The World is a Big, Thirsty Place: CFO Dispatches from London

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The world is a big place.

I’m reminded of its girth whenever I leave my office, put pants on, and get on a plane to have dinner with finance folks.

(edit: I guess I should technically say I put my pants on before leaving my office)

I look at Mostly Media as a media company first and foremost - a niche, intensely focused purveyor of CFO content. Doing that well gives us the opportunity for fun side quests like dinners, happy hours, and even recruiting.

The dinners and happy hours have been an amazing offshoot. Because they aren’t our main thing, we don’t have to force-feed them down people’s throats. If you’re an event company, you gotta do a lot of events, and inevitably the quality will slip. We can be selective about how many we host and who’s in the room, only doing about 10 per year.

My wife actually runs the events for me. She used to work in marketing at a tech company, and now she’s an unpaid laborer in the family business. (Don’t worry. She spent whatever profits we made on this trip on handbags, apparently made of rare Mayan gold.)

She came to the dinner and happy hour this time and laughed her ass off when a few people asked to take pictures together. I’m persona non grata in our home, yet score high with the middle-aged male finance director demo. As Pop Up Bagels likes to say, not famous, but known.

I know many of you imagine me to be an imposing 6-foot-5, but I’m a svelte 5-foot-8 on a good day. And apparently the majority of our readers are towering infernos who make me look like a small child in pictures.

Adding London to the event rotation has been a happy surprise

(Also, I love when people in the UK randomly use “happy days” as a modifier to any sentence. It truly makes me happy.)

The world is a big place. It’s also a thirsty place.

On Thursday night alone we deleted 118 Noam beers. While not Miller lattes, serviceable in their substance.

We usually have about a 90% attendance rate at our dinners. Well above industry standards, which are closer to 40% or 50% (as a metrics man I benchmark this). But the inevitable last-minute regrets have a different flavor depending on where we are in the world.

In the US, people say something basic, like their kid is sick, they’re stuck at work, or a board call is running long.

In London, it’s dramatic.

Brits are more artful, and poetic, in the decline.

And yet once everyone sits down, a lot of the convos sound familiar.

I remember reading The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman in high school. It was about how the internet was creating an increasingly global economy. A “no shit” statement today, but back then it was a deep thought.

I think the world is also becoming flatter when it comes to investor-backed companies and what we expect from the finance leaders who run them. I was amazed at how many series A, B and C companies I met who are experiencing the same day to day dynamics as those in the US. We consume the same media, wrestle with the same hiring problems, and apparently receive the same AI generated emails from our investors.

But first, grapes.

The world is a big place. It’s also a fruitful place.

One of the attendees at dinner was the CFO of a company that owns the IP for growing a specific class of grapes.

The type of grapes you buy at the supermarket to eat, not the type you make wine with.

They license that IP to farmers and collect royalties on sales. And get ready for this - as a family owned business, they do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, at a 75% profit margin.

In an AI first world, I am long grapes.

Another guy at the happy hour told me he was “in the piss and shit business”, more formally referred to as fertilizer. He walked me through how he forecasted the supply chain for cow manure, which was something I didn’t realize I was passionate about until I had consumed three Noams.

Another attendee led FP&A at a company that made cleaning brushes for dental businesses. People have teeth all over the world, and apparently there’s always room for a better tooth mousetrap.

I spend so much time talking about software that I occasionally need someone to bring me back to reality and explain the economics of a grape, the logistics of cow shit, or the dental hardware business to me. There are a lot of ways to make money if you know your niche and are willing to roll your sleeves up.

And yet in a software world, I can barely change a lightbulb.

(One reader asked my wife if I was handy around the house, and she embarrassingly told him about the time I tried to throw out our living room lamp because I thought it was broken, rather than changing the lightbulb)

And then I found a handful of Series B and C CFOs laughing, crying, and raging about their investors, which took me back to familiar ground.

The world is a big place. It’s also a sloppy place.

My biggest takeaway from this trip was the prevalence of work slop. It knows no geographical borders.

As one CFO remarked at dinner, “AI did not have time to write us a shorter letter or build us a smaller model.”

I was also introduced to a remix of work slop: investor slop.

Multiple finance leaders complained about the obviously AI-generated emails they now receive from their investors. What used to be a slightly frustrating human question about an unremarkable working capital fluctuation becomes infuriating when you can tell AI both plucked it out of the financials and wrote the message asking you to explain it.

One CFO described a recent exchange that went something like this:

Junk ass AI emails about junk ass AI “discoveries” are a villian we must vanquish.

As someone exclaimed (over a Noam):

The world is a big place. It’s also not a fair place.

Getting out into the world and hearing about people’s career journeys reminds me how massive a role luck plays in a career.

I’ve always been envious of people whose résumés suggest they only pick winners. Like my friend Sid, who went from CA during the perpetual license era, to AWS during the cloud boom, to Hubspot during the SaaS explosion, to Databricks during the consumption revolution. If I were a betting man, I’d take Sid to the track and watch the ponies run.

Part of that is judgment. Part of it is luck. And part of it is preferential attachment: one great opportunity gives you access to an even better opportunity.

Like when a boxer beats a good guy and then gets to fight an even better guy. When you win a few times, you start getting calls that other people don’t.

(Of course, I’ve also known plenty of headscratching CMOs who’ve defied gravity, continually falling upwards through a series of 18 month stints. So the system does have some bugs.)

But there are many, many good finance professionals who haven’t had that same luck. There are many who have had absolute shit luck, despite doing exceptional work. And so, so many who had a deal at the 2 yard line and saw it implode.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

I didn’t appreciate how common that was until I started meeting people all over the country and the world who work in the same profession. A résumé without a big exit never tells you how close someone got, or how much of the outcome was outside their control.

We have plenty of sayings about luck. The harder I work, the luckier I get (Gary Player). Luck is when preparation meets opportunity (Seneca… I think? Or was it Samuel L. Jackson?).

We also have lots of sayings about being close but no cigar, or how close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

In finance, it helps to say yes to the right opportunity, under the right CEO, in the right macro environment, under the right moon.

Because good luck being the CFO of a once booming micromobility business during COVID. You could build a hell of a business and still have nobody riding the scooters to an office they no longer go to.

The world is a big place. It’s also a hungry place.

I was having lunch at a pretty nice restaurant in London when I witnessed something inspiring.

The guy next to us was hosting a man and a woman who seemed to be colleagues. He was pitching some sort of business partnership, and he was going for it. Ideas, compliments, data points. Coming at them left, right, and center.

He wanted their business.

Eventually, they seemed to agree on something. His two guests had to leave early, so they shook hands, agreed on next steps, and left him to grab the check.

As they hit the door, this man reached over and finished whatever morsels of food they’d left on their plates.

Just gobbled it up. Zero shame. Grin on his face.

Sales is an eat-what-you-kill job.

This man was hungry. He had that dawg in him. Would hire him 10 out of 10 times, table manners aside.

So go close that deal today. No matter where you are in the world. No matter if it’s a sales deal for $5,000 or an M&A transaction for $500 million.

Take the deal off the table. Get that shit on your resume. Get that preferential attachment rolling in your favor.

And wash it down with a frosty Noam.

Wishing you trade at a high revenue and EBITDA multiple,

CJ