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👩‍💻 Watch the Recording

🎤 The Speakers

Dan Zhang is the SVP and Head of Finance at ClickUp where she leads finance, accounting, operations, and business intelligence and analytics. Prior to joining ClickUp, Dan served as the SVP of Finance and Operations at People.ai where she helped the company grow the business 10x on both topline and valuation as the acting CFO. Before People.ai, she built out AppDynamics global sales operations and analytics team and scaled the ARR 10x to $500M during the hypergrowth period. She has go-to-market expertise in both enterprise software and PLG growth companies and has worked in finance roles at companies including Expedia, Zynga, and Amazon. Dan is passionate about building high-performing teams during hypergrowth.

Julien Lafouge is Chief Financial Officer at Spendesk. Julien has been a group CFO in multi-national technology companies for the last five years, leading international teams through growth and transformation. He has years of experience in line management, tier 1 strategy consulting and financial management for multinational groups. Julien is passionate about education, science, sports, and especially swimming.

Inspired by the mission of drastically improving healthcare and building a one-stop health partner for the body and mind, I joined Alan in late 2020 as CFO. Two fundraises (>€300m in total) and an acquisition later, we are well on our way to becoming "the best" healthcare company in Europe. Prior to Alan I spent 16 years at J.P. Morgan working with European financial institutions and FinTechs.

Questions asked during the session:

What are the metrics one should be tracking in relation to economic downturn? Also how do we balance between growth and being prepared for a downturn.? How does hiring get impacted because of the slowdown? What is the ideal 0 revenue runway to have ?
What are the best instruments to invest your money in ? Is it recommended to keep liquid cash or invest in instruments ?
Taking into account our challenging macroeconomics, what do you think may be the role of Digital marketing in securing cost efficiency and a healthy pipeline to sustain growth? 🙂
How can you convince the investors about their return on investments depending on your business model and your market scalabilty, strategy to go to market? ..
How do you deal with your own selling prices, while your costs are increasing due to the economical crisis ?
As CFO, Would you come with idea to support your employees for the inflation situation giving them some unplanned bonus which was not planned while budgeting?
I like moral impact of small cuts, but I agree as we; that a big cut can cut the muscles and opportunities. So, what to cut, type of costs? I see more that the big focus is to review the priority of investments and revise ROI and to stop some activities that doesn't produce the expected outcome. What is your view?
And are you planning any restructuring and transformations in one of your scenarios? What kind of?