Cfo Thought Leader

Taking a Company Public: What CFOs KnowWhat does it really take to prepare a company for life as a public company?In this special CFO Thought Leader compilation, we revisit three conversations with finance leaders who helped guide some of the technology industry's most recognizable companies through the IPO journey. Rather than focusing on the transaction itself, these CFOs share what happened behind the scenes—the operational changes, leadership decisions, and financial discipline required long before the opening bell rang.John Kinzer, former CFO of HubSpot, explains how preparing for an IPO required transforming finance from a back-office function into a strategic business partner. He discusses the importance of balancing growth with profitability and creating the operational discipline expected of a public company.Kelly Steckelberg, former CFO of Zoom Video Communications, reflects on building the people, processes, forecasting capabilities, and financial infrastructure necessary to support a successful tr

When Martino Cadoni joined DeepL, he arrived with an unusual perspective—he already knew the company’s product firsthand. Earlier in his career at Klarna, he had helped introduce DeepL as a translation solution, making the transition from customer to CFO especially meaningful. Today, DeepL is backed by investors including HV Capital, Benchmark, Index Ventures, ICONIQ, and Atomico, Cadoni tells us. Working alongside those firms, he says, continually pushes him “out of the comfort zone.”That mindset mirrors the company’s trajectory. DeepL supports “almost 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies,” Cadoni tells us, while continuing to grow and mature for its next stage of development.Rather than viewing language translation as a commodity, Cadoni emphasizes its strategic importance in critical business workflows. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, rely on accurate translation of regulatory documentation before commercializing new drugs, he tells us. Legal firms, airlines, manufacturers, and multinational orga

When Jean Compeau joined Sonar as CFO in March 2025, AI coding was not yet dominating industry conversations. By the summer and fall that followed, however, the landscape had shifted dramatically. Today, AI agents are producing software code at a pace that humans cannot easily verify, creating both opportunity and risk.That shift sits at the center of Sonar’s mission. The company is the global leader in AI code verification and governance in what it calls the agentic-centric development lifecycle, or “ACDC, just like the band,” Compeau tells us. The scale is significant. Sonar is trusted by 7 million developers, processes 750 billion lines of code daily, serves 25,000 paying customers, and counts 75 percent of the Fortune 100 among its customers, Compeau tells us.For Compeau, growth is measured through both financial and operational signals. ARR, NRR, GRR, and EBITDA remain core metrics, she tells us. But she also watches utilization, adoption, lead generation, pipeline activity, and free-to-paid conversion r

Each day, Stacey Jenkins watches a different set of indicators than the quarterly financial results that eventually appear on a report. Candidate applications, recruiter activity, and other throughput measures help tell the story of where Aerotek’s business may be headed. Financial results are “the lagging indicator,” Jenkins tells us.That perspective reflects how she views both finance and leadership. While Aerotek remains focused on helping clients solve talent challenges and build flexible, specialized workforces, the company has steadily expanded its approach. Today, it is helping clients rethink how work gets done through workforce solutions, data insights, and new delivery models. Aerotek is also building capabilities in fully outsourced industrial services, Jenkins tells us.The common thread is a willingness to look beyond traditional definitions of the business. Jenkins says she remains proud of the organization’s ability to help clients grow while helping people build their careers.The same mindset a

When Jesse Waldron describes Thyme Care’s work, he begins with the patient experience. Cancer patients, he explains, are often thrust into a healthcare system that can feel overwhelming both financially and emotionally.That reality sits at the center of Thyme Care’s mission. As an oncology care navigation company, Thyme Care helps patients move through their cancer journey while also partnering with health plans and oncology providers. The company works at the intersection of those relationships, helping coordinate care and improve outcomes.Waldron tells us that Thyme Care partners first with health plans, which identify members undergoing active cancer treatment. From there, the company works directly with patients and collaborates with oncology practices and health systems delivering care. The goal is to help patients navigate treatment while helping health plans manage rising oncology costs.A key part of that model is Thyme Care’s virtual care team. The organization employs approximately 550 nurses, social

Five weeks into her role as CFO of Catalant, Christina Spade is helping guide a company that she believes is positioned for a different era of consulting.Catalant was founded out of Harvard Business School in 2013 and began as an independent consultant matchmaking company, Spade tells us. Today, she describes the firm as a “Consulting 2.0” business built around agile, fit-for-purpose consulting designed to help organizations solve problems and create value more quickly.The company’s evolution mirrors broader changes in the consulting industry. Independent consultants were often viewed skeptically a decade ago, Spade tells us. But as organizations sought greater efficiency during and after COVID, many finance leaders began looking for more flexible ways to access expertise.That shift helped Catalant move beyond matching individual consultants with projects. The company now works with Fortune 500 organizations, assembling teams of experts tailored to specific business challenges, Spade tells us. Technology and

When David Forlizzi describes Salsify, he begins with a simple observation: “We all use it every day.” Unlike some of the highly technical software businesses where he previously spent his career, Salsify’s value proposition is visible to anyone who shops online.Product content sits at the center of the company’s platform, Forlizzi tells us. Whether consumers are browsing a brand website, Amazon, or another online retailer, they rely on product descriptions, photos, videos, and specifications to make purchasing decisions. When that information is inconsistent or incomplete across channels, it can undermine confidence and influence buying behavior.Salsify helps brands manage and distribute that content across major retailers and commerce platforms, Forlizzi tells us. By serving as a central hub for product experience management, the company enables brands to deliver a consistent message while helping retailers improve conversion rates through stronger product information.As CFO, Forlizzi sees continuity in the

When Jaylene Kunze was asked to help rebuild a struggling subsidiary in the United Kingdom, she packed up her family and moved overseas with her nine-month-old daughter. The assignment was one more example of the type of challenge that would come to define her career. Rather than following a traditional finance path, Kunze gravitated toward what she calls “the fixer” role, stepping into situations where businesses needed operational repair, process improvement, or organizational change.That mindset began to take shape through compliance and Sarbanes-Oxley work. While many viewed the documentation requirements as burdensome, Kunze tells us the process forced her to understand “the intersection of people, process, and systems” behind the numbers. It gave her visibility into how businesses actually operated and prepared her for increasingly complex leadership roles.Her appetite for transformation became especially valuable when Tendril transitioned from venture-capital ownership to private-equity ownership. Kunz

A conversation from years earlier still stands out to Bruno Annicq. While working at AOL, he was supporting business leaders and helping tell the story of the business through data and analytics. Then a senior executive, Holly Hess, approached him with an unexpected suggestion: Why not become the CFO of AOL’s platforms business?Annicq’s reaction was immediate. “Wait, me? Are you sure?” he recalls. Until that moment, he had never envisioned himself as a finance leader. Hess, however, saw something different—a broad skill set developed through engineering studies, consulting at McKinsey, and operational leadership roles inside AOL.That willingness to build capabilities outside a traditional finance path has shaped Annicq’s career. He studied engineering not because he intended to become an engineer, but because he believed the skills would prove useful later. After McKinsey, he deliberately sought operational experience, joining AOL during a period of significant change that included Verizon’s acquisition of th

Kevin Hettrich walked into a conference room with a whiteboard full of numbers and a problem no one had fully articulated. QuantumScape’s leadership team was discussing how to scale an expensive R&D tool used to produce early battery materials. Hettrich had spent two weeks gathering data, talking with engineers, and analyzing manufacturing economics. Then he laid out the comparison: QuantumScape’s current performance, the best anyone had achieved in any industry, and what would ultimately be required to succeed in automotive production. There were “six orders of magnitude” separating the industry benchmark from what the company would eventually need, Hettrich tells us.That moment became an early proving ground for a finance leader who had entered QuantumScape from a background shaped by McKinsey & Company, Bain Capital, and Stanford’s joint business and engineering program. Rather than staying confined to finance, Hettrich immersed himself in the company’s technical environment. He tells us he would c

In early 2009, Paolo Poma found himself navigating what he recalls as a “really tough” period. At the time, he was helping steer Ducati through a leveraged buyout negotiated before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Debt obligations had arrived just as markets were “plummeting,” Poma tells us, while lenders closely monitored covenant compliance and private equity owners pressed ahead with the deal.Poma remembers sitting with bankers and shareholders through repeated discussions about liquidity, budgets, and cash generation. “Planning cash was crucial because covenants on cash were really tight,” he tells us. The experience forced him to balance operational performance with financial discipline while uncertainty spread across global markets. Ducati ultimately avoided breaking its covenants, Poma tells us, and the period became one of the defining stretches of his finance career.The challenge also reinforced the leadership style that would later shape his tenure at Lamborghini. Trained originally as an engineer,

Patrick McClymont still remembers the moment at IMAX when the numbers began moving in the wrong direction. Hired to help drive external growth through acquisitions and partnerships, he instead found himself sitting with CEO Rich Gelfond building what he calls an “early warning system.” Together, they agreed to monitor the next three film titles and “hold ourselves accountable” to a short-term scorecard, McClymont tells us. If the numbers shifted further, strategy would have to shift with them.That experience reinforced a lesson McClymont carried from his earlier years at Goldman Sachs and into multiple CFO roles: “the numbers don’t lie,” he tells us. Before Goldman, he worked in real estate development, where he learned to “boil it down to the numbers” and find clarity quickly. At Goldman, advising transportation giants including UPS and major airlines exposed him to CEOs and CFOs navigating large-scale operational complexity.When he joined Sotheby’s as CFO, however, McClymont discovered that financial fluenc

Alex Chun already knew the management team at NEOGOV long before he became its CFO. As an investor at Warburg Pincus, he spent more than four years “in the trenches” with NEOGOV’s leadership team, flying to Los Angeles to work through operational challenges alongside them, Chun tells us.His path to finance leadership did not begin in accounting or FP&A. Instead, Chun spent nearly a decade evaluating companies at Morgan Stanley, General Atlantic, and Warburg Pincus, developing what he calls “pattern recognition” by analyzing “dozens, if not hundreds” of businesses, Chun tells us.That investor mindset now shapes how he leads finance. After joining NEOGOV in 2021, Chun focused on transforming finance into the company’s “centralized insights engine,” bringing quantitative discipline beyond the finance department and into sales, customer operations, and product decision-making, Chun tells us.He contrasts the polished presentations of boardrooms with the reality of operations, where even changing the pricing of

Adam Goldbruch still remembers the celebration. In 2017, he stood inside a Tel Aviv startup office while employees cheered a milestone: a Disney princess quiz had generated “2.8 million page views,” he tells us. Champagne circulated as the founder delivered a visionary speech about changing communication through content.At the time, Goldbruch was young enough to be swept up in the excitement, but skeptical enough to question what those metrics truly meant. Three years later, he found himself in the same company leading cost reductions and layoffs after realizing the celebrated KPI had not translated into sustainable value, he tells us.That experience shaped the finance philosophy he carries today as CFO of DoorLoop. Goldbruch’s career began in construction finance, where he learned unit economics by seeing how materials and labor translated into physical buildings, he tells us. He later built FP&A functions across startups, private firms, and public companies, experiences that taught him how to identify t

When the pandemic began reshaping the world in early 2020, Sarah Riley was helping guide finance at Zoom through an unprecedented surge in demand. “You could see the volume of Zoom almost spiking up by the regions that were going into shutdown,” Riley tells us. What followed was unlike anything most software companies had experienced before. During her four years at Zoom, the company expanded from roughly $200 million in ARR to $4 billion, Riley tells us. At one point, Zoom spent nearly half a billion dollars on AWS infrastructure costs it had not anticipated, she explains.For Riley, the experience fundamentally reshaped how she viewed finance leadership. Rather than becoming fixated on gross margin guidance or traditional planning cycles, she says the finance team had to continually reevaluate the “strategic heart” of the business as Zoom evolved from an enterprise software company into a platform supporting schools, consumers, and businesses worldwide. “Forecasting and discipline comes second” in moments of

Rick Hasselman recently boarded “a moving train,” describing his arrival at a newly merged SalesLoft and Clari business as both complex and energizing. Just a month and a half into the role, he is already immersed in integrating a $300 million-plus revenue company, he tells us.That early moment captures a defining pattern across Hasselman’s career: a willingness to enter dynamic environments and impose structure where complexity dominates. At SalesLoft, that means unifying systems, aligning data, and translating operational activity into actionable insight. The merged platform combines sales engagement, forecasting, and conversational intelligence—capabilities that, when integrated, allow teams to “become smarter and smarter on what the next best activity is,” he tells us.But for Hasselman, integration is not just a technical exercise—it is a strategic opportunity. As he explains, bringing together two organizations creates a chance to rethink workflows entirely. Processes that once took “three or four days”

Macrina Kgil recalls a moment when she first encountered blockchain technology and “could not grasp whatever it was trying to do,” she tells us. Even with an engineering background, the concept felt distant and unclear. Yet that early confusion would later become a defining thread in her career.Years later, when the opportunity arose to join Figure, Kgil recognized something different. The company had moved beyond theory—it was actively commercializing blockchain to reshape capital markets. That realization, she tells us, drew her in. What she saw was an intersection between consumer lending and blockchain innovation, two domains she had come to understand deeply through prior roles.At Figure, that intersection takes form as a capital marketplace where loans can be originated and sold with greater speed and transparency. Traditional processes, she explains, required extensive validation and negotiation across multiple parties. By contrast, blockchain enables a standardized system where loan ownership is visib

At Sage Future in San Francisco, three conversations reveal how AI is reshaping the finance function—from vision to execution to industry impact. Sage CTO Aaron Harris outlines the shift from assistive tools to autonomous systems, where trust and transparency will determine adoption. Sage's Jon Fasoli brings that vision into today’s finance workflows, where teams are cautiously embracing AI to accelerate decisions while maintaining control. And Sage's Julie Adams shows how these changes are unfolding inside construction, where real-time visibility and connected data are becoming essential to protecting margins and managing complexity.Aaron Harris, CTO, Sage Explores AI’s evolution toward autonomy, emphasizing that trust, explainability, and governance will determine how quickly finance leaders are willing to let go.Jon Fasoli, SVP, Sage Details how finance teams are applying AI today—balancing speed with control, and reinvesting productivity gains into faster, more informed decision-making.Julie Adams, SVP, S

Andre Mancl recalls sitting only a few months into his first CFO role when a senior technology executive arrived with an urgent warning: engineers were leaving for Google and Facebook, and the company needed an immediate across-the-board compensation increase of 30% to 40%. It would have been a major financial commitment. But Mancl hesitated. Drawing on years spent reading markets and assessing business conditions, he tells us the moment felt “toppy.” The SPAC market was imploding, IPO activity had stalled, and he believed private-market conditions would soon tighten. Instead of approving the full request, he supported a smaller targeted pool of compensation adjustments. A week later, hiring freezes began spreading across large technology companies.That decision captures the uncommon path that shaped his judgment. Before finance leadership, Mancl spent nearly nine years in the U.S. Navy, including seven as a helicopter aviator. There, he learned that decisions carry real consequences. He describes flying nigh

In the desert during military officer training, Yuval Atsmon entered one wrong number into a GPS device. Instead of reaching the intended destination, he and his team ended up in the wrong location, and the simulated mission failed. The mistake cost him the chance to finish at the top of his class, he tells us. Years later, he would recognize that moment as an early lesson in leadership: numbers and systems matter only if you truly understand them.That principle resurfaced when Atsmon was working with McKinsey in the Philippines on the privatization of an electricity asset. He spent several late nights studying a pricing framework that did not make sense. Eventually, he concluded the formula was recursive and would allow prices to rise indefinitely. Others initially thought he was wrong, but the process was halted and reexamined, he tells us. The experience reinforced what would become one of his core beliefs: “You can never delegate understanding.”That mindset helps explain a career shaped by movement across