Especially in the age of AI, transformation is coming for every company. Rachita Sundar, CFO of the cloud-based experience management platform Qualtrics, has seen this firsthand, having worked for SaaS giants like HubSpot and Microsoft amid rapid change. “One of the lessons I took is that a company is always transforming,” she says. “As a CFO, what it means for you and what’s most important for you to understand is capital allocation. That makes or breaks the transformation.”
Sundar joins host Jack McCullough to share how finance leaders should approach capital in times of transformation, how to use technology and data analysis as a competitive advantage and her philosophies on talent recruitment. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
—
Listen to the podcast here
We have a great episode, and I’m glad you can join us. My guest is Rachita Sundar. Rachita is the CFO of Qualtrics, a Cloud-based experience management platform. Prior to joining Qualtrics, she served in leadership positions at HubSpot and Microsoft.
‐‐‐
Rachita, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me here. It’s such a privilege to be able to be a part of the show. I’ve tuned in to many of my peers before this. This is something I enjoy, so I appreciate you having me here.
I was thrilled to have the opportunity because we’ve known each other towards the tail end of your tenure at HubSpot. Having you as a guest is exciting. I’m not as familiar with Qualtrics. I know it’s a great company. Maybe you can share a little bit with our audience about the story there because it’s a great one.
Qualtrics is an experience management company. We want to make the human experience the best it can be. That’s what we focus on as a company. We have three products. One is on customer experience, one is on employee experience, as well as a strategy and research product. That helps us tie all of these together at the end of the day to help companies improve experiences for their customers, improve retention for themselves and improve their employee experience as a company.
A terrific mission. I look forward to returning to that, but first, I want to ask a little about you. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Delhi, India. That’s where I did my schooling. I did my graduation in India as well before I moved to the United States. I did my post-graduation here, and then my career has been here.
In undergrad, you studied engineering, I believe.
That’s right.
It might’ve been tough when you picked that at eighteen to think that you would be working for some hot tech companies in a financial leadership-type capacity. Do you think that background has served you well as a CFO?
I do believe it has served me well. If you followed my career, you’ll know that I didn’t set out to be a CFO or think that I would work in finance in my career. My career has been driven a lot around experiences I wanted to gain and what I found joy in doing. I followed my heart in that space. Being an engineer has helped me because the transferable skills of logical thinking, always taking the big picture and breaking down a problem in a way that’s solvable are skills that I’ve used in my finance career. I had to learn the financial concepts to complement that, but that transferable skill of how an engineer thinks about and solves problems is something that has helped me in my career.
That makes sense. We’ve had a number of former engineers as guests on the show. They’re CFOs, and they’re doing well. The main job of a CFO at this point is solving problems. There’s no one better at doing that. Even if you don’t have the time or the inclination to learn some accounting skills, that can be delegated. That’s something you can delegate, but you can’t delegate problem-solving skills. If you’re not good at that, you are going to struggle as a CFO in the modern world. It’s a little different. I’m a traditional CPA CFO. That’s fine. A lot of people do get that, but the world is so different that it can’t be just that type of background anymore.
You’re right. I’ve read an article that you published in Fortune about different types of CFOs. I feel like more and more companies want transformational, strategic, operational CFOs versus accounting-based, which you need. You need a strong accounting partner for a CFO to run the company well, but more and more companies are moving towards those types of CFOs because of what’s happening in the market.
That makes sense. I’m wondering if my boss over at Forbes heard you call it Fortune.
Sorry.
It’s not a big deal. I confused the two of them myself all the time until I worked for one of them. That was the CFO archetype article, I assume. It’s a funny story. I had to change that because I had the eight archetypes. I posted on LinkedIn and someone said, “What about the digital CFO?”
I saw that.
How could I have forgotten that one?
When I read it, I was mapping. I’m like, “Which one of the boxes do I check? How much is a digital versus strategic versus operational?” At the end of the day, I don’t think one archetype of CFO is going to be enough in this market. You have to be a bit of all, but then you have to figure out what is the leading one and what are the ones that supplement.
I wish you were my editor because more than a few people thought that I was suggesting that you were one and that was it type of stuff. It wasn’t what I was going for. I wasn’t very clear on it with hindsight. If anyone goes back to read it, it is your combination of the archetypes, not one in particular, mostly. That’s great. I’d love to talk about your career journey because it’s been quite interesting. You worked for this small company, which is near Seattle in Redmond, called Microsoft. I’m not sure exactly what they do. It sounds like it might be software from the name or something like that. Tell me how you ended up at Microsoft.
It’s a funny story. My background is in engineering. This was 2008. As an engineer, the company you dreamt of working for was Microsoft at that time. I always wanted to be a part of Microsoft. I was lucky enough to get an internship there, which converted into a full-time opportunity. That then converted into fourteen years of a very rewarding career with that company. That’s why I ended up there. Through business school, I reached out to alumni who were there and got an interview. I was targeting that company as I got out of business school.
It’s probably a good company to target. I’m going to go back. I often ask people what their first job was, and I mean maybe when they were a teenager or in college. What was the first job you ever did? Sometimes, this is the most fun part of the interview.
In college, I used to tutor young kids to make extra money on the side. I went to college in Bangalore, which is not where my parents are based. In the last two years, I was in a hostile type of environment. Extra money was always helpful at that age to spend. I used to tutor young kids to earn that extra money. That was my first job. I worked through business school, so I have had multiple different types of jobs since then.
That’s a very rewarding first job. It’s remarkable. For high-performing people, that was probably beginning to manifest itself in our late teens and early 20s type of years. That’s great. We’ll get to HubSpot, too, but returning to Microsoft, some of the smartest people in the world probably work at Microsoft, I would think. They’re known as world-class finance. What was that like working with some smart people? What are some lessons that you learned along the way that paved you for your current role with a high-flying tech company?
As I’ve gotten out of Microsoft, I’ve hired from multiple companies. That’s when I had the appreciation of how some of these companies, like Microsoft, PNG, GE and Unilever, which are the ones that I can call out, have built a great infrastructure for building good finance talent. I didn’t understand that while I was at Microsoft, but now that I’ve come out and hired from multiple different places, it reinforces that.
First of all, you work with the smartest people. The growth mindset culture is something that we cannot underestimate within Microsoft. It was instilled in us as we grew our careers on constantly learning, constantly expanding our scope, finding something new every two years and getting uncomfortable every two years.
The fact that Amy has a very strategic mindset to how she thinks about finance and how we partner with different parts of the business, those are things that are so different, in addition to the amount Microsoft invests in building talents, training and leadership programs. Those are things that differentiate when you think about talent that comes out of some of these companies versus companies that don’t have the infrastructure or the money to do that, or are scaling and can’t afford to do it at the same level that companies like Microsoft can.
It must have been quite an experience. There are Microsoft lifers. You probably could have been. You were there a little over a decade, as I recall. You made the leap to what is a great source of pride in the Boston, Massachusetts area, HubSpot. It is one of the few billion-dollar companies within my adult life. What was that decision like, other than the hot company? How did you end up there? What was that like, leaving the biggest of the big?
It was a hard decision. I will say that. I had a fantastic fourteen-and-a-half-year career. I’ll go back to what I said in the previous answer. The thing that Microsoft instilled in most people is the growth mindset, learning culture and new experiences. At the end of those fourteen and a half years, what I’d realized was that I had done all the roles within Microsoft that were interesting to me. I had supported engineering. I had supported sales. I had done OpEx. I had scaled a business like Azure and Office 365. Everything that I thought was exciting within the company, I had done that. That’s when I was like, “Is it time for me to look outside?” That’s when HubSpot reached out, and that opportunity came up.
Leaving was so hard because you’ve built a fourteen-and-a-half-year very successful career with great sponsors and mentors. You know that you’ll be successful in the company. I had internal offers, for the next level even, at Microsoft when I left. You were going to this new company where you didn’t know anybody. The SaaS world was new. It was less than $1 billion in revenue when I joined HubSpot.
You had to start from scratch. You had to build relationships. You were expanding your portfolio. You had to lead a remote team, which I had never done until then, because Microsoft was in person, and I moved in the middle of a pandemic. You had to build new relationships. It was very unsettling, honestly. It was a very big decision for me to make that leap, but it was such a great learning opportunity. That gave me the confidence to then make the leap to Qualtrics when I did. When people make those decisions, it remains uncomfortable for the first year, but you only grow through uncomfortable experiences.
That makes sense. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I interviewed for the HubSpot CFO job.
You did?
Yeah. They made the right choice with Kate. Kate
Kate is fantastic. They did make the right choice. She’s a fantastic CFO.
She and I were at Sloan together. She was either a year ahead of me or a year behind me. I forgot. I don’t think I’m dumb or anything like that, don’t get me wrong, but she has it. You can tell that in certain people. You’re like, “This person is smart, competent and whatnot.” She was the better choice. I might have bankrupted the company. Brian liked me and we got along well, so he gave me the courtesy of an interview for the role.
You’ve worked for some great people and had some great mentors along the way. You and I worked on a mentorship panel together, which was well-received by our members. I’m assuming within your career, you’re probably pretty coveted as a mentor, be it formally or informally. What’s your own philosophy on mentoring the next generation?
I believe a lot in mentoring the next generation. I’ve mentored throughout my career. It’s very interesting. One of the observations I’ve had throughout mentoring is that a lot of the time, the people I mentor are women who are trying to grow their careers, whereas I have had both female and male mentors in my life. It’s a very interesting observation. I go seek out people I can mentor who are of diverse genders, ethnicities and things like that, because we can all learn from each other’s experiences. That’s something that I value a lot and allot a lot of time for.
The other thing I’ll point out is that one of the things I’m very conscious of is that women are often over-mentored and unsponsored. I do spend a lot of time mentoring people, but at the same time, I also give a lot of thought to who the people are I want to sponsor and help grow their careers. I’ve had both mentors and sponsors. My career wouldn’t be where it is if I didn’t have a few sponsors who believed in me and helped me through my career.
That’s fantastic. It is interesting because in our profession, women have not yet quite achieved statistical parity, but it’s pretty close. When you look ten years out, CFOs will probably be roughly 50/50. In fact, on social media, you saw some of the posts. Forty-eight percent of the CFOs at our conference were female. That’s not some fluky operation. That has been trending in that direction for a while.
It’s great that you’re in a position to mentor that generation, but more importantly, that you can be a sponsor and an ally as well. Mentoring’s great. It has its limitations. It’s like, “I can teach you this. Now, let me work on your behalf within the company and make sure that someone besides me knows how brilliant you are.”
That is so important.
That’s great. Let’s chat about Qualtrics. You mentioned HubSpot gave you the confidence to later make the leap to Qualtrics. How’d that one come about? I don’t need to understand why you made it because it’s pretty obvious that it’s a great organization, but how’d the opportunity come about? What pushed you over the edge?
Qualtrics was looking for a CFO. They had interviewed a couple of my sponsors at Microsoft for that role, and one of them had suggested my name for this role. That’s how they reached out to me. The importance of building great relationships, maintaining great relationships and keeping that. That’s how it came to me.
I’ll go back to the principles that I’ve used to grow my career, learning and new experiences. This ticks the box for me for three things. One is, I always want to be working in a company in a growing market that’s a category creator. HubSpot is that. It’s the same with Qualtrics. Qualtrics is a category creator and leader in experience management. I was like, “That checks the box. You want to work for a company that’s a category leader and a creator.”
The second thing from a learning as well as experience perspective is moving from public to a private equity company. That is a pretty stark shift and pretty different in how you can be a CFO for a public company versus a private equity. That was also a great opportunity for me. The third thing that I always look for is people. How is my experience through the interview loop? What does the team look like? What are the values? Both HubSpot and Qualtrics, I feel like, checked the boxes for me before I made the move. Those three criteria checked the box for me. I thought it would be a great opportunity to go do that, especially in these years where every company is fighting for relevance and is trying to make the big shift into this AI world.
To prepare for this, I visited the website. It seems like it has a wonderful culture. There was one thing I saw on the website. It was pretty cool because I’d never seen it put this way. I don’t know if they’re your values, but they were transparent, all-in, customer-obsessed, scrappy, which I found to be the most interesting one, and then one team. Knowing you, that seems almost culturally like a good fit. It’s almost as if you could have designed it. I realize it probably predates you. Do they live true to that? How does that affect you on a day-to-day basis?
It is a lot of the values that I relate to. That was one of the pieces. As you think about how it relates day-to-day, I do see those values lived day-to-day. The question that we all are asking ourselves, and I also ask myself, is is this is a great set of values that has gotten us here? How do we need to evolve the culture to get us to the next level?
For example, this is true for a lot of scaling SaaS companies and Qualtrics, where scrappy has gotten us here through the time of hypergrowth in the market. How do we think about moving that scrappy to scalable? How do you think about evolving and building on top of that to get to a scalable, large company? That is how I think about it. The values are something I see lived every day within Qualtrics. That hasn’t disappointed me. I’ve been here almost 10 or 11 months. We constantly think about how we evolve the culture to set us up better for the future.
It’s interesting. Talent always seemed like they would never stop. People who want to attract talent, particularly young talent or Gen Z, and I’m sure you’ve worked with a bunch of them, they’re very impressive, but they do have a different way of doing things than my generation did. What’s your philosophy on recruiting talent? It’s hard. People aren’t entering the professions like they used to. There’s a shortage of accountants, generally CPAs, in particular, for when you need people with that technical expertise. Do you have any tools or tricks you can share with our audience? You might not want to because they might steal them and compete for you with talent.
Back to your question on mentorship, when I started leading a team with Gen Zs in it, I had a reverse mentor because I was like, “I need to understand how they work and how they think.” It was different from when I started my career and when you started your career. From a talent acquisition perspective, my strategy has always been to test for three things when you hire anybody. One is curiosity. Do they have curiosity? Second is bias for action. The third and last thing is a growth mindset.
What I’ve found is most of the skillsets that we use in finance, other than very niche skillsets like internal audit and accounting where you have to test for the skillsets, because it’s very important that you have to have the skills to do the job, is that if you have 80 percent of the skills, we can teach you the other 20 percent of the skills. That’s coachable and teachable.
The most important thing that’s hard to coach and teach is curiosity, bias for action and collaboration. If you have those three things, we can top up teaching the skills that you don’t have for you to be a productive member of the team. I always test for those things. I’ve been lucky to have people who have worked for me in the past who will always come back and work for me as I move through these companies.
I also believe that as we move companies, there should be a good mix of new talent and tenured talent that you bring in within the company in your leadership team. That’s for you to be able to balance understanding and rewarding the history the company has had that these tenured people bring with them, and the knowledge that they bring with them, with new ways of doing things that new people bring in. When you bring in these new people, they will know what good looks like at scale. That combination of retaining tenured talent while bringing in some new talent into my leadership team has been a strategy I’ve used at all these companies to be able to scale teams well.
That’s fantastic. I love what you said about intellectual curiosity. For me, I don’t care what the person’s credentials are. If they’re not intellectually curious and want to challenge themselves and learn new stuff every day, pretty much, that’s not someone that I want to work with. I don’t have all the answers, and probably never will, so I like people who are intellectually curious and are going to challenge my assumptions on things.
You, as a CFO, and I, as a president, albeit with a very small company, there are people that aren’t going to challenge you because of the title, not because of your personality. I assume that you’re probably pretty approachable with your team, but it might be, “She’s the CFO. She doesn’t want to hear from me.”
That’s a very important piece, too. As you hire these people, one of the things we continue to talk about and think about, and I do these round tables to do this with everybody on the team, is how you can build psychological safety within the team. To your point, as a CFO, you’re only as good as the team underneath you. It’s the same for every layer you have within the organization. How do you hire people who are smarter than you, are curious and are subject matter experts? How do you build a culture of psychological safety so that together, you get to the right answer, versus them looking to you for the right answer?
That’s great. I want to change it a little bit. I am fond of saying T and T, Talent and Technology. Moore’s laws are probably outdated in the role, but they certainly had their run. With technology, it seems like it’s impossible to keep pace with things. A good justification for a Gen Z mentor. How are you using technology, whether it be generative AI or other advanced technologies, not only in finance and accounting, but to fundamentally give your organization a competitive advantage?
We’re still experimenting with that is the honest answer, with finance use cases. There are a few use cases that have had an impact. We’re trying to see how we scale that up. There are use cases where our underlying infrastructure doesn’t allow us to make progress yet. I’ll give you examples of both. That’s something we’re working on.
Use cases that have helped us be more efficient as a finance organization are three. We implemented a use case in AP for duplicate invoice generation. We caught over $400,000 of duplicate invoices. That’s something that had to go through manual processes. Our people would’ve caught some or not caught some. That’s been one that’s been successful. That’s gotten us to be way more efficient.
The second one we are using is Cast AI and Workiva AI together in both how we close our books from an accounting perspective, but also for our prep for our lender call, which is the PE equivalent earnings call. Those are the other two that have helped us. The third thing that we’re working on as an organization is building an AI bot.
As a finance organization that also leads sales crediting and quota crediting, we get tons of questions around quota crediting and things like that. We are working on building a bot that would be able to field 80 percent of those questions. It is that my crediting team is working on more value-added work in setting the right policies, versus spending a ton of time on these.
Those are the four that have landed and have had an impact on us as an organization. The other couple that we have tried to land but are still working through our systems and tools is on the FP&A side, around forecasting and workforce planning. That is very dependent on how your workforce planning tool and HRIS system are integrated with your FP&A tools. We’re still working through the foundations of that. Then, in the treasury management system between our banks and how we manage our daily cash is another one we’re experimenting with. We haven’t had a ton of success with that yet.
You’ll get there. I have no doubt. It’s a fun time to be a CFO. It’s a little scary to keep up. I have a friend. I won’t mention his name in case you might know him. He has written what he thinks is a definitive book on generative AI for CFOs. He can’t get it published because every time he goes through the process of getting approval on the publication and then it being released, it’s no longer valid.
I was like, “Haven’t I read that book?”
He has given up the idea that he’ll ever be able to publish the book. The pace of change is too rapid. You’ve perhaps heard me ask this question before on the show, but I love it when non-CPA CFOs are the guests because they evaluate things differently. I’m curious. You weren’t trained in that way. To you, what are some of the most meaningful KPIs you use to measure business performance and know that your company is doing well or maybe not so well?
I’ll go back to your archetypes and talk about operational CFOs. I am a big proponent of tying operational metrics to financial metrics to outcome metrics. I think about metrics in three buckets. One is operational metrics, which are far more leading indicators than anything else. For example, as I think about sales execution, I’ll think about demand capacity execution. Are you generating the right amount of demand? Is the quality of demand good? Do you have the right selling capacity? Are you executing right in terms of close rates? Those are the primary leading indicators.
In the SaaS business, the financial leading indicators are net new ARR. What is the total ECV you’re driving? What does your downgrade trend look like? What does your churn trend look like? That is what will tell you what your revenue is going to be next year. What does your upgrade trend look like? What does customer behavior look like? That’s what that is.
EBITDA is a very important one that we track. We also track free cashflow, like cash position and all those things. Those are some of the leading indicators in finance billings. You have lagging indicators, which is what the industry generally looks at, which is revenue. Revenue is so far lagging that that’s something you think about as you report. My time is largely spent on the operational and financial leading indicator metrics because that’s what determines your revenue outcome.
That makes a whole lot of sense. I want to chat a little about your relationships at work. This is your first CFO job. In prior jobs, you’ve worked with some great leaders, but they were financial leaders. Kate is one of the best CFOs in the game. Your team at Microsoft speaks for itself.
Amy is the best.
Did you directly report to her?
I did. I was one removed from her.
You said it best for people who aren’t aware of Amy Hood. Perhaps Rachita was speaking metaphorically, but she’s certainly one of the half a dozen best CFOs in the country. She’s phenomenal. You’re reporting to the CEO for the first time. It’s not just any CEO. It’s Zig Serafin. I don’t want to say legendary, but a heck of a track record on that one. He is very well known and well respected. How’d you come as a first-time CFO and develop a relationship with someone like that?
In my prior role at HubSpot as the FP&A lead, I had to have a great relationship with Yamini, too, who’s a fantastic CEO as well. It’s not that you don’t have to build those relationships if you are one removed, but it is a different lens, honestly. I think of CFO, CEO and CHRO as a three-legged stool. Those three legs need to work very closely together and have a trusted relationship for us to be able to move the company in the right direction. That’s how I think about it.
It is interesting, to be honest. When you are directly working for a CEO and you’re making decisions together, the perspectives are very different. When you work for a CFO, you know the perspective is always going to be finance-led first, and it’s easier. Whereas when you work for a CEO, they’re wearing multiple hats, and the perspective will not always be finance-led.
It’s the same with the CHRO. They’re wearing a different hat than what you are wearing. That is why it’s important to have a very tight relationship where you’re able to push back, have all of the perspectives on the table and be able to advise and make decisions together. At the end of the day, a lot of the decisions are a CEO’s decision, but at the same time, you’d be doing the company a disservice if the three of you don’t have a relationship where you can debate a lot of these decisions.
That’s the thing. If the CEO says, “There’s not going to be a debate. This is my vision. I expect you to execute it well,” if you’re fortunate enough to work with a CEO who’s always right and those instincts are always spot on and perfect, that’s great, but that doesn’t happen very often in real life. It’s great that you had that partnership.
I love that you brought HR into it as well. It’s going through the evolution that CFOs have gone through in the last couple of years, where people thought of it as compliance and whatnot, versus the strategic asset that it is. It’s lagging finance. I don’t know that CPOs, CTOs, or whatever they might be quite have the level of respect that CFOs have earned, but it’s beginning to happen for sure. I can see a lot of the same symptoms or signs.
They help lead the workforce. Your biggest assets are your customers and your people. That’s it.
Without people, you don’t have much of a company. Even in a world of generative AI, it’s still the people. I want to chat. Qualtrics has gone through an interesting evolution. It was a survey company at one point. No, it’s a full-fledged experience management platform. From a CFO’s perspective on a transformation like that, what does it look like financially? You had a good thing when you were in the original model to begin with, right?
Yeah. I don’t think it’s like a transformation done type of a story. With any company, you are constantly transforming. With what’s happening with AI, you’re doing this. This is one of the things I learned at Microsoft. If you go back and look up the top 10 market cap companies over the years, there are very few that have consistently been in the top five market cap companies. Microsoft has been one of them.
If you go back and ask why it is, it’s because they have constantly transformed themself to a transforming market. Decades ago, they were there with Shell and all these oil companies, and then they were there with Apple and a bunch of companies. Now, it’s AI companies. If you look at that, a lot has changed around then, but they have consistently been there.
One of the lessons I took is that a company is always transforming. As a CFO, what it means for you and what’s most important for you to understand is capital allocation. That makes or breaks the transformation. The CHR was thinking about different things on cultural transformation and how you transform that in the right way.
How do you think about capital allocation frameworks that help you invest in the places that are in the future? How do you build a muscle of divestment within the company? That’s something we’ve struggled with at both companies I worked at, HubSpot, as well as Qualtrics. That’s because a lot of these SaaS companies went through hypergrowth and were able to transform in a way where it was a cash-rich environment. After 2022, these companies have seen a very constrained environment to be able to drive growth.
You have to think about divestment constantly as you think about investments and have frameworks like LTV to CAC and invest-divest in your engineering infrastructure. How much are you putting on forward-looking elevation versus KTLO, versus keeping the infrastructure, LTV to CAC on a go-to-market side, as well as overall company investment divestment framework? CFOs need to constantly evolve and think about frameworks for capital allocation to be able to drive this successfully.
That’s great. In Qualtrics, the value proposition is data. Correct me if I’m wrong. You certainly know better than I would. It’s incumbent upon the finance team to use data creatively, too. It’d be a little bit hypocritical if you weren’t on the cutting edge. How does finance in your organization use data to make better, smarter decisions?
This is what I’ve landed with my team and internally. I think of finance in a pyramid structure. The base of the pyramid, the foundation of finance, is getting our execution and jobs right. We are closing the book on time. There are no material variances. It is being able to pass audits, taxes and all of the execution pieces of it. There’s AP and AR, managing all of those things right. That’s to get a seat at the table. This means that you’re doing your job.
The second part of the pillar that I talk about is stakeholder management. As a CFO in a finance organization, you have internal stakeholders, which are your business partners, and then you have external stakeholders, which are your analysts, lenders and all these people. Your CEO is a stakeholder. Your team is a stakeholder. How do you map out the stakeholders, and how do you think about a strategy of managing them?
The last part of the pillar, and the most value-added part of the pillar, is strategic insights. That’s where the data piece and how you think about strategic insights come into play. I truly think that the FP&A function, as well as our IR treasury function, has to be at the leading edge. How do you take business performance, operational metrics and forward-looking metrics, stitch that data together, and drive actionable insights in collaboration with the business to change the business?
That’s what we’ve been working on here in building muscle within Qualtrics, honestly. We are stitching a lot of these insights together and teaching that skill to our finance organization on, “You’re not a reporting organization. You’re an insights and action organization. How do you build insights that you can land with the business, and how do you work with them to remediate the problem that you’ve found?”
That’s wonderful. The tagline to this show is CFOs No Longer Record History. They Make History.
That’s right.
That’s what you described. I do tell controllers this, particularly if they’re coming through the traditional controllership track and want to be a CFO. I show them, “There are a lot of people with your skillset. They have the vision and the ability to not just state facts, but tell the story behind the facts and what they mean. They make the music sing, so to speak.” That’s great. I want to change gears a little bit. You do something which I think is very wonderful and special from a community service perspective with The Sophia Way. I’d love to ask a little bit about how you got involved. Maybe tell the audience a little bit about that organization because it’s wonderful.
That’s a fantastic question. Thank you very much. Women’s causes have been something that’s been close to my heart forever in terms of how we uplift other women within the organization, within the community, or anywhere that we are. Growing up in Delhi and India, there wasn’t much expected of women. We were taught to be seen, not heard. There wasn’t a ton expected. I was very lucky to grow up in a family where they believed in educating women. They believed in making sure that women are independent of themselves. In fact, my mom was the first one in my dad’s family to ever work. It was something that was close to my heart and that I’ve continued to work on.
I’ve been associated with women’s initiatives for a pretty long time. I used to teach yoga. At that time, I used to volunteer and teach. Between my job and my two kids, I wish I had more time to volunteer with them, but the way I support them is monetarily. I always think, “How can I support organizations like this either with time, monetarily, or in terms of mentoring and bringing women up?” The Sophia Way is a women’s shelter that’s in Seattle. They honestly help women who are transitioning from bad circumstances to get back on their feet. It’s a wonderful organization. That’s the organization that we monetarily support as a couple.
That’s fantastic. That leads me to a question. You have a lot going on, running this great company and doing this volunteer work. Work-life balance is always challenging. Do you have any secrets or advice that you can give to people to, if not have it all, at least have most of it?
I wish. If somebody else had advice or a magic pill for this, I would love to hear that. It’s a constant balance every day that you have to strike. As a mom, as somebody that’s a part of the community, as well as somebody that works in an organization or leads an organization, one of the things I’ve started to do over the last couple of years, honestly, is five things that, in the grand scheme of life, are important to me.
First is the work I do. Second is my children and family. Third is the community that we’re in and support. Fourth is health. Fifth is overall how I think about learning, what I am learning, and how I am growing. Those are the five things. One of the things I’ve started to do is every year in January, I’ll sit down and say, “I can probably do two of these things very well. Two that I can dabble, do a little bit, and find a way, and one that I have to not do.”
As my kids got into high school and as they were in middle school, kids were always on that list. They are going to be until they graduate high school. That’s a constant. You then think about, “Is it work? Are you going to spend more time giving back to the community? Is it friends?” You then prioritize and say, “What are you going to spend most of your time on in a week? What is it that falls? How do you support it differently?”
That’s why earlier, I said I used to spend time at The Sophia Way. Now I support them monetarily because I can’t spend as much time as I used to in the past. I do this prioritization every year. I then try to align the time I spend with the things I said are the top 2 that I want to do extremely well, and the next 2 that I want to spend some time on. Invariably, something falls off the grid. There were years when I didn’t work out for two years, unfortunately, because there wasn’t time.
I’m someone who supposedly loves to work out, and I’ll go months at a time without doing it. We regret it, but sometimes, you’ve got to do those things. May I ask how old your children are?
They’re fourteen. I have fourteen-year-old twins. They’re freshmen in high school, so it’s a big year for us.
In four years, you’ve got another big year. That’s fantastic. I’d like to get the perspective. It’s fair to say the CFO has changed in ways that not a lot of people envisioned, but it’s continuing to grow. I’m curious. Where do you see financial leadership going over the next several years?
I feel like the CEO almost needs to wear a COO hat. You need to understand product, prioritization within product, and life cycles there. You need to understand operations. You need to understand go-to-market extremely well to be able to make the decisions that you need to make in capital allocation. That goes back to what we talked about is the most important thing a CFO can do for the company. I feel like that’s a skillset where traditional CFOs, honestly, have a hard time expanding into. In the future, if you want to be a successful CFO, that’s a skillset that people need to start building and understanding so you can connect the dots across all of these.
That makes sense. You anticipated my next question. You built on it a little bit. I always like to get the perspective of high-performing CFOs like yourself. What are your suggestions and advice for the next generation of CFOs? What are the things they should be thinking of, skills they should be developing, or whatever it is?
First, I’ll go back to what I said. Curiosity and learning about not only finance, but operations and product. Learn something that’s beyond that. Wearing that COO and CEO hat to be able to make your decisions is going to be super critical. The second most important thing is that you are only as good as your team. Who do you surround yourself with? Who do you hire? How do you build an organization with psychological safety?
As a CFO, you’re accountable for a lot of decisions. You sign a lot of documents. You’re a director at the company. The only way you can get comfortable is when you build psychological safety, and people on your team can push back and tell you the truth. How do you build a high-performing team and drive psychological safety within that?
The third thing is, it’s pretty lonely when you’re a CFO and making decisions. How do you build a community around you? I think your community is highly helpful. I have a number of mentors who have gone on to become CFOs, whom you can call and be like, “I’m trying to make this decision. Does that make sense or not?” Those are the three biggest things I would say future CFOs should think about.
That’s great. I want to thank you for your time. I know you’re busy. I appreciate you carving out an hour or so to join us. I know my audience is going to love what you have to say. I want to give you the final word to wrap this up.
Thank you for building this community. The community helps us stay up with the evolving market and the decisions that we’re making. Thank you to the audience for giving me this opportunity.
