1202: Allocating Capital in an Age of AI | with Samantha Greenberg, CFO, AlphaSense

0:00Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from OneStream, Trusted Data, Faster Decisions, and Salesforce. Explore new research on the future of finance and AI at Salesforce.com slash CFO Report. Hello, this is Blake Grayson, CFO of DocuSign, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1202.

0:30Samantha Greenberg: Fundamentally, those 18 years of investing where I lived and breathed allocating capital to the highest ROI, laser focused on determining risk and reward, Understanding how the markets assess resource allocation, narrating, understanding what makes a really concrete investment thesis and what are all the most important questions to address and to look at. Those are, again, the things that I use every day as a CFO. Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Samantha Greenberg, CFO of AlphaSense. Finance leaders are trained to wait for clarity, to test assumptions, measure risk, and make sure the numbers support the decision.

1:23But what happens when the business is moving faster than the analysis. Today's CFOs must still bring discipline to capital allocation, yet in a rapidly scaling company, waiting for the perfect answer can carry its own cost. That creates an interesting tension. How do you preserve rigor without allowing rigor to become hesitation? Our guest has experienced that question from both sides of the table, And her answer suggests that one of the hardest adjustments in finance leadership may be learning when precision matters and when velocity matters more. Our talk with CFO Samantha Greenberg begins after this.

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3:44Hello, CFO Samantha Greenberg is with us. Samantha's career has taken her from investment banking at Goldman Sachs to leading investment teams at Citadel, founding her own hedge fund before moving into operating finance as a CFO of ID.me originally, and now, of course, AlphaSense. Today, she's helping guide one of AI's fastest-growing companies through rapid expansion, major capital raises, and the evolving opportunities and responsibilities that artificial intelligence presents for finance leaders. Samantha, welcome.

4:23Samantha Greenberg: Thank you, Jack. It's such a pleasure to be here. So what an exciting career you've had, Samantha. Just in my doing a quick study on it, I took my breath away at certain moments. So this is a challenging question for you, I know. look back for us, try to identify just a few of those experiences, perhaps, that you feel best prepared you for this role of finance leader? Absolutely. Thank you for that question. So, first and foremost, I would say, you know, there's so many reasons. As you know, to summarize my career, I spent 18 years as a technology investor across public markets and private markets.

5:05Samantha Greenberg: first at very large institutions like Goldman Sachs and seven years at Paulson & Co., then started my own hedge fund in 2016, grew it and scaled it over a bunch of hardworking years into the third largest female-run fund in the country. And while it was ultimately sold to Citadel during those years, I realized that I loved being an operator even more than I loved being an investor and just helping to drive value creation, analyze data, and see the impact of it on your decisions. Whereas when you're an investor, you're always on the outside looking in. And so after staying for a few years at Citadel, helping them build a new equities business, I returned to the operating world and became a CFO in 2021.

5:54Samantha Greenberg: And I say that only to say that I have come to believe that investors make really great CFOs because so much of what we do is directly transferable. Investing at its core is about separating signal from noise, surfacing insights, and being an excellent capital allocator. And those are among the most impactful things a CFO and a rapidly scaling company can bring to the table. So decisions like how do we prioritize our product and engineering roadmap, our scarce resources, how do we measure our spend, how do we balance the decision to invest for growth versus driving towards profitability, what do we build versus buy?

6:43Samantha Greenberg: These are the most consequential decisions that organizations face. And as an investor, I live and breathe allocating capital to the highest ROI. Now, AI has made it a much more value-add, high-impact role. I will never forget the days in the 2000s of writing 55-page memos today using AlphaSense. That's something that can be done in a click with 30 minutes of spending all my time kind of iterating and checking the analysis. But just fundamentally, those 18 years of investing where I lived and breathed allocating capital to the highest ROI, laser-focused on determining risk and reward, Understanding how the markets assess resource allocation, narrating, understanding what makes a really concrete investment thesis and what are all the most important questions to address and to look at.

7:47Samantha Greenberg: Those are, again, the things that I use every day as a CFO. Yeah. Along your resume, I was finding moments in time that I just wanted to touch on with you. So much of what you just shared, I think, is revealing. But I want to point out just to the audience, I think it says something about who you are. You joined Francisco Partners before its first fund was even launched. And so, you know, why take that risk? Yes. Thank you so much for surfacing that, Jack. So a theme throughout the entirety of my career and actually my life is wanting to do things and like being drawn to things that other people say can't be done.

8:36Samantha Greenberg: So Francisco Partners, for example, it sounds crazy to us today, but believe it or not, in the late 1990s, the idea that a private equity firm that you could do a leveraged buyout of a technology company was anathema. It was considered, no, a technology company can't be capitalized with debt. They're not businesses that can be predictable, et cetera. And so, similarly, Francisco Partners set out to really disprove that notion at a time when no one else was doing it. It's shocking how much the world changes in 25 years. Looking over the last few years, 30 % of the private equity market has been software alone.

9:25Samantha Greenberg: So what a crazy transformation in the world. But at the time, I believed in that vision that technology as the fastest growing sector of the economy naturally lends itself to how the cost of capital can be optimized and how businesses can be operated more efficiently and strategically. And so I was so fortunate, to your point, to have the chance to join Francisco Partners when, believe it or not, in those early months, the co-founders and myself and one other colleague were sitting together in a room on folding chairs, you know, planning the business. And over that first year, we closed the first fund and I was able to help really build out the operating processes as well as work on the first transactions, do fundraising, all the things that actually, you know, far down the road made me a better operator.

10:20Just, it's hard not to ask you some additional questions about your career as an investor. I mean, which investment call, if you can zero in on just one for us, I'm sure there are quite a few, but one that might have changed how you judge risk?

10:37Samantha Greenberg: Excellent question. So what I learned, I worked at Paulson & Co. for seven years during this period of rapid growth. Paulson & Co. really came onto the map. John Paulson got a lot of credit for having really gone out to the market and cautioned about the excesses in the subprime category and their cascading effects on the broader economy. And so I joined in early 2009 when we were already quite well known as investors in real estate and financial institutions. And I was the first kind of dedicated investor to focus on technology, media and telecom. But what I really credit John with is what makes him so exceptional and what led to all of that success in the subprime era is that idea of understanding when you have true asymmetry, meaning you're and so the rules of thumb I always look at in investing are I want to make sure that not only do I have asymmetry, maybe kind of three times as many as much upside relative to the downside.

11:47Samantha Greenberg: But also there's only so much downside that I would be comfortable with, and it certainly informs the position size. So, for example, if a business has 50 % downside and 150 % upside, that might be a great idea, but it's not clear that you'd want a business with 50 % downside to be 20 % of your portfolio. And so but those moments and what I really learned from John Paulson is those big fat pitches when the asymmetry is extreme in your favor, they don't come along very often. And you have to really like be concentrated in those best ideas. And so to give a really concrete example, I had just joined Paulson & Co.

12:37Samantha Greenberg: in 2009. We had just come out of the financial crisis. And Comcast, which was at the time a cable company, all of a sudden it was rumored in late 2009 that they were in talks to buy NBCUniversal. Their stock immediately got killed because investors had bad memories of years before when they had made an attempt to buy Disney. But if you fast forward into what was in the press today, like at the current time in 2009, you could see that the rumored transaction looked nothing like that. They'd be using their assets to fund the purchase price. They'd be using cash and the price they were getting NBCUniversal at because NBCUniversal's cash flow had contracted so much in the financial crisis and the purchase price was being priced off of that trough value.

13:27Samantha Greenberg: if you normalize over a cycle, they were actually getting an extremely low price for the assets. So when you put all of it together, you could see that on the downside, even if Comcast were to trade further down to the lowest valuation upon which it had ever traded, close to almost like a replacement value for the assets, that was probably only 10 % below where we were. And on the upside, given the accretion of the deal, the way it was financed and structured, the trough multiple being paid, you could almost see your weight it would double. And so he took that analysis to John Paulson. And in his brilliant way, he said, you know, this sounds interesting, let me reflect on it.

14:08Samantha Greenberg: And the next day, he came back to me with a bunch with, you know, a list of follow up detailed questions. And he said, we, you know, we should buy some and he made a bigger position. He's a legend and he made it a very sized position, which was daunting for me year one on the job, but it proved to be this enormously successful investment and just represents that know when you have asymmetry, seize those moments, you're not going to get them often. All of this is building to the question on, I think, many of our listeners' minds, why leave a multi-billion dollar portfolio? And this is, I believe, what you did to become a startup CFO.

14:48I mean, why leave that? Why that career change?

14:52Samantha Greenberg: So the years running my own hedge fund did show me that as much as I love and will always love research, markets, macro, risk reward, that being an operator was what I found the most engaging. It was my why. It was having a seat at delivering the value creation, whereas when you're an investor, you're always on the outside looking in. That was what was most fulfilling and rewarding and driving me day to day. And also, the market changed in a way that was quite extraordinary. If you were to look back at 2010, for example, there was a point in time where most CFOs traditionally came from accounting or kind of financial operations type backgrounds.

15:40Samantha Greenberg: By 2020, the market had radically changed to where CEOs were starting to realize that hiring a CFO, what they would call today a strategy CFO, someone who comes from investing or investment banking or private equity, that those CFOs can be such a partner in these consequential decisions about capital allocation and prioritizing resources. and they can take all of those capital markets and investor relations, things off of a CEO's plate. And the market radically changed from, for example, CFOs who had come up a traditional accounting path being most of the CFOs to under 10 % of the searches. And so it was this also moment in the market where the skills I brought to the table started to become what many companies were looking for in a CFO.

16:36Samantha Greenberg: And so the timing was ideal. It was exactly what I wanted to do. And the part that was, you know, a big leap of faith is as I looked at my background, anyone who comes from 18 years of forecasting, you know, is going to be an FP &A, is going to have FP &A superpowers, particularly coming from Citadel, where data science was embedded for fundamental forecasting. I was strong in investor relations, having launched and raised my own fund and grown it over the years. But where I didn't have as much day-to-day background was in really intense, heavy-duty operational finance, doing systems implementations, driving operational maturity.

17:18Samantha Greenberg: And so I decided rather than going to a more mature organization as CFO, which would basically take all the things I already knew how to do and kind of continue that skill set, I wanted to develop that zero to one builder, understand how to lead finance transformation, hands-on operator, running an accounting department. And at an earlier stage company, like a Series B and Series B and C stage company, and even at IDME Series D stage, that's where you get the most valuable hands-on experience. Well, we want to ask you about AlphaSense, but I have one last question for you here. And we'll ask you a few more career-related ones later in the podcast.

18:05But I'm wondering, since you've become a CFO, is there a, call it a dictum or a belief maybe, from your investing days that has failed you in some way? That it was something that you thought that just has proven wrong as a CFO?

18:25Samantha Greenberg: Oh, that's an interesting question. So I would say that that same powerful force of true asymmetry and waiting for those really fat pitches that makes you an investor, in many ways you need to do the opposite of it as an operator in that there's a famous saying among CFOs that the perfect is the enemy of the good. and sometimes you need to just deliver. We have an obligation to deliver for shareholders and when a company is rapidly scaling, like AlphaSense growing more than 40 % a year or like ID.me, the company I worked at before it, when you grow that quickly, it's an entirely new company every two years.

19:13Samantha Greenberg: And if you wait for everything to be so perfect and filtered, you miss so many opportunities. And so that's a long-winded way of saying velocity matters too. You can't just wait for the fat pitches. What worked so well for me over 18 years as an investor isn't an approach that works in a rapidly scaling operating role. Well, thank you. Many insights along the way, along your career path there for us. So thank you for those. We're wondering, again, you joined AlphaSense just early spring. So we're wondering, tell us about this company, this opportunity that you saw that you wanted to be part of.

19:55What's AlphaSense about today?

19:59Samantha Greenberg: Yeah, thank you for asking that. And my journey and my origin story of how I came to be at AlphaSense is a funny one. So what AlphaSense does, we are an AI market intelligence platform. We automate the entire research process for knowledge workers. And we're quite scaled. we serve over 7 ,800 customers, including 75 % of the S &P 500, and it's a global business with thousands of employees. As for what we do, we're a vertically integrated research platform, and that means we solve the full end-to-end stack of research automation in one place. We've indexed all the world's valuable business content, whether that's expert interviews, research reports by the sell-aside financial and market data, and we've built a context graph on top of all of that intelligence, as well as an AI orchestration layer and AI tools that do reasoning and synthesis and workflow agents that agentically perform entire research workflows in one click.

21:03Samantha Greenberg: And because we own the entire stack, we're able to optimize that system so that the AI harness, the tools for the LLM to call, that context graph and the data it's reasoning over all work seamlessly together. And that makes knowledge projects and research projects far smarter and far more token efficient. And with respect to how I came to AlphaSense, I was happily in my fourth year at high growth cybersecurity business. And interestingly, like I told you, AlphaSense is used by 75 % of the S &P 500. It's also used by hundreds and thousands of private companies. And at my former company, ID.me, our finance organization was using AlphaSense day in and day out for every research work stream from investor relations to FP &A market sizing projects to competitive intelligence and strategy and benchmarking projects and research projects.

22:01Samantha Greenberg: that used to, before AlphaSense, take days for a finance team were taking us 30 to 60 minutes on AlphaSense. So when they contacted me, believe it or not, I was convinced that what they had done, it turns out the truth is they found me through a recruiter, the classic way. But I was convinced that they had gone on to their platform and simply said, show us all the CFOs who are power users of AlphaSense. And so when they reached out, I told them that I am a power user using AlphaSense day in and day out. I truly love the product. And so then for me, it was this once in a lifetime chance to not only join a company with such an exciting runway ahead and so much business momentum and product innovation, but also like just this once in a lifetime moment where I truly love the product and I use it day in and day out.

22:57Samantha Greenberg: There's this famous concept in venture capital about jaw-dropping customer experiences, like how you felt the first time you used an iPhone or the first time you rode in an Uber. And for a finance professional and a finance officer, that's what using AlphaSense is like. And so I'm incredibly grateful and excited to be here. Now, I think there was a capital raise in the not-too-distant past, but how are you assessing AlphaSense's capital position today? Yeah, great questions. Thanks for pointing that out. A couple months ago, we announced a$350 million fundraise at nearly double our last round's valuation.

23:35Samantha Greenberg: And we also announced that back in Q1, we had surpassed$600 million of ARR growing more than 40 % year over year. So pleased that our business momentum and product innovation was recognized by top tier institutional investors. And that fundraise leaves us extremely well capitalized. But I should note we're investing aggressively for growth and to win the market. Yet at the same time, we're scaling efficiently. If you look at measures of efficient scaling like magic number or like a burn ratio, we are top quartile or top decile on those metrics. And so that's where it's so important. You have to be able, if you want to deliver value for shareholders, you have to know how to invest your resources.

24:25Samantha Greenberg: But you can't hesitate when you have these great opportunities to drive innovation, to accelerate your product and engineering roadmap, to expand your go-to-market, to expand internationally. You do have to make analytical, rigorous decisions around deploying those resources because that's how you deliver value for shareholders. What is it that's driving AlphaSense's growth most directly? Yeah, great, great question. I think more than anything, it is the structural advantage of being a vertically integrated platform. And so we touched on the fact that because we have this content library of 500 million documents, all of that data has been indexed, tagged, normalized, mapped to a context graph that understands what is in those documents and their relationship to concepts.

25:21Samantha Greenberg: And we've built the harness around the large language model, the tools for the LLM to call that can reason across all of that stack. That means when you have a really complex research project, like I work in Pfizer's corporate strategy department and I'm looking at acquiring a private company, or I'm an investor at a mutual fund looking at should I invest in a cybersecurity company. There might be, if I'm making an acquisition for a company or recommending an acquisition, there might be 50 different things I need to look at. What's their funding history? Who's on their board of directors? How do their KPIs compare to other companies in their category?

26:06Samantha Greenberg: How does their valuation compare to public market comparables? I can give you 30 other examples. We've written, we've built tools that do each part of that research project very effectively. And so the combination of that orchestration, the purpose-built tools, having all of the content, being able to reason over it, it means that in one click, you can take a research question all the way through to fully cited presentation outputs. And that is such an incredibly token efficient and time efficient and smart solution for a customer versus what was done, you know, what you might do when you don't have a vertically integrated platform, which is you have to stitch together many different tools that do many different things.

26:58Samantha Greenberg: You've got a general purpose LLM, then you've got point tools that might be pulling in some parts of content that you need, other parts in a different place. You don't have a finely tuned harness. Maybe you're developing your own tools or maybe you're using tools from yet another vendor. The cost of stitching that all together versus vertical integration, we believe the performance differential can be 5 to 10x as far as higher ROI, better total cost of ownership in a vertically integrated platform. And that's what is driving this remarkable growth and usage on our platform. we've talked about in social media, token consumption on AlphaSense reached$35 trillion in June on an annualized basis.

27:48Samantha Greenberg: And that's up from$8 trillion in December. Think about how rapidly to grow 4X in just two quarters, quarter over quarter, is really remarkable. And it's because customers are finding that this is the smartest and most token efficient way to execute research, complex research workflows. Well, with that type of growth, we wonder about, you know, how you look into this business, which operating inputs are you watching most closely, just given that growth? What do you watch daily? What do you watch weekly? Yes, that's a great question. So one of the things I care, one of the things I love as a former investor, as someone who is diehard dedicated to the marriage of data science and fundamental forecasting, I am always looking at customer behavior on our platform, usage on our platform day in and day out.

28:43Samantha Greenberg: What are the trends around usage? And then also, conversely, how are we doing? It's been very talked about in the market lately, as I'm sure you've seen, the high cost of token spend, etc. And one of the things we're constantly looking at are things like model routing and model optimization, post-training, all the different ways that we might consume, compute, and optimize those resources more efficiently. That's another category. And then along those lines, are we on the go-to-market side scaling efficiently? I'm looking at the full funnel of sales and marketing metrics. And then there's the strategic lens.

29:29Samantha Greenberg: Where are we spending our time? What are the single most needle-moving projects in our product and engineering roadmap? Are we tracking to deliver them? How are we sizing the expected value and ROI of them? And then, you know, where might it make sense to buy versus build? We've done selectively in the past some M &A for parts of the platform. Those things have been really game changing. We have this incredible distribution across 7 ,800 customers. So those are the kinds of things that I'm looking at and evaluating every day. Yeah, that type of evaluation. And we'd love to understand some of the decision making within the organization.

30:16I mean, how do you decide where AlphaSense should invest its next dollar? Who needs to be convinced?

30:26Samantha Greenberg: Great question. And so the just like your two single most valuable resources are your money and your time. And they are also your most scarce things, your money and your time. And so where you deploy them is incredibly consequential. And the framework that I really find compelling is thinking about innovations as sustaining versus disruptive. And then are they moving the needle on driving revenue and growth or are they moving the needle on driving efficiency? And so if you think about a two by two quadrant of sustainable versus disruptive innovation, driving revenue versus driving profit, that's how you can start to realize you can't put the entire bets of the company in like only one of the four boxes.

31:19Samantha Greenberg: And so like a classic example is you want the majority of your innovation to be in truly disruptive innovation so you don't get leapfrogged and you're always at the leading edge of that innovation. But if you don't do any sustaining innovation, you have really unhappy customers. Like there might be table stakes features that just need to be improved upon. So that's like one example of a framework. Similarly, there might be an impactful initiative to drive profit. And even though driving revenue is more rewarded than the market, you still need to show progress on paths to profitability, margin expansion, etc.

31:59Samantha Greenberg: So, again, you have to allocate some time and resources to things that drive profits as well as driving revenue. And so that's how I think I it is. I have found that that two by two quadrant really helps put the decision in front of people in a way that's easy for them to immediately start debating the merits. When it comes to AlphaSense's AI agents, where is AlphaSense in that journey of measuring the customer value that AI agents can deliver? Yeah, excellent question. Today, over 90 % of the research projects on AlphaSense are being performed by agents. What an incredible world, like something we all couldn't have conceived of even three years ago.

32:51Samantha Greenberg: And we are in a world today where ROI of AI spend is such a front and center topic. And so there's several things that our customers look at. First, because we've introduced consumption-based elements of our pricing model, that actually allows a customer, it matches pricing to outcomes and allows a customer to purchase outcomes. They know how many credits translate to each different kind of research project. So you've actually fulfilled the promise of software and AI infrastructure at its most powerful. You're literally buying an outcome. And agents, in an agent world, an agent doesn't need to buy a seat per se.

33:42Samantha Greenberg: They are calling a tool. They are delivering. They are executing a workflow. And so it's buying outcomes. It's again, it's the total cost of ownership benefit of a vertically integrated platform versus a stitched together stack. We believe that's a 5x cost difference. Because if you were to try to recreate AlphaSense, you would have to put together six different categories of tools. You'd be using a general purpose LLM without a harness. That's far less token efficient. And so those are the kinds of metrics our customers are using. And then the last one is how many kind of team efficiencies they're getting.

34:29Samantha Greenberg: And so by deploying AlphaSense and in particular our new product, which is called Super Analyst, we believe our customers and we've heard anecdotally from customers that they are getting the benefit of having a team of analysts in this one product. And then just last example, because I love this example, a Fortune 100 professional services organization talks about how in their first month deploying AlphaSense, the client meeting preparation time for their team went down 83%, eight figures in the millions of dollars of savings. Unfortunately, that's not what they pay us. So they are just getting multiples of ROI on their investment their first month deployed.

35:17Samantha Greenberg: And those are the stories when customers are happy, that's our why and our reason for existing. We hear often about this sort of acceleration of the work in finance, the contribution AI is making. It accelerates things. How is AI changing actual finance decisions yet, though? You know, not just accelerating. And at AlphaSense, I would imagine you folks have achieved that in some way. So AI is certainly transforming decision making. First of all, it's transforming that process because it's automated of getting to a decision the most efficiently and effectively and surfacing those valuable insights.

36:09Samantha Greenberg: And that's what AlphaSense does. But also, it is providing these really superior tools to measure the ROI on decisions and to drive the ROI of decisions. We've never been a companies have never been able to more quickly launch new products and enter new markets in an age of AI. And similarly, measuring the results of what you're doing by having all of that real time, powerful analytics is a game changer versus a few years ago. The example I always give is, you know, in a finance 1.0 world, when you had, you know, going back like a decade or so, if you would traditionally wait until you got the month's results and you compare them to what you forecasted, in today's world, I can see every day, every customer and every revenue vertical and how it's performing in real time compared to our forecast.

37:17Samantha Greenberg: And that allows us to drive the really actionable insights that can help truly transform the cost curve, investing for growth, and so on. Well, thank you. Lots of insights there for us, so we appreciate that. We're up to what we like to refer to as our finance strategic moment. And, Samantha, this might have happened any time during the course of your career. Frankly, we're just looking for a good story that reveals something about finance along your trajectory. What would you like to share with us? Yeah. The single most powerful one for me is the power of a forecasting transformation and unlock by combining data science with fundamental processes to truly bend the cost curve of an organization by enabling real-time visibility that can produce those actionable insights that allow an organization to drive revenue and drive profits.

38:17Samantha Greenberg: And so, for example, at my last company, our single largest cost was our call center and our contact center. And because we were serving government, that had to entirely reside in the U.S. And there might be a six to eight week lead time on changes we could make to staffing. And so when I arrived working across finance and operations, we worked with our data scientists to pull all of the data on our volumes and our usage that would drive the need for staffing of the call centers into models and into dashboards and tools like Tableau so that we could see every day what the usage of the platform was.

39:08That allowed us to then constantly meet, like coordinate at first every day, eventually a few times a week across finance and operations.

39:19Samantha Greenberg: And we'd see insights like, okay, volumes are running a little bit higher than forecast, but rather than hiring an entirely additional class of workers, because we could see every day the change, we might be able to flex over time. Or we might be able to only hire a fraction of how many people we had planned. Or similarly, if revenue is running a little below, we could cancel an entirely future planned class of hiring and just flex again over time. And those things, like those insights, again, if you have to wait, if you can't see your analytics in real time, and if you don't have a great partnership of finance and data science and operations working together, you're not getting your information until the month is already closed and you've lost the entire window to take those actions that can radically transform the cost structure.

40:20Samantha Greenberg: And by the end of putting all of that, all of those analytics and infrastructure in place, we were able to draw it to nearly double gross margins over our period of two to three years. And fully half of that was attributable to those actionable insights that a forecasting transformation produced.

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41:50We're going to ask you to look back again, Samantha. I believe you've had three CFO appointments to date. We want you to think about your earliest days and correct me if it's more. We want you to reflect on that first 60 days you arrived into a CFO role. We want to know what you didn't expect. We want to know what surprised you. And again, you had observed these executives for years. You knew plenty of CFOs, but there must have been something. Anything?

42:19Samantha Greenberg: Yes. One consistent arc through the three companies where I've served as CFOs is that rapid scaling drives its own problems of success, drives success problems. And while of course every company would rather have a success problem than a lack of success problem, they are just as very hard to solve and they create an urgency around the need to drive operational maturity. And that is everything from systems that need to be integrated. A classic mistake that companies often make when they're rapidly scaling is in the early days, you just use a bunch of manual processes because the business is small enough that a few talented humans can live in spreadsheets and they don't need a system, etc.

43:16Samantha Greenberg: That works great until you've grown, you know, 10x, and all of a sudden, the humans aren't capable of keeping up with the customer and revenue scale of the company. And so that's when it's critically important to drive those systems implementations, which people don't want to do because they're really hard, and they can go wrong, and they take a long time, and they're distracting. But they're critical. Otherwise, you're just taking manual process, adding more and more and more people to duplicate the manual process at scale. And it's ultimately, you know, even harder to manage. Or the other thing is people, when a business is rapidly scaling, you implement a system without thinking about how the entire FinOps stack should work together.

44:07Samantha Greenberg: And then you have disparate systems that don't natively integrate, they don't talk to each other, and you've arrived at that same problem. And so what I would say is a very powerful lesson I have learned is no matter how much you think a person can do something better than a system, that is not true. Systems implementation and real strategy around what is the optimal systems architecture and what does that stack look like are critical to support a company scaling. That's also true of processes and filling all the skill gaps in the org. But the most important thing a leader can do in their first 30 days, this is going to sound so simple to you, is just assess.

44:54Samantha Greenberg: Rip the Band-Aid off, figure out what needs to happen to drive operational maturity and get after it. We like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side before we go. Is there something most of your colleagues might not know about you? You've only been there since early spring, so that might be an easier one for you. I don't know, but is there a chapter from your past, an interest that you had, a milestone of sorts, anything? Yeah, great question. So I would say that one thing I always say to people is that you have to remember, and that I would attribute If I look back at what's driven success in my career and people trusting me to manage these very large teams, it's because I've always really understood that the people side of your job has to be just as much or more of the full-time job than the functional tasks.

45:47Samantha Greenberg: And in fact, when Citadel bought my company, that was their message. They were complimentary about the numbers my firm had put up, but they pointed out there are other great, you're a great tech investor, your firm has delivered on every target you've set out to your investors, but there's other great investors out there too. What there are fewer of are people that can truly attract, mentor, grow, and retain good talent. And one thing that I hold myself accountable for is anyone who comes in to work with me as my partner, I consider myself just as accountable to their career as they themselves are.

46:26Samantha Greenberg: And if I don't deliver them that growth and mentoring opportunity, I've failed myself as well as them. Nice. Thank you for that. We wonder, would you have a book selection for us? Maybe not a book, maybe it's a resource, don't know, anything, something that might have influenced your thinking, or maybe it's something you escape with? Yes, Jack. So my little sister, who's my best friend, is a tenured professor and economist at Harvard. She's a behavioral economist. And both the influence of having a sister and best friend who's a behavioral economist, as well as my own interest in it, has just sparked this passion for the field of behavioral economics, decision-making science.

47:12Samantha Greenberg: And those are my favorite books. classic book that I love is Professor Katie Milkman from Wharton's book called How to Change. And it's like Atomic Habits. It's about the tools you can use to really make positive change happen and stick. And so again, I would recommend, I think of How to Change as a must read. It's one of the books I love the most. But in general, that entire category, whether it's Daniel Kahneman's work, some of Adam Grant's work, like Angela Duckworth's grit, that entire roster of books around decision making and behavior are my very favorites. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you for those.

47:56We are up to our final question, where we get to ask you to look forward finally. And we'd like to know what your priorities for the next 12 months would be as a CFO, what those priorities would be?

48:08Samantha Greenberg: Yes, excellent question. So as I think about our priorities, first it is what should always be first for a CFO, which is driving operational maturity. In a rapidly scaling business, those success problems accumulate. And so it's that need to make sure, do we have the right systems? Have we thought through the right stack? What does this look like? Then it is similarly around forecasting transformation. Do we have every metric at our fingertips? Are we leveraging those insights to drive revenue and drive profits? Are we being the best cross-functional partner to the product and engineering org, to our go-to-market engine?

48:53Samantha Greenberg: And then it's capital allocation. As we touched on, it's how do we prioritize our product and engineering initiatives? How do we measure our spend? How do we balance investing for growth with increasing profitability? What do we build versus buy? What are the right frameworks to determine risk reward? And also, are we rigorously debating to get to the right answer? Samantha Greenberg, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Thank you so much, Jack. It was such a pleasure.

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