Podcast
CFO THOUGHT LEADER
Hosted by The Future of Finance is Listening · EN
CFO THOUGHT LEADER is a podcast featuring firsthand accounts of finance leaders who are driving change within their organizations.
We share the career journey of our spotlighted CFO guest: What do they struggle with? How do they persevere? What makes them successful CFOs? CFO THOUGHT LEADER is all about inspiring finance professionals to take a leadership leap. We know that by hearing about the successes — (and yes, also the failures) — of others, today’s CFOs can more confidently chart their own leadership paths across the enterprise and take inspired action.
47episodes
Episodes
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1188: Testing Assumptions Before Burning Capital | Kevin Hettrich, CFO, QuantumScape
1w ago00:54:55Tap to summarizeKevin 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 contribute to at least one patent application each year and spent time “changing targets out of that tool” and mixing chemicals alongside engineers.The broader strategy behind QuantumScape has remained equally ambitious. The company’s goal is not incremental improvement, but batteries that are “smaller and lighter,” “faster charging,” “longer lived,” “safer,” and “lower cost at the same time,” Hettrich tells us. Today, the company has commercial partnerships with Volkswagen and collaborations with Corning and Murata Manufacturing as it works to commercialize its solid-state battery platform.
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Bonus Replay: Building Luxury Growth Without Losing Financial Discipline | Paolo Poma, CFO, Lamborghini
1w ago00:47:17Tap to summarizeIn 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, Poma tells us he built his finance career by combining analytical rigor with business understanding. He later expanded his responsibilities from controlling to investor relations, treasury, and accounting before formally becoming CFO in 2011.Today, that long-view mindset influences how he approaches Lamborghini’s growth. The company grew from roughly €200 million in revenue to nearly €2.4 billion over the last decade, Poma tells us, while maintaining a focus on profitability, product discipline, and sustainable expansion.
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Bonus Replay: Building an Early Warning System | Patrick McClymont, CFO, Hagerty
2w ago00:59:49Tap to summarizePatrick 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 fluency alone was not enough. The art specialists running major parts of the business “didn’t think about the world the way that Goldman Sachs people do,” he tells us. Rather than force financial terminology into conversations, he changed his communication style, using “brown bag lunches” to connect financial priorities with the realities of individual business units.Today at Hagerty, that same mindset shapes his focus on customer economics, profitability, and building “one version of the truth,” he tells us.
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1187: Pattern Recognition: How CFOs See Around Corners | Alex Chun, CFO, NEOGOV
3w ago00:43:21Tap to summarizeAlex 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 a product can require “90 steps” across multiple teams, Chun tells us.Today, Chun is equally focused on AI’s impact across the business. At NEOGOV, teams are using AI to analyze customer conversations, automate workflows, and rethink scalability itself, Chun tells us.
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1186: Keeping the Applause in Check | Adam Goldbruch, CFO, DoorLoop
3w ago00:51:58Tap to summarizeAdam 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 the operational “ropes” that actually move a business forward.At DoorLoop, that mindset surfaced again when leadership considered several new monetization initiatives. Rather than chase immediate revenue, Goldbruch modeled one-, three-, and five-year outcomes and concluded the company should focus on expanding the number of property units served, he tells us.For Goldbruch, finance leadership is not about celebrating vanity metrics. It is about identifying the measurements that compound value over time.
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1185: Scaling Smarter in the AI Era | Sarah Riley, CFO, dbt Labs
4w ago00:40:58Tap to summarizeWhen 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 extraordinary change, Riley tells us.That mindset now informs her role as CFO of dbt Labs, where she oversees finance, accounting, and data operations while helping guide the company through its merger with Fivetran. Riley says today’s defining challenge for software businesses is balancing legacy operating models with the realities of AI-driven transformation. “You need to balance that with how do we make sure that we’re investing aggressively enough in capturing what our user base is turning into,” she tells us.
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1184: From Deal Sheets to Operating Seats | Rick Hasselman, CFO, Salesloft
May 600:57:10Tap to summarizeRick 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” can be redesigned to take one, he tells us. This mindset reflects a broader approach: finance as an enabler of operational clarity and efficiency, rather than a function limited to reporting results.At the center of this effort is data. Hasselman emphasizes that combining systems—from ERP to CRM—requires precision, but also unlocks new possibilities. By connecting internal data with external AI capabilities, the platform can extend its value beyond its own boundaries, he tells us.For Hasselman, the challenge is clear: unify, simplify, and position the business to act faster—turning complexity into a competitive advantage.
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1183: Enter the Blockchain CFO: Reshaping Capital Markets | Macrina Kgil, CFO, Figure
May 300:46:10Tap to summarizeMacrina 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 visible and singular—“you can only have one owner,” she tells us—reducing inefficiencies and risks like double pledging.This progression—from uncertainty to conviction—mirrors Kgil’s broader strategic mindset. Rather than waiting for technologies to mature, she leans into complexity, learning from within. Her decision to engage with blockchain early reflects a willingness to navigate ambiguity in pursuit of long-term impact.For Kgil, innovation is not simply about adopting new tools. It is about applying them in ways that improve outcomes—making financial systems faster, clearer, and ultimately more effective for those who depend on them.
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AI, Trust, and the Expanding Role of Finance: A Sage Future Special
May 100:42:46Tap to summarizeAt 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, Sage Highlights how AI is connecting fragmented construction workflows, enabling end-to-end visibility across projects to better manage costs, labor, and profitability.
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1182: From Cockpit Decisions to Capital Decisions | Andre Mancl, CFO, Nium
Apr 2900:46:30Tap to summarizeAndre 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 night landings onto ships with junior pilots, keeping his hand near the controls—not to take over, but to prevent a dangerous mistake. The lesson still informs how he leads teams today.An MBA earned while teaching ROTC at UCLA opened the door to investment banking, where he spent roughly 15 years advising high-growth internet companies on IPOs, financings, and M&A. Over time, he says, business assessment became instinctive: when margins or growth rates looked wrong, something usually was.Today, as CFO of Nium, he applies that same blend of discipline and pattern recognition to a global payments market he values at $100 trillion, he tells us. His focus now includes automation, stronger margins, and using data to drive sharper decisions across the company.
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