A CFO takes his authentic self to LinkedIn

The LinkedIn-ification of the CFO role is here, and it’s about more than just repeating recently reported revenues. (Alliteration check!)

According to recent data from the social platform, member engagement with CFO content grew 15% in 2025. People want to know what a CFO has to say. Leading with authenticity has helped healthcare software platform CFO Manu Diwakar decide what to post, he told CFO Brew.

“I sometimes don’t always really understand why people want to know what I think, but I think that they do, and so I’m more than happy to share and be transparent,” Diwakar, who leads finance at Virta Health, told CFO Brew.

Finance leaders like Diwakar are increasingly acting as a “translator in chief” for their companies on the platform, according to LinkedIn’s senior managing editor and head of news growth, Devin Banerjee.

The watering hole. If there were a space where nearly all of Virta’s stakeholders could gather at the same time, Diwarkar said that space would be LinkedIn. He sees it as an important presence “not only for people on our team, but also for our clients, and our partners, and even a lot of our patients or members have added us on LinkedIn.”

“C-suite and business leaders have seen this increased opportunity to own their communications and own their message, and once they realize that, they look for a credible, professional environment to put that message out,” Banerjee said.

Diwakar has “kind of grown up on social media,” and for a long time, he thought of LinkedIn as “just a way to keep my address book in a way that was better than my phone.”

But in “the last four or five years, I think [LinkedIn] has really become a social network for business communication, more than anything else,” he said.

Creative posts. CFOs of private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are “actually taking a really creative approach to communications on LinkedIn,” Banerjee noted. “If and when they are public company CFOs, I’m excited to see them bring that creativity and format and tone to their role as a public company CFO as well,” Banerjee said.

Diwakar said he tends to shy away from posting on LinkedIn about privately held Virta’s performance. “I think communicating about the state of the business, especially financials, on a platform like LinkedIn, violates all forms of confidentiality agreements and stuff like that that we have.”

Instead, the Virta Health CFO takes a personal tone in some of his posts; one from a few months ago starts off, “I try to live every day at work with sincerity. There is no work Manu and home Manu.”

“Nothing that I would describe as ‘chest beating’ or that kind of thing; it’s not where I’m at,” he said. “I want to be authentic in my profile as a person who works at Virta and a person who leads teams here at Virta, and I don’t want to be a shill; that’s important to me, because I think the platform only works if you’re authentically you.”

Employee connections. Diwakar said he follows a lot of CFOs, and “a lot of friends on the platform are CFOs.” He sees them posting “their thoughts on industry structure, thoughts on strategy, thoughts on, especially in healthcare, kind of big policy developments that could have impact on our business.”

For Diwakar himself, LinkedIn can establish vital connections with Virta’s remote-first workforce. “When people see me and interact with me, it’s often in Slacks or very scripted meetings. The number of people I have free flowing one-on-ones with is much smaller, and the opportunity for casual interaction is a lot lower.”

“For many folks at Virta, for them to understand who I am, what I care about, what I’m thinking about, what things I want to highlight, the only way they can have a relationship with me is through a platform like LinkedIn… It’s actually an important presence and a place to live.”