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Alex Zank

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This CFO helps set growth strategy

Chikako Tyler counts sales-team management among her responsibilities.

Execs, board members diverge on path toward achieving company objectives

Directors must make an effort to understand C-suite concerns, survey suggests.

CFOville

Jesse Klein

When a company’s customers are CFOs, it puts that company’s own CFO in an especially interesting place. That's the position Josh Schauer, CFO of Insightsoftware, finds himself in. The company provides solutions for ERP reporting, accounting, and financial data analysis, the bread and butter of a CFO’s day-to-day work.

CFO Brew caught up with Schauer to see what happens when the buyer and the seller both have “CFO” on their business card.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

What’s it like being the CFO of a business whose clients are other CFOs?

It’s unique, in a very good way. Being a CFO or an executive at a company where you’re a voice of the market is a very unique opportunity. Internally…the marketing team will run things past me. How does this resonate with you? Pass this along to your team. Do you think this is catchy? Do you think this is practical from a product perspective and development perspective? Thinking through features and functionality on the roadmap…is this realistic? Do you think this is going to improve our win rate? It gives you an opportunity to get a lot more go-to-market experience and background than you would if we were at Company X selling widgets that didn’t apply to CFOs.

Does it change the way you talk to your investors about financials?

In some ways, when you’re reporting your financials, you’re reporting your financials. But in other ways, I think you get to have the perspective from a go-to-market lens that’s very different. It’s going to change the way that you’re messaging and the tone with which you’re messaging. When we present to our investors, I think it’d be very traditional to get through the financial update, and then the CFO takes a back seat.

That’s very different in our business, because we’ll get through the financial update, then we get into the strategy component. CFOs, their roles evolved, and they’re very much strategic thought partners…It’s just very different from how it used to be, that’s probably even enhanced more at Insightsoftware, given the fact that I’ve got the financial acumen and background of our specific business. I also have the voice of the customer with respect to what we’re trying to sell.

How do you see your role as a CFO in this time of uncertainty?

It is uncertain, and it’s going to continue to be uncertain in 2026…I do think in what I’ll call the modern era, the post-Covid era, it’s more of the same. Because you had Covid, you had interest rates, you had inflation, you had the Great Resignation, you had FX volatility. You’ve got all these things that CFOs have been managing for the last five or six years. And next year, it’s going to be more of that. And so ultimately, what it means from a CFO perspective is needing to continue to do the things that you’ve had to develop over the course of the last five or six years. Which is being very proactive, very thoughtful scenario analysis, trying to see around the corners, thinking through your cash and liquidity several years out, and not managing it day to day, week to week, or month to month. So it’s just more of needing to be very thoughtful with regards to what could take place. What you’re going to do in each of those different scenarios, and how you’re going to handle that and make sure it’s in the best interest of the business.

​​Understand your business. Every CFO likes to think they understand their business, but there’s a lot to understand. To really, really intimately understand your business, you want to understand your cost composition from the bottom up. What are your vendors? How many employees do you have?…From a top-down perspective, how many customers do we have? What’s our addressable market? What’s our right to win? What are our moats? What’s our win rate? How are we going to drive more pipeline? How are we going to win a higher percentage?

You really want to understand your business, because you need to understand what levers and dials you have. Because in order to be agile, you need to be able to think about, in certain scenarios, what am I going to toggle up? What am I going to toggle down? What are we going to pull back on? What are we going to lean into? How are we going to go faster? And you really can’t make those decisions in an agile manner without really, really intimately understanding your business.

If you weren’t a CFO, what would you be?

How the CFO of Insightsoftware, a platform for CFOs, thinks about his job

This CFO thinks you should understand every part of your business.

Courtney Vien

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.

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 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.

Gong was doing AI before it was cool

Now it’s riding the LLM boom, its CFO says.

While partying in the desert at the annual global cultural phenomenon called Burning Man, very few people are thinking about the financials of the festival. But that’s CFO of Burning Man Project Juho Parkkinen’s job.

” since his first visit to the Nevada desert location known as Black Rock City in 2015, but joined the nonprofit HQ as CFO a year and a half ago.

Burning Man has had a tough few years. This year’s iteration was almost biblical, with a 

 for the first time since 2011. The 2023 event became known as 

. And in 2020 and 2021, the event was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

So as CFO, Parkkinen has had to deal with a lot. CFO Brew spoke with Parkkinen about his role inside one of the world’s most interesting nonprofits.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How is being the CFO of Burning Man different from being CFO at another company?

I’m entirely from the tech space, entirely from for-profit, mostly software and other technology companies. And when I joined Burning Man Project, it was actually funny, because I was wondering if this would be a fit at all, because my experience is entirely in a different space than the nonprofit. But it turns out that the problems, the challenges, the opportunities, are very similar to many of the largest, most successful companies out there in the world. It all is about financial translation, being able to tell the story, being able to do impact analysis, being able to guide the financial decision-making in such a way that it fits the mission and fits the goals that any entity is trying to do.

We are in the mission of creating a more thriving culture, more connected culture, and it’s fascinating to be able to do financial guidance toward that. It’s not about, we need to increase profits, we need to have a better stock price. But this is about, how do we have more people engaged in a global cultural movement that gets people happy and generates awe?

 of Burning Man. How does that impact your role as the CFO?

There’s a common misconception that Burning Man is anti-money in some way or another. And that’s not true. I think it’s much more about spending money with a purpose and not having the experiences be Red Bull or Heineken presents Burning Man. That doesn’t sit well with what Burning Man is about. So that creates some challenges, because obviously, from a financial perspective on how we can fund and provide the experience, we can’t have a Heineken or Budweiser sponsor.

It’s a self-imposed shackle, for lack of a better word. But I think it creates a better opportunity to find more mission-aligned philanthropy, for example, trying to do more education and communication on, what does the ticket price actually cover? And it just brings us more innovative approaches in terms of, how we can make this more accessible and affordable to as many people as possible?

Burning Man has been in a bit of a tough financial position the last few years. As the CFO, how are you addressing this?

This really started over a year ago, when, you know, the high-priced tier, the “FOMO tickets,” did not sell as expected, and last year [2024] we had to do a lot of belt tightening. We had to restructure many things.

We really did some math around, what does it actually cost per person to come to Burning Man? And then built the ticket model based off of that. $749 was the cost per attendee…and the concept of pay your own way [for] $750. If you pay anything above it, you’re gifting back. And then if you pay the $650 or the $550, you’re really receiving a gift. That actually got some nice traction from the community, so we’re quite excited about that model as we start thinking about what 2026 looks like.

What is something that people wouldn’t expect about your job as the CFO of Burning Man?

Well, maybe they expect this or not, but people really care. Everybody has an opinion, which is helpful and exciting, but it was a little bit unexpected.

The CFO of Burning Man on bringing the nonprofit back from the brink.

An inside look at the money side of Burning Man.

Michelle Chang saw the start and end of the pandemic at two of the companies most associated with remote work. During 2020, she was the CFO of Microsoft Teams. In 2024, as masks became a rarer sight and return to office mandates ticked up, she became the CFO of Zoom.

Chang has also worked under some of the most prominent tech CFOs, Nvidia’s Colette Kress and Microsoft’s Amy Hood.

CFO Brew spoke with her about her CFO career.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As we’re seeing more return to office mandates, how are you thinking about that trend for Zoom?

We’re a company that is deeply rooted in, believes in hybrid. I think you see some companies swinging the pendulum, especially in the Seattle area—it’s a hot topic right now with Amazon and Microsoft. But from a Zoom perspective and a personal belief perspective, I think there’s a healthy balance in that. Sometimes you are at your most effective when you’re at home, in the groove, getting that deep work done. And then there are times where the interactions with your coworkers and the face-to-face meetings and the feeling part of something is also deeply important. And so Zoom and I [are] deeply aligned with, “let’s find the balance between the two dialogues.”

What was one of the most surprising things about the transition to Zoom from Microsoft Teams?

There’s a lot of differences in moving from a large, very mature behemoth of a company like Microsoft, down to Zoom, which is also a large company. So there’s all those transitions, but honestly, I’ve loved the ability to really enact change, to enact strategy pushes. It’s been a delight. This is a good fit. This is stuff where I feel like I can really help an iconic company.

How has the CFO role changed for you over your career?

When I was early stages in my career, there was sort of the ‘CFO is the Department of No,’ or the CFO is like ‘the looking-back person,’ or the CFO that just saw things as numbers.The two CFOs that I’ve worked for that probably had the biggest shape on my life were Colette Kress, who’s the CFO of Nvidia, and Amy [Hood], the CFO of Microsoft. You couldn’t get two more powerhouse examples of the CFO of the future…Of course, the job was to push on strategy. Of course, the job was to push on accountability frameworks and broad systems and the operations and guts of the company. Of course you were to ask the challenging questions. Of course, you had a seat at the table. And so I feel blessed to have never really grown up with a mentality that the job is anything other than that. But certainly reflecting on that, I think earlier in my career, it was about getting a seat at the table, being the trusted advisor.

There are so few jobs that really see left to right across a company…Lean in to the idea that really the CFO is about making the business healthier in every dimension. Really, see far less limits on the job than the opportunity.

From Microsoft Teams to Zoom

Michelle Chang has been CFO of two major remote work platforms.

Coworking is a recurring segment where we talk with CFOs and other leaders in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

Once upon a time, CFOs were just expected to keep the books tidy. Now their job is to help the business bloom. For Dominique Highfield, CFO of Bloom & Wild, that’s both literal and metaphorical.

The CFO of the UK-based flower delivery service has to act like a gardener to the business: cultivating strategies, tending to growth, and pruning flawed plans. We talked with Highfield about how even on rocky ground (last plant reference, we promise), the company is still getting flowers to doorsteps.

How is being CFO at Bloom & Wild different from other roles you’ve had?

This is my first founder-led role. The founder is also our CEO…he very much cares about the longevity of the company, and also the customer-centricity is really key. It’s why he started the business. And it remains true to this day. And I would also say, being [at an] earlier stage than I would normally be in the high growth is really important.

Is there anything unique about this business model that changes your role as a CFO?

The business model is really unique in the fact that we’re a gifting business. So we have this underlying virality where a sender sends a product, they become a recipient, and then there’s a flywheel of virality, as that recipient then becomes the new purchaser in the future. That’s a really lovely, very attractive business model, because it’s a low-acquisition [cost] as a result. But it also means that customer experience is really important, and as a customer-centric CFO, that really suits me.

What does it mean to you to be a customer-centric CFO?

It means that you don’t always make decisions based on the numbers. You make decisions based on the right thing to do for the customer coming back, and the customer to rave about our brand for doing the right thing.

We are entering a time of possible recession and a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace. How are you preparing your team and your business for that macroeconomic trend?

We are constantly doing different scenario plans and downsides and more positive looks. But I have to say, we’re not seeing the negative sentiment. We hear negative sentiment and it’s definitely true in the UK market, and the UK government would have us believe things are dire. But actually we’re in double digit, over 20%, growth this half. And we’ve seen really positive pieces. The consumers have been saving because they’ve been nervous, and they’re starting to spend more now, and we’re seeing that come through in our numbers.

How many people found us because we landed on their doorstep.

What do you think CFOs in high growth phases need to keep in mind?

What’s really important as a CFO is that you have a team underneath you that you can trust. [They] can do the day-to-day pieces, like the forecasting at the month-end with relatively minor input from you, so that you can then spend the time doing the value creation…I would urge every CFO to make sure they have a great bench beneath them so the CFO can spend time on value creation, growing, and playing in those new spaces.

I love a dahlia, but I also love a hydrangea. Actually, I changed my mind. A ranunculus is my favorite flower.

What does it mean to be a customer-centric CFO?

It’s about making decisions that aren’t always based on the numbers, Bloom & Wild CFO Dominique Highfield says.

The CFO job can be a stressful one. Being responsible for risk, and the financial health of the company, and navigating it during an uncertain or volatile time can be a burden.

John DeSimone has been at Herbalife for many years and has held the CFO role twice during his tenure. He shared with CFO Brew how he learned to disconnect, and how being a veteran at the company affects his role within it.

You’ve been at Herbalife since 2007. How has being at the company for so long impacted your role as CFO?

It gives me more credibility within the organization, and therefore more implied authority than maybe a new CFO would have because of my experience. I think it’s pretty recognized in the organization that I understand the company, that I’ve seen a lot, and that experience builds credibility within the organization, and so it just makes my job a little easier.

I had to disconnect emotionally from the result of the work we were doing. The CFO of a public company can be a high-anxiety type of job that I had to learn not to take that home. And so I wish I had learned it much younger.

Do you have any advice for CFOs on how to disconnect?

I was emotionally tied to it. I was doing the best I can. I had a great team. But then, if things didn’t work out exactly right, I took that as a failure, and it was personal. I had to personally disconnect, emotionally disconnect, from that outcome, knowing you do the best job that you can, you build the best team you can, you communicate the best you can, but there are things outside of your control.

You stepped away from the CFO role and then boomeranged back to it. How did that influence your approach now?

I don’t think it’s a different approach. When I left the CFO role originally, I became co-president, and then president. That allowed me to even further understand the business. And so I think that makes me a better CFO.

Is there anything unique about being the CFO of Herbalife that we wouldn’t expect?

For me, the learning was, what is Herbalife? We are a nutrition company—at least, I thought we were a nutrition company. What I realized is, we’re a people company that sells nutrition products. So we’re in the business of people, and that’s a skill set that I had to learn that’s not traditionally something that comes along with the financial world.

The CFO role has evolved to more of a strategy position. How do you think that evolution will continue?

I definitely think it’s evolved from number-crunching to being more forward looking, to being more strategic. I think the next evolution is the integration of technology, which is going to be incredibly important for the CFO…The world’s becoming much more digital. In five years from now, you can only imagine what AI can do, and the CFO is going to have to integrate technology into their organization to be successful, to be cutting edge, to be leading their company to success over the long term. So that’s the big change.

I’d be a physicist if I could do my life over again…I have a love for physics and understanding how the universe works, and I’m just so intrigued by it.

A portrait of Herbalife CFO, John DeSimone

An inside look at the life of the Herbalife CFO

John DeSimone explains how he manages anxiety in a high-pressure role. 

Disconnecting has been key for Herbalife CFO

While Erica Gessert, the CFO of Upwork, has been on the finance teams of some big household name brands including PayPal and Sprint, this is her first time in the CFO chair.

Gessert describes herself as an operational CFO, who oversees everything “end to end, from product and production to delivery, adoption, and financial outcomes.”

CFO Brew asked her about prioritizing revenue streams, preparing for a possible recession, and how AI is impacting her industry.

How is being the CFO of Upwork different or similar to your role at PayPal?

One of the things that attracted me to Upwork from PayPal is that they are two-sided networks. Upwork’s a marketplace. PayPal is what we call a network, but it has two sides: merchant and consumer. [At Upwork], it’s client and knowledge worker or talent. That’s where the similarities end.

Learning the human capital industry, the management of all these diverse types of work and the talent that goes with it, and really understanding clients’ needs that they’re assessing hiring is a totally different industry than payments. I thought payments was complex. But the complexity of enabling work and the hiring process…is even more complex in many ways.

How do you decide which revenue streams to prioritize?

Every single company I’ve ever been at, the most impassioned conversations are around prioritization…We knew that we needed to increase our profitability, not just to gain investor confidence and to show profitability, but also so that we could enrich our balance sheet and allow ourselves the capacity to be able to invest and actually acquire companies where we saw gaps in our roadmap.

AI was a huge overhang for our valuation, quite frankly…There was this belief that all work was going to go away. AI was going to take it, and especially work that’s done by people like freelancers, because they are impermanent…Actually, the opposite is true. So one of the things that we really thought hard about was, how do we use AI to accelerate our business to really, truly become a growth lever, which it is for us now? And we’ve done that in two ways. One is an injection of AI-enhanced experiences into the platform. If you think about the hiring process and just how friction filled it is…now, all of that is done by AI, basically 100% end to end. Uma, which is Upwork’s Mindful AI, our AI companion, writes the job posts. It can also write the proposals from the freelancers. It can review proposals for the client. It can help to curate the proposals that are written. It can actually conduct interviews and also, coming soon, we’re starting to inject more agentic qualities…But the second way is really the growth of the AI category itself, so the AI job category on our platform, that’s really taking off for us.

We are in an era of uncertainty and possible recession. How does that impact your role as CFO?

What I’ve been doing, along with my [CEO] and the rest of the management team, is really working on strategies that make us macro-agnostic. We work in an industry that is heavily influenced by macroeconomic impacts, the staffing industry…We’ve been gaining share. The ways we’re doing that are…identifying new revenue streams for ourselves that can grow regardless of macro conditions. Some of those are like subscription products for freelancers. The other thing that we’re doing is really deploying our analytics heft to create variable pricing on our platform according to the dynamics of supply and demand on the platform...It’s enabling us to have these growth revenue streams, both in volume and revenue, during this time.

A portrait of Upwork's CFO Erica Gessert.