Figma, Wealthfront & Virta Health CFOs answer your questions

Every decision a company makes is a financial decision. So finance isn't just the function that reports on the business; it's where the business gets decided.

Which makes it worth asking where your finance team's hours actually go. Reconciling last month. Chasing receipts. Policing a $30 subscription. All of it backward-looking.

That's why I use Brex: corporate cards plus AI-native workflows that absorb the record-keeping. Zero-touch receipt matching, real-time policy enforcement, continuous reconciliation. Controls fire before money leaves the account. Close takes days, not weeks.

Defense handled. Go play offense. Thousands of companies — including Anthropic, Coinbase, and DoorDash — already run on Brex. Head to brex.com/metrics to join them.

This week we have the following CFOs answering your reader questions:

Let’s get into it!

I would optimize a lot less for the title and a lot more for the quality of the learning.

There are certain lessons around building a company, leading a team, working with a CEO, managing a board, and dealing with investors that are incredibly valuable and you really only learn them when you are the number one finance person in the seat.

You can get a lot of those reps at a smaller company. A VP Finance role at a startup can be great for that too.

On the other hand, smaller companies simply do not have some of the interesting problems that show up at scale. You also lose the opportunity to work for someone who knows more than you and can teach you things you do not yet know you need to learn.

So in this case, I would really weigh the quality of the smaller opportunity, meaning how much I believe in the business and the CEO, against the quality of the training and mentorship I would get at the larger company.

Most of the time, I think the right answer is to work with the highest-quality people you can find, assuming there is a good style fit.

Titles are useful. Learning compounds.

I always optimize for learning. The opportunity to be CFO of a $20M company nobody’s heard of will most likely come around again. A VP of Finance with the opportunity to learn from a strong CFO in a much bigger business will give you more hands-on experience and mentorship allowing you to be more prepared for your ultimate goal of becoming a public company CFO. 

My honest take is that it comes down to

We had about 25 people when I joined Figma, no revenue and no one had any idea what my role was supposed to be. It was the perfect set up to test my own intuition, raise my hand to learn about anything and I was totally okay if a great story was all I got out of it. With that all said, had I not cut my teeth a bit at Dropbox before and developed a set of peer and mentor relationships I’m not sure I would have had the same amount of confidence in myself. And it was Figma’s early success that kept pushing me to grow and brought so much fantastic talent into the business. I’ve learned a ton from those people over the years.

In the spirit of the question, I think for most, the VP Finance offer is the clearest path to a public company CFO role but if you can really pick ‘em and are a glutton for pain the $20M company could be more fun for the right person.

I always try to create an environment where ambitious people can come in, get challenged, and grow because they figured out how to solve hard problems.

So my pitch is pretty simple. You are going to work with really good people. You are going to have fun with your colleagues. You are going to get pushed. And if you rise to the challenge, you should leave meaningfully better at your job than when you started.

I would not spend much time trying to out-pitch every shiny new company on whatever the fashionable thing is right now. Every founder I have ever met thinks they are building the next $10 billion company. Odds are, most of them are not.

What you can actually control is the quality of the people, the quality of the problems, the amount of responsibility someone gets, and whether they are going to develop.

I also do not really pitch work-life balance. I think work-life integration is a more realistic idea for ambitious people. There will be periods when work asks a lot of you and periods when life asks a lot of you. A good team should be able to accommodate both over a long career.

If someone is interviewing with me, they have likely found the company and role attractive such that I am pitching less about the company and more about how to be successful within the role.

I have found the following three attributes create high performers no matter the company.

Luckily if you have the first two, a strong work ethic comes for free because if you are mission-driven and super curious, you will work very hard to solve problems and feel grateful that someone even pays you to do so. What these three attributes really boil down to is acting like an owner. 

Other ways to pitch a candidate are the learning opportunities. The candidates we like to hire include the above and want to work at a smaller company. Smaller companies also allow the candidate to get more exposure both within their function and across the company whereas at very large companies you are just another employee and most likely very specialized within your function. We try to filter out candidates who are undecided as to what size company they want to work for.

Things I would pitch – obviously these need to be true :) but have worked for me over the years. 

Honestly, I do not spend a lot of time listening to other CFOs give prepared earnings remarks.

Part of that is because the prepared part of the call is usually pretty scripted and vanilla. Lawyers are all over it, as they should be.

The more interesting part is the Q&A, and honestly the smaller follow-up meetings afterward. That is where you really learn whether someone understands the business.

The CFOs I admire most are always thinking about the business and not just the numbers.

"Profits were higher" is easy.

How profits were higher is much harder.

Can you explain what actually drove the result? Is it sustainable? What did management do to create it? What could reverse it? Where should the next dollar go?

That is the skill I really appreciate. The best CFOs sound less like accountants explaining a quarter and more like businesspeople explaining how the company actually works.

To be honest I don’t have anyone that comes to mind. What does come to mind are the annual shareholder meetings of Berkshire Hathaway, which you can listen to in podcast form on Spotify or Apple going back to 1994. Between the Berkshire annual shareholder letters and the annual shareholder meetings, it’s as if you are receiving an MBA taught by Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger.

The attributes I like about Warren and Charlie are their authenticity and transparency. They are willing to admit mistakes, know what they don’t know, and do not take credit for positive performance that was caused by influences outside their control (the preening duck in the 1997 shareholder letter). They also are very good at simplifying very complex topics which is what makes them great teachers. Bezos’s shareholder letters also share many of the same attributes.

I don’t have one clear pick, but here’s what I appreciate.

Legacy software. Especially seat-based software.

There has been way too much price-taking in enterprise software and not nearly enough value creation.

Companies accumulate software one decision at a time, and then a few years later you are paying for hundreds or thousands of seats across a stack that nobody really designed, with overlapping products and wildly different levels of usage.

What personally drives me nuts is paying meaningfully more for a piece of software than we did a few years ago while basically getting the same thing.

At some point, software has to be held to the same standard as every other investment.

What are we actually getting for the money?

"We've always had it" is not an ROI calculation.

In the banking and brokerage industry there are several “tolls” that I personally, and Wealthfront as a company, don’t like. This is why we have either negotiated them away in our contracts with partners, or not passed the costs along to our clients. Also, these variable costs have no relation to the level of effort required to perform.

One example is account transfer fees or ACATS that many firms charge clients $75 to $100 – and to make matters worse – they take the fee once the account has been transferred so it looks like the new broker charged the fee.

Another example is outgoing and incoming wire fees, which firms typically charge clients between $15-$35 each. Both of these fees are examples of transfer friction fees to try and make it difficult for a customer to move their assets.

As a bonus, another fee that Wealthfront doesn’t charge its clients and pays a very marginal cost for is instant withdrawals. Most firms charge clients 1.75% of the amount requested subject to a minimum and maximum. As we discussed when I came on your podcast, we had the counterintuitive insight that the easier you make it for clients to withdraw their money, the more money they will trust you with.

Over-ordering of company swag. Not everything needs a commemorative t-shirt or coffee mug… 

But in all honesty our company swag is pretty great. https://store.figma.com/

I think finance sign-off is almost always controversial in scaling, venture-backed businesses.

The general view is that operators know how to make the right decisions, finance is there mostly to support and keep track of progress, and, let's be honest, running out of cash is usually not the immediate concern if the company still has access to capital and momentum.

But eventually the laws of capital allocation catch up with everyone. If you keep investing in projects that are not generating returns, at some point you hit a wall and you cannot talk or fundraise your way out of it.

At Virta, we've intentionally brought finance further upstream in a number of decisions across product development and sales and marketing. The goal is not to create a finance veto or turn us into the department of no. It is to make the decisions better.

A good finance team can help operators see around corners, understand tradeoffs that may not be obvious from inside their function, and occasionally pull the conversation up to an enterprise level rather than optimizing for one team.

There is always some friction when you introduce that discipline. But if finance is actually adding judgment and not bureaucracy, over time people start pulling you into the conversation instead of trying to work around you.

After launching our cash management account in Feb 2019, we continued building out checking features (debit, instant withdrawals, etc.) in a zero rate environment when cash management was less attractive as a near-term opportunity. This positioned us well for when rates eventually did start to increase in early 2022 leading to significant growth that others eventually embraced.

I expect a similar theme is going to happen with our digital-first mortgage product Wealthfront Home Lending. We are building out our home lending product in a 7% rate environment, which is quite contrarian. When rates eventually do go down, I anticipate others will react similarly to what we observed with cash management.

Praveer from Figma

Wishing you trade at a high revenue and EBITDA multiple,

CJ