technologies that have enabled new therapies. CRISPR gene editing is this next frontier.

As someone who’s been in the life sciences industry for a long time and seen technology wax and wane, I think that this is very exciting in enabling therapeutics as well as, potentially, curative therapies.

On the diagnostic side, our vision is to leverage this CRISPR enzyme to be able to develop next-generation diagnostics with the accuracy of molecular diagnostics but in the palm of your hand at the point of care or even ultimately in the home.

This is an area that has captured the imagination of investors, and there’s been a lot of interest in this space. The early folks that have been advancing the field in CRISPR have been focused on CRISPR-Cas9. These tools or systems have certain applications that are ex vivo, or outside of the body.

We believe that our ultra-small CRISPR systems could better enable in vivo therapies. We’re also leveraging them for our diagnostic applications.

There is the potential to leverage CRISPR technology even in areas outside of diagnostics and therapeutics. The company has talked about potential locations for industrial or biomanufacturing or ag biotech applications.

One of the things that got me so excited about Mammoth was this commitment to advancing the field, to continuing to discover new CRISPR systems beyond CRISPR-Cas9. The intellectual property position that we have is extremely strong, and we have this multidimensionality to our business model, potentially with diagnostics, therapeutics, and more.

795: The Canary in the Coal Mine | Anisha Sood, CFO, First Choice Health Apr 24, 2022

Show notes

Back in 2001, as the dotcom bubble imploded and the U.S. economy took a downward spiral, Anisha Sood, a recently hired consultant for Accenture, felt fortunate.

“There were rounds of layoffs happening and Accenture was trying to manage it well, but I got lucky because I was in healthcare,” explains Sood, who reports that other practice areas such as technology and media were not so fortunate.

Seven years later, just as Sood had finished logging her first 48 hours as an investment banker with Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers collapsed—but once more, Sood felt fortunate.

“Here again, I could credit healthcare as being the stabilizing factor, although there were no deals happening, no IPOs or M&A, for about 12 months after I started,” recalls Sood, who in the years that followed would lead a variety of health sector transactions for the bank before moving back to hometown Seattle to begin a multichapter career as a venture investor in healthcare.

“When I left Seattle in the ’90s, it was kind of a small town known for its alternative rock, and now I returned to find this bustling world of startups and spinoffs and large players that had made a reinvestment in healthcare and seeded this entrepreneurial biocommunity,” observes Sood, whose venture investing career chapter—unlike those that preceded it—appears to have opened unaccompanied by the peril of economic collapse.

There were other differences as well, for it was during Sood’s venture investing days that she first began to acquire the escalating desire to build things that over time fueled her ambitions to become a CFO.

Along the way, Sood says, she came to realize that most often it was finance that was first to expose whether or not a company was going to be successful. As she likes to put it: “Finance is the canary in the coal mine.”

According to Sood, the welfare of the bond between venture investors, boards, and entrepreneurial founders often depends on a single deliverable that is usually framed by more or less the same query: “Can you provide us with a unit economic model that shows us how profitable or sustainable your clients will be over time as you start to grow?”

It was just such a deliverable that later tripped up the management team of one of Sood’s portfolio companies.

“We realized over time that the company was not tracking toward its numbers—the incremental margin, the incremental sustainability, just wasn’t materializing, and it became clear that there was a flaw in the strategy and underlying business model for the company,” remembers Sood, who adds that the company was ultimately sold for far less than what had previously been projected by venture investors.

For Sood, the experience reveals why finance must always be the canary—and sound off with tough questions that are sometimes difficult to ask.

Says Sood: “How much do we need to pay attention to these numbers? When must we start to call it? If we let things play out, it may lead to an exit that no one wants to see.” –Jack Sweeney

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