Ajay Vashee on the Art of Finance Transformation

Ajay Vashee Introduction

[00:00:17] Joe Garafalo: Hello and welcome to the first episode of The Role Forward. I’m Joe Garafalo, and this episode is brought to you by Mosaic, the first strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done. Today, our guest is Ajay Vashee, general partner at IVP and former CFO of Dropbox.

[00:00:33] Ajay, thanks for joining me. 

[00:00:35] Ajay Vashee: Thank you for having me. 

[00:00:37] Joe Garafalo: Excited, excited to kick off our first official podcast, and thanks for being our first guest here. Before we get into our main topic, can you give us a quick overview of your current background at Dropbox and IVP? 

[00:00:49] Ajay Vashee: Sure, sure. Super excited to be here and happy to walk through

[00:00:54] my background at Dropbox and IVP, and I’ll, I’ll start with Dropbox. I joined [00:01:00] Dropbox back in 2012 when the company had about a hundred employees and I was initially hired into the finance organization as a first-time operator and asked to help build and scale it from the ground up, and that included functions like accounting and FP&A, tax treasury, real estate workplace services,

[00:01:23] really everything that fell under the finance umbrella, and, so, it was a great way to learn about what a finance organization was and should be, and kind of cut my teeth helping to build and scale each function, and sub-function under the finance umbrella, and I was, then, after a couple of years, asked to lead our corporate development team and oversaw M&A and strategic investments for Dropbox,

[00:01:47] and we made over 30 acquisitions during my time at the company, so we were relatively inquisitive and these were acquisitions that spanned everything from tech, to talent, to product [00:02:00] and business acquisitions as well, and those experiences, managing the finance organization and overseeing corporate development and M&A ultimately prepared me to step into the CFO role, which I did about four years into my time

[00:02:16] at Dropbox, and as CFO, my initial focus was on team building, really on hiring folks with much more experience than I had as a first-time CFO and convincing them to work with me and partner with me. And, my focus relatively early on was also on IPO readiness, making sure that we had the right team in place across all levels, the right systems, the right operating discipline that we were getting into a quarterly rhythm as it related to our accounting closed and FP&A outlook, and shortly thereafter

[00:02:47] we had to manage the IPO process itself and transitioned to the public markets and get into our rhythm as a public company, and after getting through the IPO and, and getting into a rhythm as a public [00:03:00] company, my focus quickly shifted back to the business and to how I could help to both grow and transform it,

[00:03:07] and that included working closely with our product organization to source and execute our first acquisition as a public company to launching initiatives out of the finance organization, things like project diamond, which was an effort to remap resourcing and accelerate margin expansion and free cashflow generation and a number of other automation and transformation initiatives that we launched out of our team as well.

[00:03:29] But overall, very grateful for my experience at Dropbox. During my time at the company, we grew from 100 to nearly 3000 employees from a single-product company to a multi-product company, and from one that was generating about 45 million in revenue to 2 billion in ARR, and as a former CFO from an unprofitable business to a profitable one, generating over $500 million of free cash flow a year.

[00:03:56] So, really an incredible journey that I’m very grateful to have been on [00:04:00] with everyone at Dropbox, and, last fall, I passed the reins to my successor and joined IVP, one of our series B investors. IVP invested in Dropbox around the same time that I joined the company, so I was able to get to know them well over the better part of a decade, really,

[00:04:18] and I was super excited to make the transition into growth-stage investing, to support a portfolio of companies as they scale from series B through an IPO and beyond which is what we did at Dropbox then, which is really IVP’s core focus as a fund and it’s been a blast so far. I’ve got to help the firm lead its investments in companies like Figma, Superhuman, TaxBit.

[00:04:44] For those that may be a little bit less familiar, Figma is an incredible design software company, Superhuman is a company really re-imagining email and workplace communication from the ground up and TaxBit is pioneering tax compliance and optimization [00:05:00] for the crypto and digital asset economy. So, I would say my, my core focus so far at IVP has largely been on collaboration and productivity, SaaS investing as well as companies across the finance tech stack.

Continuous Improvement and Strategic Disruption at Dropbox

[00:05:15] Joe Garafalo: Awesome. We’re super excited to have you joining us today, Ajay. You’re a wealth of knowledge and can share a lot of insights to our audience, which is VP Finance and aspiring CFOs of high-growth technology companies and we’re huge, huge fans of both Figma and Superhuman. Mosaic is a power users of both so great investments on that side.

[00:05:36] When you were preparing your introduction here, you mentioned a couple of key topics, mainly around transformation. That’s really the topic that we’re trying to focus on today, is, CFOs are constantly hearing about and reading about financial transformation. Almost every week it feels like McKinsey or, or Harvard Review is publishing articles about finance transformation,

[00:05:58] but you’ve actually kind of lived and [00:06:00] breathed some of that pain and process, so you, you mentioned that, at Dropbox, you scaled the organization from 45 million to 2 billion in revenue, 50 million users to more than 600 million users. During that time, I’m sure things transformed a lot. One of our earlier conversations you and I had, you set a goal of, of saving 20,000 hours per year as a finance organization through semi-transformation efforts,

[00:06:23] can you kind of talk about your philosophy around continuous improvement and strategic disruption as it relates to finance transformation? 

[00:06:31] Ajay Vashee: Sure, sure. So, stepping back for a moment, and I’m talking to culture and philosophy, I think, is important as it relates to our transformation efforts, as an organization, we set our own finance mission statement and our mission statement was to drive continuous improvement and strategic disruption,

[00:06:49] and we wanted our mission statement to be something that everyone in the organization could really relate to, whether you were an individual contributor on the accounting team, you are a manager, an [00:07:00] FP&A, you were a leader in corporate development helping us source and execute acquisitions, we wanted that mission statement to resonate really on all dimensions,

[00:07:08] and for some folks, there are many elements of their job that are similar day to day, but there are a lot of opportunities to improve how they’re managing that day-to-day workflow, and, so, there’s a lot of opportunity for continuous improvement, and managing the close process in a certain way. Actually there’s some really interesting evolutionary or incremental opportunities to improve how I’m doing that,

[00:07:28] and then, for other folks, there are kind of more opportunities for strategic disruption day-to-day, “Hey, I’m partnering with a product organization to help them scope a new feature or a new product that they’d like to launch, how disruptive or impactful can that product or feature be, let me help them with the business impact modeling.”

[00:07:45] So, depending on where, who you were and where you sat in the organization, there was a little bit more identification with either the continuous improvement or a strategic el, disruption element of that kind of philosophy in that mission statement. That being said, we wanted everyone in the [00:08:00] finance organization at Dropbox to be able to lean into both dimensions,

[00:08:03] and, so, even if you were sitting managing accruals in the accounting team, and, you know, I’m working through the monthly close with the infrastructure organization, we wanted you to be on the lookout for, “Hey, it looks like we’re spending a lot of money with the same vendor and we haven’t really worked with procurement to optimize that spend.

[00:08:23] Why don’t I make the connection between our infrastructure leader who’s managing our, our server footprint and Dropbox and our procurement team and see if there’s opportunity for us, kind of renegotiate some of those contracts or go out to market with some of those contracts?” That’s, like, a small example of the ways that, that, that mission statement started to permeate how we operated as an organization,

[00:08:42] and we saw folks whose primary role day-to-day was one that was a little bit more centered on continuous improvement, lean into strategic disruption, we saw folks whose primary role was focused on identifying the next big thing, come back and think about continuous improvement on, “Hey, how am I managing my day-to-day?

[00:08:57] How am I managing my one-on-ones with my direct reports?” [00:09:00] So, it was really a philosophy of, like, everything that you’re doing on a daily basis, how can you get better and better at doing that? But, then, how can you also always be on the lookout for ways to transform how we, how we operate as an organization and transform how we operate as a company as well?

[00:09:15] And, to answer, kind of, the second component of your question or something that you alluded to, the 20,000 working hours, that was a goal that we set in the spirit of the mission statement, the organization’s mission statement, and to be aligned with that mission statement, and we wanted that to be a goal that people achieved both through continuous improvement efforts, as well as more disruptive efforts.

[00:09:37] So, again, again, as you, as you get better at managing the monthly close, there are ways you can knock off an hour here and there on the monthly close process and save an hour here or there, as you implement maybe a, like, a new piece of software that can automate a lot of what we do, there’s an opportunity to, you know, to be more disruptive and to save tens or hundreds or thousands of hours, on kind of the, the close and outlook process,

[00:09:58] and so, again, we wanted [00:10:00] that, that mission statement to be identifiable to everyone in the organization, but also feed into the organization schools around transformation and automation over time. 

[00:10:10] Joe Garafalo: I love that. So, it feels like, to me, a lot of companies try to take on this gargantuan task of going through a finance transformation, but it sounds like, to me, you’ve kind of, imbedded in this,

[00:10:20] this, this culture of continuous improvement and strategic direct disruption into the DNA out of your team, and if you do kind of implement that DNA at the start, you’re always going through finance transformation. It’s not this big effort where you flip a switch one day and say, “Hey, today Dropbox is going to start their finance transformation.”

[00:10:38] It sounds like it was embedded day one. How did you really make that part of the team’s DNA? 

[00:10:45] Ajay Vashee: Well, it’s totally true, and we tried to make that part of the team’s DNA from a very early on. I would say, like, in my first few years, first year or so as CFO, our focus was really on getting ready to go public and in managing the IPO process,

[00:10:59] and then once we [00:11:00] got through that and into a little bit more of a rhythm, as I mentioned earlier, as a public company, that’s when we spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of impact and transformation that we wanted to drive on an ongoing basis as an organization. That led to the development of the mission statement that I mentioned around continuous improvement and strategic disruption,

[00:11:18] and it also led to us being thoughtful about and setting some audacious and bold organizational goals as it related to transformation. So, part of it was philosophical, part of it was cultural, making sure that people were thinking about this all the time, and then part of it was related to goal setting,

[00:11:34] and, so, we started by setting a goal of 5,000 working hours for the organization. The next chart we ducked, we upped that to 10,000 working hours saved through automation and transformation efforts, and then, next year that was bumped up to 20,000 working hours saved. And so the team was always on the lookout, across the organization for ways that they could change how they operate for ways that they could free up their own time to focus on what was most.

[00:11:57] important Supporting the business, supporting their business [00:12:00] partners, identifying new areas for transformation and disruption. And we were really on the cutting edge, you know, like always on the cutting edge of what was out there. And then as you think about like the incentives that we put around that to make that exciting and compelling for everyone, part of the review process every year for the finance organization for each individual would include a component on that.

[00:12:22] The automation and transformation and disruptive efforts that they. And the prior year. And so folks starting to think about, Hey, my annual performance review is coming up. Like, what have I done to contribute to this organizational goal? What have I done to pitch in on our transformation efforts? And it really started to take off then across the organization.

[00:12:40] And then the second thing we did from an incentive standpoint is we set up awards and we have quarterly finance team awards. And most of their awards historically had centered on our company values. And so were you a team player, et cetera, et cetera. We introduced awards that were centered on continuous improvement and strategic disruption as well.

[00:12:59] So we had a continuous [00:13:00] improvement award, a strategic disruption award. And so these folks are recognized in front of their peers. there were some really cool benefits that they got, they won the award. Things like, get your tickets or trips or vacations. And so it just became like really part of the operating rhythm of the finance organization, where, whether it’s your quarterly award, your annual review, the way that we were measuring, you know, the team in progress over time, it was all kind of centered on this philosophy of, of improvement and disruption and transformation.

Modernizing the Finance Toolset

[00:13:33] Joe Garafalo: That’s, that’s awesome to hear. you mentioned something which was being on the bleeding edge of innovation for finance team members and users across the company. when I hear finance, I, I, I generally don’t think of us in finance, on the bleeding edge of technology. given our, our toolset really hasn’t hasn’t changed much.

[00:13:49] What are some of the best process or solutions or technologies that were part of that philosophy? 

[00:13:54] Ajay Vashee: Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say we looked at a lot during my time at Dropbox. [00:14:00] I’ll give you, I’ll give you one example of a tool that really helped us across the finance organization. A lot of the focus early on was on, how do we automate more manual processes?

[00:14:10] And as an example, we, we saved, I would say roughly 5,000, maybe a little bit more, five, 6,000 hours of our 20,000 working our goal in my final year of CFO. Through our implementation of a tool called Alteryx, and Alteryx, helped us in a few different ways. Initial use cases included, replacing things like large Excel, workbooks, large volume stuff.

[00:14:35] As we, as we analyze revenue and bookings and billings, a lot of that historically had been pretty manual and there’ve been a lot of work by a team of folks on the, in the accounting organization and an FP&A really sorting through some pretty cumbersome Excel workbooks. And a lot of that was automated through our implementation of Ultrix as well as things like data manipulation prior to visualization in data visualization tools like Tableau.

[00:14:57] And so, sorting through and [00:15:00] filtering data and aggregating it and getting it ready for visualization was a use case that offers was, very helpful for us with, and then our AP and T and team. you ended up using the product to auto-generate things like email reminders for invoices and expenses.

[00:15:14] So if we hadn’t collected from a customer and we hadn’t heard back from them, you get a reminder that was auto-generated through our implementation of Ultrix. And so that’s, that’s one example of, of a tool where we tried to kind of fit, the Ultrix product functionality across the organization to really benefit Dropbox in many different ways.

[00:15:31] And then we had a few examples of, of that overtime. and so that’s like what we did, I would say this is probably a topic that we can get into a little bit now or later, in our chat today, almost more interesting are all the opportunities going forward, because to the point that you made earlier, historically, there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation and disruption in finance, and we spend a lot of time scouring the landscape, and we found a few tools that worked really well for us, but we also saw a lot of opportunity for innovation going forward for companies like [00:16:00] mosaic and others.

[00:16:00] how you can fill the gaps that have existed for a very, very long time in the finance vertical in a way that they really haven’t in other verticals 

[00:16:10] Joe Garafalo: we’ve, we’ve definitely been behind the curve and finance, but it does feel like the, the, the space is ripe for disruption. I think one of the challenges, about disrupting finance historically, is, is teams and execs.

[00:16:22] Think of finance as a G and A function or cost center for the business. How do you, how do you get over the mental hurdle or convince the execs that they should be making the investments in tools like some of the ones that you mentioned, or, some of the more innovative companies that are, you know, producing software today, that are going to close some of those gaps?

[00:16:43] Ajay Vashee: Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say part of the benefit of being a CFO and running the finance organization is that you also get to run the annual planning process and help teams set budgets. You got to set your own budget. And we would, we’ve very early on set a portion of our budget [00:17:00] aside for investment in next generation and for leading tools that could help us with our automation and transformation efforts.

[00:17:06] I would say like as the CFO organization and the finance organization, we also had the highest bar and accountability across Dropbox for ROI and how we measure the return on our spend, whether it was an incremental hire, whether it was a piece of software. We were very disciplined about how we measure the return on like new tools.

[00:17:27] And we tested a lot of them and we built some pretty detailed business plans around them before we really signed up for a full scale implementation and ongoing subscription costs. and we measured a lot of that, through the output of, of working hours saved. And so if we felt like we could. You know, a 5,000, 10,000 working hours saved goal through the implementation of a new tool that typically translated into hundreds of thousands of dollars saved over time.

[00:17:53] And, and really the ROI was there in a pretty compelling way. 

Measuring the ROI of Finance Investments

[00:17:57] Joe Garafalo: For sure. What are some of the ways that you, you measured the [00:18:00] ROI of these tools in terms of working hours? Was it a Saturday happy hours? And if the team showed up during the close, you knew it was working or was, was it a measure of closing the books faster?

[00:18:11] We’re talking about some of the things that you measured there. 

[00:18:13] Ajay Vashee: Yeah, I would say it was a, it was a few things. Certainly it was, closing the books faster was a big component of it. Like, did we, were we able to close, work through a certain component or portion of the accounting close process on a faster timeline? And so we get the revenue faster or we get through accruals faster or

[00:18:30] you know, get to our work with our audit partners as a public company faster. The same pertained to the outlook process. Once we got better data from accounting and we really understood our actuals better, we could work through the budget versus actual process on a more accelerated timeline. We could get to, you know, outlook generation on a more accelerated timeline. That gave us more time

[00:18:49] leading into our earnings calls to really work through scenario analysis on the outlook to understand what was working, what wasn’t working to go back to different parts of the organization at Dropbox and partner with them on, Hey, here are the [00:19:00] components of, you know, line that are outperforming. but here are the components that aren’t, and we need to get rep productivity up in these areas or this new experiment that we ran for the self-serve funnel isn’t performing to, you know, to the degree that we were hoping and thought it would.

[00:19:13] And so it allowed, it really opened up more opportunity for business partners. And like a focus on what was most important, which is fixing what wasn’t working and pouring more fuel on the fire, where it was. And less time went into trying to be backwards looking and, and understand what happened. so, so it was like, it was everything you mentioned.

[00:19:32] It was a close timeline. It was how fast we were able to get to get through the, you know, the new outlook and outlook refresh. It was the time that we were able to spend in business partnership, but like the unit that helped us measure all of that was tended to be working hours saved. It was the simplest way

[00:19:47] To kind of have a unit of return. 

[00:19:51] Joe Garafalo: Absolutely. And I think one thing that’s tough to actually quantify when you’re thinking through ROI is the business collaboration and when a finance team could actually [00:20:00] spend more time with their business partners. Cause they’re not closing the books. That’s where I think a lot of the real magic happens, but that’s also a place that’s harder to measure quantitatively.

[00:20:11] Ajay Vashee: Totally totally. And that we like our point of view as an organization was, th the most impact we could have was really through the right level of business partnership. And the best kind of transformation was, was, was really the business transformation and that, that informed them our mission statement that informed our philosophy, that informed the, our save goals that we set.

[00:20:33] It was all in the spirit of how can we have more of an impact on our trajectory as a company? 

What to Look for in Technology for Finance Transformation

[00:20:39] Joe Garafalo: I love it. Well, it sounds like it was a wild success for you and the team over at Dropbox. So congrats. Now, switching gears, and then talking about the investment side, what, what gets you most excited, in the finance space are, or tools that can help the next Dropbox go through, a finance transformation?

[00:20:57] Ajay Vashee: Sure, sure. Yeah. I think there’s like, [00:21:00] so perhaps we should start with a review of like, or discussion of some of the key things. That we, that I see. And we saw Dropbox and, you know, I’m sure you see at mosaic. And I think those key themes and formed some pretty interesting investment opportunities. And so if you think about the finance software stack today, it’s one, that’s served by a large number of point solutions, but results in this inefficient process and time allocation across the CFO organization in general.

[00:21:33] And so you have disproportionate parts of the organization. Kind of wasting this human capital wrestling with data versus them producing valuable strategic insights. And so some of the pain points that I’ve observed, and I would love to hear some of your thoughts as well. One data tends to be siloed across many systems and services and tools.

[00:21:52] And so data standardization becomes this monster involving manual work, which is prone to error because. Pulling [00:22:00] billing data from Stripe. And then you’re looking at, you know, subscription data from a different system. And then you’re looking at engagement data and trial data from, you know, your product organization.

[00:22:10] You’re trying to piece it all together to understand what, what the heck’s happening with revenue or top line. and so let’s pay, you know, like payment systems in terms are often not connected with financial forecast and it’s hard to land bookings and cash and payment, you know, reminders. Are often very manual.

[00:22:23] We need to miss collections. And so you just have these issues popping up across the finance tech stack. So you have this data silo issue, then this need to reconcile. It really inhibits strategic thinking. And so despite its resources and expertise, the finance organization’s efforts often get overwhelmed looking backward.

[00:22:42] And so. GAAP-related entries tend to be entered at the end of every month or quarter. And when material, those numbers will not allow for accurate or timely historical or, or, you know, forecast to be generated, leading indicators within, you know, an ERP system and other finance systems aren’t really [00:23:00] leveraged or fully utilized due to the difficulty of kind of extracting and cleaning that data.

[00:23:03] and then there’s a lot of time spent on error, checking and reporting. So air checking. Can take hours and hours of manual way of labor often completed by full-time employees. and then benchmarking can be tough to come across. often requires a lot of manual work of digging through filings in the industry, whatever industry you’re operating in, reconciling and standardizing on certain metrics.

[00:23:25] So you have kind of this like massive effort. That’s very backwards looking on understanding what happened and trying to reconcile and benchmark it. So you have that issue, which I know you’re all intimately familiar with that music. And then you have this issue of implementation, a lot of finance tools, including I mentioned our implementation of Ultrix to Dropbox.

[00:23:43] There was a lot of effort that had to go into that implementation. And we have to work with a consulting firm and it took many, many months and quarters to get it up and running. And there was a whole testing and iteration period. So most tools require an internal tooling team where I teach them to set up and train to [00:24:00] administrate.

[00:24:00] and that creates this additional expense and compliance burden for the organization. And then probably the fourth theme that comes to mind is that software. And this happened so many times to us to Dropbox software does not scale with the organization and that forces costly migrations and retraining over time.

[00:24:17] Like, like ultimate example of this is ERP. And when I started at Dropbox, we were running on QuickBooks. And one of the first projects I worked on was to migrate us off of QuickBooks, onto NetSuite. And then as we scale as a company, we started to scale beyond the limits of NetSuite’s revenue recognition and fixed asset modules.

[00:24:34] Just given that we were getting to tens of millions of paying users. And we, and we got to many, many, many tens of thousands of, fixed assets that we were depreciating across our data center footprint and we had to migrate to Oracle fusion. And each of those migrations was took quarters if not years and millions of dollars to manage her.

[00:24:55] And so, and, and that’s like the Matic, like a lot of different tools across the finance tech stack. [00:25:00] And so you kind of have this like data living everywhere, these tools breaking as companies scale and having to move to new tools. And it’s just this constant process of like trying to just get to the right data and understand the right data and be able to act on the right data.

[00:25:13] And like, it’s just not really set up for success. And so where are the, like the interesting opportunities to answer your question more directly going forward? I think there’s this very interesting opportunity to design for the finance end user. A lot of finance tools, like the best of design UX, like, you know, like design first UX principles.

[00:25:34] the best of what we’ve seen come to industries like, the, you know, the, the design vertical, the sales vertical, the marketing vertical, where you’re like building beautiful products that people used to love, or like, you know, like really love and can engage with that. Hasn’t come to the finance vertical.

[00:25:49] And so designing for the end user, I think, and really understanding their pain points and challenges both as it relates to workflow and like UX and UI. I think there’s a massive opportunity there as it relates to finance [00:26:00] tooling. Automation tools or capabilities and tools that don’t require on a workable IT timelines and budgets.

[00:26:06] I think that’s like a big theme. And so, you know, this theme of like leaning into a low-code or no-code solutions for the CFO or user in mind, I think, is a big one and we’re going to see more and more tools kind of embrace that philosophy going forward. and then I think like building collaborative workflows, That you know, like in an end-to-end user experience, where if you think about it, like today, like th the, the typical finance organization relies on this disjointed software stack to facilitate their work.

[00:26:37] And so you have things living in email and like communication and collaboration, living in an email on slack. random elements of other tools, but then you have the core workflow living in these like clunky tools that were designed 20, 30 years ago for, for like the finance organization. But how do you marry that in the same way that Figma has married that into a really elegant, collaborative user experience for design,

[00:26:58] How do you build a [00:27:00] collaborative, elegant user experience for the finance end user? So integrating elements and collaboration and communication into finance tooling, I think will be a pretty interesting theme. And then the final one I’ll mention. I think there’s a huge opportunity to disintermediate spreadsheets as the unifying substrate, and like in many ways, Excel and Google sheets act as the modern workhorse of the CFO organization.

[00:27:22] And they operate as databases and applications. And a lot of workflows are managed relatively inefficiently through spreadsheets. They perform way too many jobs today and they have this like archaic UI, this confusing features. they presuppose that core financial data is best manipulated via a single flat table.

[00:27:42] The performance degrades as you get to larger and larger volumes. So what is like a next generation tool that can replace the spreadsheet as a substrate that has a UX that people love to engage with that’s inherently collaborative, you know? and like that’s where I think there’s some pretty interesting.[00:28:00] 

[00:28:00] There will be some very interesting opportunities and innovation going forward. And the last couple of days I’ll make an innovation. Now that I’m on the other side of the table is investors. I think for the first time I’m seeing a lot of incredible talent begin to focus on innovating across the finance tech stack and more investment in dollars and resources going to those kinds of companies and projects.

[00:28:23] And I think it’s been a category that’s just been under invested in historically and is ripe for disruption. It’s one that I spent a lot of time looking at in my role at IVP today. And I think we’re going to be very actively investing in going forward. 

[00:28:39] Joe Garafalo: That’s awesome. I think you just described the ideal solution for any modern day CFO.

[00:28:45] I’ve struggled personally with all the things that you mentioned there and, when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, which is usually the case for why everything’s in spreadsheets. Or I’m on Google, but I think one thing you touched on, which was really important is [00:29:00] the collaboration element.

[00:29:01] It’s like every tool in the past that’s been designed for finance has been designed for finance people. And again, but don’t actually think of, who’s consuming the state on the other side. So if you, if you build a tool that only your back office knows how to use or operate, how useful is it? Is it really, if your executive team can’t glean the right information from it or understand what’s happening across the business in a way that, provides meaningful impact and change.

[00:29:24] So that’s one thing I really wanted to highlight as a key feature or key, important area to focus on. 

[00:29:31] Ajay Vashee: Totally could not, could not agree more. And that’s, that’s, I think there’s like a, a very large opportunity, not only to make finance tooling, more collaborative within the finance organization, but at the point that, you know, that you just mentioned to make it accessible across the organization.

[00:29:46] And that I think will be the next step for a lot of these tools. And I know that’s core to the mission and vision that you all have. Everything amazing interrupted at mistake. Absolutely. 

Advice for Building a Finance Career

[00:29:58] Joe Garafalo: Cool. Well, Ajay, thanks for your [00:30:00] insight. I think our last question for you, and we asked this to all of our guests going forward is for folks that are aspiring CFOs, is there any piece of feedback that you would leave as they think through the next steps in their career?

[00:30:15] Ajay Vashee: Sure. It’s a great question. two things come to mind and one is. Relates to context building. And I think the more breadth of context you can have around what a finance organization is, what its key roles and responsibilities should be, what each part of the organization does. The more appreciation and grinding you can have in that the more prepared you’ll be to step into a VP of finance or CFO role over time.

[00:30:41] And I got very lucky. at Dropbox because I was asked to help us build and scale the finance organization really from the ground up. and that was my first job at the company. And that allowed me to build a pretty deep appreciation for everything finance and learn about parts of the finance organization.

[00:30:56] And I really had no context on before. And so the more you can do that, [00:31:00] whether it’s through partnerships or conversation or dialogue or friendships, or an ownership of different parts of the org, I think. that’s super important. And the second thing that comes to mind is kind of disruptive impact. The more you can find a way to really, and we were chatting about this earlier and show like really have transformative impact for the company through the work, through your work and through your organization’s work.

[00:31:23] I think just demonstrating that, that, like, that’s going to be your philosophical and cultural approach goes a very long way as well. So. You know, if you have that really solid grounding and breath, and you’re really focused on going above and beyond to deliver impact to the company and transform not only the way your organization or team works, but how the company works and what the company does.

[00:31:45] I think that those are two core components that can really set you up for success. 

[00:31:50] Joe Garafalo: Absolutely. I totally agree with you speaking the same language as the business and understanding what their objectives and goals are for the organization. and then using the finance lens is just so important [00:32:00] for that.

[00:32:00] That’s that’s in, in the finance function today, total. Well, Ajay, it was a pleasure as always chatting with you and thanks for stopping by looking forward to our next conversation and we’ll talk soon. 

[00:32:15] Ajay Vashee: All right. Thanks for having me, Joe.