CFO THOUGHT LEADER

CFO THOUGHT LEADER
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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.

  1. 126: Turning Signals into Strategy in Hypergrowth | Holly Grey, CFO Horizon3.ai

    20 GIỜ TRƯỚC

    126: Turning Signals into Strategy in Hypergrowth | Holly Grey, CFO Horizon3.ai

    When Holly Grey first examined Horizon3.ai, she saw more than a cybersecurity startup. She saw a technology that could change the way companies safeguard themselves. Traditional pen tests, she tells us, are human-driven, vary widely by auditor, and usually happen just once a year. Horizon3.ai, by contrast, “started out as a technology alternative to pen testing.” Its platform can be deployed “within minutes, not hours or weeks or months,” Grey tells us, and has already executed “over 100,000 pen tests.” The system identifies exposures, connects them to known threat actors, and—most critically—prioritizes which vulnerabilities to fix. It integrates directly with tools like Jira, creates tickets, and confirms results after remediation. “Even as a CFO, I want to know we’re not exposed,” Grey explains. That value proposition has already attracted more than 4,000 customers, she tells us. Her decision to join Horizon3.ai was equally deliberate. Grey noticed two respected colleagues had recently come aboard, including the CRO. That relationship, she says, is vital: “I need to know that I can trust that CRO implicitly.” After doing her own diligence, Grey was convinced of the company’s momentum: “It’s hard to grow over 100% year over year, and do that multiple years, without having product market fit.” The timing was fortuitous. Just as the company raised $100 million in Series D funding, its VP of Finance resigned. Horizon3.ai was ready to appoint its first CFO. “Here I am,” Grey tells us, “and I could not be happier in terms of joining.”

    57 phút
  2. 1125: Finance Lessons in the AI Era | Jay Peir, CFO, Pigment

    5 NGÀY TRƯỚC

    1125: Finance Lessons in the AI Era | Jay Peir, CFO, Pigment

    At 30, Jay Peir stepped into the CFO role at SunPower, a high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer. The appointment came after leading M&A and venture investments at Cypress Semiconductor, where SunPower was the largest portfolio company. “I had my first CFO experience at the age of 30,” Peir tells us, recalling how corporate development responsibilities opened the door to finance leadership. That early leap reflected a broader pattern in his career: moving fluidly between finance and strategy. With dual engineering degrees from Stanford, Peir began in economic consulting before earning his MBA amid the rise and fall of the dot-com era. His background in technology and data analysis, he tells us, formed “my first chapter” and prepared him for navigating growth in fast-moving sectors. A decade at Tableau deepened those lessons. When revenue slowed and the company’s stock “dropped about 50% in one day,” Peir was tasked with helping lead a shift to subscription. He emphasizes that success required aligning stakeholders across sales, marketing, and finance, ensuring teams could both understand and articulate changes to customers. “There’s both internal and external change management,” he tells us, noting the importance of investor communication as well. Today, as Head of Strategy at Pigment, CFO Peir applies these experiences to scaling an AI-native planning platform. Pigment’s tools unify financial and operational planning, enabling companies to act on data with speed and flexibility. The company’s AI roadmap includes predictive analytics and autonomous agents, helping finance teams drive variance analysis, expense tracking, and forecasting more efficiently, Peir tells us.

    42 phút
  3. 1124: Rewiring the Marketplace for the AI Era | Craig Foster, CFO, Pax8

    7 THG 9

    1124: Rewiring the Marketplace for the AI Era | Craig Foster, CFO, Pax8

    When Craig Foster talks about artificial intelligence, he begins with scale. Pax8, the enterprise marketplace where he serves as CFO, connects vendors like Microsoft and CrowdStrike with 43,000 managed service providers. Those MSPs, he tells us, serve between 700,000 and 800,000 small and midsize businesses worldwide. Against that backdrop, Foster describes how AI is reshaping both internal operations and external opportunities. Inside Pax8, teams are experimenting across functions—from customer support to accounting—to automate what was once manual. The company, he tells us, has set a target “to do 20% more with 20% less,” relying on AI tools that are already available. Efficiency gains are not hypothetical; they are part of the current planning cycle. Externally, Foster sees what he calls “agentic marketplaces” emerging—ecosystems where AI modules act as labor components. Vendors are already building such agents, and Pax8 is designing its own. “We’re a marketplace,” he tells us, “so we need to incorporate those different… AI components and enable our downstream clients for efficiency.” He believes this wave, unlike earlier technology cycles, is reaching SMBs with unusual speed. The finance leader is also watching economics evolve in real time. Data aggregated across Pax8’s network shows strong interest, but pricing remains unsettled. Foster compares today’s uncertainty to the early days of API marketplaces, when usage-based models became standard. The question now, he tells us, is how to split value between provider and customer—whether by consumption, per interaction, or shared outcomes. “That’s probably the biggest challenge in industry right now,” Foster says.

    56 phút
  4. 1123: From Accounting Rigor to Strategic Leadership | Jim Rogers, CFO, Tempus AI

    3 THG 9

    1123: From Accounting Rigor to Strategic Leadership | Jim Rogers, CFO, Tempus AI

    The pivot began when Jim Rogers raised his hand. Groupon was shifting from mobile daily deals to a goods business in Europe, and—still early in his career—he volunteered to help lead the finance work. That step, he tells us, bridged his path from technical accounting into FP&A and set a pattern: seek out the build stage, then make finance a partner to the business. Rogers started in audit at Ernst & Young before moving through technical accounting and controllership into planning. He earned a master’s in accounting at Northern Illinois University to qualify for the CPA, he tells us. At Groupon, he advanced to head of FP&A for North America, experience that informed his philosophy at Tempus AI: “we’re not here to report the news,” he says—finance should enable decisions. Joining Tempus in 2017 as the first finance hire—when the company was pre-revenue, he tells us—Rogers built the function, became CFO in 2021, and helped steer the company public. He also stood up investor relations, initially outsourcing the function before bringing it in-house by the end of 2021, he tells us, investing time to educate analysts on a business that spans multiple categories. AI runs through Tempus’s work. Externally, a physician portal (“positive”) and the researcher tool “Lens” aim to make diagnostics and data more useful. Internally, large language models sift “hundreds of petabytes of data,” Rogers tells us, and surface real-time finance insights. The strategic throughline is discipline: double down on oncology, keep pilots siloed, and expand only when the core is ready—because, as he notes, “no two days are alike.”

    38 phút
  5. Finance Leaders Decode AI's Promise - A Planning Aces Episode

    31 THG 8

    Finance Leaders Decode AI's Promise - A Planning Aces Episode

    In this Planning Aces special, three finance leaders map how AI is moving FP&A from dashboards to decisions. Andrew Casey (Amplitude) shows agents automating analytics, experiments, and order-to-cash checks to democratize insight and speed action. Eric Brown (Cohesity) contrasts AI’s capital intensity with the cloud era and spotlights an “epic data battle” where privileged datasets drive advantage. Chris Miorin (APEX Analytix) links on-prem investment and clean data to faster product velocity. Co-host Brett Knowles ties it together: avoid AI-washing; structure data; target reconciliations and cycle-time compression; and lead with outcomes. Viewpoints, AI’s value depends on governance, access, and execution discipline.

    38 phút
  6. 1122: Capital Allocation as a CFO’s North Star | Chris Miorin, CFO, Apexanalytix

    27 THG 8

    1122: Capital Allocation as a CFO’s North Star | Chris Miorin, CFO, Apexanalytix

    Chris Miorin’s path to the CFO office began in a crucible of leadership. At West Point, and later at Ranger School, he was forged in environments designed to test resolve. Commissioned shortly after 9/11, he knew combat was certain. Leading an infantry platoon in Iraq, he found himself working side-by-side with a colonel “30 years my senior.” The challenge, he tells us, was learning how to add value humbly yet confidently in an environment where everything was fluid. Those early lessons in partnership and adaptability became cornerstones of his leadership style. When Miorin left the Army, he reset with an MBA at Kellogg, which he calls “two years to really immerse in how businesses run.” Investment banking followed, where he advised some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. In capital-intensive, cyclical industries, he saw firsthand how major decisions on raising capital, acquisitions, and divestitures shaped enterprise value. “It helped me understand how finance could have that strategic impact,” he recalls. From there, corporate development and M&A roles deepened his conviction that the CFO’s crucial role is capital allocation—directing resources to projects that generate the highest return on invested capital. At Ingersoll Rand, he added investor relations to his toolkit, learning how to tell a “story with numbers” that connected business strategy to investor interest. Looking back, Miorin points to four experiences—Army, investment banking, corporate development, and investor relations—as the foundation for his CFO journey. That foundation ultimately led to his first CFO appointment at SpendHQ, an opportunity introduced through his Kellogg network.

    45 phút
  7. 1121: Agility Through Scenario-Driven Finance | Ademir Sarcevic, CFO, Standex International

    24 THG 8

    1121: Agility Through Scenario-Driven Finance | Ademir Sarcevic, CFO, Standex International

    During what he calls a “terrible soccer game” his son was playing, Ademir Sarcevic picked up a recruiter’s call that would change his career. The game was lopsided, but the timing was fortunate. Within months, Sarcevic was interviewing with Standex International’s leadership team. By 2019, he was CFO of the diversified manufacturer, helping guide a portfolio that spans precision electronics to specialty machinery. Sarcevic’s readiness for that moment was shaped years earlier in Sarajevo. He came to the United States during the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s, an experience that taught him to “be ready for anything.” His first job after graduate school was at General Instrument Corporation, where a finance rotational program exposed him to audit, FP&A, and accounting. Later, at a pre-IPO company, he helped take the firm public—only to see the dot-com crash unfold immediately after. It was a lesson in resilience and the unpredictability of markets, Sarcevic tells us. International assignments added new perspectives. In Paris, he served as controller for a billion-dollar Tyco business, and in Switzerland he became CFO for a Pentair global unit. Along the way, he experienced more mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures than he can count, reinforcing the value of flexibility and objectivity. At Standex, Sarcevic applies these lessons through a disciplined M&A approach. Every acquisition, he tells us, must meet three tests: “strategic fit, financial sense, and culture.” That rigor has paid off—recent acquisitions, he notes, “have been phenomenal…performing better than we even thought.”

    47 phút
  8. In the Room Where it Happens (Part 2)

    20 THG 8

    In the Room Where it Happens (Part 2)

    In Part Two of The Room Where It Happens, we continue our journey alongside CFOs who found themselves face-to-face with some of the most iconic business visionaries of our time. From Salesforce founder Marc Benioff to Intel’s Andy Grove, Cisco’s John Chambers, and Apple’s Steve Jobs, these finance leaders share the moments when vision collided with execution, when bold strategy met financial discipline. Their stories reveal not only what it meant to sit in those high-stakes rooms, but how those experiences reshaped their own leadership journeys. Once again, we’re reminded: history isn’t just made by visionaries—it’s co-written by CFOs.

    36 phút
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Giới Thiệu

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.

Thông Tin

  • Kênh
    CFO THOUGHT LEADER
  • Nhà sáng tạo
    The Future of Finance is Listening
  • Năm hoạt động
    2014 - 2025
  • Tập
    1,1 N
  • Xếp hạng
    Sạch
  • Bản quyền
    © Middle Market Media LLC, 2019
  • Trang web chương trình
    CFO THOUGHT LEADER

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