Advanced Computing Chips are the engines of our digital world, and in this episode, we go behind the scenes with a true industry leader.
Host Jack McCullough welcomes Shelagh Glaser, CFO of Synopsys, a company at the forefront of this technological revolution. This conversation dives into the human side of innovation: How do you empower the brilliant minds designing these complex chips? What’s the vision driving the future of computing? Shelagh offers a glimpse into the mission-critical work that shapes our world, one chip at a time.
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You can follow us online at RockstarCFOs.com. I have a phenomenal guest. I am excited. Shelagh Glaser is the CFO of Synopsys. Synopsys delivers trusted and comprehensive silicon system design solutions from electronic design automation to silicon IP and system verification and validation.
Shelagh, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here with you.
Your company’s pretty well-known, but maybe the mission isn’t all that well-known with my audience. Maybe you could fill in the blanks a little bit about Synopsys’s mission.
We build software and solutions for customers to make advanced computing chips. If you think about companies like Nvidia or any of the hyperscalers, they’re all building advanced compute chips. We build the software that allows them to build those advanced compute chips. We’re mission-critical for our customers. Our top customer is the person who runs R&D inside your company. We’re trying to make that person’s super-complicated job much easier so they can build great solutions for their customers.
That’s fantastic. We’re going to get into some of the challenges and your philosophy on leading the team. Before that, I want to get a little bit about your own background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. I am originally from the Midwest.
You studied economics out of the gate. I’m curious. Other than it being a difficult major, what was attractive to the young Shelagh about economics? Why did you study that, and how does it support you in your role?
I went to the University of Michigan. That was another stay in the Midwest, not appreciating that it was warmer than other places besides Ohio and Michigan. I didn’t get that memo. I went to school and started off as a chemistry major. I was going to be a doctor because my dad’s a doctor and both my brothers are doctors. I assumed people went to school to become doctors.
I realized at some point in my sophomore year that I didn’t want to be a doctor, but I wasn’t sure what people do if they’re not doctors, so I started a survey of classes. I took an economics class, and I was hooked on it because it’s such an interesting perspective in terms of what motivates things to happen or keeps things to happen and how is the view of what is going to happen economically shapes decisions, processes, and policies. I got hooked on it.
How I ended up in economics was because I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, so the next obvious choice was to look around. The way I use economics, certainly as we’re working through the company, is how do we think about what’s going to happen with interest rates? How do we think about what’s going to happen with demand and supply across the globe? To me, it’s an underpinning of everything in business.
It makes sense. Since you apparently have a scientific mind, economics is probably the closest business discipline to science, I would think, with the mathematical models that are involved and some other things. In my day job for the CFO Leadership Council, most of our members are from accounting and finance educationally. Economics is the one area that perhaps they don’t know as well as some others, but whenever we do an economics program, it’s always a sellout. Understanding economics is so crucial to the modern CFO.
It’s such an interconnected world. When I went to college, it was much less global than it is now, but you think about things happening in one part of the world quickly infiltrating the other part of the world. It’s a good underpinning.
You mentioned everyone in your family is a doctor. Do you have brothers and sisters? Did they indeed go on to become doctors?
Yes. I was one of the people who went into business. My dad has passed away, but he used to say “business.” They were never too sure what I was doing or what that meant. I was at Intel, and I ran corporate planning. One of our responsibilities was to do the annual report. This is in the old days when you had a physical annual report to show to everybody, like, “Look what I did,” versus you have a lot to show for yourself if you’re a doctor and the well-care of patients. It’s hard as a finance professional. What’s the physical manifestation of what we do? It was exciting when I had my annual report to show everybody.
I never worked for a public company, but I was always excited when there was something I could share. You were the black sheep in a family of doctors. You continued on. You got an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. That’s another tool that must serve you extraordinarily well as a chief financial officer.
I was extremely interested in Carnegie Mellon because it had a lot of quantitative. That’s one of the areas that it excels in. The other reason I was interested is that I was living in California at the time, and the location back in Pittsburgh was interesting to me because there is so much going on in that area of the country.
I went back to Carnegie Mellon and got an MBA. I had lots of good experiences because the way Carnegie Mellon’s program is, it has mini-semesters. You have rapid semesters, and you can go through a lot of coursework, which is exciting if you think about it. That’s one of the things that’s always interested me. The more you can learn, the more you open your aperture about how you approach problems. Most complex problems require you to think very broadly about what the solutions might be. That’s what I loved about Carnegie Mellon. It’s an enormous amount of work that you could avail yourself of because they had this many semesters.
I would think an MBA is such a critical credential. I don’t want to overdramatize it, but I almost said watershed moment. That’s probably a good definition of overly dramatic. A few years ago, for the first time, there were more CFOs in the Fortune 5000 who held MBAs than who hold CPAs. Both are valid, but it shows how the role of the CFO is evolving. It’s no longer the corporate historian with a little bit of a financial bend. It’s the other way around. It’s the corporate strategist who understands finance and accounting.
There was a very interesting survey course when I was in school. It was called Game, where you ran a company. Everybody ran a company. I was one of the CEOs of that computer simulation. You can imagine it goes wrong, which is great because you learn when things go wrong. How do you bring your team back together? I very much think of the CFO as how do you integrate all those different functions? How do you integrate all those different points of view into a combined financial strategy to go forward?
That holistic education is so important because you don’t know where the most critical thing is in your company. People will tell you, “This is the most critical thing,” but you may find out at some other place where there’s some critical shortage or some critical issue. You have to be able to do that full survey, and you have to be able to bring that broader group of executives together.
I want to explore your career a little bit. You worked for this little company called Intel. It doesn’t look like you were there very long. You couldn’t even make it three full decades. Were you there for 29 years?
I was there for 29 years. I had gone to grad school at Carnegie Mellon, so I was in Pittsburgh. Before I had gone there, I lived in the Bay Area. When I got connected with Intel, I was like, “Do I want to go back to the Bay Area, yes or no?” I went to an interview with Intel, and it was so perfect. The company was pretty small at the time. It was ‘92. We would’ve been about 20,000 people. It was maybe about $8 billion in revenue. Andy Grove was the CEO. It was a company where people were starting to understand what it was, what a computer chip was, and what it meant to their lives.
I came out for the interview, and honestly, I was skeptical that I would be interested in this. By the end of the interview, I was like, “I am ready to sign up. I’m ready to be a part of this company,” because there was so much innovation going on and so many unknowns. It was exciting to me. That’s how Intel was my whole career. Each time I felt like, “There’s something better outside,” then I rotated to a new area of the company, and I got challenged in a new way. I had to learn new skills. I had to be able to have an impact in a different situation. It was constant innovation.
I loved the culture that Andy Grove had created. He had written a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. It was the idea that you have to disrupt yourself because if you don’t disrupt yourself, somebody else is looking to take your customers and looking to take your business. That constant challenging environment was spectacular. I couldn’t ever run out of things to do or run out of things to learn. It took me 29 years to find the next thing that I wanted to go toward.
You mentioned Andy. When I think of the iconic CEOs in American history, the oldest one I can think of is Henry Ford, but then there’s Jack Welch. Certainly, you’ve got to throw Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in there. I put Andy right in that category. He is legendary, it’s fair to say. I’m assuming you probably knew him a little bit.
When I was in the corporate planning role, which was the corporate finance role, I got to present to him and Gordon Moore, who was the author of Moore’s Law, which is the drumbeat of the entire semiconductor industry. I remember I worked for the gentleman who was the CFO at the time. His name was Andy Bryant. I was practicing presenting to these industry luminaries.
I was so nervous to present to them. Andy Grove had been Time magazine’s Person of the Year. He’s a tremendous person. Andy, the CFO, says to me, “They’re just people.” I’m like, “That isn’t even slightly true. They’re people who invented an industry. They’re not just people. They’re these luminaries.” He taught me the idea that I had to think about what was important to them and how to make sure of that when I’m presenting, I’m presenting in a way that’s going to make sense to them. That is something I think about all the time.
We used to have these conversations about, “How do you get an A in this presentation?” Sometimes, you might define it as, “This is what I want to tell people,” but that’s very different from, “Is that the right way to frame it for that individual? With the way that that individual parses information, is it geared towards some way they think about it, or is it the way you want to do it?” That was an important learning because both of them were incredible technologists and incredible leaders. The way they were thinking about things was at a much higher level than sometimes I was, so I had to focus on putting myself at the right altitude to engage with them.
That makes sense. Everyone’s only people, but it doesn’t mean a reasonable person won’t be intimidated by them.
We were presenting, and then the two of them were debating whether they fundamentally believed in the physics of matter and how matter conducted itself. I thought to myself, “Wow.” To be a fly on the wall with these two people talking about that was pretty tremendous.
That makes sense. You then went to a slightly different-sized company, but still a great company. You went to Zendesk after Intel. Did you know Elena Gomez?
Yes, I know Elena. She’s tremendous. I was ready to be a CFO, and sometimes, that position’s not available at the place that you’re at. You have to go on your journey. At that point, so much of the value was coming from software, and so much of the way that software was getting written was so different in the cloud and the SaaS model. At Intel, it has a lot of software, but the value comes from hardware. Understanding that part of the business and that part of the value chain was important. Elena was a great supporter in helping me ramp. We still are in connection to this day. She’s a tremendous leader.
She keynoted our conference. I got to know her a little bit through that. She was a huge hit with the audience. She was great to work with, too. It’s been quite a success story. She’s gone on to do some great things with one of the iconic local companies. Other than being the dominant chipmaker, Intel is known for its culture. It’s a continuous learning type of environment. I’m curious. Who might have been some key mentors you met along the way during your journey at Intel and Zendesk, too, if you’d like?
One of my key mentors was the gentleman who was the CFO and then became the chief administrative officer, Andy Bryant. Andy Grove built a culture where the paranoid would survive. It’s this idea of constructive confrontation where you’re confronting the problem, not the person, but whatever the issue is. You’re asking, “What isn’t working? How do we get that on the table so we can dissect it and we can solve it?” without assigning blame to people because sometimes, people get defensive. We get the problem on the table and take the problem down.
One of the things that was always so important to me was working for Andy Bryant, who was the CFO and then became the chief administrative officer. He used to always ask me this question, “What would you do if you were king?” It moves you from a spectator to having responsibility. That was one of the cultural aspects of Intel, assumed responsibility.
hen you have a problem, it’s your problem. No matter what the problem is, you’ve found the problem. You own it. You might not be the right person to solve the problem. Maybe somebody else should solve the problem, but it’s up to you to get that problem handed off to the right person, or it’s up to you to get the people together.
His, “What would you do if you were king?” moves you out of that armchair critic or commentator into, “You have an active role. If you aren’t doing something about it, then that is the same as creating the problem.” You’re like, “I thought complaining was going to be helpful here.” It turns out complaining solves zero problems. It’s scientifically proven. It moves you into what I always think, which is to think like an owner and act like an owner. How do you make sure that you remove barriers or solve problems?
Andy was a great mentor for me. Throughout my years, I always had people whom I admired. Sometimes, they had very different opinions from me, but I would seek them out because the way that they thought about things was so different from me that I wanted to understand their perspectives. I had mentors both in the finance organization and in the operations organization that I would constantly touch base with and get their perspective on how they were thinking about things.
As I went on Zendesk, I had great mentors who were on the board at Zendesk whom I use quite a bit. I have great mentors in Synopsys beyond even this technology world, but other peers of mine in the CFO arena. What I always think about is that your team is as big as you want it to be. Draw your circle as big as you want it to be. Sometimes, the people that you look to for advice from are from a very different part of the industry. Maybe they’re not even a part of your particular domain, but they’re going to give you a perspective that’s going to force you to look at a problem in a different way.
That makes sense. I love the fact that some of your key mentors are your fellow CFOs. Look what I do for a living. I suppose it might be self-serving. That is one thing I’ve learned. Executives learn from their peers more than almost any other resource that they can. It’s great that you’ve done that. I do want to talk a little about Synopsys. I’m curious. A couple of great gigs, well-branded and well-respected companies. What drew you to the role at Synopsys?
When I was at Intel, I knew Synopsys because Intel makes advanced computing chips, and Synopsys is the leader in the software to make advanced computing chips. I knew Synopsys for that. I went to Zendesk to learn software, and then when the Synopsys opportunity came through, it was like the integrated perfection of all that. Synopsys makes software similar to Zendesk, but it’s for the engineers. It is software that helps make semiconductor chips. I spent 29 years making semiconductor chips, so it was like the integration of those two things. To me, it was the perfect mix.
I got to meet the founder of Synopsys, who is still the chair of the board. Our incoming at the time, the gentleman who was the president is now the CEO. I fell in love with the company. The innovation that we drive is so cutting-edge because we have to build the software before the cutting-edge chips get built. If you think about it, we have to be ahead of the future so that people can build the future on top of it. It’s so fascinating.
The capabilities that we serve up to our customers are mission-critical for them to be able to design chips. One thing that the customer has is an unbelievable amount of complexity. They’re getting asked to deliver more performance in computing with less power. Those two things run in polar opposite. How do we give tools that customers tame that enormously complex opportunity? I came over on a holiday to meet with the founder and then the then-president. The minute I came here, I was like, “I want to be a part of this company.” This is so important. What we’re doing for our customers is so important. I felt like I wanted to be part of the mission.
I don’t believe in fate or anything like that, but it does seem like the universe was asking for you to take this particular position at that moment in your life. You referenced the CEO, Sassine Ghazi. I’m curious. Did you say you started around the same time as him?
No, he had been at the company for about 25 years. He started at Intel as a design engineer. He did what our customers do, and then he grew throughout his career at the company. He has done every single role in the company. It was a very thoughtful transition between our founder and Sassine to get him a larger remit and to prepare him for the CEO role. His transition to CEO happened about a year after I joined the company.
I’m always curious because for years, CFOs have said their most important partnership is with the CEO. Since COVID, it’s been reciprocated. A lot of CEOs are saying that their most important partnership is with the CFO. While it happened a little bit before, it’s happening in larger numbers. How do you build a relationship with your CEO based upon trust and respect? Sometimes, you are the only person who’s going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the CEO.
I think about it as a key business partnership, and I’m a key lieutenant for the CEO. For me, one of the things that’s always important is mutual trust, mutual respect and full transparency. The way I think about my role to the CEO as CFO is a combination of challenge and support. In the end, as we move forward on something, we’re going to be fully aligned. That doesn’t mean that we might not come with different points of view or different opinions that we’re going to have a deep discussion about, but once we align on something, we’re going to be fully aligned.
Part of my role is to give a comprehensive picture. What is the full picture? What is the opportunity? What’s the investment required? What’s the timeframe? What’s the return? Where are the risks in that? We have what I would call a full 360 of what the opportunity is, and it’s no sugar coating. I am not here to gloss over if something’s a big risk or we have to go off, mitigate, and be in a situation where we can have those very trusted and honest dialogues.
That is the most important relationship. It’s most important because if you think about how the company becomes successful, it becomes successful because we’re able to have hard conversations. We’re testing ourselves and checking ourselves on, “Is that the right set of decisions to make?” Having the ability to have hard conversations is important to be able to build that relationship. Without a strong relationship, to your point, how do you have those tougher, more challenging conversations? I view that as one of the most important relationships and one of my most important roles.
Someone said if two people always agree, one of them’s not needed. Usually very successful CEOs are not looking for yes men or yes women. They’re looking to be appropriately challenged in the role. It sounds like you’ve been able to do that. You’ve been able to grow a great company and do it in a respectful and productive way, which is the name of the game, I suppose.
First of all, it’s very hard to be a CEO. What a hard job. The demands on your time, first of all, are often beyond 24 hours. Depending on the lens that somebody is presenting something to you, it might not be the full lens. It might be a point of view. My role is to have that whole 360 view, be able to save time for the CEO, and be able to have him be able to do the high-impact work that he can do both inside the company and in the industry.
That’s great. I want to change a little bit, although still on the company. How is the rise of AI shaping your overall corporate strategy and your financial strategy as well?
It is probably one of the most profound changes that I can think of in my career, the speed at which it is getting adopted into so many things. I’ll start with a company and then move into how we’re doing it internally, too. We’re in the business of enabling advanced compute chips. The most advanced compute chips that are being built are AI chips. As we’re serving our customers, our customers are using our software to build AI chips and AI solutions.
As that’s happening, how people want to build compute is changing because the cycles are shrinking. The requirements and the performance requirements are so intense for these workloads, so people aren’t willing to do things the way they’ve always done things. They need to start designing chips in new and different ways. We’ve infused AI into all of our tools. All of our workflows that we offer to our customers include AI in the workflow. We’re working on, eventually at some point, how do we even have the idea of a gen capability, if you will an agent, that can help you build your advanced compute AI chip.
The kind of people we support don’t have enough people to do the job. There are not enough advanced semiconductor design engineers. It’s getting so complex that people need tools to develop those chips. If you think of us as a strategy, our strategy is how do we enable our customers to be able to build these ever more advanced chips and, at the same time, modernize the environment, infusing AI into it so that they can build these chips. It’s that big virtuous circle.
If you think about our company, we have a lot of software engineers. That’s the most important part of our company. We’re a company of a little bit north of 20,000 people. The majority of people in the company are software engineers. How do we also use AI to modernize the environment that they’re in? When they’re building these capabilities for our customers, how are we, as our founder would say, eating at our own restaurant? How are we infusing AI so we can free our people up so our people can even innovate more to be able to offer more to our customers?
That’s one of the things that we’re working on, how we infuse that in every part of our business. We’re looking at how we infuse that even into what you might call the core engine of the company. If you think about how we do go-to-market, finances and marketing, how do we use some of these AI tools and capabilities to free those teams up? We’re creating capacity for more innovation and more capability in those teams.
We see it as shaping the industry in a very profound way. We have an important role to play for our customers so that they can build these advanced chips and then use them to modernize the work environment. It’s a pretty exciting place to be. Honestly, almost every day, you’re reading something new about a new large language model or a new capability that people have. To me, I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated what this can do for almost every aspect of every business.
When the internet became a thing, that happened within the course of my career. I was maybe in my 30s or late twenties. I assumed, “This is the biggest innovation that I will ever experience in my professional life.” That has probably proven to be true, but this has all the feel of being something quite a bit bigger than that.
I agree with you. The pace is what’s so amazing to me. The pace of change is so amazing. This is such a rapid learning rate. Each time something new gets learned and we ingest it, we then find something new that we can do. It’s so great. Do you remember when it was like we first got our first browser? We were like, “What in the heck do we do with this?” Now, what would we do without it?
That’s the sign of technology. You talk to young people and it would’ve been like my parents talking about the advent of television or something, I suppose. They’re like, “What do you mean it was invented and that it wasn’t always here?” It’s such an accepted part of their life. They’re like, “It’s not that big of a deal.” Someday, AI probably will have that type of feeling, too.
I came across a great quote of yours. I want to read it and make sure I get it right. You said, “Finance is the scorecard of the strategy.” I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that and what that means to you. For people who are reading at home, a quick pause. Pick up a pencil and paper and write this down.
One of the most important things that we do at the company is to set our strategic direction. We, together with the operations, work on operationalizing that strategy. We know what we want to do. How do we do it? How do we make sure we’ve got the investment in the right place? How do we make sure that we’ve got the right number of people and that we’ve got the right capabilities? Ultimately, we build the financial plan that links all those together, and that’s the scorecard.
I can’t think of a great strategy with terrible financials. Either something’s wrong with the strategy or something’s wrong with the operationalization. I always say, “If it doesn’t show up in the financials, did it ever happen at all?” You can have some great product that is the best thing that everybody has ever seen before, but where the heck’s the revenue for that product? Where the heck’s the margin for that product? To me, that’s what I think is so great about finance. We can connect all the dots together. Ultimately, the scorecard that we have is the financial plan that we put together, which we all commit to.
One of the things that is always so interesting is that a lot of people are like, “You’re in finance. You’re there with the financial plan.” I’m like, “We’re here with the financial plan,” because you need everybody in the company rowing together to be able to make that strategy operationalize and make that scorecard happen. Everybody needs to understand because every single day, every person in the company is making a decision whether we end up hitting that scorecard or we end up missing that scorecard.
They make decisions about which projects they work on, which projects they prioritize, and which projects they talk to the customer about. Every one of those micro decisions ends up landing in the financial plan somewhere, someplace, or it doesn’t land in the financial plan someplace because somebody didn’t have that conversation, or somebody didn’t dedicate their team to build that product. To me, that’s the scorecard.
The great thing about being a public company is that I receive a grade every 90 days. We set out what we’re going to do, and then we build what I call “commit and deliver.” In the end, it is our ability to execute what we said we were going to do despite lots of known unknowns that are going to happen. Commit and deliver is what gives us the permission to do the next big thing at the company.
I never thought that you would get a report card every 90 days. In my days as a CFO, I was with venture-backed startups, so I never had the stress of being a public company CFO. I have plenty of friends who did, so I have a good sense that isn’t for the faint of heart. I want to chat a little about Synopsys. You’ve got this tiny little acquisition coming up, a company called Ansys. I’m curious about the genesis of that. For those who don’t pick up on it, it’s not a tiny acquisition. It’s $35 billion if I have my facts straight. What was the genesis of that? Why this acquisition at this moment in time? Anything you can share on it?
Ansys is probably not a household name. We build software for digital chip design. That’s our expertise. What Ansys builds is computational multiphysics software. It might not be a household name, but you could think of that as being doing crash testing and things like that. More mathematical formulas that you can model to give you a sense of what’s going to happen in a crash. When you build the chassis for the car, what’s going to happen? How will the airbags deploy? What will happen to the passengers? That can all be modeled in physics, so you don’t have to crash the car. You run millions of tests in a physics model.
It goes back to our AI conversation. What’s happening is a car is turning into a computer arm. It used to be that chips in a car controlled the infotainment, whether it is the sound or something like that. Now, the chip is controlling the whole car, and it’s controlling the safety in the car. When you go to design something like a car, you want to be able to design in the same design environment. What does that physical manifestation look like, and what is going to happen with all those chips inside the car? When something happens, are you going to get the right outcome?
You want to have a single design environment for the engineers to be able to design both the mechanical and the digital. That becomes a math model that they work in or, if you will, the cockpit that they work in. In a car, for example, if the chip’s taking too much of the power, that’s why you don’t have a very big range in the car. You need the chip to be power managed. How do you download software into the chip when the car’s on the road? Cars go to lots of different places. That’s something that you can figure out in the early stages of chip design.
Those are two different design environments. An engineer only has the specifications of the chip, but ultimately, what they want to do is be able to design those two things simultaneously. If you find a problem here, it’s much better if you solve it all the way at the beginning of the digital design. You solve the power performance optimization. You have a much better chance of getting a better outcome if you do it all the way in the beginning.
Those are two different design environments. You can think of problems that hyperscalers have. When you put a lot of chips together, it takes up too much power. You only have so much power in a data center. If you could design that in a single design environment, you could see how you could optimize the chips for the power performance so that when you got to the data center, it was optimized.
Think about modernizing R&D. There’s about a trillion dollars of R&D. How do we create tools and capabilities so people can make products and solutions in a much more modern way than they do? It’s bringing together this multiphysics world and this digital design world into a single cockpit for our customers. We call it silicon to systems because most things are getting designed workload down. Once you know what the workload is, you want everything in that whole build optimized for that workload. If you don’t, you end up with the wrong power, the wrong performance, and the wrong outcome. That’s what we’re in service of.
This has always been a company that we’ve had a relationship with. For multiple years, we’ve been in partnership with them. Since 2017, our CEO has formed a deep partnership with them. We’ve got a go-to-market partnership where we co-sell, and we’ve got engagement on the R&D side. They’re still two different environments. What our customers want is a singular environment. To be able to do that, you need to bring the two companies together so you can create the tools and capabilities end-to-end for our customers. That’s the genesis of it.
We’re super excited about it. Our customers are even more excited about it. Semiconductor customers are doing something called multidesign. They’re moving from building a ranch house, which is everything on a single chip, to building a high-rise condo. When you build a high-rise condo and you put hot chips on top of hot chips, a lot of things can go wrong, and they’re multiphysics problems. How do we help customers like an NVIDIA or a hyperscaler design in that virtual world so they can spot the issues and so they can create a much better product?
It’s super exciting. It’s going to be able to create a design environment for our customers. Our customer is a design engineer. It is that person inside the company who is responsible for products and solutions. This is to help make their job much easier and allow them to be able to continue innovating in a much more modern way.
That’s fantastic. It’s such an exciting thing. I want to shift gears a little bit. You’re on the board of another public company, PubMatic. I’m curious a little about how that works out with you. What’s your role there? I suspect you’re probably on the audit committee. What are some of the things you’re doing at PubMatic?
It’s great. I’m the audit chair. It’s helpful because I have an audit committee in Synopsys. It helps me have an outside-in perspective. It’s in a very different area. It’s digital advertising, which is not a field that I knew much about. That expands my knowledge, learning about that whole part of the industry, which is super fascinating, and going through a lot of transformation.
Being the audit chair, how do I make sure, first of all, I have an open dialogue with both the CFO and the CEO, and how do I be of service to them? I’m not an operator there. I’m there to be the voice of the shareholder but also support for the CEO, the leadership team, and most specifically the CFO. I enjoy it because it gives me that outside-in lens. When I’m thinking of developing things for my audit committee, I’m probably going into too much detail. How do I help summarize things so I get that at the right altitude for them to be able to weigh in and give advice on? Having both those lenses helps me check myself.
Also, what’s great about it is being a part of developing another finance team. I meet with a CFO and a chief accounting officer. That’s one of the things that I feel like has come through my career. There were always people helping me develop. That’s something that I feel like I have to be a net creator of talent for the industry. In finance, it can be a different area, but that’s certainly something that I enjoy. I enjoy being able to be a resource and be of assistance as they’re building their team and creating their capability to be able to optimize and maximize the company.
It’s interesting. Do you think your role on a board and an audit committee changes how you approach your day-to-day job as a CFO or maybe makes you even a more effective CFO?
It helps broaden my perspective. One of the things that I always think about is you look out one particular window, which always informs how you think about things, but it’s just one particular window. Getting other people’s views and realizing some of the other challenges that are happening makes me step back when I’m thinking about something and say, “Wait a minute. Have I thought about this thoroughly enough? Have I thought broadly enough about what the possible solutions are?” To me, that helps me be better in my CFO role. It helps me be better with my board. It pushes me out of getting into a routine view of things and challenges me. I love to be challenged.
That’s fantastic. I always have great admiration for people who have a lot going on and lead a healthy life. You’re with a CFO of a very visible public company, and you’re also on the audit committee board with a public company. It never ends. Do you have any tips for achieving work-life balance to the extent that’s even possible for someone in your role?
Yeah. Part of it is don’t fall for this idea that there’s perfection. I think that work-life balance implies that somebody else is doing it and you’re not. First of all, take that panic out. No one is perfect at having the perfect amount of time. One of the things I think about is, “What’s my number one today?” Make sure that you’re checking yourselves. Maybe there’s somebody in your family who’s at the hospital. Guess what? That’s probably your number one.
Make sure that you check in with yourself about what your priority is. Ruthless ZBB is the way I think about it. It could be ruthless ZBB on the home front. It could be ruthless ZBB at work. Make sure that you’re not falling into the trap of doing something. The dishes in your sink will probably be there later. It’s okay. You can go read a story with your kid or go to your child’s event. It’s okay.
I’ve got three daughters. I realized when I had my third daughter that I was under the impression that somehow everybody else knew exactly the right proportion to do everything in. Once I had three, I realized nobody knows. Each day, if I can pick, “This is my most important thing. I have to make sure that this thing happens,” that helps.
Also, the other thing I would say is making sure that you give yourself a break. Go out for a walk or do something. Do some physical activity every single day. It could be the smallest thing in the world. It doesn’t have to be something big and elaborate. Make sure you get out in nature, or you get out of your grind. It’s important. That’s both on the home front and at work. This idea that somebody else has it all figured out, nobody has it all figured out. Be clear on your number one. It can change every day. It can be changed. It could be a different number one every day. That’s okay.
That’s a great attitude. I’m in Boston, and it’s sixteen degrees here. Getting out every day isn’t always that pleasant around here.
It sure wakes you up when you go out at sixteen degrees.
It does have that effect on you. The tagline or one of the things we say for this show is that CFOs no longer report history. They make history. That’s fair. The role has changed considerably since I was a CFO. I’m curious. If you could take out your crystal ball a little bit, what do you see the nature of financial leadership changing in the years ahead?
I certainly think that it is about helping make the business happen, helping set the strategy, helping unlock the strategy and then helping bring the various parts of the company together to be able to maximize the full potential of the company. That’s what I think of the role. That definition of the role means that the CFO has to be in front of learning new technologies and understanding how those technologies could be used in the product area and can be used in how you run the company.
I very much see the CFO role continuing to evolve into strategy operations and helping accelerate the pace of the company. To that extent, I think the idea of challenging yourself in a lot of different roles and playing a lot of different roles as you come through your career is super important. It’s one thing to have a view of academically what that role is like. It’s another view to live that role.
That makes sense. It is a good segue, although you gave a bunch of the answers. I always like to ask our guests what advice do you have for the next generation of CFOs, maybe people who are going to get their first CFO role, or even a rookie CFO doing it for the first time.
Part of it starts with making sure that you deeply understand your business. Make sure you are making connections with the business leaders and understanding the customers’ perspective. Deeply understand it, and then build your team. By building your team, the team isn’t just your finance team. The team is going to be helpful in helping the company accelerate and how you build your connection. Those could be salespeople or product people. Make sure that you’re investing in those people and investing in how you can remove barriers to challenges that those people face.
I know you have a lot going on and probably in general, so I do want to thank you for being a guest on the show. I enjoyed the conversation. I know that my readers will as well. I’d like to give you the final word.
My final word would be to put yourself out of your comfort zone. If I think about how I got to this chair, I wasn’t a baby and then became a CFO. None of that happened. I know sometimes that can be the story. Trying a lot of different things and then learning from things that didn’t go well is what made me be able to be in a role like this. There are a lot of times when your role is helping course-correct things. Get out of your comfort zone, challenge yourself, and focus on constantly learning. That’s how you get to be in a chair like this.
That’s fantastic advice.
