Operationally minded CFO

Aziz Megji, chief financial officer at work management platform Asana for nearly two years now, had a path to the CFO office that could best be described as serpentine.

He began his career as an investment banking analyst at Bear Stearns right before the global financial crisis, made a brief stop in private equity, and then in 2014, switched to corporate development roles at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and then Nvidia. Then he decided he wanted on the CFO track.

Eventually he “linked up with a former colleague,” Sonalee Parekh, CFO at RingCentral, to lead strategic finance, treasury, and IR. When Parekh moved over to Asana, Megji joined her and stepped into the CFO role after Parekh left for a new opportunity.

While Megji had the capital markets experience many companies now look for, before jumping into corporate finance he reached out to his network to find out what experience he lacked. He spoke with CFO Brew about what he thinks is the most important part of being a finance chief.

You’ve had some very different positions on Wall Street and in corporate America. You started out in investment banking.

There were two parts of my career, which is kind of more M&A and strategy heavy, where it took me from banking to HPE, where I helped drive their transformation, and then Nvidia, which I came on board pre-pandemic…I was brought on to help lead the Arm acquisition. As we were completing it, [Nvidia] was taking off like wildfire and really bursting on the scene around data centers and AI, and the government started taking notice. [Regulatory challenges caused Nvidia to call off the Arm deal in February 2022.]

How did you transition to corporate finance?

When I was in corporate development and I had this [CFO] aspiration and goal, I had a lot of conversations with mentors and people in my network of what skill sets I needed to augment, because I had a very strategy/corporate development/capital markets-rich experience. I think the greatest skill set is to be operational. Tarek Robbiati, who’s now the CFO of Everpure, was very clear: If you’re going to take that leap, you’ve got to be really an operational finance leader at heart, because you have the strategic piece, and that will always be with you. And that drove me to leave one of the world’s greatest companies to get deeper into operational finance, from Nvidia to RingCentral, and people were like, “Ooh, that’s kind of crazy.” But to get where I want to be, I have to get the right position in operational finance and marry the strategy with operations to get that experience. And in hindsight, I’m super comfortable with that decision.

Do you think it’s crucial for CFOs to have capital markets experience?

I think capital markets experience is important. But understanding the operations and being able to tie the operations to how you tell a story and craft a narrative, I think is more important. I think that operational finance [combined] with positioning with strategy is the most effective kind of one-two-three combination for a CFO.

So, what do you tell other CFOs? That there’s more value in operational experience?

I do. I do…If you’re a neo-cloud CFO, capital markets and how you raise capital and think about cost of capital and different sources is probably your number one focus. But I think a lot of these companies, especially when you’re thinking about different sources of spend and different sources of input to revenue, like LLM and compute, it actually makes you have to be a lot deeper. My understanding of our usage and our consumption, our underlying costs, and how we orchestrate and route that to create better gross margin and better unit economics is so important. My understanding of resource allocation and where we can place our resources from a geo is so important. My understanding of sales productivity and cost of book, and how we can reallocate resources to drive that paid media efficiency—that’s going to be what unlocks our growth, not how we raise capital, and ultimately how we tell our story. Because ultimately, if you give me a lot more growth...the story sells itself.