Gina Mastantuono became the CFO of ServiceNow, a B2B cloud platform, in January 2020—just before Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. To make things even more challenging, Mastantuono was new to the software industry and her boss, Bill McDermott, chair and CEO of ServiceNow, was also new to the company.
That sounds like it could be the opening of a disastrous case study, but it’s been the opposite. ServiceNow’s stock has tripled since 2020 and its market cap is in the same neighborhood as IBM, Uber, and Morgan Stanley. This week, Mastantuono joined Austin Hankwitz and Katie Perry, hosts of the Morning Brew show After Earnings, to talk about what ServiceNow does, how it has expanded, its early bet on AI, the company’s success—including its entry into the Fortune 500—and much more.
This summary has been lightly edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the whole episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Perry: We all feel like the last four or five years have felt like one or two years. What were the core changes on the executive team that you had to make to keep everyone aligned and moving quickly?
There was a lot going on…We didn’t have answers. As a leader, how do you motivate [and] inspire when you don’t have all the answers? A lot of folks just kind of retrench and don’t say anything, because they don’t know what to say. And Bill and I and the entire leadership team…[increased] the pace of our all-hands [and] our communications. And if we don’t know the answer, we’re just going to say “We don’t know…But this is how we’re going to think about it.”
Click here to continue reading.—GD
|