CFO THOUGHT LEADER

In this episode of Planning Aces, CFO Kevin Rubin of Zscaler, CFO Bruce Schuman of Universal Technical Institute, and CFO Razzak Jallow of FloQast share how disciplined FP&A leadership is shaping AI adoption. Rubin frames AI as a capital allocation exercise governed centrally to prevent tool sprawl. Schuman stresses foundational readiness—data governance, ERP consolidation, and process redesign—before deploying AI-driven forecasting. Jallow cautions against fragmented “spaghetti AI,” advocating for platform coherence and skill development. Together, they reveal that AI success in FP&A depends less on speed and more on governance, architecture, and trust in the planning process.

Nearly 90% of Americans suffer from metabolic disease, Manu Diwakar tells us, citing a recent McKinsey & Company study. For Diwakar, CFO of Virta Health, that statistic defines both the scale of the challenge and the clarity of the mission. Metabolic disease, he explains, includes type 2 diabetes, obesity, liver disease, kidney disease, heart disease, and high blood pressure—“branches of a tree,” he tells us, all sharing the same root cause: poor nutrition. Virta’s model blends medical professionals and technology to reverse those conditions, partnering with insurers, employers, and government entities in a B2B2C framework. From a finance perspective, the impact is measurable. Diwakar tells us Virta uses pharmacy and medical claims data to compare enrolled members with non-enrolled employees who share the same conditions—creating what he describes as a “really clean A/B test.” For type 2 diabetes, the company delivers a “two-to-one ROI,” he tells us, making the value proposition tangible. In a market captivated by GLP-1 drugs, the numbers sharpen further. Virta charges about $150 per month, Diwakar tells us, compared with roughly $1,000 per month list price for GLP-1s—about $500 after rebates. More important, he notes that when patients stop GLP-1s, weight often returns. By targeting the root cause—nutrition habits—Virta aims to make results sustainable and long-lasting, he tells us. For Diwakar, disciplined measurement and root-cause thinking align strategy with impact—improving health while lowering cost.

Before his first cup of coffee, Alex Melamud opens Slack—not to scan revenue charts first, but to read customer feedback. “The first one that may surprise you as a CFO that I look at is actually NPS,” he tells us. At Engine, every survey drops into a shared channel so “every executive can see” what customers said, he tells us. That habit fits a finance leader who didn’t grow up in the CFO seat. Melamud started in investment banking and then spent 16 years in private equity, learning to build theses, chase signal, and “sell… the product of private equity,” he tells us. Sitting on boards, he watched the CFO role evolve from “corporate governance accounting” into “executive first and maybe CFO second,” he tells us—someone who can talk like product, sales, or operations and earn board trust. Engine became the moment he stepped inside. After leading the company’s round “18 months ago,” joining the board, and helping with a CFO search, he looked at founder “Eli” and asked, “what if I joined you as CFO?” he tells us. The draw was a focused mission: serving SMB travel, where customers book “like a consumer” and lose corporate rates and visibility, he tells us. Now his investor lens shows up in the unglamorous work. During annual planning, he dug into the “top 50 costs” outside headcount and pushed leaders to treat each contract “as a brand new relationship,” he tells us—an inspection that produced “10, 15%” savings and “tens of millions of dollars,” he tells us.

On her first day as CFO at Greenphire, Sue Vestri sat in a conference room “learning all of the acronyms” of the clinical trial industry, she tells us. There were “many, many, many,” she recalls, and she listened to the sales team outside her door to understand how the product was positioned and why it mattered. That willingness to learn from the ground up defines her career. Earlier, a mentor warned her she would stagnate if she stayed in the safety of a large company. “You’ve got to go to grow,” he told her. She left for a 100-employee cloud software firm, a decision that launched a string of growth-company chapters, transactions, and ultimately multiple CFO seats. At Greenphire, she joined when the company had roughly 72 employees and “very low double digit revenue,” she tells us. Under private equity ownership, it expanded globally, shifted from clinical sites to big pharma customers, and supported the Pfizer clinical trial during COVID. Sue and her CEO conducted “20 or 30 presentations” during a remote exit process, she tells us. Today, as CFO of CRIO, she describes finance as embedded in the business—not “sitting behind a desk… producing financial statements.” Her filter for AI is deliberate: avoid the “shiny object” and invest in what is “truly transformational,” she explains. Whether evaluating predictive revenue indicators or AI tools, Sue’s throughline remains the same—grow, but with discipline.

In his early 30s, Guillermo Lopez walked into finance as an outsider. “Nobody was giving me a chance in finance because I was an engineer,” he tells us. Then a boss took “a risk” and moved him into a finance role—partly because he was “good with numbers,” and partly because his consulting background meant he could be put “in front of…external parties,” Lopez tells us. That entry point set the tone for how he builds a career: intentionally and with breadth. At American Express, he moved across businesses and finance roles on purpose, because “it’s important to get breath, especially if you’re thinking about a CFO,” he tells us. Over time, he came to describe himself as “very data driven”—the “non emotional part of the decision making,” he tells us—while also learning to make decisions with “imperfect information” in global roles, he tells us. A later inflection arrived after Visa acquired Tink. Lopez became “the grown up” Visa sent to Stockholm, commuting from London each week, he tells us. The environment was smaller, faster, and short on big-company support. It was “daunting,” he tells us, but it taught him to move quickly, focus on priorities, and take bigger career risks. That same blend—speed and discipline—shows up in his definition of finance’s strategic role: being embedded in investment and capital-allocation decisions with data in hand, Lopez tells us. His proof point comes from an earlier chapter. In an international CFO role, he helped reframe how a business allocated “close to $700 million a year,” building ROI insights that pointed to “$30 million more of revenue every year,” he tells us.

An employee is on vacation in the mountains when it happens: “I left my laptop at home.” Instead of scrambling, the employee logs into a virtual desktop from another device, pulling up what looks and feels like their own PC, delivered through the cloud. That simple moment captures how Steve Shimizu describes Omnissa’s mission—helping companies enable a digital employee experience that allows people to work from anywhere, on any device, he tells us. For Shimizu, this practical use case reflects a broader evolution in end-user computing. What began with desktop computers moved to laptops and mobile devices, and now extends to “everything” that consumes data—from retail scanners to cars, Shimizu tells us. Omnissa operates at that expanding edge, supporting both physical and virtual endpoints while helping employees stay productive regardless of location. That same blend of flexibility and discipline shapes how Shimizu thinks about the company’s growth. Although Omnissa emerged from a carve-out, he resists the startup label. Running a multi-billion-dollar organization with thousands of employees is more like earning a pilot license and being handed a “747” as your first plane, he tells us. Growth matters, but only when paired with financial stability—what he calls “profitable growth.” Finance plays a central role in that balance. Shimizu explains that real partnership comes from moving beyond surface-level metrics and “double-clicking” into the data until it becomes actionable. Just as importantly, finance must revisit those decisions, measuring what worked and what didn’t, to guide the company through its next phase of transformation, he tells us.

As he nears the end of his first 100 days at Nintex, Burt Chao is doing something many new CFOs resist: listening more than talking. Understanding the business, its people, and its real growth potential comes before dashboards or directives, he tells us. Chao describes Nintex as a company with a “long and rich history” of helping organizations automate mission-critical work, but one now entering a new season. That evolution centers on orchestration—whether AI-enabled, agent-based, or rooted in RPA—while remaining clear-eyed about identity. Nintex, he explains, will not “become an AI company.” Instead, it aims to help customers leverage AI deliberately, embedding it where it strengthens the foundation of their operations, he tells us. That emphasis on fundamentals shows up quickly in how Chao evaluates performance. In today’s environment, “there’s no more important number than growth,” he tells us. Margins, profitability, and even rule-of-40 metrics only make sense once leadership understands what growth is possible and how it can be accelerated. Benchmarks matter, but only as tools; every business must be understood on its own terms, he tells us. That discipline has shaped some of the most challenging moments of his career. Chao recalls “shrink to grow” decisions—walking away from investments that still produced revenue but no longer delivered the best return. Those moments are rarely spreadsheet problems alone. They are emotional, cultural, and deeply human, requiring influence rather than authority, he tells us. For Chao, that balance—grounding strategy in numbers while leading people through change—defines the modern CFO role.

The lesson arrived abruptly in a boardroom in Battle Creek. After months of analysis, charts, and market data, the president of Kellogg’s cereal division looked up and said, “That’s all interesting. I just don’t know what to do with it,” Dean Neese tells us. The comment landed hard. It forced him to confront a blind spot early in his consulting career: insight without action is inert. Neese and his team went back, rebuilt the presentation, and returned a week later with clear recommendations tied directly to decisions, he tells us. That moment rewired how he communicates to this day. Every deck now starts with the message and earns credibility with data, not the other way around. That discipline carried forward as Neese moved from consulting into operating roles. At DocuSign, he chose to run both corporate development and integration so there would be no ambiguity about outcomes, he tells us. Strategy, in his view, only becomes real when someone owns the consequences. Living and working overseas reinforced that belief, teaching him that even the best analysis fails if it ignores cultural context, he tells us. Today, as CFO of Placer.ai, Neese applies those lessons through capital allocation. He often asks to see the budget before the strategy document because “where you’re spending the money” reveals true priorities, he tells us. Drawing on research involving 400 executives, he points out that top performers make roughly twice as many major decisions each year as underperformers, he tells us. From a single uncomfortable moment at Kellogg’s to scaling a data-driven company, Neese’s career reflects a consistent principle: finance creates value when it accelerates decisions, clarifies tradeoffs, and turns insight into action.

This special episode of CFO Thought Leader explores how finance leaders develop not through authority or technical brilliance, but through moments that reveal emotional intelligence. Drawing on recent conversations with Kevin Rubin, Toby Driver, and Bruce Schuman, the episode highlights a consistent pattern: leadership is forged through judgment, empathy, and self-awareness when stakes are high and answers unclear. Structured in two parts, the episode first examines formative moments that reshaped how CFOs think, featuring Shelagh Glaser, John McCauley, and Joe Euteneuer. It then shows how those lessons are applied in practice—through difficult decisions, organizational change, and trust-based leadership under real pressure.

The accounting team at Looker showed up every day knowing their jobs might disappear within a year. The company was in limbo—acquired by Google but still waiting on European approval—so the deal hadn’t closed, integration hadn’t begun, and uncertainty hung over the office. Yet the team continued to deliver “absolutely excellent work,” taking pride in their craft even when the upside had faded, Razzak Jallow tells us. That moment stayed with him. For Jallow, now CFO of FloQast, it crystallized a belief that professionalism and pride are not situational—they’re intrinsic. “We get to choose what we do,” he says, reflecting on how the team’s attitude revealed character when incentives were stripped away. It’s a lesson that echoes throughout his career, from Adobe’s subscription transition to Apple’s sales finance organization and into his first CFO role. At FloQast, that mindset shows up in how he approaches scale. Early on, the work was about fixing what was directly controllable—the “low-hanging fruit,” as he puts it. Over time, the challenge shifted. As teams and systems matured, the hardest problems required multiple functions to change together, Jallow tells us. Speed gave way to coordination; individual fixes gave way to shared ownership. The same discipline shapes how he thinks about growth. Efficient growth, in his view, starts with customer value, not the P&L. If teams are investing in the highest-ROI initiatives for customers, the financial results will follow—“maybe not in three months… but certainly long term,” he tells us. Whether navigating acquisition limbo or platform expansion, Jallow’s throughline is clear: strategy is built on judgment, culture, and pride in the work—especially when no one is watching.

At 18, while many of his peers were heading off to university, Toby Driver made a different choice. He joined an accounting practice through an apprenticeship, a decision driven by his desire for a “quick learning curve” and real exposure to business, he tells us. From the outset, he was less interested in credentials than in understanding how organizations actually work. That instinct carried him through years in audit and into transaction services, where he learned to dissect businesses at speed. In deal advisory, Driver was tasked with getting “under the nuts and bolts” of companies, performing financial health checks with significant value at stake, he tells us. The work sharpened his ability to spot value drivers—but it also revealed a blind spot he wouldn’t fully appreciate until later. That realization came after he moved into operations at Ideagen. Leading M&A integrations end-to-end meant sitting with the CEO and C-suite to align sales, product, technology, and culture. Bringing two organizations together was far more complex than it ever appeared from the advisory side, Driver tells us. The experience reshaped his mindset, pushing him to think “business first, rather than necessarily finance first.” As Ideagen scaled from roughly £50 million in ARR to five times that size, Driver faced another inflection point. The company reorganized into regional operating units to restore accountability and clarity, a change finance helped design, he tells us. Today, he carries those lessons forward as CFO—focused on structure, transparency, and creating an environment where people surface issues early. “Bad news never gets better with time,” he says, a principle that now defines both his leadership style and his approach to scale.

When Kevin Rubin arrived at Zscaler in May 2025, he joined an established organization following the retirement of the company’s longtime CFO, taking responsibility for continuing the work of a finance leader who had already built a strong foundation. Rubin describes stepping into a business with scale, experienced leadership, and a customer base that included some of the world’s largest enterprises, he tells us. In explaining what Zscaler does, Rubin walks through the company’s core idea: zero trust. Traditional cybersecurity, he says, relied on network-centric “castles and moats,” requiring large amounts of equipment to connect people, applications, and data. Zscaler challenged that model by treating the internet as a “superhighway” and applying a principle of minimal access. If an employee wants to use Salesforce or email, Rubin explains, the system first authenticates the user and then limits access to only what that person is authorized to see, he tells us. Zscaler was founded in 2007 and went public in 2018, Rubin tells us. Today, roughly 40 percent of the Global 2000 and about 45 percent of the Fortune 500 use the company’s platform. Rubin attributes that adoption to a model that delivers security with less overhead and infrastructure than traditional approaches, he tells us. At its core, he says, cybersecurity comes down to two problems: stopping malicious activity from entering the network and preventing sensitive data from leaving it. Reflecting on his first 100 days, Rubin says the transition was shaped by continuity and people. He describes a welcoming executive team and an organization already positioned for growth. Cybersecurity, he notes, remains a dynamic market, with new vulnerabilities constantly emerging, and staying ahead of those threats continues to define the work ahead, Rubin tells us.

At Intel, Bruce Schuman remembers walking into a meeting as a controller, proud of a product change his team had worked on “for months.” Then CFO Andy Bryant asked one question—one that reframed the proposal around customer impact. “Nobody had thought about (it),” Schuman tells us, and that question “completely changed the entire conversation,” leading to a “10 times better” outcome. That moment captures why Schuman spent “two decades plus 27 years” at Intel, he tells us. Rotational roles pushed him into new challenges every few years, while leaders modeled what influence and partnership looked like in practice. Intel even had a term for it—“constructive confrontation,” Schuman tells us—encouraging finance leaders to put difficult issues on the table in service of better decisions. When Schuman later moved into CFO roles outside Intel, he carried that mindset with him. FP&A, he says, should not simply “report the score of the game,” but act like “people on the field literally changing the outcome of the game,” Schuman tells us. That expectation shaped how he built finance teams and approached decision-making in smaller, faster-moving organizations. Today, as CFO of Universal Technical Institute, Schuman applies those lessons to a mission-driven business focused on workforce development. UTI works with “about 35 OEM partners” and “about 6000 employer partners,” Schuman tells us, and measures success through “70% graduation rates” and “about 85% placement rates,” Schuman tells us. Growth remains disciplined: “We’ll never sacrifice student outcomes,” he tells us, even as the company plans to build “anywhere from two to five campuses a year for the next five years,” Schuman tells us.

When Drew Laxton looks back on the past year at Outreach, one moment stands out—not a transaction, but a plan. The company set its annual targets, executed against them, and then exceeded expectations. “When you see green numbers at every quarterly all-hands,” Laxton tells us, “it’s amazing how that little bit of momentum just builds the company.” What surprised him most was the cultural impact: morale rose, confidence compounded, and belief followed performance. That belief didn’t happen by accident. Laxton’s career has consistently positioned him at the intersection of numbers and narrative. He began in investment banking, where he learned early that finance only matters if people can retain the story behind it. “If you can’t tell the story, it just stays there,” he tells us. That mindset carried him from banking into operating roles, and later to Apptio, where he experienced nearly the full corporate lifecycle—from IPO preparation to public markets and eventually a private-equity take-private. Serving as Chief of Staff during Apptio’s Vista ownership pushed him beyond traditional finance. The role, he explains, was about making sure the CEO “didn’t run into a locked door,” anticipating decisions and asking the questions leadership would need answered. That experience sharpened his instinct for alignment. Today, as CFO of Outreach, Laxton applies those lessons through planning discipline, FP&A embedded in the business, and storytelling that connects strategy to execution. Finance, in his view, is not a back-office function—it is the force that helps people understand why the company is moving where it is going.

In this Planning Aces special episode, CFO Thought Leader brings together three finance executives operating in very different industries—but facing remarkably similar planning challenges. David Lee of WEBTOON, Cristina Kim of Octaura, and Zane Rowe of Workday share how FP&A has evolved from a periodic planning function into a continuous decision system. Across global consumer platforms, fintech infrastructure, and enterprise software, each CFO explains how they use leading indicators, forecasting discipline, and real-time data to guide resource allocation. The conversation highlights how modern FP&A enables faster learning, sharper prioritization, and disciplined adaptability in an environment defined by rapid growth and accelerating change.

In his late 20s, Jorge Pliego found himself financing a major expansion in Mexico—not by calling corporate for cash, but by rethinking the entire structure. At Procter & Gamble, he was given the chance to fund a new paper products facility locally, navigating tax and financing incentives until the deal carried “zero” interest cost, Pliego tells us. Convincing senior leaders in Mexico and at headquarters required clarity, confidence, and an understanding of the business beyond finance alone. That moment reflects a career shaped by early responsibility and proximity to decision-makers. From ERP implementation work—where he adapted U.S. costing systems to Mexico’s 100% inflation environment—to treasury leadership, Pliego learned how finance decisions land inside real operating constraints, he tells us. Those lessons were tested again when he left P&G for Sara Lee, joining as the second employee in Mexico. Suddenly, he was learning how to import product, choose systems, hire teams, and manage risk without the safety net of a mature organization. At Diageo, that operational grounding met strategy. As CFO of Mexico, Pliego helped lead a six-month effort to craft a plan to triple the business in three years, he tells us. Finance worked alongside marketing, sales, and operations to define investments, risks, and measurements, while leaders focused on inspiring people and course-correcting quickly. Today, as CFO of Improving, Pliego carries those lessons into a faster, private-equity-backed environment. Speed matters, but discipline matters more. He’s shortened the close, sharpened data visibility, and applies the same lens to AI—calling it “a very hungry monster” that only delivers value when fed consistent, high-quality data, Pliego tells us.

In his first “60 to 90 days” as CFO of Presidio, Manny Korakis learned that preparation doesn’t cancel pressure, he tells us. “Now the buck stops here,” he tells us, and he “didn’t really appreciate the pace” required until he was living it daily, he tells us. Korakis traces his move into enterprise thinking back to the McGraw Hill companies. Early on, he was “very technical” and “pretty close” to a singular controllership focus, he tells us. Then a mentor CFO pulled him into what they called the “growth and value plan,” he tells us. He worked on the “system landscape” and “data flow,” and on portfolio decisions about which assets were core and which were “distracting,” he tells us. That work drove the separation of McGraw Hill Education from the rest of McGraw Hill and a rebranding to “S&P Global,” he tells us. It also surfaced “hidden gems of value,” he tells us. Seeing theory turn “real life” became his “aha moment,” he tells us. In a later chapter, Korakis served as CFO of S&P Dow Jones Indices, where partners were aligned “in many cases,” but “not always aligned,” he tells us, requiring balance of “different needs and expectations,” he tells us. That arc shapes how he defines finance: not just “counting the beans,” but “highlighting the key things” so others decide better, he tells us. Today, he says finance “own[s] the model” for where Presidio wants to go, he tells us, and AI starts with “bite sized pieces,” he explains.

As one year closes and another begins, most of us are wired to look forward—to new goals, fresh plans, and the next chapter. But this special episode of CFO Thought Leader invites you to do something slightly different: look back. Not to financial milestones or career titles, but to the moments that quietly shape who we become long before anyone hands us a business card. In this episode, three CFOs take us back to the earliest chapters of their lives—stories of family, displacement, discipline, sacrifice, and unexpected kindness. You’ll hear how a father’s insistence on “trying,” a mother’s balancing act between career and family, and a landlord’s life-altering act of generosity became the invisible architecture behind leadership, resilience, and purpose. None of these moments appear on a résumé. Yet each one echoes through boardrooms, decision-making, and how these leaders show up for others. As we release this episode on New Year’s Eve, it feels like the right reminder: progress isn’t only measured by what we build next, but by what shaped us along the way. Before the spreadsheets, before the titles, before the outcomes—there were people, moments, and values that set everything in motion. We hope these stories give you pause, perspective, and perhaps a renewed appreciation for the beginnings that make all the difference.

When it came time to pick our holiday bonus episodes, Tim Arndt quickly came to mind. Few companies sit at the crossroads of as many 2025 storylines—tariffs, data centers, and AI—as Prologis. In our February conversation, Tim walked us through a “merger of equals” that reset leadership, the capital-markets discipline that followed, and why logistics is about “atoms, not electrons.” He tells us Prologis oversees roughly 1.3 billion square feet across 20 countries, with nearly 3% of global GDP touching its facilities. From post-GFC balance-sheet rigor to new rooftop energy and mobility plays, this one captured listeners’ attention—and still feels timely. Enjoy this rerelease of one of our most-played episodes of the year.

David Den Boer traces the origins of the EPM Summit to a pattern he kept seeing across projects. “Sometimes the error is not necessarily beginning in the project,” he tells us, “but in the way they selected the product.” Too often, he observed, finance teams were locked into technology decisions before fully understanding their requirements—or their alternatives. That realization reshaped how he thought about impact. While Den Boer says he enjoys solving customer problems through implementations, he began to focus on “slower, moving bigger problems,” including gaps in thought leadership and how organizations evaluate EPM solutions in the first place. The Summit, he tells us, was designed to address that upstream decision-making moment. He draws on experience hosting EPM-focused events beginning in 2009, after SAP acquired OutlookSoft. At large vendor conferences with “hundreds of products,” he explains, it was difficult for EPM practitioners to get focused answers, connect with peers, or evaluate options objectively. As legacy platforms declined, customers increasingly asked him where to go next—and how to choose wisely. That question has only intensified with AI. Den Boer tells us finance teams are now being asked to rethink processes “from a first principles perspective.” Without that reset, he warns, organizations risk “just bolting on AI” to workflows that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades. The EPM Summit reflects that conviction. Den Boer says he personally curates content to avoid “glossy marketing stuff,” relying instead on practitioners who have delivered dozens—or hundreds—of projects. Panels, hands-on product access, and difficult vendor questions are all designed to give finance leaders what they rarely get: clarity before commitment. In an era of expanding choice, the Summit is built around a simple idea—better decisions start earlier.