2016: Building the Operating System for Agentic Automation | with Ryan Roccon, CFO, Zapier

0:00Ryan Roccon: Support 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 Shiv Verma and I'm the CFO of Robinhood and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1216. over the last eight years i've managed the business to be cash flow positive every year and we've done that by being very strict about the investments that we make and ultimately the good news is that because we are cash flow positive and because we generate a pretty sizable amount of cash it allows us to be pretty aggressive with the bets that we make but generally speaking you know we have an engine that runs quite consistently that we can rely on and then we look at each initiative as as you might expect to understand what do we think the possible roi is and the net price and value of that initiative.

0:57And we rank them and use the dollars that we believe will generate to fund those. And so we still try to maintain that cashflow break even or better. And I challenge the organization every year. I say, make me violate this rule. I want to lose money, but I want to lose money on the right thing. Like show me where there's an opportunity that's outsized. And when we find those, we certainly go and make the investment. In the age of AI now, it's changing every month. And so I'm getting more and more of those pitches. But the reality is we've been very measured in how we deploy investments. We try to be quite consistent about the frameworks that we use and sort of use the same measuring stick across all of these different areas.

1:38Ryan Roccon: Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Ryan Rakan, CFO of Zapier.

1:48Ryan Roccon: AI is creating an interesting problem for CFOs. The cost of building something new keeps falling, while the number of things worth investing in seems to keep rising. So financial discipline may no longer be about simply saying no. It may be about knowing when the opportunity is good enough to break your own rules. At Zapier, Ryan Rakan has spent years managing for positive cash flow. Yet he regularly challenges the organization to find an investment compelling enough to change that. And with AI creating new possibilities almost monthly, that challenge is becoming a lot more interesting. Our talk with Ryan Rakan begins after this.

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4:15Ryan Roccon: Hello, CFO Ryan Rakan is with us. Ryan's career has taken him from construction accounting to leading finance for a fast-growing e-commerce manufacturer before joining Zapier as a controller in 2019. Since then, he's moved through a series of expanding finance leadership roles, becoming CFO and most recently COO in CFO. So today he brings that broad operating perspective to Zapier as the company navigates the rapidly changing worlds of automation and AI. Ryan, welcome. Thanks for having me, Jack. So take a look back for us, Ryan. And you made an investment of time here at Zapier. It's interesting.

5:00Ryan Roccon: You might have seen a lot of growth during those years. But go back a little earlier for us. Take us back. How did you find your way into the finance lane? Yeah, you did. You did a great, great job there with the introduction. That covered most of it, but I'll give you some details. So yeah, interestingly, right out of college, I joined a retail general contractor as their controller. So I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college grad who came in as a controller for a company that was doing tens of millions of dollars and about 50 employees. And to be frank, I didn't have a whole lot of experience, not only working in a professional setting, but within accounting, I went to school for finance.

5:39So it was a trial by fire to say the least. But the thing that it really kicked off for me was this really heavy focus on operations. So yes, I'm a finance leader. Yes, I'm in the CFO seat, as you mentioned, now in the COOC. Throughout my entire career, I think that's been a through line, which is while I'm a finance leader, I'm also very much an operational leader. And so in that, you know, construction company. Lots of operations, accounting, finance, admin, HR, payroll, people, all that good stuff. And throughout those years, oftentimes I was leaning on folks around me. So I had mentors through family, friends, folks who had been in similar roles.

6:18And that sort of got me through those first few years. I got my CMA, Certified Management Accounting designation, which for what it's worth, I focused on that because I found it was more forward-looking versus the CPA, which is backward looking. And I certainly had this vision of wanting to be a CFO in the future. And so when I did that, the next thing I did was I moved to a company, as you mentioned, e-commerce company, Sticker Mule. Very, very interesting company. I joined when they were about a dozen people or so at the startup part of the business. And we grew that to six, seven, 800 people in a matter of a few years.

6:55Very, very successful, privately owned business. and a very similar story. I joined as a head of finance, helped grow the business. The key thing there though, which is very unique, is they hired me as a remote worker. So they were in upstate New York. They had trouble finding somebody to fill this role that they felt like was qualified. And so they opened the search to make it remote and they found me. So I've been remote well before it was Vogue, almost about 11 or 12 years now. And a lot of folks look at that and they think, oh man, remote feels like it can be a decelerator, especially if you get stuck in that mode where I only want to work remote.

7:34And for me, it was the opposite. It was very much this chance to take on a different role in a different organization and have a lot of impact. And then from there, I moved over, as you mentioned, to Zapier. And again, I find myself in a similar circumstance joining as their controller. They had about 100 employees. And over the last eight years, as you mentioned, it's been quite a ride, eight years long. I became from controller to senior director, VP of finance, CFO, and then Zapier's first ever COO and going from about 100 employees to about 800 employees during that time. I'd say the thing that's been interesting through all the years and all these changes, in almost every case, the reason for me being in these roles and having these opportunities was just me saying yes.

8:23When I saw an opportunity, even if it looked a little strange or outside of my wheelhouse or something I hadn't done, it was mostly me being curious and saying, yeah, I want to give it a shot. And that turned into another opportunity. So that was something that really has stuck with me through the years.

8:39Ryan Roccon: I want to just point out, and you made an investment of years at each of these companies, the construction company, you were there nearly six years at Sticker Mule, nearly four years. And of course, here, you were just mentioning eight years. So you make this investment of years over time and you join these companies, as you mentioned, Sticker Mule was rather small. I had Zapier as well. I have to imagine what my question would be like, there are certain risks to joining these small types of companies. And I imagine you thrive in that environment or no, Jack, it's hard work. How would you look at it for us?

9:19Yeah, I mean, it certainly is hard work. And I do find myself thriving in those environments. There's, again, with that operational tilt comes this builder's mindset. Like in every case I've come in and even with Zapier, you know, you think Zapier, a lot of folks look at that and they go, oh, they're not really that much of a startup. When I joined in 2019, they very much were. We didn't have a procurement program. We were running on QuickBooks. you know we didn't have uh sort of um pay progression and job families and all the things that go along with it very very much a startup still with that being said in in every case even with with sticker meals i mentioned there's only about a dozen employees one of the little known things about that company was they were backed by a much larger traditional manufacturing company called noteworthy that had been in business for 45 years uh zapier not not too dissimilar.

10:10I mean, obviously very different, but in the sense that very strong financials, you know, I don't know, folks who aren't familiar with Zapier have never raised anything more than their seed round, completely bootstrapped, self-funded, profitable, incredible growth, incredible company, incredible story. But again, you could see that in the fundamentals and the financials. So when you join a company like that, it feels a lot less risky than the sort of upstart that's burning cash and has a runway that's measured in months rather than years. So those are some of the things that I sort of made sure of before I joined any of these companies.

10:46Ryan Roccon: Would you have done this differently at all? I mean, would you have wanted maybe a chapter in a large enterprise finance organization or never wanted that? And again, you already described something interesting. You like being a remote worker. You know, it's a great question. It's hard to say whether I would have enjoyed it or not because I didn't really have the opportunity. I did work for US Steel as an intern when I was in college in their finance department. And it was, I mean, you did get to see a little bit behind the scenes of what a very, very large organization looked like. And obviously, as we all know, pros and cons to both sides.

11:26For me personally, whether it's my nature or just the things that I like, I like having influence and direct influence over outcomes. And I think the smaller the organization and the larger the scope of your role within that organization, the higher the probability of that being true. And so you get into these really big, large enterprises and you become a cog in the machine. And I just, I like to have ownership over the outcome. So again, yeah, looking back on it, I'm certain there would have been a lot of lessons learned and things that I could have benefited from that would have made my sort of skillset sharper throughout my career, having worked in an organization like that.

12:04At the same time, I don't look back at it and go, oh, I wish I had done that. It's been pretty fun so far.

12:11Ryan Roccon: Well, let's ask you about Zapier. What kind of company is this? And I know that what we're getting at is what does the business provide today? And this is for those of us who might not be familiar with the company. Who uses this type in automation and where's the opportunity? Yeah. So Zapier has been around for, you know, better part of 15 years and our primary customer are knowledge workers. They're knowledge workers who are trying to automate business processes. And that happens across every function in the org, every org size, every team, right? That's been Zapier's business for the last 15 years.

12:50In this age of AI, what we've, what we've really sort of positioned and what we've changed is we're now doing that, but in an agentic way. So Zapier is where AI built work goes to actually run. So you can build whatever you want, wherever you want, any harness you want, but Zapier will run it, will keep it working, and will give the company visibility and control over that. So maybe if I break this down a bit, as the world has changed, AI has made building things incredibly easy, like profoundly easy. Anyone can stand up something that works in a demo environment or an app very, very easily. But once you go to run that thing in production, once it becomes an automation, a recurring solution, that's when things start to break, right?

13:36You have an app that changes, maybe it costs more than it should because you're consuming a lot of tokens. And generally, not a lot of folks can see exactly what it's doing or who approved it or share it properly. And so you kind of create this black box around these automations within AI. And businesses, obviously, us among many, want and need visibility, control, and CFOC speaking here, predictable costs, right? They don't want to deploy AI across their org and just let it run wild and not have any idea what's going on. And they don't want employees to be responsible for having to make sure all these things are done in an optimized way.

14:13So we have millions of businesses that are running automations across thousands of apps and increasingly they are being built or starting their build in the new harnesses that you hear all about all over the news, right? Cloud, Cursor, ChatGPT. What they'll do going forward though is build those things in the harness and manage the ongoing automation in Zapier, right? To make sure it's observable, controllable, auditable, managed, shared with the right permissions and so on. So that's a bit about what the business is doing today, how we fit into the greater AI ecosystem.

14:46Ryan Roccon: And you had mentioned, I think, Like Zapier has largely grown without venture funding or traditional venture funding. How has that shaped the way you invest? Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, over the last eight years, I've managed the business to be cash flow positive every year. And we've done that by being very strict about the investments that we make. And ultimately, the good news is that because we are cash flow positive and because we generate a pretty sizable amount of cash. It allows us to be pretty aggressive with the bets that we make. But generally speaking, we have an engine that runs quite consistently that we can rely on.

15:24And then we look at each initiative, as you might expect, to understand what do we think the possible ROI is and the net present value of that initiative. And we rank them and use the dollars that we believe will generate to fund those. And so we still try to maintain that cashflow break even or better. And I challenge the organization every year I say, make me violate this rule. I want to lose money, but I want to lose money on the right thing. Like, show me where there's an opportunity that's outsized. And when we find those, we certainly go and make the investment. In the age of AI now, it's changing every month, and so I'm getting more and more of those pitches.

15:59But the reality is we've been very measured in how we deploy investments. We try to be quite consistent about the frameworks that we use and sort of use the same measuring stick across all of these different areas.

16:12Ryan Roccon: Well, as Zapier expands beyond automation, we're wondering, just in terms of the revenue model, which part of the revenue is most important to understand as you move into the future? Yeah, I mean, so again, you can kind of look at Zapier in different pieces. You've got the core existing automation business that uses traditional workflow and Zap automations. You've got our enterprise business, which is growing and growing quite quickly. And then you've got this new agentic functionality within Zapier. So we've had agents, we've had chatbots, we've had AI by Zapier within the product for years now.

16:54We, funny enough, called it AI Code Red back in March 2023. So we've been well out of the curve for a few years now. But when you think about what part matters most, at the end of the day, it is the agentic revenue associated with Zapier. So maybe one parallel or proxy that I can share that'll help you understand the way that sort of Zapier is working today. So Zapier agents have existed now for probably 18 months. So agents just like you would expect an agent to be defined, right? And we have hundreds of thousands of users building and running agents on Zapier every month. We went and we actually audited those agents to see what people were building and running.

17:36And we found that about nine out of 10 of those agents were actually running deterministic code. Deterministic code meaning sort of if this, then that code, right? It's very rules-based. With only a small part of it, truly agentic, truly requiring judgment or inference, right? And so then we went and said, okay, what if we rebuild some of these agents using the deterministic bits where we can and the agentic bits where they're needed? And let's see what it costs. Let's see what it does to token cost, what it does to task cost within Zapier. What we found is about 75 % less cost and a workflow that's more reliable because now it's using rules instead of judgment for things that allow for a rule, right?

18:22And so, you know, if I translate that, it's like the agent that is sort of checking your email or updating your calendar in the background, it doesn't need inference to do that. It needs a rule, right? It needs a web hook. It needs a trigger. And the evidence of this working is something we built called Automation Bench, which looks at the actual work running through and across Zapier, tells us which models perform best, which versions are most efficient per dollar, and where determinism just wins outright. And so ultimately, to answer your question. We are looking at the revenue and the usage of what we are calling next generation ZAPs.

18:57These are ZAPs that are built-in agent harnesses, but deployed and managed on Zapier and primarily made up of mostly deterministic bits with agentic components where it matters. That is the future of cost-effective, efficient, reliable, long-standing automations. And so that's where we're putting a lot of focus on obviously measuring the performance of these things, but sort of growth forecasts and so on.

19:23Ryan Roccon: As you sort of beef up that focus, I mean, did you change anything organizationally? Has organizational change been required to introduce these types of new offerings? Yes, yes. And I'd say it changes by the month for the last few years. I mean, a great example here is just the way in which we write code. You know, you've heard, you've probably heard a lot about software factory as a concept, this idea of engineers deploying agents that are deploying agents of their own with QA and sort of all of the quality controls built in. And it's this idea of one really, you know, great engineer can deploy this army of agents to write, merge, manage, you know, review code.

20:11And so when you do that, that looks very different than your traditional engineering product design pod. You start to have these sort of technical managers and code reviewers and different subsets of folks that fit together in a unique way that didn't exist a few years ago. And so on the whole, yes, the entire organization has been sort of restructured to put AI at the forefront and the center of how we design and ship work. Specifically though, yes, for these types of initiatives, things that we call bets or that we're putting a lot of money and intent behind, we are reorganizing to have clear what we call directly responsible individuals or DRIs.

20:46So we know who's on the line, who's driving this, who's going to make the decision, and lots of changes along those lines.

20:53Ryan Roccon: Has there been a discussion in terms of how you charge customers? I mean, as AI agents take on more work, could that eventually, of course, change the approach Zapier takes to pricing and charging? Oh, my gosh. Uh, yes, is the short answer. And that is pricing and packaging is within my remit. And it's been there for the last, I don't know, four or five years. And I will tell you, it is one of the most challenging parts of my job. It is incredibly challenging, especially for a company like Zapier. Forget about AI for a moment. We're a fully horizontal platform. We serve literally every industry, every use case, every ICP, truly, and every company size.

21:37And as a result, trying to create a pricing model that works for everybody, I can tell you it's tough. With that being said, now add AI to the mix, you've got sort of this double-edged sword. You've got inference costs, which can be incredibly expensive. And Zapier as a product has a lot of AI built into the products that we are producing. So if you use AI by Zapier and you come into our product without your own key and you want to use Zapier's key, well, we have to pass those token costs through to you. We have to make sure that there's enough margin there to make sure that we're not losing money on every dollar that goes through these tokens.

22:11At the same time, we want to price it competitively because we want you to use Zapier to solve these AI challenges. On the other hand, we do allow you to bring your own key. And so in that case, we need to make sure we're not charging you because you're bringing the key. So the short answer is we have spent an incredible amount of time. we are trying to walk the very fine line of we want to be the most cost-effective solution for automation, full stop, period. We want it to be. That's Zapier. That's our job. Automation should be reliable and cost-effective. In order to do that, we have to really, again, walk that line of where things are expensive like tokens and we're having to pass those through, we're going to price them at cost as much as we can or even slightly below cost.

22:55On the things that are cheaper for Japier because we've been doing them for the better part of a decade, just standard infran hosting, there we'll have a little bit more margin. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we want to be the cost-effective solution for agentic automations.

23:12Ryan Roccon: What about inside the finance function? We've been speaking to two years now about how quickly the work gets done with AI. But what about, has AI changed some of the decision-making within the finance realm? Has it, you know, assisted you in ways that, you know, turned back the clock? It just wasn't two years ago. Oh, boy, yeah. I mean, it's changed everything. It's changed how we work as a team. It's changed the things that we build internally. you know i've talked to a lot of companies and shared a lot of our own experience so one thing i will say about zapier is again i mentioned we called this ai code right back in march 2023 that's not you know fiction or some hyperbole truly we said we are going to redesign the way we operate as a business the way that we hire folks how we measure competency everyone's job is changing and AI will be at the center of it.

24:19We did that, you know, two and a half years ago. And since then, the things that we've built, every automation, every tool, every process within accounting, finance, tax, etc. It's got a Zapier-powered automation behind the scenes 70 % of the time with some amount of inference built in with an agentic step. You know, whether it's month-end close or reconciliations or doing a financial analysis or scenario analysis or the way we do our R &D tax credit and write our memos with tax. All of it is being run through Zapier automations with, again, with oftentimes an AI by Zapier or Agentex step. And so, yeah, I mean, we can, I'm happy to dive into examples wherever you might find it useful, but the reality is every single function, finance included, has changed the way that we work.

25:08Ryan Roccon: We want to touch on your visibility into the business And we wonder what signals tell you that customers are getting more value from Zapier before that shows up in the revenue. Before the revenue arrives, you're able to see, ooh, the customers are moving in the right direction here. I mean, do you have that type of visibility? What are the indicators, the signals? Yeah, I mean, they're not going to be shocking. it's usage activity, right? It's usage activity across the various products that we offer and then paired with time and then in combination with each other. So, you know, the most valuable users who get the most value out of Zapier, generally speaking, are going to be the ones who have found a way to automate multiple use cases across a line of business, across a team, even better, when you've got not only HR doing it, but finance doing it.

26:07And then you start to sort of stair-step into the other products that they're using. So you might be using deterministic core Zapier workflows paired with an AI by Zapier step. They might have a full end-to-end agent running. They might be doing tool calling within AI by Zapier. They might be using MCP off platform. So if you're within Claude and you're building automations, you can hook up Zapier's MCP and get access to the 9 ,000 apps that we've built over the last 15 years and battle-tested for authentication and app credentialing and sort of all of the version control and everything that goes along with the incredibly robust sort of structure that Zapier built.

26:49So we're looking for that multi-product platform usage. The folks who, again, who are really going to thrive with Zapier are going to start to put the pieces together of like, wait a second, I can vibe this thing on Claude, connect it to all my apps. And as soon as it goes away from, hey, I just want to see an output to, hey, I want this to run every day. And I want it to happen when this event happens. And I want it to ingest all of these things from all of these apps. And I want to be able to share it with my team. And I want my auditor to come in and be able to see the results. As soon as that clicks for them and they start building in that way, and they deploy on Zapier and have that functionality, that's when you go, they got it.

27:27They get what's going on here. Like, this is the future of building on Zapier and the future of how AI and that off platform, on platform all blend together.

27:37Ryan Roccon: Wow, amazing. Great peek into the business for us. We are up to what we like to refer to as the finance strategic moment. This might have happened last week. It might have happened 10 years ago. What would you share with us as a finance strategic moment? Yeah, I'll split the difference with you. It wasn't last week. It wasn't 10 years ago. It was probably about three years ago. So again, for those who aren't entirely familiar with Zapier as a business, Zapier is a textbook or was a textbook product-led growth business, right? So, and if you're not familiar with that, the idea is product is what sells, not a sales team.

28:18And so a freemium product based on a trial, right? Could sign up for free, self-serve, put a credit card in, you're a Zapier customer. And we have one of the best SEO engines that anyone has ever built, incredible growth, great timing. We launched the product, you know, all the way back in 2012, throughout the COVID period, incredible digital transformation growth, everybody going remote, Zapier being a remote first company, remote only company founded that way, had just incredible momentum and no sales team, none, right? Never had sales at Zapier. So that meant we didn't have commission structure, CRMs, no comp plans, no enterprise SKU, no deal desk, nothing.

28:54None of that existed three years ago. And we were proud of that as a business, the people that we hired and the people who really thrived here were product people. They wanted to build an incredible product that sold itself. People used it. People loved it. That's all we wanted to do was just keep building that. And ultimately, we knew that if that worked, we would grow. And that's what we saw for the last decade. But as we started growing and larger customers started showing up with needs that we weren't built for, we saw that as sort of this like double-edged sword, right? This is an opportunity.

29:28We've got customers who are coming to us, but it's also a threat because if we don't serve this need, somebody else is going to. So what I decided was, this is again about three years ago, I said, I'm going to build a long-range plan beyond the usual three years. I'm going to build it all the way through the end of the decade. And I'm going to take the entire history of Zapier, every sort of major product decision we've made over the years and all the growth metrics, all the sort of financials, and I'm going to put them together and create a story that tells anybody who came to Zapier today or years from now so they understand how we got to this moment in time.

30:02And so I spent probably almost six months really just distilling down the entire business, looking at that long-range plan, talking about all the decisions we made over the years, how that translates into new ARR, reactivation ARR, churn, contraction, etc. And what I showed them was, look, a business shaped like Zapier is going to follow a curve that looks similar to other businesses that came before Zapier, the likes of Slack or these other Atlassian, other product-led growth businesses. And what they show is that there is a gravity that comes in with self-serve. It's low ACV, small business, very small business.

30:38And so I mapped it all out for the entire organization. And I wrote this narrative, which I called the path to a billion, right? And I said, this is what will get us to a billion at the end of the decade. And it was a very, very long document. It ended up being about 50 pages. And I remember the CEO coming and telling me, Brian, this is way too long. This is way too long. And I said, go read it again and tell me if there's anything you think I can cut. And he read it again. And he said, no, this is, yeah, you got to send the whole thing. So I wrote this document. I shared it with the company. Like I said, it was, to be fair, there was lots of graphs, lots of charts, lots of stuff in there that made it longer, but But I shared it with the entire organization, put it on our intranet, our HQ.

31:19I did what we call hangouts about it. And I embedded it into every part of the organization. I said, this is what we're going for. This is the North Star. This is how we're going to build our metrics. This is where our objectives are going to ladder up. Every part of the organization should be able to say, I understand how I fit into this path to a billion, right? And how we go execute against this. And the first thing I'll tell you is that through that six-month process, I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of folks who said, for what it's worth, to be clear, maybe I didn't make that entirely clear.

31:50The answer to that gravity or that sort of drawdown over the years was that Zapier has to move up market. We have to go serve these enterprise customers. We have to build a product that meets their needs. We have to be able to sell to them. We have to build all the things that go along with it. But through that process of building that narrative, like I mentioned, I got a lot of pushback. A lot of folks who were like, I didn't sign up for this kind of company. This cuts against the culture here. We built this amazing product. I don't want to be sales driven, quota closing, quarter end. That's not for me.

32:19And so I had to really spell it out. But at the end of the day, when I really did make it incredibly clear, all the may sayers and doubters said, okay, I get it. I finally get it and I buy it and I believe it. And so we went at that very moment, we said, all right, let's go. Sales team, commission, CRM, comp, deal desk, all of it. We got to build it, the SKUs, the pricing. And for the last three years, that's what we've been doing. And you can't walk around sort of the virtual hallway of Zapier without hearing folks talking about the path to a billion. It's become ingrained in every single person's sort of like understanding of what we're trying to do at Zapier.

32:58And the thing that's also funny is it became, you know, I didn't quite expect this, but it sort of, it became a bit of future telling because with what we're seeing with AI now, certainly the pressure and the competitive pressure has really compounded this idea of like self-serve growth isn't going to be the lever that's going to get us there long term we have to be able to sell to large organizations um and so it was it was a bit like looking back on it now a lot has changed but even still i find myself going yeah that that path is still the path that we are on today and we needed to be on and so you know the lesson i i sort of take from that whole experience is that as a cfo my job is to align the entire company on that North Star and make that path, it has to be very legible.

33:44Building that financial model, that's the easy part. That's step one. But telling the financial story, making it compelling, making it matter to folks and making them understand how they fit into it is the much, much harder part. And it deserves a lot more time and energy than I think some CFOs give it credit for. So if you're starting that long range plan, make sure you spend a lot more time beyond the spreadsheet, telling that story, creating that rally and cry and getting folks bought in.

34:13Ryan Roccon: AI is changing the finance function, but how much business value is it actually delivering? According to new research from Salesforce, 90 % of finance leaders using AI report a positive return on investment. And as AI agents enter the picture, finance leaders are seeing opportunities to improve productivity, reduce costs, and strengthen forecasting. But there's another side to the story. CFOs are also confronting growing revenue complexity with more subscription, consumption-based, and hybrid business models to manage. And that raises an important question. How can finance leaders gain the visibility they need to make better decisions while putting AI to work?

35:03Ryan Roccon: Salesforce explores these challenges and the opportunities ahead in its latest CFO research. Discover what finance leaders are saying about AI, revenue complexity, and the evolving CFO role. Visit salesforce.com slash CFO report. That's salesforce.com slash CFO report. I wonder just when it comes to capital structure, whether that path to a billion, are there milestones related to the capital structure and how it might have to evolve? I, you know, are will your mindset when it comes to accepting investors evolve or no, there's such a cultural cornerstone there? Maybe not. you know i never say never um i think the the reality is is that we've built a really healthy profitable business and we've made decisions on our own terms and we still maintain a very small private board and not only do we not have any funding from sort of an investment perspective we also have no debt and we've never raised debt either so in many ways zapier has been control of its own future since the beginning.

36:23And for us to make a change there would need to be quite compelling as to why. And the reality is that that may exist. There might come a moment in time. And I've certainly explored it in the case of potential acquisitions that we've been pursuing where it's large enough and significant enough that would require outside funding. But the truth of the matter is we need a pretty sharp and clear reason to go do that. And we're building a plan and we're building success metrics that rely on our own internal capital to get that done. But if we find a place where we don't think that's possible or we see a clear opportunity to move faster or swing bigger as a result, like I said, never say never.

37:01Ryan Roccon: So it was only 2024 when you were appointed CFO. And again, you've had another title at it since. But can you tell us about your arrival that first six months? I mean, and again, I think you shared with us that that plan you mapped out began two years before you became CFO even. A lot's happened. But we like to always ask about that. Once you got the title, something surprised you. You know, you thought you understood completely about the role. And then this. What is that one thing that you wish someone had told you before you accepted the appointment? yeah i mean i guess i i guess i'd say that the i had spent so many years being so deep in the details and a true operational driver that i guess i didn't realize how how quickly the job would stop being technical and and really become more of this like judgment narrative sequencing sort of executive, you know, having to, having to understand the entire business and, uh, and have a, an opinion and a very pointed opinion on things that maybe you haven't been as close to or familiar with every year.

38:25It's like, I, like I said, I spent, you know, 20 years really being the person who knows it better than anybody else. And all of a sudden there I'm being put into positions to make decisions that I don't know it better than someone else. Um, and so I, maybe I I wish I had somebody would have shared that with me and prep me for that a bit. But the reality is I, I, I do find it like, I find it both enjoyable and I like the challenge and I thrive on that decision-making process. You know, I've, I've spent time talking to other, other folks and on other podcasts and things around, um, decision-making.

39:01And one of the, one of the, another piece of feedback that I got earlier in my career was that sometimes I didn't give something the credit it was due in terms of going deep enough versus knowing when to go broad. And so there was a few times early on where I sort of made a call pretty quickly that I probably should have invested more time and thought into. And as a result, it was the wrong call. And I got that feedback like, you went too fast here. You didn't understand it. And I spent a lot of time thinking a lot about that and throughout the years about this decision making because I thrive on speed and trying to create action.

39:41And over the years, I think I've really cultivated this ability to make decisions quickly, but to know what kind of decision I'm making and ultimately be able to know when this is a two-way door versus a one-way door and whether this is going to come back to bite me. And that right there is a learned skill that, again, when you're thrust into this sort of this new role. You have to make these decisions really quickly. And I was fortunate that I had a lot of experience and mistakes made along the way that taught me like, okay, understand, is this two ways? Is this reversible? What's the stakeholders?

40:14What's the consequences of the risks? But you got to build that context. You got to ask people, you got to practice it. In my opinion, it might be one of the most important, if not the most important skills. Forget about as a CFO, as an executive at any organization, this ability to make decisions and know when you can make them quickly with limited information.

40:37Ryan Roccon: Ryan, we always like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side. We're wondering if there's something your colleagues might not know about you, something from your past, a pursuit, an interest that you had way back when, some milestone that you achieved. I don't know. Yeah. I think my colleagues know this for the most part about me. They know a little bit. They don't know all of it. I think it's interesting. I might not be classified as your typical CFO. I'd say I'm probably pretty far from it. Most CFOs are quite risk averse. And I think within the business context, I'm pretty close on that spectrum.

41:21I'd say less risk averse than some CFOs, but Not so extreme. When you take me out of the business context, I'm very far on the other side of the spectrum. So any extreme sport that you can name, I can promise you that I'm either doing it once or twice a week or have done it for many, many years. So downhill mountain biking, rock climbing, surfing, mountaineering, skydiving, snowboarding, skuma diving, all of them certified, have done multiple times. Again, I mountain bike a couple of times a week, rock climb pretty often. it's for me i think it's like the the yin to the yang of this job this job you know we just talked about decision making decision making is just so it's so mentally taxing my context switching on a day-to-day basis is is incredible it is it is very very taxing and requires a lot of brain power and when i go to do these these things that are very risky in many ways but i've created a lot of systems and sort of ways to calculate that risk and manage it and be in control of it through many years of practice and experience, it's like the exact opposite.

42:26It's this pure flow state where you know, here's the risk and here's how to avoid it. And here's how I can be expert in it. And it just kind of like everything else goes out the window. So it's something that a few folks know about me. I've shared here and there, but it is certainly a very big part of my personality.

42:44Ryan Roccon: Just curious about rock climbing. Is there like a number of boxes you're trying to check, a number of feats you're trying to accomplish or are you a little less ambitious? That's funny. Yeah, there is certainly a part. So I'm less on the like peak bagger. I have to do X number of climbs and get to Y grade and so on. I do it more for the activity itself, just to be out there and have that headspace. I will say though, that there's certainly something very addictive about all of these things in the progression that you get. And even, you know i've been going to climbing gyms for boy better part of a couple decades now and very addictive when you go and you kind of go look at the grades of each of the things and say all right next week i'm going to go up at least to this one and the next one this this progress that you get to sort of visually uh visibly measure yeah something about it what does a membership in a climbing gym look like is that an annual thing you sign or is it yeah i mean there's monthly, there's passes, there's annual.

43:48Yeah. I mean, that's a, it's, it's booming by the way, if anybody, any CFOs out there aspiring to get in a membership business, CFO, uh, the climbing gyms are, they're, they're booming these days.

43:58Ryan Roccon: The risk averse CFOs. Uh, well that you're part of a very small group, I think, but that's great. Thank you for sharing that with us. What about, is there a book selection for us? Doesn't have to be a book, actually a resource, something you'd recommend, something that you enjoyed, something that influenced your thinking along the way? Anything? Yeah, I'll give you a couple. On the book, I like to share this one because it's very atypical. I've read all of the business books, all of the CFO books, all the 80-20, measure what matters, so on and so forth, read them all. One of my favorites, a little bit outside the lines, though very, very popular, Influence by Robert Cialdini, or however you pronounce it.

44:40Very popular in the sales organizations. But my concept here is that perception is reality. And your ability to persuade and create perception goes a very long way in a leadership position, especially as a CFO. Yes, you can have all the spreadsheets in the world, but if you can't explain them and persuade folks, you're going to be in trouble. So it's a really, really great book. It's very practical ways to create this sort of perception and his aura and again, tactics that are really easy to implement and allow you to sort of create this stronger perception and persuasion. So that is my book recommendation.

45:19And then I'll give a plug to just networking groups. I was very fortunate that when I took the role of CFO, our CEO introduced me to probably, I don't know, three plus dozen other CFOs of large public companies, small privately held companies, folks who had come up through, I mean, we're talking Fortune 100 CFOs, very, very high impact, successful folks. And I went and talked to every one of them and asked, you know, hey, what does this job mean? How do I do it well? How do I not make mistakes? Like, how do I partner with the CEO? And I created an absolutely massive doc of all the advice. And I sort of distilled that against my own strengths and weaknesses.

46:00And I brought that back to the CEO and said, hey, here's where I think I'm good. Here's where I think I'm going to need a lot of support? How do we partner to make this successful? And that was a really big part of me stepping into that role, making sure we were both bonding on that. But from that day on, I joined multiple CFO networking groups and there's a million of them out there. Some are great, some are good. If you have an investor, many of them offer them, whether it's Bessemer or YC or Sequoia or whomever. There's a bunch of other private ones you might've heard of, F-Suite or The Circle.

46:32um again great i have found them to be hugely invaluable they just the opportunity to go chat with your peers connect trade war stories trade notes really really really valuable so any cfos out there especially new in the seat like get yourself in one of these groups you will find a

46:47Ryan Roccon: lot of value there yeah wonderful and i you know it's an interesting looking at your career path and what you shared with us up front that very often you've been remote networking uh is important for people like yourself and at the level now that you are, it's indispensable. So interesting insight. And I guess I'm not surprised. That would be so important, I would think, at this stage. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. We're up to our final question, which is to have you look into the future for us, 12 months. And we'd like to know your priorities as a CFO for that coming 12 months. Yeah, I think I would change the question slightly and say less of my priorities as a CFO, more my priorities as an executive and a leader at the business at Zapier.

47:35I say that because it's easy to kind of go all the way to the financial results and just simplify it like that. I want to see growth and I want to see profitability and I want to 12 months from now, they're both going to be great. Hooray. The reality is the priority for me, again, as a leader is to make sure the world knows what Zapier has built and what it's offering. Our products changed dramatically over the last couple of years. AI has created incredible opportunity. It's an incredible tool. And AI inside of Zapier is what I believe to be a world-changing tool, something that can really, really create incredible opportunities for those folks who are building automations

48:10Ryan Roccon: across their companies. So I want to make sure our go-to-market message is loud and clear. I want to make sure the product delivers on it. And then I want to make sure the financials follow suit. right that's my that's my cfo priority but as coo and as a leader of this business i just want to make sure that the thing that we're building that i'm really really proud of gets in the hands of folks and they understand and know how to use it and they find value the same way that we do ryan rokan thank you for joining us on cfo thought leader yeah happy to be here thanks for having me

48:44Ryan Roccon: Hello, we're benchmarking the CFO path. Join 500 finance leaders helping define how today's CFOs rise and lead. If you're a CFO or senior finance executive, contribute your experience. It takes just a few minutes and you'll receive early access to the findings. visit cfothoughtleader.com benchmarking.