From Etsy to Envoy: Sinohe Terrero wears a ton of hats

Sinohe Terrero, COO and CFO at Envoy, told CFO Brew that his superpower as an executive is doing the hard things. He said he likes to know what’s going on with his teams; for example, he joins “all the mundane sales calls” that other CFOs might forgo for an email summary.

But from being a VP at Citi to leading finance at Etsy soon after, Terrero has amassed skills that help him juggle more than one C-suite role if need be.

At Etsy in the late 2000s, an experience he calls “magical,” Terrero wore “a ton of hats”—built a data team from scratch, built the accounting team, and worked on the early international expansion. In his six-and-a-half years with workplace platform Envoy, he’s consistently held the CFO role while also working nonconsecutively as interim CPO and CRO for several quarters.

We asked Terrero about his experience in the early years of Etsy and about his approach to jumping between ops and finance at Envoy.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How was the experience building and leading finance at Etsy?

I got to Etsy [in 2008] and there were only 77 of us in Brooklyn, very different than Citi. When I got to Etsy, these people had shorts and flip flops and tattoos, and I showed up with my shirt and tie—actually a suit—to the first interview, and Rob Kalin, who’s [one of] the founder[s], was like, “Why are you wearing a suit?” To me, the question was wild; I’m a finance person in an interview suit. So when I went for my second interview, I went with a jacket, but I didn’t take a tie, and he was like, “Why do you have a jacket?”

But what I realized right away is that in Citigroup, we were there for the name brand and the money, and when I got to Etsy, particularly at that time, it was kind of like magic. Rob had actually built the [office] kitchen because he was a carpenter, and he was just so proud of the fact that he built that kitchen—which was pretty janky, by the way. It wasn’t like this elaborate thing; it was just like, “I found this wood in the street, and I built this thing,” and I remember thinking, “Man, these people love their jobs. They love the mission, they love the job,” and it was more than just being at this cool tech startup.

What did the Etsy experience mean for your career on a professional level?

[Etsy] gave me an opportunity that I just couldn’t pay for. At the time, Etsy, on the board was Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, who was the first money in Twitter, and the biggest East Coast VC; Jim Breyer from Accel, who was the first money on Facebook, was on the board; Caterina Fake [co-founder of Flickr]; and Danny Riemer [managing director at BlackRock] later, and I got this opportunity to start reporting…to these people that were thought of as these gods, if you will, and I realized they’re just people. So it gave me a good entry to break that imposter syndrome.

At Envoy, how do you switch between and manage the COO and CFO roles?

I know the business so well that I can basically jump in and jump out, and I think that one of the things that I’ve honed and continue to try to improve is that I say that I could be Google Earth or I could be Street View. And the question is, at what point do I deploy which one? Because I think there are people that want to be too Street View…all the time, and that’s like their claim of fame. And I’m like, no, sometimes I need to be flying up here.

The other thing I would say is that my main job is enabling people to do their job. It’s not for me to go in and be the savior; my main job is making sure that I am unblocking things. As an East Coaster, I come into these conversations with a certain level of transparency, and I don’t mince words. I’m not passive aggressive, I’m not saying that I’m aggressive, I’m just candid. Someone once asked me, ‘Who don’t you work well with?’ and I said ‘I don’t work well with people that, in their attempt to avoid confrontation, create more confrontation.’

What did the nonprofit Code2040, which you were on the board of for a decade, do?

Code2040 is an organization, unfortunately no longer around as of this year, and the sole purpose was to bring engineering students of color an opportunity to get an engineering internship. We would recruit engineers of color, and then try to place them in these big tech companies: Intel, Microsoft, whatever. And it was really a thing to really try to bring diversity into the tech world.

I am fortunate and unfortunate to be the only minority executive now in the last, like, five companies I’ve been at, so I understand that I am privileged, that I stumbled upon an opportunity that I think other people would wish to have, and I always consider it my job to make sure that there is that opportunity.