Companies must be ready to change as market trends and customer demands evolve. To avoid losing your momentum and keep your entire team on the right track, maintaining a culture of accountability is a must. David Lee, CFO and COO of Webtoon Entertainment, shares how creating such a workplace environment made them the world’s largest digital comics platform right now.
In this conversation with Jack McCullough, Lee explains how to achieve entrepreneurial success in a global company without sacrificing artistic touch and human connection. He also shares how his mentors, his experiences working with different companies and the most important lessons of his childhood shaped him into a versatile CFO in today’s volatile market. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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This is going to be a great episode of The Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. I have a CFO who’s certainly had one of the most interesting backgrounds of anyone I’ve interviewed on this show. He’s worked for some of the most transformative companies in the industry, and I’ve actually wanted to work with him for quite a while. The fates just didn’t allow it until this moment, so I’m really excited. Please welcome David Lee, who is the CFO and Chief Operating Officer of Webtoon Entertainment. At a 10,000-foot view, Webtoon is the world’s largest digital comics platform, home to some of the biggest artists, IP and fandom in all of comics. David, welcome to the show.
Great, thank you. It’s been long and coming and I’m eager to spend time with you, Jack, as well.
Absolutely. Webtoon’s a fascinating company, and one of my gifts and one of my sins is that I oversimplify things, but you could maybe give a little bit more of a holistic view of the company.
Absolutely. Webtoon at its core is a global digital storytelling hub. On the one hand, we have these 24 million creators and strong, and they’re creating over 120,000 new stories every day that arrive at our platform. We use technology to ensure that the best of those stories. For the most part, these creators have full-time jobs. We work really hard to let anyone with a Wi-Fi connection be able to see if the story in their head can be a global success.
On the other side of our business, we have over 160 million monthly active users, and we’re the category creator and leader in all markets in which we compete. A creator gets the benefit of publishing in one language, his or her home language, but quickly being able to find success globally. The format’s quite interesting in the palm of your hand in a mobile device.
Our strongest demographic, by the way, is 18 to 25, my daughter’s age. You can just flick your finger and you can see where a story is going very quickly. On the other hand, you can choose to deeply engage if you want for 30 to 60 minutes on average is what we find amongst our consumers. The last bit is, I think that the world needs a source of evergreen stories that don’t come from the tried and true, possibly tired sources that have previously been in the world. I’m excited to give a platform to creators and to allow consumers to find a story they didn’t expect to find anywhere else.
It’s an amazing story, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you, you went public a little less than a year ago as of the time we’re having this conversation.
Yes. The company went public on NASDAQ or tickers WBTN at the end of June 2024, and I joined the company in November of 2023 to really try to shepherd our globalization and our passage to being publicly traded. It’s been quite recent. We are new to the world with regards to being a public company, and frankly, a lot of consumers know us really well. They’ve seen our stories on Netflix and Amazon because they turn into these great films. A lot of our investors are realizing that their household knows this. Oftentimes, their 18 to 25-year-old friends or friends of the family are really aware of us. For those of us who are a bit older, it may be a new story.
I have to admit I was more familiar with you because you went public than because of the actual underlying business model, but it’s just a really fascinating company. We’ll definitely return to that b Before we get into it, I want to chat a little about you, David. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in what felt like a rural town. It is called Spokane, Washington on the border between Idaho and Washington State. My parents came over as medical doctors, and they eschewed the whole HMO managed care visits. They had a little two-doctor practice. They would leave together with black medicine bags. They would go on home visits they served the marginalized parts of the population. I remember seeing them get paid in apples in venison or IOUs.
I grew up in an entrepreneurial setting where my parents, I thought of them as business owners. I also thought of them as having a vocation, trying to create what economists call a positive externality, trying to create a service to the community they had joined. From there, I ended up spending time on the East Coast, in the Midwest for college, and now find myself here in California.
Your parents, you literally said they had the black medical bags.
It felt like a TV series out of the long pass, like a traditional medical practice. They knew families. They went from by the be being trained as specialists in residency here in the United States to being primary care physicians where they would help the birth of a child and watch them grow. For them, I think being a medical doctor was a definition of care to a community that I think in our modern age of healthcare may have been lost a bit.
As a result, they struggled. In the advent of having large HMOs and managed care companies, they stuck to their tradition, which is to provide the best care they could one patient at a time. Seeing them fight hard to pay bills to create enough opportunity to take the ability to serve patients for free oftentimes was a good imprinting on me. That great business that delivers great returns can still be paired with a positive difference in the world.
It’s funny you mentioned like a TV show. When you said the black bag I immediately flash back, it might be a bit before your time, to Dr. Marcus Welby, MD.
That’s right. It is not before my time. I just thought that better it come from you than me, because I don’t know how many of those reading remember those great TV shows, but yeah, I do remember that show.
When you said paying in apples, I was thinking the doctor from Little House on the Prairie, but I can’t recall his name.
Little House on the Prairie was my father’s favorite TV series, actually. I may have seen every episode a couple of times.
How about that? We should probably, not during the course of the show, but we can discuss our favorite episodes at some point. You mentioned your parents came here. Did they migrate from Korea?
Yeah, so they came from Korea in 1965, a time when the United States was struggling to serve more rural communities with healthcare professionals. They had just both graduated from medical school in Korea and then trained here, did their residency in New York and in Ohio, and ended up finding their practice in Spokane, Washington.
You had a really fascinating childhood, just interesting experience as you’re going through it at a relatively young age. I’m curious, does that impact your worldview since you are presently working for a very globally oriented organization? Does that influence you as a business leader now?
I think in a way, looking back, maybe not realizing it along the way, but in retrospect, I was imprinted with this idea of looking at the world through first principles. My parents were trained to evaluate every patient, every situation as if it was a first situation not to get caught in the habit of presuming that because they had seen something prior that it was the case.
I think that stuck with me throughout my career. Being able to look at old existing problems in a different light is probably one of the reasons why I have tended to work on large transformations or on new to the world startups where people had never heard or thought of a vision of a future a founder had. There’s also a first- or second-generation immigrant mentality of pulling yourself up and believing in this American dream of a great work effort and hopefully great work itself does rise naturally. That belief, that work ethic and being taught that you, you can do business differently and perhaps solve problems better has been a theme that’s lasted throughout my career.
Parents have a indelible imprint on us forever. You grew up, you attended Harvard College and did you major in like Political Science or something like that?
I did. You’re well informed. First, I arrived at Harvard coming up with not a rural background, but I certainly felt like the buildings were awfully tall at Boston, spending time in Cambridge. I’d always been equally interested in the sciences as well as in the liberal arts. I ended up majoring at Harvard in what’s called Government, but it is Political Science, as well as fulfilling all my pre-med requirements. Again, that imprinting I was so influenced by watching my parents.
I had a couple of great experiences in college creating entrepreneurial groups and trying to book gigs and receive revenue and fell in love with business outside of medicine. I found myself in my senior year feeling awfully behind as many of my classmates were multiple generations at the school, but also had been working on, from summer internship freshman year, their path to investment banking or consulting, or law school or business school.
There I was, this kid from Spokane, Washington, suddenly realizing I didn’t want to be a medical doctor as the medical profession was very different than what I experienced in my childhood and feeling awfully behind. Again, this is this recurring theme of having to look at a situation with fresh eyes because I was naive, frankly, but having to figure out on my own, like, what would be helpful. What should be that first job, hopefully in a multi-job career?
I ended up from my entrepreneurial experiences thinking that if I could walk in the shoes of consumers, if I could predict and measure what they will want to buy down the road, I would be better off in any business pursuit. I gravitated towards an unpopular choice. I moved to Chicago and I worked for an ad agency called the Leo Burnett Company. I think my first year salary was less than $20,000 a year.
Impoverished in Chicago but learning very quickly the trade of launching new brands and new products, and also at Burnett, what was interesting, it was the largest private agency at the time. We were put in a situation where we were managing teams far earlier than we probably should have. I remember being at the company less than nine months, and I had a couple of teammates to bring into the fold and tutor and manage. Before you knew it, four years had gone by and you’re managing a large team.
That combination of marketing, advertising and learning to be an air traffic controller with a client, launching a car for General Motors, which is one of my assignments there, felt like running a mini business within a much larger set of businesses. It ended up being a pretty pivotal experience, that first job straight out of school.
First job can’t define you forever, but if you pick the right one and you learn a lot, and you have mentors who look after you and make sure that you have a nice growth plan, it can set you up for long-term success. The opposite’s not true. If the first jobs are crash and burn, you’ve got the rest of your life to recover, obviously.
Yeah, exactly. I think I was lucky. From that moment, those first few days in Chicago, I became a repeat beneficiary of great mentors that took an interest before my supposed potential had turned into reality. I think that was a very important part of my first job experience as well.
Yeah, I can imagine. You ended up getting an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Yeah, I ended up dating the woman who would become my wife. I remember her telling me, “It’s great that you love your job, but can you possibly learn how to do things other than advertising, marketing and managing people? The $20,000 are less per year that you make is not going to be enough. It’s time for you to learn more.”
At the time, I really wanted to stay in Chicago. I looked at Kellogg at the University of Chicago and what is now called the GSB at the University of Chicago Booth School of Management. It had such a great history and reputation in what I didn’t know at the time, which was finance. Going and getting my MBA, which by the way, I ended up doing concurrent to already having the job I wanted after I got my MBA.
I was working for McKinsey as part of an experimental group of three associates there are usually post PhD, post MBA. Here I was, secretly finishing my MBA at the University of Chicago while I was already in that post-MBA role. It was a very concentrated period of time for me to be able to receive my degree, but also, frankly, I think McKinsey was as good or better a source of education in areas that I didn’t know like management or finance or operations. For me, it was, again, a stroke of luck but a critical time where my doors opened beyond the advertising marketing space that I was in prior.
That’s great. Clearly that was a good decision because when I look at your career path, and I’ve interviewed a lot of people that worked for leading companies and market leaders and even transformative. You’re in a situation, you’ve worked for two companies that, if not created the industry, certainly define them in Zynga and Impossible Foods. I’m not a guru in your current industry, but it certainly feels like you’re doing it for a third time. Do you think having the MBA gave you some of these phenomenal opportunities?
I think having an MBA in my time working at McKinsey gave me the opportunity to reinforce the same lesson I learned growing up, which is, if you look at a problem through the lens of first principles and not through the lens of what is common or best practice now, you’d be surprised. I think creating new categories, having a plant-based burger called the Impossible Burger actually be served at a Burger King and be eaten by meat eaters was a bit unimagined prior to Pat Brown, the founder there, with me making it.
Zynga, paying for virtual digital cows in a Farmville game, not tied to your desktop, but on your phone that moved to mobile was very new. In fact, I remember going through the revenue recognition process with Ernst & Young through the IPO and having to really create new rules of the road that I think persists now for the mobile gaming category.
I think for me, the looking at what will a consumer want, not now, but in the future, has been a first principle practice that served me really well. Not thinking about what the meat eater craves now, for example, but what, what are the actual components of their experience? They love creating a product that is good enough for them to feel less guilty to eat a hamburger, which is a guilty pleasure, to be very honest.
That consumer lens persists to what we do now at Webtoon. Webtoon’s about giving these younger consumers our strongest demographics, 18 to 25 years old, the ability to find a story, an unexpected great story from some part of the world in the palm of their hand. Seeing from a fandom standpoint, when sidelined, the quarterback in me became, for a variety of top five film the day after Thanksgiving in 2024, it created a desire to go back and look at where did that novel previously exist. It existed on our platform as a digital novel.
Finding ways to delight the consumer that’s either more convenient or more engaging, or more fulfilling. For me, as a starting point, it’s helped me look at problems that may seem impossible and see a path. Same is true with these large company transformations that are public. Feeling lucky to be part of the new team at Best Buy after Circuit City found trouble and realizing at Best Buy that we could out fulfill many eCommerce players that people wanted to show.
They wanted to touch and feel a new mobile device. They wanted to sit on a couch and watch a show on a big screen TV before they made that leap digitally. Being able to out fulfill some of these larger high growth competitors, because turns out Best Buys were, on average, fifteen minutes away from the average consumer.
We could be their showroom, we could be their omnichannel fulfillment shop for eCommerce. Again, it’s all about understanding what the consumer will pay for and then making it so. It’s not easy. I think at Best Buy, $1 billion was cut out in order to fund the hypergrowth that emerged from eCommerce. I always like thinking about where the consumer will go as a way to open doors and reframe limits.
We all suffer from the same ceiling of defining a category or a market by the product format currently consumed. Think about the old days of is this the VHS market or is this the Betamax market? Maybe it’s a videotape market, but if you imagine that this is a consumer market where people want to see great hit movies anywhere they want to, then companies like Netflix can emerge. For me, broadening the aperture in the consumer lens on a first principle basis has been actually a common theme despite all these different situations that I’ve been lucky to be a part of it.
You’ve had such a great run, and your success is terrific. Again, having interviewed a lot of very successful CFOs on this show, almost all of them will share with me that they’ve had an important mentor or multiple mentors along the way. When you look back upon things are there any that particularly stand out that made a huge impact on you? You’ve worked with some great companies.
It feels almost like picking your favorite child, because I’ve been fortunate in having a few.
To be clear, you’ve had few favorite mentors, not favorite children.
I have no favorite children, though. I have two daughters and a puppy. As for mentors, I would say that first job out of what I call the service industry. I worked in advertising. I got my MBA, I worked at McKinsey, had a flirtation with being in venture capital, but my first industry job was a company called Del Monte Foods, a 100-year-old plus brand I had tripled in size through acquisition. I had decided that I was going to learn a craft that I wanted to actually not jump from place to place. I ended up spending nine years at Del Monte being in multiple jobs. My first boss was a gentleman named Larry Bodner, who ended up becoming the CFO, it is now the CEO of the Shave Company.
He taught me that being a specialist in a function, being a CFO could be enhanced if you were a generalist. If you’ve run a P&L, if you run a factory and led a marketing campaign yourself, if you’ve done the M&A, not thought about doing it, but you’ve actually done the post-M&A merger integration, which is the value creator, when you’re in the seat of being a CFO, it’s a lot easier to know where to push for change. It’s also a lot easier in building consensus with your colleagues.
It’s was invaluable for me to have run the consumer products business at Del Monte, even as I was the CFO at Zynga because it meant I could sit with our chief marketing officer, or the folks running the P&L, having walked in their shoes, of having some of those experiences and being able to say, “Here are the ways in which we can partner, but here’s the firm line on from a company shareholder standpoint, what we have to allocate resources to.” Larry was indispensable. He’s a great mentor at work turned into great friends over time. He’s only a text away. I’ve really benefited by folks like him.
The other thing I would say is the mentors I’ve had have always seen something in me that I didn’t see at the time. When I started at Del Monte, I really had no clue, or I certainly didn’t understand firsthand much of what I would later have the ability to claim as experience. However, he saw something and he shepherded me through the way. I’ve been very appreciative of him, but also all the other mentors that have come along my way.
Yeah, that’s an interesting observation. I’ve noticed, with people whose career is largely in finance and accounting, it’s almost like we have this genetic humility gene. We don’t think we’re anything special. You could be one of the best CFOs in the world, you still just think you’re doing your job or anyone can do this. I always tell young people, “You need to think a little bit more about your brand a little bit. You’ve got something special and unique. While you may be humble, you need to let the world know what you can do.”
I completely agree. I grew up believing in the concept of meritocracy in life and in business. If you work hard enough and create enough results, that old metaphor cream rises to the top, whatever metaphor we want to use. What I realized is that mentors and mentees, in the business experiences that I’ve had, have been instrumental in allowing anyone to rise to any level. When you’re being promoted in any situation, oftentimes, you’re doing something for the first time. The leap of faith is inherent in the decision to take a bet on a younger, less experienced person in a more tenured role.
What really allows for that is if you have folks who will go to hell and back for you where if you are the mentor to a team that will fight against the odds, and if you have mentors yourself who are willing to see something different and put you in roles that for the first time stretch and challenge you. I think that much more became my mental model on development, but it certainly wasn’t my mental model growing up or at Harvard, or even I think in the McKinsey era or University of Chicago. It’s become different as I think about my own path.
I want to talk to Webtoon and I won’t ask why you joined Webtoon, because that’s fairly obvious, but how’d the opportunity come about? What were the big things you were looking for for the next adventure?
It was interesting. It came about during a phase in my career where candidly, Jack, I said I was retiring from public company life. I had spent 25 of the last 30 years really focused on transforming these larger or smaller public companies, or being the turnaround person, the transformation person for young companies that were public that might struggle.
The bar was awfully high. I started an AI startup and had just got it funded as its co-founder and chair. I’d come off my experience at Impossible Foods, this first crazy startup company experience that I really enjoyed. To my delight, though, the opportunity at Webtoon was so compelling, to use technology to empower creators globally and delight younger consumers. Frankly, similar to our previous conversation, it came through a network of mentors and mentees.
I was asked to look at the parent company at the time, this company called Naver in South Korea. Naver’s an amazing technology company. It’s a roughly $30 billion Korea-listed tech giant that’s a bit like the Amazon, Google of South Korea. Having spent a lot of time in tech and in consumer for large public companies, I looked at Naver and got a chance to realize that there was something called Webtoon run as an independent company within it.
I thought that Webtoon was fascinating. That conversation led to meeting Junkoo Kim, JK, we call him, our CEO and founder. His vision for this company, which started in 2005, has proven to be pretty prescient. In meeting him, I made the leap having fallen in love with the company to say, “I’m in, in whatever role you need or whatever we need to get done.” That happened to be as the COO and CFO. I joined the board with JK as well. I joined in November of ‘23, and we listed at the end of June of ‘24. It was right in the heart of an IPO process, which was my first task.
“Welcome to the team. Take us public.” You said it so casually. One thing I like to explore because it, it’s critical is either relationship you have with the CEO, and for years, CFOs have said strategic partner of the CEO, my most important relationship. I’ve noticed in the last 2 or 3, a lot more CEOs are reciprocating that sentiment. They’re agreeing that the CFO is the most important person they interact with a daily basis. It sounds like you hit it off with him right at the start, but honeymoons wear off. How do you maintain a respectful, trustful relationship with two people, your partners, but on the other hand, he’s your boss to a degree too?
Candidly, partnering with the founder, CEO is the product of a lot of hard work on both sides. It’s almost a bit like a marriage, I imagine but it’s also a bit of luck. Generally you are meeting someone who you want to be your partner through an interview process that is rather abbreviated, you usually don’t have a lot of time to assess fit. I got very lucky. JK is by far the best CEO founder that I’ve had a chance to work with or work for. I characterize our relationship as a true partnership. He’s one of those rare CEOs that really wants to delegate and share. Trust can be built, to be clear. The job of A CFO and the COO is to establish trust with their, their boss.
If trust is established, he’s not territorial. He just wants the company to thrive. The way he thinks, which is visionary and strategic first and then pragmatic second has been a very nice combination for somebody like me because remember, I tend to think about things on a first principle basis. It can appear to be a little bit out of the box and maybe a bit too high level for many operators initially, but then I imagine pretty specifically what is required to achieve it.
I think JK thinks the, the same way. It’s also informed by a lot of relationships with other founders. Partnering with Mark Pincus, the founder and chair while I was there at Zynga, with an incoming new CEO Don Mattrick or watching Hubert Joly partner with Dick Schultz, the founder of Best Buy. According to some articles, we may have been in a hostile fight with the founder as part of the new team. Having a history and perhaps some scar tissue on what works and what doesn’t really helped me later in my career, in my 50s, try to partner again with a great visionary founder of, of a company that was going public.
I think it’s very specific to the individuals involved. Really spending the time and getting to know somebody is, in all relationships, important. It’s no different in the role between a CEO and a CFO in my mind. Establishing the rules of the game, so to speak. What’s yours? What’s mine? We know we’re going to bump into each other and perhaps overlap. How do we resolve it? How do we discuss how we resolve it prior to it happening?
These basic things that I think oftentimes when you’re in a CFO job, sometimes, we puff up our chest and feel like we’re wearing a suit, like a suit of armor, and we’re establishing our role in finance, and we have to elbow our way through having enough say. I think after you’ve been around the block a bit, you realize that can be effective, but like in any marriage or relationship, but also it can be terribly ineffective.
Figuring it out how do you partner as the CFO because usually you’re being hired by your CEO as the boss who’s been there prior. Hence by far, he usually knows more about the business and has better relationships with the board. Understanding that incoming relationship, I think, is important on how you begin the relationship, which, as you said at the beginning of the show, how you start something has a big bearing on how it usually ends.
Yeah, it’s interesting because like a founder, CEO, one of my friends who’s a CFO, he compared the two. He’s like, “You worked for a CEO who didn’t found the company. There’s one dynamic, but the founder, the company’s his baby. It’s almost like dating his daughter or something like that,” which was an interesting way to put it. They just bring a certain passion to the, the business they created that nobody else can have.
You’re absolutely right. You find oftentimes for breakthrough unique companies, and I think Webtoon really is that something the world has never seen before, a category creator, oftentimes, you find in these companies that the founder and CEO created something and largely have created this own imagination of the future, primarily as their job. You don’t oftentimes see founders that spent 30 years across lots of industries and lots of functions, then reimagine the world as a founder.
In addition to how much they love the thing that they’re giving birth to passionately, it is their baby, there’s also this bridging of experiences. I’m a great contrast to oftentimes founders, because I feel like I’ve covered a lot of industries over the last 30 years and had a lot of diversity of experience. Finding a way for that to be a helpful combination is also a bit of how you establish a productive relationship.
It’s not a coincidence that great founders that have created something unimagined before and primarily has only done that. They oftentimes need CFOs that have had more experience and more diversity of experience to add to the team. It’s funny, if you look at it, it’s not that unexpected, the set of dynamics between a visionary founder and an incoming CFO, but I think we don’t talk about that enough. We more just quietly try to make our way which is another reason why great mentors and mentees come into play, particularly the CFO and CEO relationship.
I want to ask you about the IPO, and certainly there’s enough information on taking companies public, but I think something that doesn’t get recognized a lot is the cultural impact of an IPO and the CFO’s role in that because some people oversimplify, “Just an event, a really big one, but still an event,” and that’s an oversimplification.
You went from a company is very entrepreneurial, innovative, perhaps in new your case, a very artsy type of company, given what you do for a living and you’re taking it public. That can’t help but change the culture of the company. There are just expectations, there’s pressure to make quarterly numbers and a lot of other things. How do you maintain that entrepreneurial, artsy type of culture while still continuing to thrive and deliver value to investors as a publicly-traded company?
I think of the process of going public as being akin to a crucible. It’s intense. It’s urgent. No one’s really ready until they are already public. It’s a difficult new experience. On the other end of it, if you’ve done it right, you’ve not just changed the ability to attract investors. Being public means you can attract almost any investor versus being private, where you’re focused mostly on venture capital or individuals.
I also think it creates a new identity for a company. In our case, we already have product market fit globally, like 60%-plus of our 160 million monthly active users are in our in Asia where we originated the company, but they’re in the rest of the world, as we call it. Announcing to the rest of the world, “Hello, we’re here and we’re being traded on NASDAQ, we’re headquartered in Los Angeles. We aren’t the company you may think we are.” We are already being consumed by 18- to 25-year-olds globally. It’s a rare opportunity to be able to establish a new identity, in our case, for a global company, that has had creators and consumers across the world for some time. It’s new news.
Even now, if I look at the performance of the company, we’re still in that infant stage where a lot of folks, a lot of investors really don’t know who we are. If they do, they may not fully appreciate the strength of the company. Preserving culture, when you go through that process, it’s similar to when a startup goes from having less than 50 people to having over 150 people. Within hypergrowth, you are recreating the company given circumstances, and that’s independent of being public. I think that’s just true in hypergrowth. Going public is an extension of that transformative process.
I think it comes down to the culture that you start with. As you say, applying rigor doesn’t mean you kill culture. We have a very data-driven, thoughtful, high integrity culture. Having gone through the crucible of being made a public company, that culture, I think, remains. Adding new global team members, new independent board members, expanding in parts of the world that you were less prevalent, less strong in, those are the challenges to culture.
I don’t see going public, per se, as being a challenge if you already had a culture of accountability. JK is very driven on transparency, on results well before us being listed on NASDAQ. I think because Naver, his benefactor and former parent, was public in Korea. I think the biggest challenges for the IPO and culture is when in other situations, certainly not at Webtoon, where that culture of accountability isn’t preexisting, then I think there is a big clash. The bright light of quarterly releases, there’s no hiding from accountability, and that is true for every public company. Fortunately for Webtoon, we had that culture of accountability prior to the IPO process.
That’s the mindset. It’s just another event. Again, it’s an oversimplification, but if you’re a well-run company and you’re doing the practices that best, best run companies do, it should be a transition. I want to ask you, you have a bit of a dual role and that you’re CFO and COO, and this isn’t the first time where you’ve had the COO title.
You’re also on the company’s board of directors, which remains a relatively rare thing. I believe I’m correct in saying that. Do you see that as something that’s going to be happening more often in the future? How do you juggle those three roles that sometimes you’re on the board, “The CFO is incompetent. What do we do about them?” I’m sure you’re not having those conversations.
First, I highly encourage folks who are reading, if they’re interested in being a CFO, particularly, this is probably true, if you’re interested in being a private company, CFO or a public company CFO, having previous board experience, I think, is invaluable. I’ll touch upon my roles, but I think having sat on a board, I’m on the board of a company called Zevia, the ticker ZVIA, and I’m chair of the non-gov committee. I’m on the audit committee. Being in the room with other public company board members is really helpful when you’re on management and you’re trying to establish what is the right way to frame an issue for a board.
In the case of Webtoon, everything is brand new. The board is new. We have new independent board members we recruited that are new. The process of running a public company and running a company that has the needs of a public company board is new. Part of my role as a board member and as a COO is really to do whatever is required to enable JK to be successful new to the public company world.
I have had some of those experiences in other public companies, so I think the thought was to leverage those strengths for as long as they’re needed. There is a need when you’re playing more than one role. When you’re a public company CFO, you’re in charge of the, the corporate leadership, which is really my COO job. You’re trying to help establish a set of board governance.
You have to be very deliberate and state from what lens you’re offering your view. There are many times when, as a board member, I’ll offer a karma as a board member, and that holds me as management to a higher bar. There are times when I’m looking at the company internally and from a narrow lens of the CFO, if you’re not thinking about the business health, for example, but you’re thinking about the short-term financial results, there is a perception of a conflict.
I would tell you, though, that the dirty secret is a great CFO has to think like a COO and a board member. If you’re really doing a great job as a CFO, you’re thinking about strategy, you’re thinking about operations. You’re not just narrowly focused on accounting for the financial results. It’s a much broader role. While I’m deliberate about some of the very rare circumstances where I feel internal conflict, the reality is most of the time, the roles seem to work seamlessly with each other. I think that’s a credit to my CEO and founder, JK, who embraces feedback and help in multiple areas.
I think that’s great. You mentioned the fact that you’re on the board of Zevia, and so speaking as a diabetic, thank you. It’s a great product. It took me a little while to get used to the cola of being clear colored, though. I have to admit that it freaked me out the first couple of times I poured it. How does being on the board of another company impact how you execute your day job of being a CFO at the company, if at all?
Yeah, it’s interesting. Zevia is an amazing company. It’s trying to create a better version of a soda company. We like to say we’re trying to get rid of the artificial, which is why our products are clear as we don’t color them artificially. That company went public several years ago as a upstart against really strong, the Pepsi, Coca-Cola, etc.
Being part of the board, being on the audit committee and the non-gov committee, looking for new board members on behalf of Zevia or sitting in the seat and trying to help a CFO presenting to me the results of the corridor and guidance, it’s helped to reframe how I conduct my job as a member of management. It’s also been helpful for me to understand the difference between being a board member and being part of management.
When you grow up in management, presenting and preparing for boards, sometimes one can imagine that when you are on the board, you’re just in a more senior role when you were the CEO, CFO or COO. The reality is your levers and your responsibilities are radically different, particularly at a public company when you’re on the board. Your job is not to jump on the grenade. Your job is not to personally ensure that the company pursues the right operational direction. That’s the job of management.
Your job as a board is to ensure that you are holding management accountable on behalf of shareholders and you’re planning for succession for the CEO and for the board. You’re part of the governance practice to make sure that we’re compliant to the highest bar required as a member of an audit committee. When you’re in that role and you experience it for the first time, it reframes the next board meeting you’re presenting as the CFO or member of management.
I find it very helpful. I think it’s something that I was lucky enough to experience earlier in my career board, a board role. It’s really reframed how I prepare. Management sometimes shows up with 500 pages for a board, imagining that they are as well versed in the business. Not only is a board oftentimes not, but they don’t need to be. Their role is different than management. Seeing those divisions, I think, has been helpful to try to be more productive as management presenting to a board in my experience.
I wanted to ask you, everybody says they have a global footprint, but Webtoons is not a huge company. It truly has a global footprint, and that just inevitably creates a lot of financial and operational complexities in all the markets you serve. How do you execute that in what I have to think is a relatively modest-sized finance team?
We are global at Webtoon, as you know. The commerce of stories is truly global. Consumers want it from all parts of the world. Careers want to publish in multiple languages. The finance function, by definition, has to be the common language across all regions and markets. US gap results are US gap results, whether you’re talking about your business in France or Southeast Asia or here in North America. I find it as a great unifier on understanding how did we do and where’s the growth going to come from in the future? Having that common language as a public company and viewing it as the role of the finance team to build bridges and hold accountability across very different businesses with different brands and different business situations. We’re the number one consumer app in Japan called Line Manga.
We’re just getting going in North America and France looks like a wonderful potential bridge to Europe, but it’s even earlier than North America. We all look at the same non-gov KPI metrics and finance still needs to roll up results. I think the way you operate in the finance function is to view your role as the common element across very diverse languages teams business situations, even levels of awareness of your business.
In terms of scale, I think a finance function can be highly efficient if it leverages systems. By systems, I don’t mean just ERP systems though that is a part of it, but systems meaning the process by which you close the books and the process by which you predict and report. Having a similar system in one part of the country, one part of the world, really, as you do in another part, creates efficiency.
Where I see finance teams get in trouble is if one part of the company is operating on a different system of record, again, either IT system or business process system. It creates a lot of inefficiency to consolidate or even do account reconciliation at the top level of the company. For me, those are the keys. The view of finance shouldn’t be to divide, it’s to unify and it for it to be the common language across the company globally. Efficiency comes from common process and systems which then over time get better and better and allows you to scale smaller team size against global footprint.
That sounds like you’ve had a great experience at the board. I know one thing our readers want to know is what’s your perspective on how the role of the CFO is likely to continue evolve? We’re almost getting to the point where digital skills are equally as important as financial skills in the CFO role. Do you see that as something that’s ongoing or am I just off base there?
I think you’re absolutely right. I think volatility is becoming, in this current period of time, the norm as we’re speaking, which has probably been true for the last 3 to 4 months, it feels like there’s a new headline on any of the major financial networks. In this shorter period of time, I think the role of a CFO has to be to manage risk and volatility just as it also manages the financial resources of a company.
That’s a broader different mandate. That is having a perspective on foreign currency. Where will AI take the finance function or the company’s business? What does the board need now? Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important for boards. The role of a CFO is to serve that audit committee or risk committee. I think managing exogenous risk and volatility is definitely on the increase from the headlines I’m seeing. I think it affects all roles, but particularly the CFO role.
I think what remains the same is where we were previously talking about how does a CFO become more than a reporter of results, but becomes ingrained into the business so it’s really partnering, not just with the CEO but with the entire C-suite. I think in this age of increased volatility, a CFO must be able to partner with the head of marketing, the head of ops the head of PR in order to manage exogenous risk. Defining the world not just as finance, but managing risk capital, if you will, is probably the biggest theme I think that will emerge for those of us in the finance function.
That makes a whole lot of sense. David, you’ve had some great roles, great success, and one of the most popular parts of this show is when I can ask my guests to share what their advice is for the next generation of CFOs. Those folks are perhaps in their first ever CFO role or on the cusp of attaining that role.
That’s a big responsibility. I think the biggest piece of advice is to walk in the shoes of functions outside of finance earlier than you might think you need to, so that when you’re in the CFO seat, you have the credibility and experience to be able to partner directly in functions that you’re not assessing from the outside.
I think the second piece of advice is to ensure that you pick mentors. Mentors don’t pick mentees. They’re too busy. Mentees, go out into the world and imagine and dream, “Who would love to get advice from, and how do I create an opportunity for myself to convince that person to be my mentor?” I think those two pieces of advice I wish I had heard from someone earlier in my own career. I think they’re pretty important on a go-forward basis for anyone who wants to be in this role.
That’s great advice. David, I know you got a lot going on with being on a public company board and being a CFO for a public company. On behalf of the readers, really grateful for your time. I would just like to give you the final word.
I guess the final word is to be bold and imagine on a first principle basis, a future for yourself and the company that may feel out of reach. I think we should do that, whatever role we have, but I think in particular, CFOs need to do it because as managers of risk and finance, our jobs are getting more challenging as technology changes at day by day.
