Gong was doing AI before it was cool

Boasting five Fortune 10 companies as customers, Gong is a leading player in the new space of revenue intelligence. An extension of customer relationship management software, revenue intelligence software gives companies more visibility into their customer and sales data and allows them to use AI and other analytics tools to glean insights from it.

Founded in 2015, Gong has grown to around 1,400 employees, CFO Tim Riitters told CFO Brew, and from under $15 million in ARR to “several hundred million.” The company has built far more functionality into Gong’s software, he said, and has expanded across EMEA.

Riitters, who joined Gong as CFO in 2019, is now helping it enjoy the tailwind from the LLM boom. His experience steering the company through periods of both growth and efficiency is instructive for CFOs managing through a volatile economy.

From Google to Gong: Riitters was perhaps born to be in finance. His father is a CPA, and his family owned a business. “I saw the nuts and bolts of the P&L and the balance sheet, and it just became a natural sort of career progression for me,” he said.

After working at Deloitte, Riitters joined Google’s finance team. He worked at the search giant from 2004 to 2014, and saw the explosive growth of search firsthand. During his tenure, Google grew from around 1,700 to about 60,000 employees. Riitters then took on the CFO role at data storage company Pure Storage, and saw it through its IPO in 2015.

Riitters accepted a role with Gong in part because he found its software so intuitive. “It was a product that I really understood,” he said. Had he had Gong at previous jobs, he said, “it would have given me much better insight, and frankly, allowed me to make different and probably better decisions.”

Pivoting from growth to efficiency and back again: But Gong’s story hasn’t all been about meteoric growth. Gong experienced a period when it needed to emphasize efficiency over expansion, chief revenue officer Shane Evans told CFO Brew. Riitters’ agility helped see the company through the rough patch, he said.

Gong “came onto the scene and got product-market fit very early, which is rare,” Evans said. That led to surging growth for much of its first seven years, he said. But “then the macroeconomic environment shifted” and more competitors emerged on the scene. “Gong was dealing with high customer churn,” Evans said, and the company wasn’t “as operationally sound as it needed to be on the go-to-market side.”

But Riitters, he said, was able to pivot. “Tim did an amazing job at going from high growth mode to efficiency mode” to make the company “financially fit and healthy,” he said. Riitters has the ability to balance fiscal discipline with calculated risk-taking. He “understands the need to stay efficient and to run a good business while at the same time identifying certain areas where we need to make bets for the company and take risks,” Evans said.

Gong has now “become a leader in a new expanded market,” Evans said, “by playing the long game, by innovating and by making sure that we are doing it in a fiscally responsible way.”

Gong had LLMs before it was cool: Gong has benefited from the generative AI boom, Riitters said. But it was doing AI long before everyone started buzzing about ChatGPT.

Gong is “AI at our core,” he said, and has used machine learning and other types of AI, like clustering algorithms, almost since its founding. It built its own LLMs.

Now, Gong can use LLMs developed by other generative AI companies, he said. “That allows us to put our innovation elsewhere,” he said. “It’s improved the economics for us because we don’t have to build it ourselves.” Customers are also getting more comfortable with AI, he said, which is good for Gong. “Prior to LLMs, people thought AI was science fiction,” Riitters said; now, “it’s really become mainstream.”

Future CFOs should get broad experience: Riitters’ advice for aspiring CFOs is to get as many types of experiences as they can across the finance function; he rattled off tax, accounting, financial planning, treasury, and investor relations as examples. “I had the absolute fortune to be exposed to a variety of those functions at Google,” he said. “Great CFOs pull all of that together.”

Now, he says, his goal is to ensure that Gong stays what he calls the “top innovator” in the revenue intelligence space.

“Six years later, I’m still having a lot of fun,” he said.