The Reset That Restarted Growth | Aidan Viggiano CFO Twilio

0:00 This is episode 1174. And so what AI allows us to do is to pull data from every source. It really has no limits, right? Whereas people at some point have a limit in terms how much they can analyze, we can pull in all the historical business contacts, we can pull in trending on our customers, we can pull in external factors and KPIs that correlate with our growth, we can pull in customer information, what are they saying externally and sentiment, things like that. So we can just do so much more and get so much deeper on our analysis on things like, you know, revenue forecasting. And it's it's been a force multiplier in terms of growth. It has allowed our self-serve or yeah, our self-serve channel to essentially handle more accounts, right?

0:45 So say historically if anything above $100 went to an AE to be managed, well now it doesn't have to be $100, it could be $200, right? Because the channel is so much more efficient. And we're seeing it actually impact growth, right? We We grew nearly 30% in Q4 in that channel. So it's been great. I think our AI agent there handles something like 98% of the inbound inquiries now. So there's areas where we're getting more efficiency. I'd say finance we're getting some, but it's still early days.

1:18 What happens when a company built for rapid growth suddenly has to relearn financial discipline? It's a question more finance leaders are facing right now, and it's not theoretical. At Twilio, that shift meant confronting slow growth, rethinking cost structures, and rebuilding investor trust all at once. Our guest today offers a candid look at what those moments really demand from a CFO, not just analytically, but emotionally. Because when the numbers change, the leadership equation changes with them. This is a conversation about hard calls, organizational reset, and what it truly means to lead when the story has to change. Our talk with CFO Aden Vigiano begins after this.

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3:20 Tell them that Jack sent you. Ridiculously easy, ridiculously fast. Go to something better with your Tuesday. Operators are standing by. Well, one operator. It's the agent. It's actually it doesn't sleep. Hello, CFO Aden Vigiano is with us. Aden began her career at GE where she spent nearly two decades developing as a finance leader across audit, FP&A, and investor relations, including serving as CFO Chief of Staff to multiple CFOs.

4:04 That experience gave her a front row seat to complex global operations and leadership under pressure. She later joined Twilio where she advanced through several finance roles before entering the CFO office in 2023. Aden, welcome. Thanks, Jack. Happy to be here. So you spent nearly two decades at GE. What What did that environment most fundamentally, let's say, teach you about leadership? Oh man, it taught me so much. I I loved my time at GE. So I started um in a program called the GE Financial Management Program. And maybe a step back from that, like the reason I did that, I went to um undergrad at at Wharton in Philadelphia, and a lot of my classmates actually headed to Wall Street. That was the most common career path, but I realized that I wanted to be closer to the actual operations of a business, and I wanted to see how, you know, financial decisions played out like on a factory floor and like a service center, in the real world essentially, not not on a computer, not in a spreadsheet. And so I'd heard about this program called the GE Financial Management Program, it's FMP for short.

5:15 And it's GE's entry-level program, and it's a 2-year rotational program, which meant that every 6 months I was starting a completely new job in a different part of the business. I was moving between areas like, you know, accounting and FP&A and treasury. And I did my FMP stint in GE Capital, and over my four rotations I got to, you know, move across different businesses like insurance and real estate and commercial finance. And I got to see different parts of the country. I was in Kansas City, I was in Richmond, Virginia, I was in Connecticut. So I I loved that experience, I loved the variety that it offered, and it exposed me to a lot of different cities and businesses and business models in a short window, and it gave me a broad kind of toolkit or foundation on which to build. And then from there I went over to GE's Corporate Audit Staff Program where instead of moving every 6 months, I moved every 4 months. And instead of staying in one GE division, you cross businesses. So you could be in aviation and then move to health care and then GE Capital all within a year.

6:20 And instead of staying in your home country, you actually moved all over the world, and it was kind of like FMP on steroids. And I would say it definitely had came with a higher order work than you were doing on on FMP. It was GE's top leadership development program at the time. Many of the graduates were some of GE's best kind of CEOs and CFOs, and in fact I'd say many actually went on to be CEOs and CFOs outside of GE.

6:47 Yeah. And the way the program worked is it was kind of like an upper out program, which meant every year you went up for promotion, and you either got it or you went back to the business. And the first year is kind of like on-the-job training, you're an individual contributor, um but after the second year of the program, you start managing teams of people, which is pretty unusual um as an experience to get to kind of get that experience in your mid-20s. No. So I was very fortunate. I worked my way up the organization, and by the time I was, you know, 28, 29, I was in charge of all the auditors in the GE Energy business, and I was managing, you know, an organization of about 100 people. So it was not only a great way to learn the business, I would say, but there was there was a tremendous amount of emphasis placed on managerial experience and a lot of training on how to be an effective leader. Um and then one of the perks for me was travel. I actually didn't travel much as a kid, so I loved the fact that I got to travel the world and and save money while doing it. I got to go all over the US, all over Europe, and and Asia as well. So that was pretty awesome.

7:52 Um and then after the audit program, I um went and took a role as the FP&A leader for the GE Energy business, or it was called GE Power at times. Today it's called GE Vernova, it's its own public company. And that was one of GE's largest divisions. Uh it was based in Schenectady, New York where GE was founded. So that was amazing. And then from there I landed as the Chief of Staff to the CFO of GE. And so that was the first time I was really exposed to like the things that a public company CFO has to deal with, right? Investors, quarterly earnings, corporate governance, activism, all that. And I was fortunate enough to be in that role for nearly 6 years. So I got to work under three different GE CFOs. I just happen to have there happen to be turnover in that role while I was there, so I got to see different leadership styles as well. Um and they're kind of everyone had a unique approach to the job, so that was neat to see. Um and then from there I went to Twilio, and I knew I was ready for a change, and and I've been here since 2019. Well, what wonderful overview for us. I do want to cherry-pick uh a snapshot out of this. I picked this out of your bio. Uh you were under 30 and you were leading a team of maybe 100, and I I I think it's the Corporate Audit Staff that you were part of at that time. But can you tell us something about that, why you emerge as a leader fairly early uh in your career? And I'm wondering what you know, what tested you there?

9:19 Why Why were you allowed to advance to such a a leadership role at such a young age? Well, it wasn't just me. I mean, there were there were definitely others as well. So the whole point of the program, right? Uh if you think about the Corporate Audit Staff, it was is really like executive uh conditioning or grooming, right? The primary mission was really to identify the um I would say like the the the high-potential employees, right? To fast-track them into senior leadership roles. And it was remarkably successful in doing it. Like at one point I think like 80% of GE's business unit CFOs came through the Corporate Audit Staff. So that was kind of the the way it was designed.

10:00 I think for me, it wasn't like one experience that I think um kind of got me to the the last level there where you talk about managing, you know, a bigger organization. I was really fortunate to have worked with so many terrific leaders at GE, both in the businesses I was auditing and the and the the managers and leaders that were above me on the audit staff. They They constantly pushed me out of my comfort zone. And they did this with all the auditors, right? It was a It was a way of testing the ability of the auditors. And I remember one example that was during my first year. It was my second rotation, which meant I'd been on the program for four year four months, sorry. And my primary team, so my manager and my peers were They were based in London and I was sent alone to the Nordic region to really to lead a kind of confidential project on my own.

10:49 And it was a really daunting assignment because first of all, I just started and I was working in that case directly for the executive audit manager. So, she would have been the person that was like managing the 100 people, but she was three levels above me. And she was based in the US, so I didn't have any of like the usual support layers of a traditional team, right? My managers wasn't there, my peers weren't there. I wasn't co-located with the person I was working for.

11:12 And I was there for 4 months and I was working directly with the CFO of that business. And that told me a couple of things. It built a ton It built me up a lot, right? It a lot of self-confidence. It was my first time out of the North America uh area. I'd been to Canada before. It was the only other country I'd ever been to outside the US. So, being on my own in in Sweden and in Norway, it really forced me to trust my instincts, right? There was no safety net. Um there's no one to validate my work before I presented it, which meant I had to be 100% certain of my process and my conclusion. So, experiences like that and you got them all the time. This is just one I happen to remember right now. You got them all the time on audit staff. The other thing it forced me to do in that rotation was up-level my communication. And um you know, I see this today as a CFO, like this is something that a lot of people are still working on. Um but working directly with executives, it really forced me to refine my communication. I I had to kind of move past the tendency, which I had earlier in my career around like just dumping the data, right?

12:15 Telling the executive everything I know. That's not necessarily the right way to communicate, right? I had to provide clear, high-level conclusions that a senior leader could easily understand and actually act on. So, that's an example of an assignment that it kind of stripped away the the securities that you typically have around you from a team perspective and it told it kind of taught me that, you know, being a leader, the real value is in the ability to provide clear perspective in a kind of a high-pressure situation. And I had a series of those examples that kind of led me up to the executive audit manager ranks ultimately.

12:53 I I also want to I have to zero in on this. I The chief of staff role, if I understand this correctly, uh you had three CFOs during your time as chief of staff. Um you got to observe these people up close. Talk about uh understanding the CFO style or the CFO leadership style. You had three examples that you got to see daily. How am I doing? Am I close to what your experience might have been there? Oh, yeah, daily. Um absolutely. So, I was fortunate, like you said, to have three different CFOs. I guess fortunate and unfortunate, right? There was a lot of change, but it was also great to see because, you know, when you were divisional CFO of GE, that that's very different than being the CFO of GE because the divisional CFOs are not dealing with investors. They don't have to do earnings call. They don't have to worry about like financing, debt, equity, the right side of the balance sheet. You're just running the business every day, which is hugely important, but doesn't necessarily prepare you to be a public company CFO. And so, being there was amazing. Um I started under a guy named Keith Sherin. He was unbelievably smart, probably the smartest person I've ever worked with.

14:02 And he had been in the role for a a while, a decade or two or something like that, when I got there. So, I learned a ton from him on how to think about a CFO as a CFO, how to prepare for all the things that came along with that. And then transitioned to Jeff Bornstein and Jamie Miller, who were newer to those positions. So, I was actually helpful to them to get them up to speed, how to preparing them for things like earnings, sitting next to them on the earnings call and making sure they had everything they needed. So, I grew a ton in that role. I got experiences I never thought I would have. Um and I would say that was probably the role that best prepared me for being a public company CFO.

14:42 Wow. Well, as much as we have learned about you so far, we have to believe that after 18 years at GE, you were very intentional about where you were headed next. There was a lot of thought that went behind it. Can you tell us and and we're going to ask you about Twilio um and about the opportunity that surfaced. But first, you know, what was your mindset when it was time to leave? What was What were you looking for?

15:09 Yeah, well, I I loved GE, so I I wasn't running from GE. I was ready for a change. Um my husband at that time took a job in California. So, that kind of accelerated things because we were living on uh you know, different coasts. So, that wasn't sustainable. And so, I ultimately decided it was time to look. And then the the criteria I had were number one, I did want to try a smaller company. GE was humongous, right?

15:34 Um and I wanted to go work for a smaller company that was growing really quickly and innovating quickly. And I think for me, it was about finding all of those things, but also finding one that was a strong cultural fit. I loved the culture at GE. And I interviewed at a number of different country companies. I had offers from three of them. One was just not a cultural fit. I knew I wouldn't be successful there. Two of them were. And I think what Twilio offered was that really high growth um plus cultural fit.

16:05 It just it felt like the right the right move for me and I ultimately uh decided that was the right fit. Well, we're going to circle back with you with a few more career- related questions a little later, but for listeners new to Twilio, how do you describe what this company does and and help us understand what sets it apart? Yeah, I get this question a lot. Um especially from people in my family and things like that. What exactly is it that Twilio does? So, Twilio's a company that you you probably use on a daily basis and you don't even know. So, put simply, we help companies interact with and engage or and understand, I would say, their customers. So, we're an infrastructure company and we power communications for hundreds of thousands of brands, like over 400,000 brands.

16:54 And we provide the APIs that enable developers to integrate voice calls or text messages or emails directly into their applications. And we do this by serving as a bridge between traditional telco networks and businesses and allow them It allows the business to to really automate communications. So, that's kind of what we do. But like, where would you see us in everyday life? So, if you've ever gotten a text message from your Uber driver saying that your car is about to arrive, well, that's that's us. Or when you um receive a two-factor authentication message with a six-digit code to your bank, right? So, that you can log in, that's us. Or, you know, a call from a bank alerting you to a fraudulent transaction, something like that would be us, too. Even a promotional email from your favorite brand, likely us.

17:48 Um or, you know, or obviously one of the peer companies that may do something similar. So, what we do is enable the communications between businesses and consumers. Um so, that's kind of how Twilio grew up. That's the legacy business. We did acquire a customer data platform in 2020. So, the problem that business solves is, you know, brands today have customer data trapped in different systems, CRMs, marketing systems, where data warehouses, etc. And when data is siloed like that, it makes it really hard to get a complete picture of the customer.

18:25 And what Segment allows is for companies to get a unified view of a a customer and their journey with the brand. Um maybe to give an example is if you're a fan of Nike Nike and you opt in to engaging with them, what Segment allows Nike to do is really understand you as an individual. It knows if you're a runner, right? It knows what size shoe you wear. It knows what type of running shoes you like. It knows your color preference or your purchase cadence. It knows if you're clicking around on a website or if you've abandoned a cart, right?

18:56 Having all that information really allows Nike to engage in a way that's more valuable to them and to the consumer. So, instead of getting generic marketing messages or promotions, they're actually tailor tailored to the individual. Um so, things like that's what essentially the customer data platform does. And we're really just getting started. Like we've got a lot of innovation in the pipeline around persistence and memory and and channel orchestration that that's kind of uh we're working on today that'll take this all to the next level.

19:27 So, you stepped into the CFO role in 2023 and clearly the business has evolved quite a bit. But at that place in time, Twilio was at a at a pivotal moment. And, you know, we're What was the the first hard call you you had to make? Yeah, unfortunately, the first hard call was a layoff. Um we were in a situation where the growth of the company was slowing. Well, let me take a step back. So, when I started with the company, it was really fast-paced growth.

20:00 Only to be accelerated by COVID because all communications went digital. That's what Twilio does, right? So, we were growing extremely fast. Mid-2022, it started to slow. And we knew that listen, the reality of it is we can't be slowing in growth and not be profitable and not generating cash. And so, uh one of our first decisions when I took the CFO role was to reduce the size of our workforce. And unfortunately, over the course of, you know, 6 months or so, we had to reduce it by about 40%.

20:30 And so, it was sizable. It was a very difficult thing to work through. I think I learned in that those very early days, the importance of over-communication with your workforce, even when the messages you have to deliver are difficult, being transparent, being open on why those actions are needed. And treating everybody with humanity, like it was it would I learned that through our from our CEO. And and it was a tough thing to go through, but very formative for me as a leader. When when did you begin to feel the momentum shift?

21:07 Uh we pretty quickly, actually. It So, we had two issues at the time. Number one, growth was decelerating, and we weren't profitable or generating cash. We started to see the profitability and cash flow really take off pretty quickly. Um and so, that I would say mid-2023, you know, we started to see that uh remedy, but we were still not yet profitable. We still had work to do. Um so, it over the course of 2 to 3 years, but you you started to see the the improvements pretty quickly.

21:39 I'd say growth re-acceleration took a little bit longer. That took until about 20 mid-2024 to really inflect back up on growth. And it was a lot of hard work, obviously, by our sales and our product teams and making sure the investments were going to the right places. But, I'd say, you know, over my first year or two, you started to see the fruits of our labor, you know, the the actions and everything that we had to do really kind of uh start to inflect the business back to re-accelerating growth and meaningful levels of profitability and cash.

22:11 So, at at this stage, how are you balancing growth and profitability? I mean, what what metrics tell you you're getting that balance right? You know, listen, I the the company uh has re-accelerated, you know, we are we grew 13% organically um in the, you know, recently, and we generated nearly a billion dollars of cash flow. And we were we uh full year GAAP profitability profitability for the first time in 2025. So, we're seeing a lot of momentum on the financials.

22:45 Um I think there's still opportunity. And the way I I kind of have managed it is like if you look at our organization, costs and headcount have been roughly flat for a couple of years. And we've been able to do that while accelerating and re-accelerating growth. And so, I look at that um and obviously other factors that um I measure internally on kind of how to think about running the company with the right cost discipline and controls.

23:14 So, so then what would be your um let me put it this way, your top financial priorities on that agenda today? Um more of the same. Um so, I think a couple of things. I we have a In addition to that, I would say we have a pretty um ambitious product roadmap over the next couple of years. So, making sure I have the ability to free up funding to uh ensure that happens. And so, it's make it's all the balances. I'm making sure I can keep, you know, controls on costs overall, but making sure I can funnel the right amount to innovation.

23:48 Um and uh high level, again, we put frameworks out there for investors, and I'm really just focused on doing what we said we would do and delivering on those. We'd love to talk a little bit about AI with you. How is AI changing Twilio's value proposition to customers today? Yeah, so in terms of, you know, how AI or Twilio plays and interacts in kind of an AI and agentic world. So, for customers, we sit at the vital layer a vital layer of the stack, as I said earlier. We're providing the infrastructure that enables global scalable communication. So, in a world where customers uh or sorry, our customers, so companies, are building agentic experiences, trusted communications, it's a must, right?

24:35 Without the ability for an agent to communicate with a human or with an LLM, they just aren't very valuable. And that's what we do, right? We provide the trusted communications layer for our customers, which has met led many AI startups to really rely on Twilio. Um we've seen the most growth today with our voice product. That's because when you engage with an AI agent, it's largely done via voice today because that's the most natural form of communication. So, when a customer calls in to a customer service line, they're increasingly engaging with agent, and that human-to-agent communication is really done over our voice infrastructure.

25:15 Um so, that's a big way in terms of like how we're engaging today, but voice is a big deal. Some of our software products are as well. So, the way the engagement works when you're talking about engaging between humans and agents or at some point it'll be agents and agents um is a customer's voice is converted to text and fed into an LLM. That LLM then addresses the customer's issue or answers the question, and then that text is converted back to a voice model, and that AI agent relays that information to the customer. Well, there's a ton of technology required to do that in the fraction of a second.

25:51 Obviously, there's the underlying voice pipes, as I mentioned. There's also speech recog- recognition, there's text-to-speech, speech-to-text conversion. All of these different things. And Twilio orchestrates that interaction. So, our voice channel, like I said, but also our software products like Conversation Relay, that eliminates a lot of the complexity that goes into building voice agents for our customers. So, those are the types of things we do. We're seeing I'd say we've been a beneficiary of AI. Uh we're seeing it in voice. Um that channel's having a bit of a comeback, if you will. And uh you know, I think that's because we're just really able to connect the AI models and agents to the real world. It's to the real world.

26:32 What about uh the finance function? Is there Is AI something you'll be applying there or already have? Mhm. Yeah, we already have. Definitely, revenue forecasting is an area where we're using it. So, like I said earlier, we're a usage-based business, not subscription. So, with that, obviously, it's harder to forecast, right? When your revenue's not committed, you you have a lot many more factors that can impact your growth. And so, what AI allows us to do is to pull data from every source. It really has no limits, right? Whereas people at some point have a limit in terms how much they can analyze, we can pull in all the historical business context, we can pull in trending on our customers, we can pull in external factors and KPIs that correlate with our growth, we can pull in customer information. What are they saying externally and sentiment, things like that. So, we can just do so much more and get so much deeper on our analysis on things like, you know, revenue forecasting. Yep. We're also using it um in our more transactional functions.

27:33 So, think, you know, accounting, maybe collections or something like that. Helping our team that engages with customers on collections determine the next best action or to propose communications and draft communications for them um with all the customer context they need. Or or even very simple examples like, you know, our AP team, they get something like a thousand emails into their AP inbox, like the generic one they have. They get like a thousand a day or something like that. Well, they used to have to go through that and figure out which ones do they need to focus on? Well, AI does that now, right?

28:06 It hands them the 10 that require human engagement. So, we have chatbots and things like that, but it's enhancing how we work today. I wouldn't say it's fundamentally reshaped it. Um there are a couple of areas in the company where I'd say it's having more of an impact, you know, self-service, which is our most efficient sales channel. You know, in that space, we've introduced AI agents to do everything from qualifying leads to making product recommendations to resolving customer support issues. And it's it's been a force multiplier in terms of growth. It has allowed our self-serve or um yeah, our self-serve channel to essentially handle more accounts, right? So, say historically, if anything above $100 went to an AE to be managed, well, now it doesn't have to be $100. It can be $200, right? Because the channel is so much more efficient.

28:59 And we're seeing it actually impact growth, right? We we grew nearly 30% in Q4 in that channel. So, it's been great. I think our AI agent there handles something like 98% of the inbound inquiries now. So, there's areas where we're getting more efficiency. I'd say finance is getting some, but it's still early days. When outcomes are really still emerging, as you said, early days, what what's your mindset um when it comes to ROI on these investments?

29:28 Yeah, it's hard. You know, that's um I would say easier in concept than it is in reality. I think uh there's a lot of different areas that we're using it. Um one good example would be like in R&D, for example, where you're using coding tools to uh make the uh uh developers more productive. And in that situation, it's about, "Hey, listen, if I look at historically how productive we were and how much code we generated, you know, am I able to to increase that with the same level of quality?" They're not like super easy metrics to get at, but we're looking at metrics like that to understand, "Are we getting a return on the investment that we're making?" Um in my function, like the way I kind of manage it uh is, you know, we don't we've essentially been flat on headcount for 2 to 3 years. And the real And my answer is we kind of have to continue to be. So, I need you to drive efficiency within your organization leveraging this tools and AI and all of that because as the business grows, like the the tendency is to want to add heads to support the additional growth in the you know, the to scale with the company, but we're just limiting that and saying, "Sorry, you know, we're going to stay where we are here from a headcount perspective, lean into AI." And we're giving them all the tools to kind of really enable that.

30:43 So, how do you balance uh AI adoption with governance with risk? Yeah, it's You know, what goes through your mind? Yeah, a lot um because I own security in addition to owning finance. >> Yeah. Um you want to be able to move fast, right? But you have to know you know, you have to be comfortable with the tools. Like the last thing I would want to do is drop our financials into a uh system that, you know, you know, just training some model that I'm not sure where all that information is going. So, we've moved slower maybe than some because of that. We have a council that uh looks at every tool that we're bringing in and has representation from IT, from security, from legal, from architecture and all of that. Um and we go through a a kind of a pretty I would say thorough vetting process. And I do think again, maybe we've been slower than some because we are hesitant to um you know, run the risk of any kind of compliance issues or security issues, but it's definitely a factor that comes into play um every day when when we're considering these tools.

31:52 We're going to maybe ask you to put on a your visionary hat here. How do you see AI reshaping the CFO role over over the next few years? What's occurred to you here? How is this role going to be changed? I don't know. I think the I do think um how we work will change over time. I don't think it's there yet. I think, you know, you hear that in some companies, maybe it's more than others, but I think it's really quite limited. It's making everybody more efficient, but I don't think it's really driving a change in how we're working yet. But I do think eventually it will. And I think what we our teams look like will maybe be different over time and where we have people focused. Like I I I ideally don't have people focus on transactional work, right? You have them focused on higher value work. Um that's starting to happen, but I'd still it's not it's still not quite there.

32:44 Um And I would just say like the ways of engaging every day are probably going to be different. I was just talking to my IR leader yesterday. Like right now, like what why can't we do the entire earnings process with some chatbot? Why can't all the information be dropped into AI and we query that instead of going through the rigorous kind of onerous preparation that we go through today? That's maybe a bit more manual in nature. I think it'll transform. I'm not going to put any predictions out there, Jay. I have no idea. I'm not a I'm not going to step into that, but I do think it will evolve.

33:16 >> Well, thank you for answering. We threw a few extra AI questions your way, so thank you so much. We are up to what we like to refer to as our finance strategic moment question. And this is where we ask you to look back in time and just share one moment of insight. Uh and again, this might have happened 20 years ago, might have happened last week, but something that resonated with you, a moment of strategic insight.

33:39 Anything come to mind or what would you like to share? Well, I think I'd go back to what we were talking about earlier. So, it it's not a moment, it's a series of moments. I don't know if I'm allowed to do that. But it was my first 2 years as the CFO here. Like it was a time of monumental change for the company, as you said. Um if you think about we had a lot of hard decisions to make, right? We shifted the culture of the company from one that was focused on growth to one that was balancing growth and profitability. But in addition to that, we had to take actions to the workforce.

34:07 We completely remade the compensation structure of the company. We had to We went through a CEO change from a founder to a you know, non-founder CEO. We made governance changes. We brought in TC new sweet C-suite leaders. We had activism. We had a lot going on and we were faced with a lot of moments. I would say that empowered me as a leader and honestly forced me out of my comfort zone. But ultimately, um you know, we made commitments to shore up the financial foundation of the company and we did what we said we would do. Like my CEO's our CEO, Khozema, says that often.

34:41 Like our top priority has to be like we do what we said we were going to do. Like and that is ingrained in me. And I the first 2 years of my CFO tenure, like that was our mantra, right? And so, I wouldn't say it was one moment, but a series of moments over a couple of years where you know, we had to make a lot of difficult changes um but ultimately came out better on the other side. And I definitely came out as a stronger leader as a result.

35:08 I want to where we want you to look back again. And again, you had that unique role at GE, the the chief of staff role, but then you um usually I ask about your first impressions of the CFO role, that first 60 days you were in the role. And you know, it's funny, we've been talking about that just because there was a pivot happening, there was a lot going on in a short amount of time. Um but there must have been something that surprised you, something that you shook your head and you realized, "Oh, I didn't realize this is part of the job." What What is it that you would tell yourself if you went back in time?

35:50 Um I would say it was lonelier than I thought it was going to be. Huh. Um Because you're making it's not just you, right? Obviously, the CEO and the rest of the C-suite is with you, but at a time when you're making a lot of really hard decisions or we are making a lot of really hard decisions that are obviously uh many unpopular when you're changing compensation structures or some devastating when you're having to lay off people, right? Just really tough things to do.

36:20 Um you you don't have a lot of people you can confide in and and work with. You can't go talk to your CFO peers, you know, you can't go talk to your team about it. You basically you obviously spend a lot of time with your board and your your C-suite, but it's a little bit lone It gets lonelier a little bit I'd say as you get to the top. That was one thing. I think the other thing the biggest gap for me, I would say, was the investor side of things. Just because you don't deal with that unless you're an investor relations person, you typically aren't engaging with um the outside world on a regular basis. And so, having to thread the needle of Investors were pissed at us, right? Like we uh were slowing in growth, we weren't profitable, and we had to change the narrative and build trust again. I didn't realize how hard that would be and how many years it would take to do that. So, I'd say maybe those were the the two things.

37:16 Nice. Thank you for those. We're going to We always like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side with us. We're wondering, what is something that maybe most of your colleagues might not know about you? Something most people might not know about you? Something from your past, an interest that you have? What would you like to share? I'm a triplet. Um so, that's pretty interesting. And I have a sister that's uh we, the triplets, have a sister that's less than a year older than us. So, I'm actually part of a set of Irish quadruplets. All girls. Uh the triplets were fraternal, so um I think that's pretty unique. And and as I think about it now as a parent, I I cannot fathom having four kids under the age of one. And I think it's definitely easier to be part of a set of triplets than to raise them. Your organizational skills, I mean, did your family they must have been well organized at some point in their life.

38:08 >> was a saint. Um but it it What I would have What I would say is like when you were born into a set of triplets and you have a sister that's less than a year older, you have a brother that's a couple years older than that. Um you like you're part of a team day one. It's never about you, it's always about all of you and the team. So, uh it was a great way to grow up. I wouldn't change it for the world.

38:29 So, uh what about a book or a resource for us? Something that's influenced your thinking along the way, something It might even be something you escape with. Anything come to mind? I escape with working out. I love to work out. I do that every morning, first thing. But I would say in terms of a book um that I might recommend to others coming into a similar role, you know, there's a lot of great leadership books. I'm sure many that have been on your podcast before have shared them. But when I was coming into the public role, like I said, the IR side was the area where I was less experienced. So, our VP of IR recommended a book called Winning Investors Over. Um it's written by a professor at NYU Stern. And I found it helpful because uh I really wanted to understand how investors think and how to build trust with them and how to effectively and kind of consistently tell the Twilio story. And like I said, there was a lot going on when I came in. So, building trust was important to me. And it just helped me realize that, you know, being a good CFO, it isn't just about, you know, reporting the numbers. It's about providing the right context, um being consistent, right? All those things. So, investors can actually, you know, value the company for the long term, for the future. Nice. Well, we're up to our final question, which is to ask you to look forward finally, and what we want to know are what your priorities are as CFO of Twilio. What would those be?

39:53 Yeah, I think it's kind of what we talked about earlier. AI is a big one. Seriously, like you know, I it is a huge focus. I would say I don't have anything else to add on it, but both for finance and the whole company because I do own IT as well. So, that's a big focus of mine. And then on the financials, I would say again, just doing what we said we would do, right? We laid out a framework at our investor day. We set a high bar for ourselves.

40:21 We've come a long way from a financial standpoint, but there's still a lot of opportunity ahead, and it's it's my job to make sure that we deliver as an organization on on those metrics. So, that's a big priority for me and and my team. Eden Viggiano, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Thank you, Jack. Appreciate you having me.