As global CFO for delivery at Uber Eats, Michiel Boere helped take the company from losing a billion dollars a year to being profitable. In 2023, he became CFO at another company with a global footprint: HR software startup Remote. Clients can use Remote to recruit, hire, and pay employees and contractors across borders.
Boere spoke with CFO Brew about how, in both those roles, he had to navigate a complex multinational compliance landscape.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You’re the first CFO at Remote. What changes did you make when you started?
As a CFO, I have a three-to-five-year roadmap in my head of all the things that we need to do within finance to get the company ready for the next phase, and that includes things like proper cash management, a good global tax structure, understanding the unit economics of the company, making sure that our collections process works really well…And then it’s about getting the right people in place and giving them the right amount of support to go on a journey from startup to scale up to eventually a public company.
It’s got to be challenging to keep up with the compliance requirements in all those different countries. How does Remote handle that?
Number one, we have actually developed AI ourselves to alert us and customers of changes in regulations globally. The second is that we have implemented what I would call a continuous audit process, where we continuously audit our operations in all countries around the world…essentially a full screening of all the requirements that are there in a country. For example, there are many countries where you need to do gender pay gap reporting, and there are many countries where you need to do ESG reporting, and there are, of course, VAT returns everywhere. There are statutory filings. Then there’s financial audits, there’s IT audits.
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What advice would you give someone who aspires to become a CFO?
Do as many different things as possible during the early stages of your career…If you want to become the copilot of the CEO, you need to have a reasonable understanding of how marketing works, of how operations works, how pricing works. It’s not just about tax and accounting, but about understanding all the facets of the business.
What were some of the decisions you made that helped Uber Eats become profitable?
A lot of pricing decisions, and then a lot of portfolio management. We also shut down [operations in] a few countries…You’re going to invest the money in places where it works, and you’re going to not invest the money in places where it doesn’t work. Probably one of the most important jobs of a CFO is to organize that capital allocation.
In some countries, for example, you can have drivers deliver food with a car. In some other countries, that’s not possible for various reasons. You can only have people on bicycles, and in some countries you had walkers…Geography and local regulations and local labor laws, of course, really impacted the dynamics of the business, and therefore the profitability potential or the unit economics of [a] country.