“Most Decisions Are Reversible” – A Masterclass in Decision Making with Zapier’s Ryan Roccon

0:00 most decisions are reversible even the biggest boldest ones believe it or not in most cases are reversible even these big product initiatives big Investments folks are like wow we go down this path it's gonna be really hard to undo it's like you're right it will be like there'll be money spent people hired people that get shifted onto something else but guess what like it's all within the realm of possibilities when I'm pushing folks to make these kinds of

0:22 tough calls I I will be very explicit around like let's let's look at it and see if it is a 2A door even if it doesn't feel like it is at first like let's really truly examine that and then once we get to the point where it's time to just like sort of like make the decision and move on I will very plainly say like I'm G to underwrite your decision no matter what you choose like

0:42 Point Blank I'm going to underwrite it and we're going to go either win or lose together funny enough most of the time it goes pretty well um and when it doesn't you know we'll learn something from it and we'll we'll we'll we'll be a little better next time is this thing on yesterday's PR is not today's [Music] price welcome back to the show and I

1:13 have a massive headache because I just had uh all the leftover birthday cake from my daughter's first birthday party this episode is an interview with Ryan raon the CFO of zapier uh actually zappier like happier it's the first thing he actually tells me on the podcast and I already got that wrong already uh outside of the standard X's and O's of accounting and finance Ryan tells me that the number one skill is storytelling but we say hey what does

1:36 storytelling actually mean to you and what are some ways that you can make storytelling uh real to people outside the finance organization how do you talk to Engineers about your financial profile how do you uh make it relatable and and use storytelling as an onboarding ramp to talking about your operating profile zapier oper zapier operates in a highly transparent uh remote first model we talk about how that impacts their approach to financial transparency and communication throughout the entire orc and uh Daisy

2:05 dosi at least we solved the zapier zappier thing DAC Frameworks great in theory but uh I suck at getting people to use them maybe it's I can't get myself to use them but they run them every single day it's like a cultural thing at their company they'll do it in slack and it helps them get to decisions faster he takes us through a couple other Frameworks for decisionmaking and getting Buy in across the org including fist to five this is a visual one hint

2:29 hent and it's not violent don't worry and finally uh they're all about automation we talk about how you can use automation within your own tool stack all this and much much more after a short word from our sponsors does your Revenue recognition process feel like a total guessing game step right up and pick a card any c you're not alone revenue account is getting more complex especially with subscription models usage based billing and evolving compliance standards woohoo right rev is

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3:23 up by their teams reporting nightmares you know me I'm a business model fanatic and don't get me wrong I love all the Evolutions we've got self- sered revenue usage based Revenue now even success based Revenue you name it but that doesn't make it any easier for us being counters on the back end to keep score right rev is like a cheat code for staying ahead of Revenue complexities so you're ready to transform your Revenue accounting visit WR rev.com to schedule

3:47 a demo that's WR rev.com and tell them your boy CJ s right rev modern Revenue recognition simplified oh yeah listen being a CFO it's uh it's not always that glamorous so sometimes I find myself watering the plants and taking out the garbage in the office and you know the best CFOs I know are they're true Business Leaders they know how to drive growth in heroic fashion unfortunately the status quo of Finance makes that really hard because

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5:04 Quick Books to netw Suite it's your time to shine as the Strategic growth driver you are and brex can make it easy more than 30,000 companies like door Dash coinbase and seek use brex to make every dollar and every minute count join them at brex.com metric that's brex.com [Music] metrics Ryan thanks for joining me on the podcast today yeah thanks for having me excited to be here all right Ryan let's set the record straight once and

5:35 for all is it zappier or zapier yeah we we like to say zapier makes you happier that's that's the the proper way to say it that we've gotten it we've gotten all kinds yeah I'm sure you have I worked at a company before called sneak and everyone uh no one knew how to pronounce it uh they call it snike snook sneak and then I found out after working there for three years that it really stood for so now you know

6:04 which I thought was clever but uh it's it's funny when companies get named that they don't always anticipate that five years down the line people will be uh still debating how to pronounce it yeah I think we we blew uh some employees mind who joined recently who didn't know the history of zapier by showing them the original logo that has the API in the middle highlighted a different color oh yeah so maybe I just blew your mind

6:28 as well that's that's that's where it came from yeah it's kind of like the FedEx logo if you look at it yeah right yeah with the arrow yep okay well now that we got that out of the way zappier makes you happier I can get to the hard-hitting questions and um Financial storytelling I know is something that you're really passionate about Ryan and outside of the standard X's and O's of accounting and finance I want to know why storytelling

6:53 is so crucial what does storytelling mean to you because people always use it in this Buzz termy kind of way when it comes to finance but like what what do you think storytelling is yeah definitely has some Buzz around it I mean I I guess first is you know you can have a great financial model but it's only as good as the execution that sort of makes it a reality and so when I think about bridging that Gap from model

7:15 to execution it starts with telling a really compelling story and that story has to connect the what to the why and and sort of promote action and urgency in order for it to be successful and so I think it actually follows a very similar structure to any any sort of traditional story right you kind of have like the setup this like conflict and then a resolution uh but it obviously needs to be tailored to to your audience

7:38 as well right you got to like speak directly to them reflect their level their understanding of the company their role their tenure if you do it really well though what you end up with is you effectively translate what is often a pretty complex Financial story or financial data rather into a narrative that helps folks understand the company strategy near-term objectives long-term ambition the levers that will help sort of achieve those results and then the things that they often have influence

8:05 over and ultimately get to something that sort of like we all benefit in when it goes right so uh that that's sort of like the driving force behind a good Financial story but to be clear there's definitely no perfect delivery vehicle here uh when it comes to to that Financial story I can tell you that we've built quite a few assets over the years all focus on telling the sort of a better version of a financial Story Each

8:28 better than the last but I I really do enjoy this process of of of uh seeing it click for folks right where it's like you tell that story and they all of a sudden understand the importance of their work how it connects back to the company strategy and sort of how they can help influence uh each of those things we had Andy Rasin on uh who's a consultant and an author who talks about the power of what he calls a strategic

8:50 narrative and he took us through kind of like how a lot of movies out there follow the same structure like the heroes Journey if you go back to Star Wars and he had a really unique way of laying it out that you can apply with your company's story so it becomes more of like something with a plot rather than just like numbers on the page oh it absolutely has to be that way I mean like any good story you have to keep

9:12 your your reader attention and if you don't set it up that way you'll lose him right off the bat I really like Ryan how you picked out that it depends on who the audience is can you just speak to why why that's critical because a lot of times you're juggling the same numbers but it sounds like you're almost form fitting it to who's receiving that information yes for sure I mean but when you treat it like a story you again have

9:34 to set it up in a way that sort of like sets the stage you can't just hit people over the head with with kager and bips and all of these financial terms you really gota like sort of like build the build the story for them so if you're thinking about a team like a product or engineering or like a build team right you might start by saying okay zappier we a leader in the AI space but we want

9:53 to make a bigger investment uh here's why we want to make that investment here's what the market is telling us here's why we need to do it now uh and then you sort of introduce the conflict right again telling the story you go well if we don't do this here's the disruption that we Face uh here's what could happen to our growth rate in this segment if we don't invest now and then finally get to the the sort of

10:13 resolution part which is okay so here are the things we actually need to do and so you get to the audience this is where the audience comes into play if I'm an engineer in your product again if I hit you with a million different sort of Cagers or year-year growth rates or all these different things that might not make sense to you but what I can show you is sort of like here's the here's the growth that we're striving

10:30 towards but here are the things that need to happen for that to to happen effectively so like we need to have these capabilities shipped by these dates we need this many users to interact with them we need these users to convert based on this rate like these are these are tangible deliverables that are CL tied to maybe a clearly defined launch moment and discuss usually like in whole numbers right not not like abstract Concepts and folks can then go

10:53 back to their backlog and say well okay now I understand why it's important I think these things on the backlog are going to be most relevant for sort of achieving that goal and then here's how I'm going to prioritize them so again it's like you set the stage tell the story some financial terms in there will help sort of uh like determine the degree to which you're sort of striving towards a result But ultimately you got

11:12 to convert it into like hard and fast units that folks understand I love that hard and fast units that people understand it's kind of like the saying that you got to meet your customers where they want to transact it's like you got to meet your audience where they're going to be able to understand what you're saying and something that I've been trying to get better at as a leader over the last couple years Ryan is uh inserting my audience into the

11:33 story when I'm talking to the team internally and what I mean by that is and I was seeing you do it there with like the engineering team but like when I talk to the engineering team yes I'll be using the same metrics but I'm talking about like their influence on the product or calling out like this team over here built a product that drove x million dollars in Revenue yeah no it's it's incredibly critical I mean

11:51 we we try to do it to the point where just about anybody at the company can clearly draw a line to the work that they're doing and how it influences the strategy you know I have procurement is one of the teams uh that reports up through through finance and it's it's awesome to see how they realize the the tools that they are sort of uh acquiring are then going on to be tools that are employed by you know engineering teams

12:14 and things to ship things faster to get in the hands of customers and it's just like you know sometimes the line is a little curvy or dotted and but you can see it and explaining that and helping helping folks make that connection is like it's one of our core focuses at zapier on the finance team and it helps them take it person right they can get out of B each day and be motivated about that like I'm not

12:32 just buying software I'm doing something that I can trace from point A to point B to point Z and it's actually in the customer's hands and showing up in Revenue exactly this is a question uh asking for a friend here uh do you ever feel like you're repeating yourself or going almost into potentially falling into robot mode when telling a story for the thousandth time like like the company story yeah yes is most definitely the answer we actually we

12:57 talk about that a lot on the exec team we say we have to repeat ourselves till we're sick and as a matter of fact most that we do this quarterly kickoff hangout where we sort of reflect back on the last quarter and talk about what we need to do for the next quarter and almost every one of them I start off by saying I know you're sick of me saying this I'm gonna keep saying it because

13:14 it's important so yeah I'd say maybe maybe tip one is a little levity never never hurts right just to kind of keep things fresh but for for me I think the way that I've navigated this idea of just like avoiding Robo mode or like the antidote to that is while the story itself needs to have a consistent through line the way in which you tell it like the medium and the story can can change and sort of evolve over time and

13:39 so at zapier it's like I mean I have a laundry list of things that we've done over the years that we've kept and built on that sort of are all on this this uh this vein of thinking happy to share more about some of those if it's useful or yeah I I would love to hear more about that because the story evolves over time right it's not a static yeah exactly I mean so so like okay so ways

14:00 in which we repeat ourselves so right off the bat something we do as app here which is very unique is and we can certainly talk more about later but is that we are just a very transparent organization so every year right when we start the year we have our sort of annual board meeting that sets the budget for the year that whole board meeting that whole package gets shared with the company it gets sort of like

14:18 polished shared out and I do a voiceover going through it and I talk about sort of the key drivers the annual plan you know the budget that we set and uh just what we're expecting for the year it's like we set the St right off the bat by sort of telling the story for the next year okay and we we sort of again give the the story straight from the board then every quarter we go into sort of

14:37 the reflection mode that I just mentioned where we kind of look back and say hey how are we doing how is this getting us closer to the goals that we set for the year reinforcing those same key drivers so again same through line right we're talking about the same key drivers how are we performing and uh how are they getting closer to the to the goals that we set for the year then something that we do that I'm a huge fan

14:56 of that we developed years and years ago but we've refined a kind over the last few years is we have a monthly Financial update which we've automated in uh in looker Studio it's really beautiful visualization and we just sort of pull the data every month and I do a voice over that goes with it called the why behind the numbers and again the point here is that this this thing is this this product it captures a bunch of

15:18 highlevel SAS metrics all the things you'd expect like ARR nrr broken down by component funnel activity acquisition Trends a bunch of other financial data like Revenue per employee and C generated all all these really great metrics but like just on the Page by themselves they're interesting it's it's it's great to see the trends but now with this story that I attached to it the Y behind the numbers I can connect it back again to the strategy and those

15:43 key drivers and say hey remember we're driving for this kind of quantity in P1 leads and that's helping drive up the AR that we're seeing in this particular this particular Lane and that's helping inflect nrr in this cohort over here and so like tying it all back together and that's happening every single month we've got a bunch of other products in addition to that like another one that I'm really uh proud of at zappier we we

16:04 call it our key progress metrics it's updated daily and it has again a lot of those same metrics but the thing that's really unique about this one is we actually again wrote it in a story form on looker studio and so it's got like sort of like here's where zapier came from here's where zapier is going here's the key pillars within our bets uh and here's all the things that need to be true for these to be successful and

16:28 folks can log on literally any day of the week and see sort of like how the the actuals versus targets are trending it's just one more example but yeah I mean I've got literally like probably five more things that we're we're either currently building or have built that are all under the same purpose of just like repeating and telling the story in a similar but slightly different way in a different medium so folks can sort of

16:50 access it in a way that they feel most comfortable you know I've I've come to feel that the term templatized talking to uh Naim ishak the CFO of Checker and he said it's great CJ it actually reduces cognitive load and it sounds like what you're doing is you're giving people an easier on-ramp to understand metrics that may change but the format in which you deliver it is something that's digestible 100% 100% And and I mean it goes even Beyond those

17:18 things that are completely templatized that we we do something that I think is really really interesting is that we do like benchmarking every year where we look at our our peers and we we sort of plot ourselves we actually write a big quite a you know significant post around that again trying to help explain tie the story back to here's where we are on this sort of scurve of growth remember why these things are important now let's

17:41 go look at our benchmarks and see the companies who've done this well look at their Enterprise Value look at what they're the kind of customers they're serving and look at where they're sort of aspiring to it all ties it back and helps folks really understand like why we're doing these things Beyond just the what we're doing hey thanks for listening we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors ready to plan confidently close faster and Report with accuracy here's

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20:10 story or an uh analogy that you frequently use to simplify a complex Financial concept for people what zapier does yeah I mean luckily we don't we don't have to chat with investors because we're for bootstrap then we we really don't have any primary investment I that's not quick plug for bootstrap yeah right exactly I was going to say uh you know the finance team's hiring so if anybody's looking it's a great environment when you when you're

20:34 privately held without without significant investment you know we as a company we use a ton of analogies to Rally rally folks around these sort of ideas and montras we we've been using the same sort of one over the last few years here and it's something we sort of like weave into the Strategic narrative but it's more at the at the BET level where we're kind of talking about hey remember these are the problems that we're solving for our customers for me I

20:54 don't I don't really have I've never really found like that secret sauce uh and analogy that I really really like you know I use all the standard ones that folks might be familiar with you know like talking about the Leaky bucket for for net revenue retention or or like sort of visualizing a funnel to explain you know how folks are kind of where they're dropping off and how they're getting down to sort of like our paying

21:12 users um but honestly I think where I found the most success is just like really well-designed simple charts that I like you mentioned sort of templatized on a regular basis so folks become really intimately familiar with them and can just like glance at them and understand what I'm getting at of the ones that that I've been using a lot lately uh that I've sort of started putting in the beginning of of every quarterly kickoff is just a really

21:36 really basic simple rule of 40 chart that has profitability on one side and growth rate on the other and sort of a cross cutting line that says you know you have to be up and to the right of this to be greater than yeah the rule 40 and uh we just plot all of our data points over the last few years in s of all the data points that we have going forward and that really is like it's

21:54 become this like very easy thing to point out and say hey remember this is where we're going this is why this is important again tie back to the benchmarks in that case like that picture is worth definitely more than a thousand words I'd say it's become like a a sort of a Mainstay in and how we talk about our performance hey uh when when you think about benchmarks how much has the cohort of companies you compare

22:16 yourself changed over the years has it been kind of the same group you think or you uh you know reaching up to to be a part of a higher Echelon each year in terms of you compare yourself to no I mean it's a it's a great question it's definitely I mean there's a there's a core group of folks that we've always compared ourselves with that we will continue to do so and most of those are are in that that group set because they

22:39 operate very similar to us they're generally like you know plg companies or at least were founded that way who've expanded up Market over time serving a large customer base we have on the fringes though absolutely added folks that we're aspiring to be more like especially as we move more up market and then I'd also consider the fact that you know as our pricing structures changed we start to compare ourselves with folks who are more usage based and and

23:01 similarly with like the you know emergence of AI there's definitely companies that are sort of sort of coming out of the woodwork on that front that are that are becoming interesting comps as well so yeah it never stays static but there's definitely a core few that we we think are good proxies that are just great companies too that we always want to emulate that that's so true I think I've become uh pickier and pickier over the years with benchmarks

23:25 especially to your point around pricing and and how the company sell I think when I first started using benchmarks I thought you know to a hammer everything looks like a nail like I want to be like snowflake too you know they're trading at this multiple but then you dig into you're like well maybe I have a Marketplace element to it maybe I have a plg element to it and then you can refine it over time to be more

23:44 academically honest yeah yeah I I mean I don't know what my what the rules are for for plugs but we use uh tool public comps that's that's fantastic it's awesome oh they're great yeah and I mean it's just like I'll go in there there and grow in a high growth SAS sector or I'll go you know just like B2B or sort of like Enterprise sales and just it's so simple to to toggle between plg all these different motions and just kind of

24:09 get like a range of of comps that are just it's it's really useful Ryan uh I I told you that sometimes I get distracted I'm like a dog that sees a car go by and I chase it how does storytelling come into play when you're recruiting new employees how do you describe like their the company story and then their potential outcome uh as employees as I mentioned here I mean obviously I I like to use benchmarks because that's

24:33 publicly available data to kind of show them like hey here's the value of a company that's operating at these at these sort of like productivity metrics and this growth rate so on and so forth and that's that's generally how I'll sort of set the stage of like you know because often times you can't really come out and say hey we we think we're worth exactly this much but you can you can help folks sort of like paint the

24:50 picture and that's something like I said we regularly reinforce not only for folks that are considering joining zapier but folks who are on board and within zap happier and then we also will provide like a calculator effectively that says you know at this level we're very UPF front around you know we offer an exact amount of equity per level and per role and uh we will we'll make that really clear and say Here's the calculator that goes with it you can

25:13 effectively plug in you know here's your options here's what the value would be given these different Enterprise values over time and you can see what this grows do and it does kind of help tie it back together like this is the this is the potential for you as an individual as zapier continues to grow you're one of the most transparent orgs I think I've I've ever come across it's yeah so I mean yeah I mean well funny enough

25:36 it's uh we have five core values at zapier and default to transparency is one of them okay and I'll tell you A lot of people say that their company is a Valu driven company uh zappier means it when they say that I I remember from when I first joined the company it was like week one I I was in slack and i' sent a DM to somebody and they immediately responded and said this should be in a public Channel

26:02 because other people need to be learning from this like question and and I mean I had just joined and it was just like some any I don't know some person on slack I was like oh man like they're not kiding around it where does this originate from is it because you're a remote first company yeah absolutely I mean I mean yeah we're we're a remote first company we're remote founded company right I mean we we've been in this boat since

26:27 well before was uh you know forced upon us and we've built pretty much every part of zapier every process and policy and just like system with this in mind we are definitely a very like Wy writing heavy culture and uh yeah we we just have have defaulted to sort of like the more that we can share out in the open the more informed folks can be and just make more thoughtful and well-informed decision so I mean it happens within

26:54 Finance definitely at a degree that's much greater than most companies but it's certain across every part of the the business and that's what I want to hit on because part of me is really excited about this but the CFO part is like oh oh [ __ ] like that's a lot of sharing I don't know if that's too much how how do you score that as a CFO yeah I mean there's a couple different angles to that there's like there's the too

27:15 much sharing and because everything's important nothing is important and then there's the too much sharing as in you share data that no one should have had access to so so the second version I can promise you know we're very thoughtful about that we've built all those controls and we're not going to share anything confidential or or share something at a granularity that lets you sort of like drill into somebody's individual paycheck or something thank goodness so that that part we've got

27:39 pretty well solved the other part though to your point uh it's a there's a fine line right like you can share too much create anxiety or just create confusion like folks just don't know where to focus and so interesting story about that we had a uh an amazing former CFO who joined us a few years back and when he joined he uh we built a new wbr process it was our first time we had switched through a few different

28:01 versions of sort of like how we kept ourselves accountable but we wanted to introduce the wbr sort of process and when he joined he literally asked for every metric I mean like thousands like thousands of metrics and we spent the next few months putting every one of them on a page it was it was a huge undertaking uh it was also amazing to be to be frank like I had been there for four years at that point and I learned

28:25 more in that six months than I think I had learned in in the last four years it was just like there's something to be said about just putting it all on the page even if it's not the most important stuff um but then what we did do is we turned that into our wbr templates we sort of broke it down by investment Lane we started sharing that with the leaders and we would have this sort of uh you

28:42 know these wbrs with these like really large fpna driven wbr templates with a lot of metrics and at first it was great we got lots of great sort of discussions happening and making important decisions from them but it wasn't more than I'd say a couple of months before those discussions started to go Ary where where folks were like picking the metric that was doing well even though it had nothing to do with what was most important or just like completely

29:08 ignoring some subset of the of the metrics that were like really critical because there was just so many you could kind of get easily like distracted and go off off course and so we we took we took the idea behind it and we we kept those files in the background for the fpna team and we use that to sort of like drill deeper and really stay close to to the numbers but we took the the the again the intention and we

29:29 simplified it by by building dashboards that were limited we put a bunch of rules in place I literally okay you can't break these rules they can't be more than 10 they have to be more heavily weighted towards input metrics they have to be in priority order you can't have more than one uh line on the chart so not no multiple axises um and you have to have a clear definition right next to the metric it has to say like what is this measuring

29:55 and why is it important and then there has to be a Target line it can't just live in isolation can't just be like here's a number it has to have what should this number be and so we sort of took that really giant wbr file kept it for ourselves and like boiled it down to those things that we think are most important because we did we ran into some of those issues that you talked about just keeping folks focused on the

30:14 right things it feels like that throw line like sorry I didn't have time to uh write you a shorter letter yeah exactly exactly yeah I mean the truth is though is even in this new version while it's a massive Improvement it's still just not like we're not it's not there like we we have more to do like we we got to make it better like we got to keep the conversations focus on the most important things Ryan we talked

30:37 about oversharing potentially uh making people either a zone out or uh get confused do you ever worry about oversharing the sense of creating anxiety amongst employees yeah I mean I think that's something that we we come across every once in a while I mean honestly it's I I think folks will self-regulate where like they'll read the things they want to read and dig into the details where they want I think that's part of how you have to serve it up you kind of have to

31:03 give them to your earlier comment you know that monthly Financial update that I that I that we built it's about 15 metrics the 15 that we think are most important you can just read that every month and uh that's good like maybe you go okay yeah great the business is growing we're hitting these goals wonderful or you can watch the video and go a little deeper or you can join the wbr or you can sort of Click into our

31:25 our KPM dashboard and read the more like granular level metrics I think it's a matter of like the folks who really are like hungry for that information will take that initiative the folks who are just kind of want the sort of like higher level like we'll te it up in that way and let you sort of Choose Your Own Adventure so I was gon to say Choose Your Own Adventure that's exactly what it sounds like if you want to go that

31:44 deep Bro go ahead exactly it's like there's always risk that you're going to overwhelm folks with with information but I'd rather eror on the side of sharing too much than sharing too little the hardest one that I've run into a lot is when the company's 4098 changes in a way where it actually goes down and then you have to explain to employees what it means that's always a hard one for me to get across yep the 49a is always an

32:05 interesting one yeah there's like there certain language you have to be sure to use when you're when you're talking about a 49a so it's definitely that one's a tricky subject at times what's your take on having a board plan and then an operating plan and I asked this because you're very transparent about like the performance that you expect out of the business but there is uh somewhat of a need to guard the org as a CFO

32:26 against things like big deal risk attrition so how do you square that yeah well you know as you're aware and I mentioned earlier zappier is a bootstrap company and we've been running cash flow uh positive since forever effectively but but even with Revenue Ryan like quotas and stuff do do you do you share with the Reps like everything so so so I guess let me let me answer the first part and then I'll talk about I'll talk

32:50 about the quter part so the reason I Shar about the whole bootstrap thing is because yeah when we build our when we build our plan you know this question around like how much you put in we build it with that as a principle that we're a sort of like unbreakable rule that like we're going to be cash flow Break Even or better uh and so when we go through that process we effectively do create the board and the sort of like

33:11 management plan and the management plan uh effectively is is is the the one that that is goaling us to sort of like our aspirations where the board plan is like what we have committed to and we're going to build the budget around to maintain this cash flow Break Even uh sort of like requirement or better and to build those things in as you mentioned some some of the big deal risk doesn't exist for [ __ ] here today uh I

33:35 mean we've been a plg company historically we are just now sort of expanding up market and serving larger customers and it's only been over the last call it year and a half two years that we've introduced a sales team uh and quotas are only a recent development is Zapp year Believe It or Not whoa yes and so sales for us is a is a new is a new motion and it's very it's very like we are just getting into the kind of

33:58 conversations that you're talking about to your point like quot attainment or like looking at those kinds of things that starts to get to a level where the transparency you start to violate like individual privacy if you're not careful will want to ride the line of showing you know maybe distributions of things to say hey look here's how attainment is stacking up against our goals and why we we need to either raise or lower it uh going forward but yeah I mean that's

34:23 that's gonna be something we're going to sort of navigate as we go but it's been like I mentioned it's a unique question for zapier because of our very unique position uh it's something we haven't had to deal with with often to be honest with you that it's it's an amazing position to be in and I I'd guess that certain a certain mindset comes out of you know having this unmovable rock that we have to be Cas FL positive and it

34:49 probably plays out all through the company culture it does it does and we talk about it often you know because folks want want to know why why it's important and the obvious you know reason stand of you know the war chest and like rainy day fun and being able to take take advantage of opportunities when we see them but it to be to be fair it's something that I that I sort of uh get alignment from the board and the

35:10 exec Team every year before we even get into the planning cycle I sort of set the stage of like here's the principles I'm operating under and why I think these are the right ones and uh and I I sort of you know ask folks to to sort of raise their hand and like dispute them and and walk me through why we should be willing to violate this because those rules exist to be violated in with the

35:30 right sort of opportunity yeah but it's a good way to kind of keep folks rowing in the same direction for the most part are there any other big rules similar to that if you don't mind me asking I mean that is the primary one I'd say most of the other rules are less so rules and more Ambitions you know we kind of align we kind of align around like how we wna how we want to structure head count on

35:50 like where we're willing to forward invest uh we also align around you know like certain growth rates within the company as far as like where we want to be by the end of the year and where where we're willing to sort of like reallocate investment from one bucket to another uh but those change year every year those are a little bit more fungible but I'd say that the sort of this cash flow Break Even or better is

36:10 is a pretty consistent one that's great thanks for sharing that I really appreciate it do you get down to a fully burdened p&l by product line or is that something that's not really relevant yes and no so we do but right now it's a finance internal only sort of like product so talking about the whole trans parent thing it's something that I actually want to spin up a summarized version and share with the entire company you know we go back we do an

36:33 engagement survey and some of sometimes we get this this this question around like I don't understand why we're investing in this particular part of the business right now like I can't see a clear like why is it worth it like we're spending a lot of money and what's the return and so with this p&l by product line where we do try to fully burn it which I will add to caveat that like some things are much more direct and

36:55 easy other like allocated costs are bit more generic and we kind of have ignored some of them for now but with that being said the intention is we don't just do it in isolation we don't say okay this product cost us this much this month and it delivered this much uh you know this month and so it's operating in a loss we sort of project out into the future we say okay look we're making this investment today on this product and yes

37:16 it is operating at at a loss currently but in six months we think it's going to be here and in 12 months we think it's going to be here and if you look at the actual investment s of like Roi this is much more significant than this other lane we're in investing less and so uh that's that's the ultimate goals like again peek behind the curtains help folks buy into the decisions we're making around where we're putting where

37:35 we're sort of placing our bets but but more work to come on getting in the hands of folks and getting it truly fully burdened so I asked because I'm in a very similar situation as you where as a finance person in my own office I've come up with pnls by product line but I I've very rarely made a person responsible for it and I think that's where the rubber hits the road because like I'll create a contribution margin

37:59 analysis or p&l by product line I'm like great now I have it but it's like did I give it to someone if I want to change the answer did I make it so they were responsible for it yeah that's a super interesting question I mean I uh fortunately for us like the way that we structure it it's it's the products sort of line up to the functional leaders who are responsible for them in the first place so there's already kind of like a

38:20 naturally defined owner who sits over each of them uh or at least a group of them so there's like not a lot of ambiguity there but to your Point actually handing it to them and saying this is yours to manage now like this is the budget this is the envelope for you know the next six 12 months whatever it might be we don't we don't do that yet today I would love to get there but it

38:40 is it is a tricky one to sort of make the transition from like the functional budget to the full p&l budget manag it is yeah Ryan I want to talk about decision making a bit and uh you told me that you use the DAC framework and I have this theory that everyone wants to use the DAC in uh but few use it like in reality how do how do you get everyone to buy in it's funny there's a debate what is it

39:05 actually called Daisy or dossy I've always said dossy zapier zapier so I think we have the opposite problem at zapier if I'm honest with you because the fact that we are so like writing heavy everybody uses it like everybody at every level and there's no sort of like push to get people to use it they I'd actually say honestly it is the opposite some sometimes folks will write a dosi for something that could have just been like a slack message and could

39:33 have been solved with like a quick you know 10 minute meeting but but honestly that remote first culture it's tilted us really heavily towards like writing memo style and a lot of folks have lean into that and I think I think on top of that it just like the ambiguity that it removes by clearly laying out those those different categories you know it helps folks just like cut through the noise and uh and get to decisions faster

39:58 so if I had a wager a guess I think I probably get something like five dosies Daisy however you want to say it a week really I do I do yep and I mean they come from every level of the orc so so like a few examples of ones that just popped up like I had one pop up that was from accounting and they were asking around like Gap treatment on this unique credit situation and whether we should

40:21 like rush to fix something or if it was okay to let it sit or I got one from you know Partners on this like really interesting investment opportunity this partner relationship that we were exploring whether we should like go more in depth now or wait uh then I got one from legal around whether we should open up a new entity and like what what the risks are of of this country versus that country and so I mean that's like a

40:44 regular occurrence it's zappier the these things are just constantly being being turned up so anyone could call one like if I reported to you Ryan I I could be like okay Ryan let's do a quick dossy here yeah for sure and and that's generally how it will go it's like when you know the decision is relatively important you'll sort of like do a local dossy for that group so like the accounting one the accounting one stopped with me you know it was like

41:07 they sort of got feedback from folks across the team and then it came to me and I was sort of like the ultimate decision maker in that one for a lot of other ones that we actually have a channel in slack called feed bullpens and you submit it's it's for the exact team but anybody has access to it and you submit a dossy in there and a quick little description and like our executive assistant team will schedule

41:31 the relevant execs to to meet live if necessary so they'll be tagged in the dossy we have to go in and put in a response by a certain date and if there's misalignment then we'll have a live meeting scheduled if there's clear alignment to start then no meeting necessary but that that feed like that slack Channel again I probably see I don't know a couple of week at least this is next level I wish I was

41:51 disorganized it is truly Next Level the systems and processes we have for this kind of decision- making is Za here it's it's pretty impressive last question on this I'm so fascinated uh by how effective it is do you tactically do it in slack or is it in like a word do it's in a word dock yeah we have a template we have a template and it's and it is intentionally like fixed you can't really like change the format much you

42:15 know you have to stick to sort of like the main components okay awesome what's first to five it's technically fist to five fist to five wow it got violent real quick let's do this I mean it can can depending on what what scores you get so that's uh fist of five it's a pretty simple but but I'd say somewhat powerful like voting mechanism and so fist as you might imagine is like a zero right and that represents something that

42:39 you're strongly opposed to five something you're effectively fully aligned to you don't have any remaining questions and so it we use it all over the place but for example you know sometimes you'll join a meeting and there'll be some really trick tricky topic that we're all talking about and I don't know about you but I've definitely experienced this circumstance where you start going around the room kind of doing a little round robin like hey what do you think and the the person the next

43:02 person to go will go like just like so and so on the left of me said you know let me elaborate a little bit more by the time you get all the way around it's like you're all saying the same thing and you just question like is somebody holding back because they didn't want to be sort of like the the person who maybe said something completely different and because you're kind of going in order it's a bit of like you know you get get

43:21 to cheat and see what your neighbor says first so often times I'll actually start the meeting with this thing so we'll say hey we're trying to we're trying to decide on this this particular investment topic you know initiative whatever like you all have all read this document you understand what we're asking like the question is should we make this investment today you know based on what you read in the document fist of five and all at once live on the

43:46 video you know throw up your score what what do you think and you get a few things if you get if you get all fives well it must be a pretty damn good idea like and folks are pretty clearly to it if you get nothing but zeros it sounds like maybe you skipped a few steps and shouldn't be at that that sort of for a decision yet right but where things get very interesting is when you start to

44:06 get some consensus you know you got 10 people and like seven of them are fours or fives and then there's three that are like ones and those outliers are the ones that usually have really interesting takes and sometimes again those takes get a little bit overshadowed if you're kind of doing this like group discussion or maybe the person doesn't feel like confident enough to speak up and so this really just like forces is it forces folks to

44:28 pick a side without knowing how everyone else feels and it's and then the second thing we use it for is at the end of the meeting whether or not we started with it it's the way to kind of like we call it like the exit row check as well sort of like hey before we leave like let's see it again like where are we all at are we feeling like this is the right decision do you have lingering questions

44:48 you know like and you'll go back around the room again and again if somebody's still sitting at a three it's like we didn't solve it like we have not we have not convinced this person like we got we got work to do let's come back and figure this out this is so cool because by human nature we're we're tribal creatures like we want to be accepted and if you went around and I hear that you know our CMO is a five in the way

45:10 that he's talking about it you know our chief product officer is a four and I'm sitting here and I don't want to crap all over this and like stick out as a sore thumb this this totally cuts through it does it does I mean that's funny I even so you were talking about some of the principles for financial planning that we use so I wrote last year I actually wrote this big document that sort of laid all those out around

45:30 like hey here's how we want marketing spend to tr to sort of uh grow next year here's what some of the again cash flow sort of like principles that we're building I laid out all of these different decisions and I gave it to each each exact blind I made a copy for each of them and then I put within each of those things I made it in an affirmative statement we are going to hire this many people in this in this

45:50 org and then I made them vote zero to five and then I I consolidated all the scores and I sort of gave them a readout of like this is where we clearly are all thinking the same way and this is where we have very different opinions and how we should be running the business so let's reconcile those things so I I just I find it a really useful mechanism just to cut through the noise and get folks aligned

46:12 are people ever uh like U do they feel a little bit blindsided like there's going to be friction or how how do you how do you deal with that yeah I me yeah no not really I I think like if if any if nothing else really it's not friction as much as it is like a productive discussion it's just like You' almost rather have friction now it's like you want friction now not friction when you're about to ship the thing or about

46:38 to you know go hire a dozen people to go do it it's like get the friction out early that's what this is intended Ryan it feels like you're the type of CFO who wants to empower others on your team to make decisions I can tell just by the way we're talking about Frameworks and also the transparent culture that you have how do you make it safe to fail while also expecting a high level of performance yeah I mean I I love this

47:02 question I love this topic I I mean some some interesting context we do a personality test at zapier when we start called the burkman among a gosh dozens others throughout but like that's what we always we do for new hires and there's a there's a a measure called restlessness zero to 100 I'm 99 on restlessness it's it's like off the charts it's I I'd say I'm very action oriented to say the least and and so in

47:27 order to be action oriented I think you get you have to make a lot of decisions you have to make them pretty quickly uh so the first thing I do to help Empower folks to make decisions is you just model that behavior right like I when I'm presented with a tough choice I don't jump to the decision I ask a lot of questions and in the end oftentimes I don't really need to even make the decision sort of like I just make sense

47:48 of what's happening and then the decision makes itself but but throughout that process sometimes it's rambling sometimes it's winding but I will sit there and sort of like talk out loud through what is what is entering my head as I'm hearing the sort of problem we're discussing and again I will like have them part of that process with me to sort of hear how I'm thinking through and where I'm sort of like okay that's a worthwhile risk that one doesn't feel as

48:11 confident but part of that process obviously we're going to rely on a whole bunch of data analysis but I also tell folks like that can only be part of the story like you it's not going to make the decision for you and you can't get caught up in uh in the data like just 100% And so some of the things that I try to just remind folks of are you know not not to get caught up not only in

48:34 that but just like the opportunity cost of not making a decision or you know the this uh this realization that most decisions are reversible even the biggest boldest ones believe it or not in most cases are reversible can you say more about that is that the concept of oneway versus two-way absolutely this this is idea of oneway versus two-way it's like I talk about two do constantly even these big product initiatives big Investments folks are like wow we go

49:01 down this path it's going to be really hard to undo it's like you're right it will be like there'll be money spent people hired people that get shifted onto something else but guess what like it's all within the realm of possibilities people people sort of lock up when it comes to making these decisions especially the ones that feel like that there's a fear around it's around you know decisions you know the root word of decide is to cut off that's

49:23 the Latin route of decide and so it's like cutting off future future choices or cutting off opportunity and so it has this like finality around it right folks just like react that way when I'm pushing folks to make these kinds of tough calls I I will be very explicit around like let's let's look at it and see if it is a two-way door even if it doesn't feel like it is at first like let's really truly examine that and then

49:45 once we get to the point where it's time to just like sort of like make the decision and move on I will very plainly say like I'm going to underrate your decision no matter what you choose like Point Blank I'm going to underwrite it and we're going to go either win or lose together funny enough most of the time it goes pretty well um and when it doesn't you know we'll learn something from it and we'll we we'll we'll be a

50:07 little better next time I did not know that's what it meant in Latin decision means to cut root word yeah yeah word wow that's that's powerful that's powerful uh I have a couple miscellaneous ones for you here Ryan your company is all about automation if you could automate one part of your job as CFO what would it be and why this is kind of a maybe not the best answer but I like we have all these International

50:34 entities and just like constant filings I have to notorized things and get stuff apposed and fedexed just like every other week that's the worst I'm just trying to figure out how do I how do I do that how do I get this to be to be automated I mean I just don't understand how we can't get to the the day and age where like a notary can't be digital but anyways I mean I know they have notary

50:54 online services now but I'm with you wedding think that's the worst uh besides that I think I think the bigger thing that less so me and more as a company we're just trying to automate as much of the of the financial reporting as we possibly can like we've got all these different assets that all like ladder up into each other so like I don't want to like repeat the same thing that I'm building for the Bardock for

51:14 our quarterly MBR for our kickoff for you know XYZ so we're trying to we're trying to like create sort of almost like components modular components that we can just like repurpose pretty quickly uh because otherwise we find ourselves just like spending a lot of time just rebuilding the sort of like the the template for each each round couldn't agree with you more what's the US steel and Stanley Cup story okay so this is a funny one when I was in school

51:42 I was an intern on the finance team at us steel you know big Fortune 500 company I'm from Pittsburgh originally it was it was awesome I got to go to all the plants and I worked in the office but on site at the plants and at one of the plants I had a phone there that happened to be the phone number associated with usdl if you went and Googled usdl literally like if you Googled usdl the phone number popped up

52:03 was the number that ran to my desk and and you know I would get random phone calls all the time and it was sort of like this like should I answer it should I so I i' pick up the phone and um one time I picked it up and it was the commissioner from the National Hockey League and it was he was responsible for the the Stanley Cup doing a photo shoot because the Detroit uh Red Wings were

52:28 playing the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Final in Pittsburgh and they wanted to shoot a spot where they had the Stanley Cup in front of them pouring steel with like the sparks flying everywhere and I thought it was a joke I was like I have no this is this is wild and so I finally I got my boss and I'm like you got to talk to them and we usually didn't allow anybody in the the

52:48 facility because it's you know obviously like a very safety oriented facility but they made some exceptions and they got them in there and so I'm wearing my full PPE you know hard hat still toed boots gloves all that stuff and I'm sitting on this giant stack of like Ingot like metal with my arm around the Stanley Cup while they're pouring steel behind me so I have this picture but it's a really funny story because it's it's sort of a

53:11 little bit of a reflection on my career in some ways it's like I've always just been willing to like do the things on The Fringe and just like go learn about something interesting you I was like I wasn't really learning much on the phone but like it almost didn't matter I was like sure give give me something like I'm going to go deep and figure out what what this is all about and I mean that's effectively how I ended up in this role

53:33 at zappier it's like every opportunity that I've been given to go deep and learn something about it it's just like this curiosity and this willingness to just try things on The Fringe and learn more about the business and just get in there and and it's just something like early in the career that was really helpful for me to kind of get into that next role and then even today it's just like I generally like to say yes and

53:55 just learn about things as much as I possibly can so saying yes pays off sometimes in funny ways that story is nuts you literally went from cold call to stay on the cup photo shoot in like two hours it was it was wild it was it was unbelievable thank you for sharing that's crazy Ryan I'm gonna take you into what we call our long ass lightning round so you're a successful guy but I ask everybody who comes on the show if

54:20 you could give us one thing you've screwed up in your career could be this role or a different one oh yeah I have a really a really fun sort of practical one I worked as an analyst at the Bank of New York melon fresh out of school I every night I had to like create this file for a sweep and one day I did some sort of I made some sort of sorting error before I did a vlookup and I

54:42 transposed account numbers for like a few thousand accounts with millions of dollars in this sweep and it somehow got caught with some like automatic reconciliation at the that night so the sweep got canel it it did not sweep that night and the next day I came in and my boss told me he said you were effectively sending like tens of millions of dollars to the wrong sweep accounts because of your formula error yesterday so who um I uh I could tell

55:12 you that I've I've been very very very meticulous about all my QA and sort of like fat finger uh mistakes since then it's it's like yeah that's crazy what do you wish you knew earlier as a CFO something that I've started doing recently that has been incredibly helpful is I joined a bunch of like CFO specific professional networks and almost everything that we do as CFOs somebody else has already done and done pretty dang well uh it wasn't until a

55:41 few years ago that I got introduced to most of these but it's just it's been an incredibly valuable resources and I would just say like one quick plug here all the folks who've shared their time with me it's just incredible their willingness to do that and I'm just very very appreciative of the coaching and chat and the chats that I've had with folks just been really meaningful and helpful totally it uh it it's a stupid saying it takes a village but it's like

56:05 it it does get lonely sometimes and also a lot of the stuff we're doing it's not recreating the wheel so if you can go to somebody who can give you that life hack to figure something out like how do I run an employee secondary or how do I do uh how do I run my first audit like that you want to go to people who have seen around those Corners absolutely can walk me through your finance software stack

56:28 what tools does your team use to get the job done uh we use let's see next we is our Erp we use zip for procurement P2P and we were on adaptive but we actually implemented a tool lately that we're really in love with uh love the founding team it's a great tool it's called Alf I don't know if you're familiar with it I'm a huge fan of Olf yeah Albert and the crew are awesome huge fan Albert

56:55 yeah Albert and those guys are are crushing it we are just uh finding new incredibly cool ways to integrate it and just like we've just got data feeds pulling in from all over the company building tons of awesome automated models and it's just uh it's we're we're we're impressed it's a great tool and you mentioned that your company is plg they're probably like the first plg fpna tool I've ever encountered yeah I think so I think so yeah they're definitely

57:22 one of the few yeah they can get you like up and running wicked fast very quick yeah they're super responsive what's the craziest thing you've ever had someone try to expense we do these uh company Retreats every year and uh as part of it we have like a free day where we allow folks to sort of have a budget to go do like a fun team activity together and somebody somehow thought going off by themselves and buying a

57:46 Nintendo switch was was an acceptable way to spend their free day so we saw that one come through and had to have a have a bit of a of a difficult conver that was tough Ryan this has been a blast thanks for uh your radical transparency and also just uh all the career insights it's been a really fun one for me yeah likewise happy to be here run the numbers is a mostly LLC production yelling an intro by Fat Joe

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58:38 models and financial metrics thanks for riding with me share this with your friends peace