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Chad Gold might have the most perfect name for a CFO—he will admit it himself. And he lives up to that name, having been the CFO for five companies in his more than 20 years of financial experience. Earlier this year, he became the CFO of Fullstory, a customer lifecycle software service. He joined as the company was experiencing significant growth, a challenge he’s familiar with from his time at other growth-oriented companies.
CFO Brew sat down with Gold as part of our My First Day series to understand how he thinks about his new role and how he makes decisions at an AI-driven, growth-first company amidst economic uncertainty.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been the CFO for a lot of different companies; what does your routine look like when you’re at a new company?
Number one is I’m a big proponent of listening first. No matter how much experience you have, you don’t know the company better than the people who have been there before. And I think if you’re not careful, and you don’t listen and learn and get the context around all the decisions that were made, you can be uneducated in providing advice.
And then with all of that listening, what I always tell executives is, in your first 90 days or even six months, you gotta pick three or four really big things that you want to attack, and go after them. And almost be maniacal at, not ignoring everything else, but not moving away from those three or four things before you get them done.
When you come into a new company, everybody says, “Oh, this could be fixed, and this is broken.” The list gets really long, really fast, no matter how good the company is. And if you don’t prioritize and pick a couple really big things to go after, you won’t find that you’re making any progress. You have to be maniacal at really prioritizing.
What are the personal skills that you would need to be a successful CFO at this company?
I think the most successful leaders in any function, not just finance, are collaborative. Most decisions at our size and scale are very cross-functional in nature. I think that being the person who’s helping to bring people together to the table is really important. I think being open-minded is really important. Every company has different challenges, different opportunities at the same time. And I think coming in with a playbook that you’re not willing to adjust is not the right way to think about it.
Fullstory recently announced a focus on AI. Will being the CFO of an AI-forward company be different from your roles at other companies?
Everybody’s using the term AI today. I think, why? If you take a step back and think about the world of AI, the companies that have the ability to gather and distill data in a meaningful way are the ones that are going to win. That is literally the core technology that Fullstory is built on.
What’s probably different for me at Fullstory versus other companies is our addressable market is massive. We have airlines as customers. We have retailers. We have quick-service restaurant chains. We have software companies. And so the blessing, but also, candidly, a challenge for us, is because the opportunity is so big, we have to keep being maniacal at focusing on the ones we really want. Because we could technically sell it to everybody.
How do you decide who you’re going to focus on?
You look at who is your ideal customer profile. For a company like us, I think there’s two things. One is, we’ve been really focused on moving upmarket. In software and technology, those enterprise customers tend to be better long-term fits than potentially smaller ones, which tend to not stay with you as long. I think that’s one. I think number two is, we look at data around where do we have the best retention rates, where do we have the best win rates, where do we have the best kind of footprint as a customer base? You tend to land on five or six really good ones where the use case of your technology is really applicable. One for us, obviously, is retail. Every retail company wants to understand how their customers are engaging in e-commerce, and how can they further optimize it, and Fullstory is a perfect use case for that.
You came into this role at a time of a lot of economic uncertainty. How does that inform how your department makes decisions?
Finance’s responsibility is to look around corners and marry the external environment with, are we seeing changes in our own business performance? So making sure that we’re not making one-way-door decisions. We’re being aggressive, but we’re also being conservative at the same time. You’re constantly watching the dials of the business, and if you see things change, you could take a step back and pause for a second and really analyze it.