Sara Lindquist:
I'm Sara Lindquist from Fuse. We're an early-stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver.
Today, we continue on with our Operational Excellence Series focused on the hiring journey. I'm back with Fuse operating partner, John Connors, to talk about hiring an early-stage VP of Finance. This role is personally relevant to John as he served a significant finance leadership tenure during his time as CFO at Microsoft. He has seen and experienced firsthand what it takes to build the right team and has since been able to support dozens of startups along their hiring journeys. Today, he is going to share some of that story and wisdom with us.
Let's get started!
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Sara:
John, thank you so much for joining us here again today! I'm excited for you to share some more great wisdom on the hiring journey.
John:
Thank you very much, Sara! It's a pleasure to be here. This will be fun.
Sara:
It will be fun! Today, it'll be extra fun. We're onto the VP of Finance role, which I know is personally relevant to you. You've had a tremendous career as a finance leader, of course, including your tenure as CFO and CIO at Microsoft. So, John, I'd love for you to share more about that experience, but my first question, I'd be specifically curious to know who are some examples of strong finance leaders that influenced your path personally along the way, or ones that you admire now? Can you describe also what it was that made or makes them great?
John:
Yes. Gosh, that's such a good question. It really takes me down memory lane, and there have been so many influences from different stages of my work career. I did the math, and I think I probably worked in finance/accounting roles 8 years out of the roughly 35 years I've been working now, 35-plus years, so have some good experience, but fortunately, have worked around great finance people during that entire 35-year career, even though I wasn't in a finance function for a very large percentage of it.
I'll start with - I think great finance people are very good business thinkers. I also don't think a great finance person has to be in Finance, and I'll explain. But I look back over my career, Tom Hoover at Deloitte, who was a manager and then became a partner in the time I was at Deloitte, was a very good influence early because he just had a great business mind and a great understanding of getting to what mattered. That was a great example. And then, I worked at Safeco Corporation for a period of time, where a guy who was controller, then CFO, and then President, Boh Dickey, was a really great example of a terrific finance person because I saw someone handle a large number of very different things, all of which had a finance or accounting angle, but were multiple business issues. And to watch how he threaded and multitasked was very instrumental.
Then, joining Microsoft, probably the best finance person I was ever around at Microsoft was a guy named Steve Ballmer. And even though Steve didn't ever work in accounting or finance, he understood the importance of accounting, and he understood accounting, but he was just a person that had a brilliant business mind and business model-mind and always understood where the accounting mattered, where the resource allocation, FP&A mattered, and how to use finance and accounting to make better decisions. So, Steve really kind of brought to life that accounting is the language of business, and it was a great example from him across multiple years and multiple roles of a brilliant finance person who happened to be a top executive that ran Product at one time, ran Sales at one time, was CEO for a lengthy stretch, but a brilliant finance person.
Then, I was very fortunate to be in roles at a big multinational that was a well-known brand, and that brand was able to attract great talent. So, I've been able to follow some of the folks that we recruited into Finance or developed in Finance that now have gone on to have really substantial roles. Amy Hood was hired from Goldman Sachs into investor relations, and now she's the CFO at Microsoft and probably one of the most capable CFOs American business has ever had. You look at what Microsoft is doing, and her partnership with Satya is pretty remarkable to see what they've done.
Another woman that worked for us and ran FP&A and could go toe-to-toe with Ballmer on anything was a woman named Colette Kress. She's now the CFO at NVIDIA, and that's been a wonderful thing to follow. I was fortunate, I was on the board of Nike for a number of years, and to see the work that, for example, Andy Campion did in building the finance organization ... He's now chief operating officer ... a great example, business-oriented strategist who had to learn the accounting side but did. I look at a person like Dave Conte who built the early stages of Splunk's Finance, FP&A, Tax, tTeasury. Did a remarkable job, and then Jason Child followed. And Jason had to do the very hard work of being the CFO during a re-platforming and a fundamental change in business model.
Oftentimes, what you see is a Finance leader might be doing really great work, even though the stock price and the market cap change might not reflect it immediately, but it's important work that will allow the company to grow and prosper in the future. So, I've just had so many great examples, but in all of them, it comes back to they were brilliant business people that happen to be either in the finance function or worked really closely with the finance function and understood its importance and the need for truth and accuracy and insight.
Sara:
Yeah, those are great examples across the board, and I think just super useful framing for what companies can aspire to and aspire for with hiring for this role. To dive in a bit further and get started here, thinking about this role in the context of the startup level, I think it'd be helpful to define the role a bit deeper. So, John, what do you see as the key responsibilities for a finance leader at the startup stage, especially in relation to maybe a founder or a CEO? Then, a specific nuance to that question I have for you is - what of those things do you see as table stakes, and then, also, we've talked about this at length, but what are some of those responsibilities that a finance leader needs to lean into that won't explicitly be in the job description? I'm sure you have plenty of examples of this.
John:
Oh, gosh, such a great question. First, the Finance function is a really broad discipline, and I think there's really probably five principle areas, if I think of it, top of mind. The first is controls and compliance. The second is forecasting, planning, and analysis, or financial planning and analysis. It can be used interchangeably. The third is business operations and systems, and the fourth would be tax and treasury. And then, the last would be stakeholder and investor management, and that stakeholder group might be a board of directors. It could be private investors. It could be public investors, so it's a very broad category.
And when I think about the finance function in early-stage ventures, the first thing you've got to start with is controls and compliance is you've got to get the accounting records right, and you've got to comply with a myriad of laws and statutes and regulations -so getting the basics right of accurate, timely accounts - because a business simply can't be run without accurate, timely accounts - you have to get that right. And then secondly, there's just a whole bunch of things you have to do to stay in business or stay out of jail, and that's the very first thing is controls and compliance.
It's critical and fundamental to every business of every size, but it's really important in early-stage venture where there's not a very big team, there's not a lot of money, and there's not a lot of time. And you got to get the truth out regularly about...the accounting books give you the truth. That's why you publish a monthly, and why you review them, and why you do quarterly reviews, why there's an annual statement. It's the truth of what the business is doing, and so that's key.
As the company starts to grow and you've got the foundation done, you've got to get really good at forecasting, planning, and analyzing results, and early-stage venture forecasting is very hard. It's very challenging because you don't have the most important ingredient to accurate forecasting by a wide margin - which is history. "What did we do before?" is the single best guide to what's going to happen in the future. Well, when you're early, you don't have any history, so forecasting is really hard, and it's volatile.
So, you have to have a process that is dynamic when you're planning, knowing there's going to be change, because you just don't have a lot of history of what's happened before. Things will change in the plan, both good and bad, and the forecast process has to capture that. The plan and the forecast have to have good insight about the industry, about the business, about the team, so that you have the right variables and drivers identified that are important to your business model and you're constantly adjusting "what did we assume in our plan and forecast?", "what is now happening?", and "what has to change?". And then, the executive team has to get everybody on board for what those assumptions are and what those resources are that will be used in the forecast, but they're actually the activities and money the company's going to allocate.
After controls and compliance, forecasting, planning, and analysis is just critical. As you grow, the company is going to move into the third key area of Finance, and that's business operations and systems. And generally, when you get started, there's not a lot of investment in systems and business operation processes simply because A, there's not much of a team, and there's not much money, and there's not much scale in the company, so it's not a priority. But if you are successful and you're growing fast, all of a sudden you find out, "Oh, my gosh, we've grown much faster than our systems and processes have followed."
And I learned this in my days at Microsoft in that I was in Finance, and then I moved out of Finance into the systems division, and then I was working in Europe for the president of Europe, got called back to become basically corporate controller at Microsoft, and largely, it was a job to build the systems and processes for the company's finance function because it had grown so fast. And the problems were things like, we couldn't pay our bills on time because we didn't have any procurement and accounts payable system that was scaled. We couldn't get our budget done and financials published with budget numbers because the budget system was so screwed up.
So, that controller job, about 75% of it was hiring the people and getting the systems built to support the scale, and really good finance leaders are very astute at business systems because it's such a critical part. It's the circulatory system of a company. You've got to build the business processes and the underlying systems to allow the accounting and the forecasting and the business to operate. At the end of the day, the finance people are going to be responsible for the sales system accuracy and timeliness, even though the salespeople run it. At the end of the day, the finance people got to make sure that's right. When it's a manufacturing system that has cost of goods sold, well, those people don't report to finance, but it's finance job to make sure it's right.
So, you've got to work collaboratively with a lot of different people in different functions because finances is involved in every single organization, whether they want it or not. That fourth area, as you scale then, well, as you start to grow, you start to have tax and treasury requirements that have to be met. You start building that group, and then ultimately, if you get to a point where you're starting to have some scale, there's stakeholders that are important, generally investors. If you go public, those investors are public investors, and that function is really important to be telling them what you're going to do, how you did it, and what you're going to do next. And that's all codified largely either in your SEC filings, that are of critical importance or in the forecast and earnings process that Finance manages.
It's an incredibly interesting and varied function, and, at the end of the day, those that are really successful at it are really good with people. They're really good with solving ambiguity across the organization, and they're also very good at analysis and insights.
Sara:
Yeah, that's super helpful, understanding those key pillars. We've talked about this in conversation before. Are there any additional things outside of those functions that you look for in a finance leader that exists outside of that? And maybe it speaks to what you said about being really good orchestrators and being kind of the connective tissue, but what are some things that founders or CEOs may not even think about?
John:
Well, I think the really good finance leaders, regardless of the size of the organization, they help the CEO get leverage in their role in that they allow the CEO to work on things that are most important in building the product or service and delivering on the go-to-market strategy. So, the first thing is: give that leader leverage. The second thing is give that leadership team insights. What you really hope is that the culture of the company is such that the finance leader can, in some ways, be the truth-teller or the person that brings real objective insights to the executive team. That's something that CEOs that use their CFO effectively look for them to do, and that CFO should help give the CEO leverage so that they're really focused on the most important things in product and service as well as in go-to-market, but also insights about where the company can improve and where each operation can improve, and a real incredible focus on helping to build a scalable and efficient business model.
I think, right now, in the period we're in, where we're coming off of probably the third, maybe fourth manic bubble that I've been involved in tech in the 35-plus years that I've been in tech, we're just coming off a period of incredibly high valuations, multiples, and ease of raising money. And the public market stocks, I thought I've heard something the other day that on NASDAQ, I think, over 60% of the NASDAQ stocks are off their 52-week highs or all-time highs by at least 50%. So, it's just been absolute carnage in the public markets. Well, it's now slowly trickling down into the private markets, and it just takes longer because you don't have somebody buying and selling your stock every day, so you don't get truth on valuation and as fast in the private markets as you do public markets. But it's happening.
All of a sudden, there's a big focus on efficiency of business models, and I think that there's probably a large number of finance leaders out there in the private world that have been harping on this for the last few years. But it was too easy to raise money, and so now, all of a sudden, everybody's getting a crash course in efficient business models. Well, a really great finance leader gives leverage to the CEO, but also brings truth and brings just iterative improvements in the company. And a really good finance leader helps the rest of the exec team make 1+1+1=5.
Sara:
Yeah, that's really good. I like how you said it in conversation before about the CFO and the CEO are the complimentary counterparts in terms of bringing balance and well-rounded approach as a thought partner. So, it's interesting. It leads into my next question for you. Now that we have this good, initial framing, I'm actually curious to know from what you've seen, both in your time as an operator and as an investor and helping startups, what are some of the common mistakes or misconceptions you've seen people make or have when hiring for this role?
John:
It is such a great question, Sara. What I find is folks have this concept that Finance is bookkeeping, that accounting is bookkeeping. So, they have no idea how complicated the world of Finance, broadly speaking, actually is. I can remember probably the best way to capture it is I was CFO at the time this crazy, onerous compliance thing got passed by the U.S. Congress called Sarbanes-Oxley. There were a few bad actors coming out of the dot-com bust, Enron, and WorldCom, and some of these bad people doing bad things. So, Congress did what Congress does. They passed a law that everybody has to follow, this crazy draconian regulatory regime called Sarbanes-Oxley. It still exists today, and it's the auditors', consultants' full employment act.
Well, anyway, Microsoft had to start complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, and it required that the CEO and CFO sign an attestation every quarter that there's no fraud or big mistakes in their books. Well, Ballmer was CEO at the time. I was CFO. So, we had to have this crash course for a week of Ballmer getting up to speed on everything in finance because he wasn't going to sign this attestation unless he understood things more deeply. We had five 12-hour days of covering everything in Microsoft finance, and it was amazing to me to sit through that for a week as each group came in and the leaders did the work of explaining what they did.
The first thing that struck me was Colette Kress, who was running FP&A, sat in most of those sessions. And good lord did she know a lot about Microsoft Finance because she ran financial planning and analysis, and that's where so much of the accounting, the planning, the systems, it all came together in that group. But the second thing was at the end of that week, Steve and I had a one-on-one to debrief, and the first thing he said to me was, "Wow, your job's way more complicated than I thought." And this guy had been at Microsoft for years. He knew a lot about it, so it's way more complicated than people get, and it isn't bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a simple subset of accounting. It's far more complicated than people realize, far more extensive, but it also gets complicated as you get larger in people, products, geography, et cetera, et cetera.
But you have to build the foundations right no matter what the size is. The controls and compliance have to be right. The FP&A group has to function well. You have to build the efficient business processes and systems. The tax and treasury group has to be well-staffed. The company has to have a story and a strategy for investors, and finance is involved in all of that, not to mention all of the work that finance is involved in. In every single transaction of everything you buy and sell, finance is somehow involved. So, it's a much broader function than people get, and it's not bookkeeping. Getting the bookkeeping right is really key, but that's the table stakes.
Sara:
Yeah. Another piece too that I think I remember we talked about that I'm curious to get your thoughts on is also the importance to - obviously, at the early stage - to have that cultural fit, for this person to be able to sit at the strategy table, yeah, not just the bookkeeper, but also not ... Some people maybe have strengths in cost-cutting and efficiency, but so much at the early stage is about generating top-line revenue. So, do you see that at the early stage too, that maybe a cultural fit and growth-minded CFOs or Finance leaders really matter?
John:
Oh yeah, such a good point. And I think the other thing that needs to be understood by the Finance leader, as well as the team, is - what is the role that the CEO has delegated to the finance leader? Because, at the end of the day, your job really is to inform and influence. You don't run product. You don't run sales. You're not the CEO. So, that role between the CEO and the CFO in terms of "what role does that CEO want the CFO to play?" when they don't run sales, they don't run product, they don't run these other organizations, their job is to support, influence, and help these organizations.
But sometimes that influence and help can be things that those groups do not want. I.e. they don't want cost control. I.e. they don't want sunlight brought into contracts that they've entered into that are stupid contracts, or maybe violate company policy, or could be unlawful, or any number of things. So, it's a really interesting role that you influence and support and bring insight, but you don't control. On the other hand, if things get too whacky, the CFO's is going to get fired. If something happens on their watch in a group they didn't control ... They don't directly manage something that gets out of control, well, first thing investors are going to look at or the SEC's going to look at is where were your controls, and why weren't they enforced, and why weren't they implemented.
The first thing a board's going to look at is where were you? And the excuse can't be, "they didn't report to me, so not my problem." So, it's a role of really important responsibilities that often doesn't have straight-line authority or has dotted-line delegated authority. And the CEO and CFO, it really is helpful if they have a "meeting of the mind" on what's the role the CFO should play.
Sara:
Good point.
John:
And how do you make that very clear to the organization? A CFO has to be a pro-growth person and a pro-growth advocate because if you don't grow, you don't create value. At the same time, it can't be growth at any cost, or growth with actions that aren't legal or actions that aren't healthy long term. So, you hope that the finance person has some wisdom and has some discernment and that they have a very good working relationship with the rest of the executive team.
Sara:
That's really helpful, John. Thank you for diving into that a bit more. Okay, so now that we have a good grasp on a lot of the components that this role entails - which is a lot - how should founders think about timing? Again, you've had a lot of experience with startups and personal experience in your own career, but what are the key learnings that have helped you define your approach and advice for when and how to hire for a finance leader? You've talked about the core pillars and how those can compound as you scale, but what else should founders think about?
John:
So much of it depends on the background of the Founder, and the more general management and multifunction experience that a founder or CEO has really is going to be the most important thing about what type of profile they hire at different stages. If a CEO is an experienced person with a lot of general management background and has worked a lot around Finance and understands the function, you can probably, early on, hire someone that is more of a controller-focused person, more of a controller background, and get controls and compliance done, get the rudiments of FP&A done, get the ability to get the very basic systems in. Because the CEO with a general management background is probably going to be driving a lot of the forecast and planning and analysis. The finance team will be supporting it, but that experienced person is going to have that frame in their head, and they're going to be outlining the strategic vision and the resource allocation and the goals.
Sara:
Oftentimes, you see really early that some people even outsource it at the very early stages.
John:
Yes, exactly.
Sara:
Yeah, okay.
John:
An example is early at Carbon Robotics (FUSE Portfolio Company) that's growing rapidly, Paul, experienced person, we've hired a firm that is doing the work, Paul Quinn and Associates, I think. They just do a great job. Now, we'll transition to a full-time, hopefully very top-notch CFO now that we've scaled to a point where it's a must - but you can hire firms to do that work if you've got that experienced CEO with the right mindset. If however a CEO or founder is not a very experienced person, and they haven't really had much general management experience, it probably is very useful to have them hire earlier a more experienced, broader finance leader who's going to maybe operate in some ways almost as a COO type of helping them not just with the basics of getting the accounting system in, the controls and compliance in, the planning and analysis, but is probably also going to help them think through pricing, and think through contract type, and think through how to vet sales candidate leaders, or how to think about really measuring the product roadmap milestones.
Someone who isn't an equal, they're not the CEO, but someone who is a much deeper business partner than maybe an experienced CEO would need. If you're early, hire someone strong.
Sara:
Yeah, and then, in what case in the journey are ... Maybe it's the COO type that's maybe even handling HR and/or IT. ... I know the role can be really flexible.
John:
Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Sara. Usually, early on, the finance leader will often have not just finance, but they'll have HR. Whatever has to be done on HR, those people might report to them. Anything IT-related is going to fall underneath them. Anything legal-related is going to follow under them. What that indicates to you is as you grow and you build an HR function, you build an IT function, you build a legal function, those corporate groups, i.e. non-product, non-sales, they're going to have to work very cooperatively together. But generally, you can start out that the finance function is going to be the first one you hire for.
Sara:
That's great. So, as a company scales, obviously the needs are going to change. And you've touched on this a little bit earlier, but how does that person's role evolve, especially as they're in late-growth, pre-IPO readiness? I think you mentioned, usually, that's when an actual CFO can come in who's had previous experience with more of a storytelling piece about the business.
John:
And I think the key thing is that as the company gets to that stage where it has a prospect, say you just get a hundred million of revenue or more, that's a real company with real complexity. As you get to that stage and north of that, that Finance person needs to be able to manage and be on top of all the areas we mentioned that are the foundational pillars of Finance. But even more importantly at this stage is this person has to be able to recruit great leaders, and cultivate people and develop people -because, by the time you get to a hundred million, that's becoming a big complicated job. And if the company is growing fast, you are for sure under-resourced relative to big companies. But you've got to start having all the things that big companies already have built over many years, just with far fewer resources and much faster moving teams.
It requires that you be great at recruiting talent and great at recruiting managers who are going to work underneath you, who are better than you at that function they're going to run. So, you want that controller to be a better controller than you are as a CFO. You want the FP&A person to be better than you would be at running FP&A. You want to hire experts that are good with people and good leaders because your job becomes much more about running a team versus running individual functions.
We do see sometimes that the people that are able to scale generally are quite good people managers. And what happens as the company gets bigger is your expertise in controllership, or your expertise in FP&A, or your expertise in tax or treasury, or your expertise in M&A - well, that's not going to be enough to be great across the whole spectrum of that role because it's just way bigger than that one particular thing. So, you want to be able to hire great people in each of these functions and make that team a really strong team for the company.
Sara:
Yeah. And John, would you say ... You've covered so much... Are there any other key attributes across any stage of a VP of Finance / CFO's journey that you think would be worth calling out?
John:
Yeah, I think there's a couple. The first is this person has to have a steadiness.
Sara:
That's a good point.
John:
They can be relied on. You don't want a lot of volatility in the personality and behavior of a finance leader. It's important that they have really good judgment and that there be a steadiness, a predictability, an assuredness that people in the company have. Because when you have a breach that is financial, whether it's a huge mistake or malfeasance, it hurts a company really, really badly because then trust is lost.
I think the second thing that is really critical is there's just way, way more judgment and risk in businesses than people realize. And if there wasn't more complex judgment and more significant risk in business, then everybody would be successful, and there would be no failures. But there's tons of risk, and there's all kinds of judgments that have to be made that are hard decisions, some of which are "what's the least bad decision we have to make?". So, you want someone whose judgment you really trust because if a company breaches the fiduciary trust - or rather, if you can't trust a company with its finances, you can't trust them with anything.
So, there's way more risk, way more complexity in business than most people appreciate unless you get into it, and you want somebody that makes really good judgments and is really truthful about those judgments.
Sara:
Yeah, and someone who ... to your point about steadiness, but it is chaos, putting out fires and having to surface things that are probably really uncomfortable to bring up to the CEO or the board, whatever it might be but... enjoys that probably.
John:
Yes.
Sara:
It's definitely not a job for everybody.
John:
And I think it's also, there's just maybe with experience now, it's just so different. There's just a lot of peaks and valleys. About every ... What is it ... every seven, eight, nine years, we have some major global issue that affects everybody, and you work through it. But if you don't have that steadiness, that rock, that cornerstone mentality, you can cause a lot of anxiety and bad reactions that you want to avoid.
Sara:
Oh, that's such a good point. Thank you for mentioning that. I'm glad we didn't miss that. That's really important. So, John, how should founders go about uncovering these things? A lot of them are very tangible and concrete, but a lot are also very, in some ways, not tangible. How would you recommend people go about trying to suss that out?
John:
The best way is to always talk to people that have worked with the candidate. First, know what you're looking for. And then secondly, as an early-stage CEO, just understand unless you're very experienced, you just don't know very much and don't assume you do know. One of the things that I have found since getting into Venture and earlier stage stuff is that a lot of very, very smart people that are early in their career, they just think they know way more than they actually know, and they have the assumption that things are way simpler than they actually are. That ability to know what you know and know what you don't know, and hire someone who you will learn from, and you will seek their input, and you will trust that input is really key.
It's this hire of this Finance person, if it works well, it's probably going to be one of your most trusted advisors and most important business partners you're going to hire. In all likelihood, if you're an early-stage founder who's product-oriented, you have a strong point of view about product, and you're probably going to influence that a lot. With sales, you're probably going to cycle through a fair number of sales leaders, depending on how the company does. If it doesn't do well at sales, you'll replace people. If it does well, some of those salespeople will migrate out because they've achieved their goals, and it's the next stage you're hiring for.
If you hire the right Finance person, it's probably a pretty good chance they're going to be with you for a while because I think finance people don't tend to job shop and jump as much or haven't historically, and they are going to grow with you, and, if you allow it, be a key advisor and input to you. When you think about that hire, just be really clear, what is it you're hiring for in the near term, the next 12 to 24 months, versus what are you hiring for the long term if this company's going to be successful. And that's probably the key thing. Am I hiring for the short term, or I am hiring for the long term? And if it's long term, if you're a young founder, you're going to be hiring somebody that knows way more about business than you do, and you're going to be their boss. Get comfortable with that and use that resource.
Sara:
Yeah, that's great. Even just extrapolating from what you're saying, it's probably really important that a founder or CEO spends significant, ample time with the potential candidate, right?
John:
Yes, exactly.
Sara:
Because that partnership, it has to be a fit. No single interviews and moving on quickly, this one requires thoughtful time.
John:
Exactly.
Sara:
That's great, John. Okay, so before we wrap up here, any other parting words or advice for founders or CEOs as they're looking to find the right leader here?
John:
I can say that with almost every company that has had issues or that has really struggled, there's two things. One, either the product just didn't ever find product-market-fit, i.e. It just didn't ever work in a way customers wanted, or we missed the market. Or, alternatively, we had a flawed forecasting process, meaning far too aggressive assumptions about sales that weren't vetted and weren't tested and then weren't monitored early, and truth didn't come out early enough. The team, the investors just remain too optimistic versus getting to truth. Almost always a great finance person helps you get to truth fast - and testing and vetting and jettisoning the assumptions that were just wrong.
In an early-stage where you don't have any history, forecasting is really, hard and planning is really hard because you just don't know. So, constantly getting at truth about what is known in the product and sales is what a finance person should really help a CEO do. I have seen, whether it's large companies, very large companies, to the smallest companies, the CEO is not the head salesperson all the time, and the CEO will have to be really critical in sales in almost every organization.
But where I've seen real failure of CEOs is when they don't take off the head sales hat and become the CEO who represents all shareholders and all employees, and they simply don't get to truth on what's actually happening in the market with their product, service, or business model. That CFO should help you get to truth. Hopefully, it's there. Your priest, your rabbi, your pastor, your imam, whatever it is, your spiritual guide, hopefully, they're helping you get to truth.
Sara:
Bring in the lights. Drop the mic right there, John. That's awesome. Drop the mic right there! Well, this has been fantastic. Can't thank you enough for taking the time to be here and continuing to pay it forward, John, as you are.
John:
Well, thank you. How fun is this, Sara? Getting to work in business with early-stage companies that are just changing the world. How lucky are we?
Sara:
It's truly a gift. So grateful, so lucky.
John:
Yeah, very grateful. Thank you.
Sara:
Thank you, John.
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Thanks for joining us! Be sure to check out our next conversation on the hiring journey. Next in the queue is a discussion about finding an awesome VP of Marketing. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.