CFO THOUGHT LEADER

Three accomplished CFOs. Three candid conversations. One revealing look at how finance leaders think about acquisitions before the headlines ever appear. In this special CFO Thought Leader edition, we revisit conversations with Jonathan Carr, former CFO of Armis, James Redfern, CFO of Reltio, and Toby Driver, CFO of IdeaGen. Each discusses acquisitions from a different vantage point—planning, inte...

Sinohe Terrero still remembers the timing. He joined Envoy in January, only to see the workplace transformed just two months later as offices around the world shut down because of COVID. The company had been building products for offices, but suddenly, almost no one was going to the office, Terrero tells us. That abrupt shift forced Envoy to rethink its future. The company quickly introduced a pro...

Taking a Company Public: What CFOs Know What 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 b...

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....

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 le...

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 leade...

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 w...

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 d...

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,...

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...

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...

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: QuantumSca...

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....

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 scor...

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 eva...

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...

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...

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...

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 compan...

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 acc...

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 bu...

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 a...

Before his career became closely tied to middle-market businesses, Scott Thorell built his foundation in larger arenas. He began at Ernst & Young in New York, auditing financial services firms, then moved to Campbell Soup Company, where financial and operational audit assignments took him to Australia, Hong Kong, Europe, and locations across the United States, Thorell tells us. Those chapters...

In this special episode, we revisit a past conversation with Hilary Maxson and explore why her appointment as CFO of Oracle Corporation comes at such a consequential moment. As Oracle accelerates investments in AI infrastructure and cloud capacity, the finance role now extends well beyond stewardship into capital allocation, operational discipline, and long-term value creation. Maxson’s career—fro...

As a child in Austria, Thomas Baumgartner bundled unwanted toys into mystery bags and sold them to classmates. Buyers could not see what was inside—they simply paid and took their chances. He cleared out old toys and earned spending money, he tells us. The story is lighthearted, but it reveals something enduring: an instinct to create value, move decisively, and keep looking for the next opportuni...