Gabi Gantus is the CFO of Mytra, a startup aiming to reinvent warehousing and industrial productivity through automation and machinery that allows inventory to be moved in any direction from any cell in the system, up and down, automatically. “A lot of companies right now, everyone has warehousing. Everyone’s trying to move parts around, and if you go into any warehouse right now, it looks the same as it did about 75 years ago. Just forklifts moving boxes around,” she says. “We’re just trying to disrupt that because it’s an industry that desperately needs disrupting.”
Gantus joins host Jack McCullough to share how Mytra is pulling the logistics industry out of the “Eisenhower era,” the unexpected lessons she learned in her early career at Tesla and why CFOs shouldn’t move too far from the work. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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We have a really exciting guest. She works for one of the hardest startups on the planet. Gabi Gantus is the CFO of Mytra. Mytra is supercharging and disrupting industrial productivity with bots. Gabi, welcome to the show.
Thanks. I’m super excited to be here.
How’d I do in my description? I’ve been accused of all of simplifying things from time to time. Can you fill in the blanks?
Yeah, I think it’s a great description. I always like to say what Mytra is doing is getting materials from point A to Point B, but in a new, innovative way. A lot of companies right now, everyone has warehousing. Everyone’s trying to move parts around, and if you go into any warehouse right now, it looks the same as it did about 75 years ago. Just forklifts moving boxes around.
We’re just trying to disrupt that because it’s an industry that desperately needs disrupting. What makes Mytra awesome is not only do our parts move forward and back and side to side, but we also go up and down. With that innovation, we really can completely reinvent how you do material storage and how we get parts both to the line to case pickers for people that pick things to put in boxes. If you want to go get your Amazon packaging, you have a mixed box, really, everything and anything in between.
Yeah, no, that’s fascinating. I’ve heard the industry described as being stuck in the Eisenhower era. Apparently, a lot of the innovations were made shortly after World War II. It’s great that you’re tackling this and you’re going to change the rules of it. The company has gotten a lot of favorable publicity, a lot of buzz out there, but still not yet a household name. Is there something maybe you could share with us about your company that people aren’t aware of?
I think the biggest thing for us, and I think I said in the intro before this, is the ability to go up and down. Even in my former life at Tesla, Tesla has automated warehousing solutions, it’s a lot of cranes overhead. They go down aisles. Again, the ability for us to go up and down and side to side really saves on density, it saves on labor, it increases throughput. That’s really, I think, what sets Mytra apart from everyone else in the industry.
That’s great. I want to return to Mytra, but I want to talk a little about your own background before we do get into that. Gabi, where’d you grow up?
I grew up in Los Altos, California. Right next to Stanford.
You’ve been in the heart of the innovation sector your entire life. Although I noticed you came East for college. You studied at Trinity in Hartford, Connecticut?
Correct. My parents are both from the East Coast and my sister went to college in Maine. I actually forced myself out of California for college. I did not let myself apply to a single school in California because I knew I’d want to come back one day. For people who want to stay in California their whole lives, that’s great for them. I wanted to try to experience something different for college. I went East and I absolutely loved it.
It’s interesting because you studied economics, which used to be not unheard of, but whatever’s adjacent to unheard of for CFOs to have a background in economics. I think in the modern world, it’s actually a very useful background to have and has an impact into how you approach your role as a chief financial officer.
Not really. Trinity is a liberal arts school, so there are no really, I would say, like practical majors you can have. I majored in economics with minors in French and writing. I would say the most helpful class I took in college, I took Accounting 101. Actually, very helpful for all the jobs I’ve had since college. I always viewed it as more building an analytical background, how to approach problems, how to solve problems. I think that’s super important. Not necessarily the content, but the skills picked up.
Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned your jobs and I’m always curious, what was the first job you ever had? Not after college, but maybe when you were in high school or college?
I taught horseback riding. Babysitting doesn’t count. Yeah, I rode horses all the way through college. I taught horseback riding when I was in high school.
The reason I’m reacting is strongly is that you’re not the first person who’s been a guest on this show that is involved with horseback riding. In fact, a prior guest, I think, was like a national equestrian champion or something like that.
I wasn’t that, but it was a good hobby.
My first job was at Burger King, so yours was far more interesting than me. How about when you got out of college? Tell us a little about your career path coming out of Trinity.
Yeah, so I did investment banking in New York for about a year. It was a small boutique firm called Berkshire Capital. It did mergers and acquisitions focused in FIG. I decided it was not for me. All my friends are enjoying their twenties and I am working every weekend, every night until 10:00 PM at least, 1:00 AM a lot of nights. It’s not the life that I wanted. I went over, took a company dark, and then honestly, I was looking for my next gig. I applied to many jobs on the East Coast. I was in New York at the time and a job in California, which was Tesla. I got that job and headed home.
It’s quite a game-changing type of company, to say the least. You started out as an FP&A analyst at Tesla, is that correct?
Correct. I think technically was a senior analyst because I was two years out of college, but yeah, pretty low on the totem pole.
I don’t know about that. That must have been just the run of a lifetime, working at a company, game changer is probably an overused term, but Tesla clearly is one of the game-changing companies of our lifetime. What was that run like?
It was amazing. I cannot say enough good stuff about working at Tesla. The people there, the mission, I mean, game-changing, I actually think is very accurate for what Tesla has done. When I joined Tesla, the people feeling like EVs were going to exist was not a thing. Everybody was still like, “I don’t know if this is a thing. We’ll see.” It is now a thing. EVs exist in the world. They’ll forever exist in the world. They will eventually dominate the world. That was because of Tesla.
I actually do think it is a game-changing company for that reason. It disrupted the entire automotive industry which hasn’t been disrupted in I don’t even know how long. It is a lot longer than I can think of. It really was a great run. The people are amazing. The mission was amazing and the problems that we got to work on every day were really just the most interesting you could think of.
You put in 12 years there. It was quite a different company by the time you left them, the company that you joined. Same mission, but a little different.
A little different. When I joined there, I think I was number nine on the FP&A team. When I left, there were 80 people on the FP&A team. I still think quite lean for a company of Tesla’s size. Tesla always runs very lean. I think everyone is well aware of that. Yeah, just a little bit different, a little bit more money too, anyway.
You had an interesting story about your encounter with Elon Musk. If you’d like, I’d love to hear that story if you could share with our audience.
Sure. I think the question that was asked to me is what made you realize the impact you were having and the place you had in the company? When I was at Tesla, the financing actually needs to me on for a while, it was every week. It’s now become every two weeks. Everyone’s become a little bit busy. The company’s a little bigger, but this was early on in my career.
This was pre-COVID. I was working with our president of Baltimore at the time, Jerome. We were actually trying to decide where to build a product, between which factories. I can’t give much details other than that, but he and I went in, the two of us. Elon had one idea and what he thought. We made our argument, we showed the facts, we gave our opinions and we ended up changing his mind. He’s political. You present him the facts, you present him the argument. You couldn’t get him to change path. Make a good argument, and you present a good reason why something should be different. He listens. Which is something I always appreciated.
I think that’s great because people 50 years from now and when there are students studying history, they’re going to read about Elon Musk the way you and I might have read about people like Henry Ford. I think he’s that pivotal figure in business. Also, what I find interesting about the story is the importance of salesmanship skills. You couldn’t just go in with data and convince somebody. You needed to really tell your story and be persuasive. It’s such a critical skill for CFOs and all probably across the entire C-Suite.
Yeah. One of the big important things I think of being a CFO or any financial leader at that is having data. People normally want to have information, they want to make the right decision, but they need to have the information to make that right decision. Often, if you are willing to share it with them or make the effort to share it with them, they’ll end up at the same place you want them to, and they’ll get there by themselves without you having to force them into it.
I do think giving the whole story, giving people the context, that’s something that was always ingrained into me by all my mentors at Tesla. You have to give the context. Why should this engineer care that they need to get their costs down? Why should this person care that they need to meet their timeline by a certain date? What’s the context? Why is it important?
No, that makes a lot of sense. I want to chat a little about you. During your career growth, you’ve worked for some great companies. Obviously, Tesla is, by far, the most well-known of them, but I’ve known very few people who achieve the success that you have relatively early in your career without important mentors to guide them along the way. When you look back, can you think of any mentors you have that really stood out, somebody that you learned a lot from? It might even be your parents or someone like that.
Honestly, my biggest mentor is Zach Kirkhorn. He’s the former CFO of Tesla, pretty well known at this point. He became my boss after about two years at Tesla. I started working for him. He was actually the head of manufacturing finance, which was the position I ended up taking over. As he grew, I grew with him. I started by having just the Fremont factory and then I took over the Reno factory and then it just kept growing from there.
Zach was my boss. One day, Zach became CFO and I got promoted and took over the whole thing of all the stuff that he had been running. He was really an awesome mentor, really believed in me, gave me a lot of opportunities. I learned so much from him. I still learn a lot from him. I was catching up with him. I would say he’s the number one mentor for sure. He and I have very different styles and approaches. There was always even a lot to learn about how to approach a problem, how do you present what you’re trying to a group of people. It’s nice actually having someone that is a different approach. You can learn different ways of doing things.
You grew up, so to speak, not through the traditional controllership path to become a CFO, but doing FP&A in a company that bluntly is known for having really solid FP&A type of stuff. How does that shape how you approach the CFO role now?
Yeah, I would actually argue that at Tesla, I was definitely an FP&A, but we worked incredibly close with accounting and treasury and all the other finance functions. It actually is a very well-oiled finance machine. Everyone knows each other super well. Everyone works together really well. It really always felt like a partnership.
The amount of times at the end of month where I would be sitting with accounting, working on getting feedback on entries or they’d ask me questions so they’d book it correctly or they’d have a question to make sure it was right because it looked weird as they were booking it. It was just one of the expectations.
Through just those relationships, I got comfortable not just doing straight FP&A but learning a lot about what the accountants do. Both cost accounting as well as just payroll, AP, all of that. I think it’s super important. You should understand what your colleagues are doing so you can help them. FP&A’s job is to understand what’s happening in the business and help translate it over for the accountants. You need to understand what they’re doing so you can do that well.
I want to turn to Mytra now and obviously, leaving Tesla after a decade, big decision. World-class company always exciting stuff going on, I have to think. What made you decide to make the leap to Mytra?
A couple of things. First, what they were doing, I think it really is an industry that needs to be disrupted and is ripe for disruption. At Tesla, we had lots of warehousing, external and internal. We had some of these legacy company automated systems in and I could see the problems that come with them. They take years to install, years to get up and running. It just wasn’t the solution that was out there. I would say first that.
Second is the team. Chris Walti and I worked at Tesla together. I was his finance partner for many projects he was doing. He’d come to my desk, we’d talk about how to make sure it paid back and that it made sense and then he would go off and do his engineering thing and build robots in the company. He approached me and then when I went to the office for the first time, the team there was just so impressive.
It was a mix of, it’s a lot of Tesla alums, a lot of Slack alums and then a mix of others. It was just such an impressive team, which with so much caliber of skill, such a high caliber that it was really just hard to ignore. Doing hard things is hard. This team can do it. I would say that one. The third just ready for a new challenge. As you said, I’d been at Tesla over 12 years at that point.
I joined two months after the Model S started production, so I was there for every launch after Model S and I actually interviewed on the day Model S was being rolled off the line for the first time because I remember I was being interviewed by Deepak, the CFO before Zach and he was like, “I have to go, we’re having a party.”
I was like, “I totally get it, you can do that.” When I joined, it was Fremont only and it was a small quarter of Fremont and then Tesla grew into the entire Fremont factory and then it was Reno and then it was China and then it was Texas and Berlin and then Buffalo got picked up in acquisition. I was doing all that and it was definitely still challenging and super interesting, but I was ready to do something different.
I also felt like I built a really great team at Tesla. They’re all still there and I felt like I was leaving it in really good shape that I could feel comfortable that I gave back to this company that gave me so much for my career. I didn’t want to leave it in bad shape. I feel like I left it actually in a great spot, great place where I don’t think they’d miss me as much because my team was awesome and they could take over.
If you’re a great leader when you leave, you shouldn’t be missed because you should have developed the team to survive without you. You’ve been in the new role a little bit less than five months. I’m curious. People always talk about like the first 90 days, in your case it’s more like the first 130. What have you learned so far in the early stages of the company?
Yeah, I mean it sounds weird but it’s pretty similar to Tesla. It’s a startup but Tesla acts like a startup with a lot more money. You move fast, you have to be very agile, things change and you have to adapt. I’m used to it. For me it wasn’t that surprising. I actually think the most surprising thing was I joined and what I put a big focus on is understanding current costs and what is our path to cost down.
I think that there was one finance person for me and he was holding down the fort doing everything, doing an amazing job, but just getting a little more focused on you can’t get your costs down or even understand what your eventual costs will be until you understand your current status. That’s really been one of my main focus when I come in. Where do we stand right now? What is everything costing us right down? Getting the forecast to a really good point, very accurate. Also, just revisiting everywhere that we’re spending money.
I did a whole overhaul of what is our hiring plan with Chris. I did some audits. I spent one night, my husband was making fun of me, digging through all of the old Mytra brand cards, digging through everyone’s expenses. What is everyone spending money on? Just making sure I had a good understanding of it. Digging through all of our software, where are we using, where are we spending money on software? Do we have the right number of licenses? Are we even still using it? Just getting my feet wet and just so I can say like I know where our money’s going every day and getting that good understanding.
Follow the money. That’s always a good path for first-time incoming CFOs. In your role as a CFO, and we’ll get to the business later, but as the financial leader of the company, how are you using AI internally in your work? What do you think may be the biggest opportunities and even missed opportunities for CFOs with AI?
I’ll be honest, I don’t use it quite yet for my work at this point. There’s myself and one other finance person and we use some external accounting firm. Where actually I could see AI being incredibly helpful and I look at it even how AP is done, matching bill, matching invoices to purchase orders. That feels like something that AI could just do so much faster and not have to use a person to do it.
Even booking accounting entries I feel like could be something that AI can be incredibly helpful with. Honestly the big thing for me, I use AI the most right now is when I find a term right now that I don’t understand because it’s at a robotic startup where I just don’t have as much experience, just using it to explain to me what’s happening is often very helpful in my day-to-day.
Yeah, a lot of people are still just using it to rewrite their emails and some people are bracing it as the ultimate productivity tool I think in the world of CFOs it’s somewhere in between. That is my own worldview on that. On the subject, I want to understand just because your business is fascinating even if I don’t have the highest aptitude to understand exactly what you’re doing. Can you share a little bit how AI is enhancing bot efficiency by automating route optimization and inventory management?
I think the best way to describe it is when customers come to us they’re like, “We have all these parts, we need this.” It’s often they need a throughput. They need to pull pallets out at a certain speed. What our AI does is it can really do it in the most efficient way possible. You say, “Here’s all the materials we’re going to put into the system and when it comes out they don’t care how it comes out. They just care it comes out at the speed that they need it and when they need it and then not broken, which is not a problem in warehousing.
I think where our AI helps is that it helps us make the system the most efficient as possible. It allows us to put in different type of structured cells. It can help us reduce the number of bots so we can accomplish the same thing with even fewer bots than other companies might need because we can use the AI to do smarter routing. If something were to happen in the system because of AI, the bots can route around that cell and keep going, the system doesn’t go down. For us, it really just allows our system to be less expensive for the customer, more efficient and for us, just really keep enhancing. We can keep making it better as time goes on.
Even I can grasp that value propositions, but one of the questions that CFOs ask me a lot is how they build relationships with the CEO and you’re working for a visionary CFO in Chris Walti and he’s not only the CEO but he’s also one of the co-founders of the company. As a founder myself, nothing quite that big but there’s an emotional attachment to the company that wouldn’t be there if I just worked at the company. How do you develop that constructive relationship between you and Chris, a true strategic partnership and but there’s that nuance that he is the founder?
I think it actually really comes from him, his willingness to take my thoughts, take my opinions and put them into practice. You need to make sure when you’re joining a company, the relationship that you want, the expectation that you have is what you’re going to get. For me at Tesla, finance had a very different role than at most companies. It was a very operationally heavy role.
We spent a lot of our time being in the trenches with our business partners. I would say we actually spent about 80 percent of our time being externally facing out of finance versus into finance. Chris knew that. When he approached me, I was like, “I don’t want to be in a spreadsheet. You know this. I don’t want to just sit in at my desk, I want to be on the floor. I want to be helping with strategy that makes your financials better.”
He said, “That’s what I want, too.” From the beginning, we had the right foundation of that working relationship, where in my opinion, every decision that makes the company should have a financial viewpoint because ultimately, every decision has a financial impact. Now you can make a decision that maybe isn’t the best financially, but at least you had the facts before you made the decision, and that’s okay.
Sometimes, you need to spend money in the short-term to spend less money in the long-term, but you need to understand all those facts before you proceed. Chris’s openness and knowing the kind of relationship we had at Tesla and knowing what I was looking for for my next role and frankly, what I think he wanted as well, which was he wanted someone in the trenches with him, not, as it was often described, ivory tower finance. We did not want to be ivory tower finance. You want to understand the problem so you can help advise.
Can you give your own perspective on the state of the U.S. supply chains? As a side question, there’s been a trend to people wanting to go invest in and work more in the physical industries or the tangible industries. Can you give your spin on that and why that’s happening and what we can look for?
Yeah, I think my whole career has been more about bringing industries traditionally overseas onto US shores. I think it’s just where we’re moving, where the tariff structures that are coming up and just general consensus is that people want, and frankly, supply chain disruptions. During COVID, anything that came from overseas, I remember at one point I was looking at shipping rates, getting parks to the factories, things that used to take three weeks were taking two and a half months because shipping routes were just getting disrupted left and right.
Boats were getting stuck, customs were taking even longer. With that, the importance of moving more things on shore so you’re less dependent on overseas, I think has just become how do you shore up your business? How do you ensure that no matter what happens, your business can continue running? I think it’s become a bigger piece on everyone’s minds as they plan their companies now.
There’s not a lot you can do about economic uncertainty. It’s going to happen. The best thing you can do is make sure that you have proper cash funding your company. You have a plan how to get your company profitable and keep it profitable even in downturn situations. Make sure that you have enough pipeline that no matter what, you can keep going. Frankly, always in the back of your pocket, God forbid you had to squeeze a little bit, how would you do that? Where can you cut expenses in the near term to survive, go into hibernation mode, as one might call it.
You mentioned a plan and one of my favorite quotes, it’s applicable on business but it’s not a business quote. The legendary thinker, Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face.” A lot of times, the planning is cultural as much as anything. You need to have a mentally tough team. They’re not going to get down when things don’t go exactly according to the plan. As the leader of that team, you are the example for that.
Yeah, we always used to say the plan is the plan till the plan changes and it changes a lot.
I would imagine your industry, it certainly does. You also touched upon tariffs, which, CFOs, at least in the U.S., didn’t really think a lot about tariffs until the last year or so. Did tariffs impact your company and then what advice can you give to your fellow CFOs who are forced to deal with these issues?
Tariffs definitely have been a bigger part of my career in the past few years than it was at the beginning of my career. For Mytra right now, because we’re still in smaller volumes and we’re starting to build production volume now, but we’re still on the smaller side. We’re doing a lot of sourcing from within the U.S. and a little bit from overseas.
As we scale, it becomes more and more attractive to pull more parts from overseas or even from next door in Canada. Just get parts for cheaper. Obviously, the tariff structure changes that a lot. The biggest learning that we always had was make sure when you do your costing, you do fully landed cost. A part might be cheaper on from the bill of materials, but if you’re going to put a huge tariff on it and you have to ship it from overseas and shipping becomes more expensive, you might’ve just wiped out that at entire savings.
Doing full landed costs is always a super important thing and it’s something that I’m making sure at Mytra, when we do our current cost status, it’s fully landed cost and when we’re planning what the next cost should be, we’re using that as well. Definitely carrying that over. Obviously, you do downside planning. What if tariffs double? Does that change your answer? What if shipping becomes disruptive? How do you manage? These are all very important things because you have to make sure your business keeps moving. If you source everything from overseas and all of a sudden, the shipping goes from 30 days to 90 days, that can be very problematic.
I probably didn’t know it at the time, but I probably lived in like a golden age for being a CFO. I never dealt with rising interest rates, inflation tariffs, excess regulation, supply chain shortage. It was a pretty easy time to be a CFO, which I suppose is what enabled me to be one for nine years.
Everyone did a lot of learning really fast in COVID.
CFOs really stepped up. They had to, of course. I think during crises, people realize that the value that a world-class CFO can bring to an organization, both in terms of what they do but their cultural impact and people look to them for vision and leadership and transparency more than they do for any other C-Suite member typically.
I want to ask, just because your background is not super unconventional but economics, a lot of FP&A, some accounting, but I’m guessing accounting is probably not what you would consider your own greatest strength. You probably have some interesting KPIs that you like to rely on outside the world of gap. I’m wondering, can you share a few of them with me?
For most of my career, I was doing finance for manufacturing facilities. For us, it’s how do we get a preview of how we’re doing before you have the financials in. A lot of the KPIs we’d use, we would use labor content. That’s a huge one for us. It’s just the number of hours it takes to build whatever you’re building divided by the number that you built.
It was a great preview of how are you doing week over week. Financials close once a month, but you want to know on a daily basis. Are you doing better than yesterday or are you doing worse? That was always a great KPI for a manufacturing facility. Scrap was another great indicator. You could see it live as it was happening. For us, also headcount. Is your headcount growing and shrinking versus your output? Ultimately, that all feeds into labor content, but you also have to look outside of just the direct labor.
Are you becoming more efficient if your company’s just growing in a linear fashion? That’s not going to be great for financials. You don’t even have to run a financial to know that. That’s the other one that we’d often use. At Tesla, just because of the amount of investment it was CapEx, how much CapEx were we outlaying? Were we investing in the future? Were we more focused on maintaining the current lines? I think the market always put a lot of thought into how much CapEx Tesla was outlaying at any given time to really know what was coming down the pipe.
When I look at Mytra now, I’m starting to put in these KPIs. I was actually talking to our operations guys about starting to understand what is the labor content trajectory they expect us to have over time on building our bot and how do we improve that? How do we think about how do we improve the installation cost of putting down our racking systems? These are things you need to start thinking about when you’re doing your next architecture. You put these targets in now so that people can think about when they’re just, “How am I going to make the bot cheaper?” They’re not just thinking of the bill of material, but the whole cost that comes with it as well.
Something you mentioned earlier, I wanted to go back to, and you mentioned early, you want to understand where the money’s going to, but you’re an interesting position because you’re with this high-growth company, rapidly growing all the potential in the world to be a real difference maker. It’s the intersection of robotics, AI and logistics, which, from what I understand, are all high-investment, a lot of capital allocation issues. As the CFO, how do you juggle those things? You don’t want to be the person slowing down growth. On the other hand, you’re financial in nature so you’re perhaps a little bit more conservative about certain things than the rest of the suite. How do you juggle those things?
Hardware is expensive. It takes a lot of cash and I learned this throughout my career. It’s more about creating the mindset of where are you putting the cash. I get made fun of sometimes. I will clamp down on something like very small where I’m like, “Why are we spending $2,000 here when we can be spending $1,000 here?”
It’s not about saving that $1,000. It’s about saving the cash and have people understand that we will outlay cash, but we need to save as much cash as we can for building the hardware and everything else needs to have such a high bar to spend. You really just want to get it into people’s heads. This was really just ingrained in us at Tesla. It takes a lot of cash to launch a hardware business and every dollar you outlay is very valuable.
For me, it’s more about creating that mindset with everyone where it might be something small, but I’m picking at it because I want you to think about every dollar you spend and make sure do absolutely need to spend that dollar. If you make the argument to me and we do, I will 100 percent support it. That’s where I was saying that it’s important that you make sure that you’re investing in the future.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much a product costs if it doesn’t work. You have to get it to work first and then you start working on cost downs from there. It’s really creating that mindset with everyone, the value of every dollar the company has. My husband makes fun of me. He works in software. He said I would have a very hard time being a financial leader at a software company because they spend so much money on stuff that I would have the hardest by dealing with just because of my background. For me, hardware is expensive. Dollars are important. I think why Tesla survived is there was always a focus on preserving cash. That has to be true with every hardware company.
In most businesses, if you want to make money, you need to spend money, but it’s just a matter of how you do it and you have to be prudent in decisions around that. I want to chat a little about you because you’ve had a great run. I can only imagine high stress, really busy job being in one of the more visible startups that I’ve come across. Your outside life, do you have any ways that you integrate work-life balance as best you can? Do you have any interesting hobbies or maybe some travel that you’ve done?
I have a 15-month-old, so that forces the work-life balance. We have childcare and we have so much help with grandparents, but there’s a two-hour block each day between 5:00 and 7:00. That’s my time with my son and I go back online after he goes to bed. That definitely forces me to put things down. He doesn’t care that if someone’s Slacking me at 6:00. He wants attention at that time. That helps.
Outside of that my husband and I love to cook. I’m actually a pretty avid baker myself. When I had more time, I would do more of it. We also ski. We love to travel. We actually were in Japan. My husband is a big Dodgers fan. I’m a Giants fan, but we went to opening day in Japan for the Dodgers. We went skiing. We took our son and it was amazing.
I feel like I actually keep a pretty decent work-life balance because of my family and we cook almost every night, which is awesome. It’s also nice, having that balance. I have a great skill of being able to multitask, so it’s very possible that I can be hanging out, talking to people and digging through on a spreadsheet. I can be on a call while prepping dinner. I’m pretty good at it. It comes in handy a lot, especially when you have a little kid.
If I’m going to ask, Gabi, what’s your son’s name?
George.
Is that a family name?
Yeah, he’s actually named after his great-grandfather on my husband’s side.
How about that? I’ve noticed parents nowadays, their children’s name, if they’re not named after a relative, the name is frequently a name that basically didn’t really exist within my own childhood. I’m called Jack because there were like six Johns in my first-grade class.
My husband is John.
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it was like John, Michael, Robert and Steven. You just described 90 percent of my high school graduating class males. That’s great. It’s interesting. You’re a Giants fan and he’s a Dodgers fan?
Yeah, it’s a mixed marriage as my dad described it in his wedding speech.
Yeah, that’s tough. That’s like being a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan, I believe. There’s some genuine hostility between the fan base.
Yes. Luckily, we both like baseball enough. We really just enjoy going to games. We go to more Giants games than Dodgers for obvious reasons because we live in the Bay Area. There’s always the joke of what will George become. My husband has realized he’ll most likely become a Giants fan just because he lives in the Bay Area. It’s going to be hard.
Yeah, he’s going to be, but although you can’t really go wrong rooting for the Dodgers.
He has a much happier life than the Giants fans do right now, for sure.
They’ve got an ownership team that really is committed to winning and they’re probably going to be competitive.
Committed to investing to the future
Spoken truly like a CFO. I want to chat a little bit before we sign off. The CFO role has changed quite a bit since I was a CFO and it’s even changed. Also, you mentioned COVID, but looking ahead, breaking your crystal ball, how do you see the role of the CFO evolving over the next few years?
Understand the operations. Be in the day-to-day. Don’t just take the numbers. Understand what’s happening so you can better advise. I’m seeing it more and more where the CFOs are not just doing the accounting and the background. They are involved in the business. They’re part of the strategic decision-making team, and I think that’s critical.
I think I said earlier, every decision has a financial impact, whether it’s what wage you should pay your workers, where you source your materials from or where you should put your headquarters. All ultimately all of these will feed back into financials. Understanding the day-to-day difficulties, the problems that are happening, so you can better advise, I think, makes you a better CFO or financial leader in general.
I want to ask, you’ve accomplished a lot in your career, you’ve had some great experience, worked with some brilliant people but what’s some advice that you can give to the next generation of CFOs, those who are maybe on the cusp of getting their first CFO job or even people like you who are in their so-called rookie year of being a CFO?
Don’t move too far away from the work. Be willing to get your hands dirty. It’s very easy to form out work, but you should be able to do every piece of work that you’re having your team do. What I’m back to at a startup now is I’m managing the financial forecast. What was nice is I never got too far away from that in my career. It was always important to have my hands in the model to know what’s happening in the business so that at any point, I could go through it and understand what’s happening there.
Don’t be afraid to sometimes do. It’s annoying, but work has to get done. People appreciate if you’re like, “We need to go through all of these audits. We need to fix all of these purchase orders.” You’re doing it alongside them. I think it’s always important that you’re willing to do the work you’re having your team do and that you understand it.
That’s wonderful advice. Gabi, I want to thank you for your time. I know you’ve got a lot going on, so it’s great you were able to carve out some time to chat with us. With that, I’d just like to give you the final word.
I think being a CFO is an awesome opportunity. It’s something never to take lightly and make sure you’re always advising people well, but I think most importantly, you’ve got to make sure that you care about what the business that you’re supporting. I think that makes you better at what you do, at being passionate about it and wanting it to succeed.
