Strong leadership shapes the future of finance, and Lauren Dillard, CFO of LiveRamp, knows exactly what it takes.
In this conversation with Jack McCullough, she shares how her diverse career—working in various corporate functions, from investor relations to marketing—has influenced her approach to financial strategy and team building. Besides discussing how the CFO’s role goes beyond the numbers, Lauren reveals the key to fostering accountability, adapting to change and making bold career moves.
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We have an awesome guest. Those who read regularly know that I don’t say that every single time. I mean it this time. My guest is Lauren Dillard. Lauren is the CFO of LiveRamp. LiveRamp is a data connectivity platform enabling secure data sharing for targeted marketing and analytics across channels. Lauren, welcome to the show.
Jack, thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be part of this wonderful show.
We’re excited to have you. How do I do on my one-sentence description of LiveRamp?
You did okay. If I were to describe LiveRamp in one sentence, I would talk about LiveRamp as providing data collaboration software that helps B2C brands and their partners leverage data securely to power and ultimately optimize personalized advertising and marketing. I recognize that as a mouthful, and LiveRamp is not a consumer-facing brand, so it is not a household name yet, but all our customers are. We have the privilege at LiveRamp of working with some of the world’s biggest and most innovative companies.
I’ve noticed you have a customer list that people would kill for. Congratulations on that. In preparing for this, I went to ChatGPT and asked them to give me a one-sentence description of your company. If I got it wrong, don’t blame me. Blame those smart people at OpenAI. No, that’s great. We’ll come back to LiveRamp because it’s a fantastic story, Lauren. Before that, I’d like to chat about you briefly. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in the Bay Area, east of San Francisco, by about 40 miles, in a small town called Lafayette. I grew up in a family of four kids. I was the oldest of four. I never ventured too far away from the Bay Area. I went to college in the South Bay, lived there for several years, and then returned to San Francisco.
I did similar things with Boston. I grew up in the Boston suburbs, and I never really left. I can certainly relate to that. It’s a great part of the country where I live. You were the oldest of five, you said?
Oldest of four.
I’m sorry, my bad. I will talk about that because I know you have, by modern standards, a big family now as well. I’m curious. You made a great career decision when you were seventeen or however old you were in college by studying business, but what was it about business and maybe finance and accounting that you thought, “This might be a great way to make a living?”
I grew up in a family of accountants. My father was an accountant. He worked at Deloitte & Touche for his entire career. He had a 40-year career there, doing many different things, from running their audit practice in his later years to running their corporate development strategy function. His father, my granddad, was also an accountant. It was just something I was familiar with. I graduated college in ’08. Job security was undoubtedly at the top of my mind. Accounting was a good launchpad for anything I wanted to do in finance later.
It’s interesting how many people I’ve interviewed have parents in the profession before. What was your first job ever? I don’t mean your first professional job, but maybe as a teenager.
My first job ever was as a basketball referee. My parents were super involved in our school and our school’s athletic program growing up. They were athletic directors and ran the refereeing program for CYO basketball. I was 13 or 14, thrown in a referee jersey, given a whistle, and told to pitch where I could. It was great. I made $15 or $16 per game, which was a big deal then. It kept me close to basketball, a sport I loved and played growing up.
That was nice, too. My first payroll job, like an actual job, was as a seasonal worker for the Gap when I was home for the holidays during my first year of college. Talk about the low person on the totem pole. I was the one in at 4:00 AM. I remember this: my dad would drive me in and drop me off on his way to work. I did all the stocking and organizing before the store opened at 10:00 AM. Definitely a lesson in work ethic.
Those jobs teach you work ethic and humility and all those other things. They also teach you to be kind to junior employees when you’re the senior employee. I didn’t work at the GAP but had similar retail and fast food jobs. They just give me a lot of empathy to this day. You mentioned basketball. Did you play in high school, or did you play in college as well?
I played competitively throughout high school and was recruited to play in college. For a couple of reasons outside my control, I didn’t end up having a full college career. Again, my dad was both an accountant and a basketball player; so was his father. We grew up in a household of athletes and competitors, and sports were front and center. It’s how I spent my weekends and time after school, and some of my favorite memories growing up revolved around sports.
Were your siblings athletic as well?
They were. My sister, who is closest in age to me, is fifteen months younger. My dad coached our basketball teams through the eighth grade, and instead of coaching, too, he always had my sister play on our team. I got to play with her for almost my entire basketball career because she and I played on the same team in high school.
That’s pretty cool. I was a decent enough athlete, nothing special, but my younger sister was an outstanding athlete, and to this day, and we’re 60 and 55, and she’s going to kill me if she hears this. I say the reason she was a good athlete was because I was five years older than her, so I was a lot better than her [at the time]. I just wouldn’t let her win. I just would not let her be. It wasn’t being mean. I just didn’t see the point of letting her win, and because of that, by the time she got to high school, she was like an animal.
Good, I can imagine.
She was playing against a guy five years older than her. By the way, my friends didn’t let her win either. By the time we were 22, 23, and she was 18, it might’ve been flipped a little bit, whether or not she would let me win. She was good enough to play in college, and I was good enough to not play and to almost play in high school. There’s a difference.
You got caught up.
Career Journey
She doesn’t rub it in, at least not around me. Anyway, so that’s great, Lauren. You had a great experience in college, studied accounting, and had a great program. Tell us a little bit about your career journey after that point.
I love this question, mainly because my path to CFO is somewhat unusual and not the path that I imagine many of the folks you speak to take. I graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in accounting. I spent a couple of years in public accounting at Ernst and Young right after school. I earned my CPA and then transitioned into a corporate finance position at a startup at the time in the clean tech, clean networking space called Silver Spring Networks.
I joined as an entry-level financial analyst. I was a low person on the totem pole, but I was fortunate to work with an incredible group of finance professionals. I think about the folks who led the finance function at that time, and almost every single one of them is now a sitting CFO. I got to work with a great group. Given the stage of the company at the time, it was a crash course in preparing for an IPO and public company readiness.
In doing all that, I got to work closely with the company’s head of investor relations at the time, Tricia Gugler. I loved the work. For me, it was this wonderful marriage of finance and accounting, storytelling, communications, marketing and relationship building. I knew pretty quickly that it was something I wanted to spend more time doing. I left Silver Spring. I spent a couple of years at a strategic communications advisory firm in its investor relations practice before going to rejoin some of my previous Silver Spring finance team at a company called Axiom.
Axciom is LiveRamp’s predecessor. LiveRamp spun out of Acxiom about five years ago. I’ve spent the last decade-plus here. While I initially joined to run investor relations, I’ve worn many hats during my tenure. From that standpoint, I would almost describe my role here as being a bit of a utility player, which, in hindsight, probably tracks pretty closely with my upbringing and background. I’d mentioned being a competitive athlete growing up, playing basketball, and even in my basketball days, I probably would have been described as a utility player.
I was never tall enough to play center, but I could play any other guard or forward position depending on the need or the opponent. Anything I could do to help the team win, I jumped at. The same has been true at LiveRamp. During my time here, there have been specific roles that needed to be filled. Because of my interests, curiosity, and desire to be a team player, I’ve jumped at and taken advantage of those opportunities. They were not the most obvious ones based on my skill set at the time.
I’ve run IR, FP&A, and field operations during my time here. I spent three years as our chief communications officer, overseeing all elements of our communications strategy and program, from public relations to analyst relations to community relations to internal communications. I spent a brief stint of less than a year as our chief marketing officer while we were recruiting to fill the role permanently. While unconventional, I would not have traded these opportunities for anything.
The communications work helped me hone my storytelling and learn to influence through communication. I think it helps me today to better communicate with our shareholders, and marketing reinforced my desire to be a customer-focused, customer-centric leader. This is something that I’ve tried to extend into how I manage our finance teams. All of my experiences have allowed me to have a much greater impact on the organization, and I think have allowed me to support the organization in a CFO capacity better. I’ve been in my current role for about a year and a half.
It’s by the way. Thanks a lot. You took my next three questions. I was interested in your point about having an unconventional career path. I love the fact that you were the first one to bring up a sports metaphor of a utility player because I often get criticized— I cannot go three minutes without making a Boston sports reference. You beat me to the sports thing. I was curious because we’ve probably had about 40 or 50 guests, and you’re the first person who ever came from a marketing role. I know it wasn’t your career thing, but you did it for nearly a year if I remember correctly. I’m guessing it was meant to be several weeks and ended up being months or something.
That’s exactly right.
I am curious. You touched on this a little bit, but how did something like that make you a better financial person? Do you think having better interaction with the product, the customers and the sales team is a good thing for a CFO to expose himself or herself to?
A CFO must expose themselves to that. For me, I’ve always been somebody who has a customer-centric approach. I think this is something that, in a marketing seat, I had to spend a lot of time on. Having run IR, the product, in great detail, you understand the customer challenges it solves. In a marketing role, you have to put yourself in the mind of your customers.
That experience was invaluable to me. I think it has shaped how, sitting here, finance can influence some of the go-to-market motions that support customer retention or sales compensation. How we motivate our sellers influences our ability better to service our sellers through our services and support functions. I picked up many things in that marketing seat, and the communications role has been quite transferable to what I do now.
That’s interesting because I’m the generation ahead of you. I became a CFO for the first time because I was an excellent controller; it was just a natural progression. By the way, the farm team for the CFO is still largely controllers. The days of straight accounting leading to being an elite CFO are probably done. I don’t necessarily tell people to take a year-long sales and marketing rotation. Although if they can, that’s fantastic. A lot of times, people are looking for mentors.
I’m like, “Why don’t you get a VP of sales or VP of marketing as your mentor?” A friend of mine taught me that. She was with Gillette at the time. It’s now part of Procter & Gamble. Her mentor was, he ran the sales for one of their divisions. She thought of finance and accounting, which she probably knew about. She’s like, “No, I want to get a broader skill set. I want to bring the customer focus to this.” In many ways, you made the same decision.
CEO Relationship
I want to chat a little bit about, and you have the background, but your relationship with Scott Howe, the CEO of LiveRamp. That’s always such a fascinating, thing how a CEO and a CFO work together. I’ve even heard many people lately use the expression deputy CEO to describe a CFO. What is that dynamic like?
I like the framing of deputy CEO because CFOs are increasingly being asked to play a more strategic role. Jack, this is, I think, something you talk a lot about with your guests. I’ve worked with Scott for eleven years. When I stepped into the role, he and I had a strong relationship.
I remember he challenged me in those first few quarters. He said, “Obviously, maintaining and stewarding the financial health of our organization is a top priority, but I want finance and I want you specifically to drive a ton of accountability across our organization and not just financial accountability, but accountability for the things we know we need to do to be successful as a business.”
That changed how our team operated and how he and I interacted. That’s been interesting and pushes me to play more of a COO role. Back to your point about being a deputy CEO, he’s placed a lot of trust in me and our finance function to play a role outside the typical finance swim lane.
No, that’s fantastic. It makes a lot of sense that CFOs would become CEOs. Obviously, it’s not right in every circumstance, but every time a CFO becomes a CEO and crushes it, it’s just good news for our entire profession. That’s why my idol is Corie Barry, the CEO of Best Buy. She was the CFO. She was like 42 or something when she got the job, and it was a Fortune 100 company. I put aside my desire to hate and be jealous of her to do her well.
When we spoke, one thing that came to me was the pride you take in the team around you. It is not only the finance and accounting team but across the entire enterprise. I want to explore your philosophy on building a team and creating a high-performance culture.
I was lucky. When I stepped into the CFO role, I stepped into a strong team that had been working with each other for a long time. As I mentioned, I’ve been here a decade. Our controller, chief accounting officer, 25 years. Our head of internal audit, 40. I’ve worked with our head of tax at two companies for nearly fifteen years. It’s a group that has worked together for a while and has a solid operating rhythm. That said, we’ve made a few recent hires that have also been successful so far.
Somebody once said that in any interview setting, you’re interviewing for skills, abilities, values or some combination of the three. When I’m interviewing someone for a role on my team, I think the skills and abilities have probably largely been vetted. I’m focused on screening for values. I think I’ve always tried to recruit and hire people with a very strong work ethic with the right problem-solving approach, the ability to move quickly to solve a problem. At a former company in Silver Spring, we talked about this as a “kill the snake” mentality.
I never heard that one. What does that mean?
I’ll explain it because I think I’ve loved it and have used it ever since. You’re walking down a path, you see a snake. You can stare at the snake, you can organize a lot of meetings to talk about what type of snake it might be and how you’d go about killing it, or you take a shovel, and you kill the snake. It’s this mentality of acting with urgency and jumping on problems to solve them quickly, and I place a lot of value on that among the folks who work on my team.
We have a group of very talented people, but a group who come to work believing that they’re only successful, that their functions are only successful, if the business is successful. I think back even to my basketball days, and the best teams I played on were teams in which every person on that team was focused on the only stat that mattered the next day, which was whether or not our team won or lost.
Finally, from an interview perspective, my former boss coined the dinner test that he said, “You’re going to be in roles where you’re working long hours in a war room setting with your team.” Are they people that you want to go and have dinner with after that? Do you enjoy the people that you’re around and working with? The dinner test is often the last piece of a screen in an interview process. I am fortunate to have created a team who have shared these values and, above all else, care deeply about the success of LiveRamp.
Lauren, it is such a privilege to be on the receiving end of your narrative. You’re so well-spoken. I can tell that you really care, and you’re really passionate, and you bring so much to the table, and you have such an amazing, beautiful demeanor. I would imagine your team feels that they are absolutely so lucky and privileged to be at the end of your leadership. Thank you so much. I loved the snake story. That was fantastic. I am going to take that for my own and relay that to the world and my network.
Please, yeah. Steal away. Thank you again for the opportunity.
That wraps up this episode of the show. A huge thank you to our sponsors, Plantiful and the Leadership Council, for their amazing support. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and visit us at RockStarCFOs.com. Until next time, rock on.
