Keep pulling the thread on Adam Swiecicki and Michael Miao.
Adam Swiecicki outlines the evolution of a startup's finance team from seed to Series C/D as: 1) Start with a generalist strategic finance lead and outsourced accounting, 2) Bring in a controller to in-house accounting, 3) Separate strategic finance from a central FP&A team and create specialized finance roles, and 4) Stand up a separate Biz Ops team.
At Rippling, the finance team measures R&D efficiency by tagging R&D costs to the product level and comparing dollars spent to the net new ARR generated by that specific product.
Citing a case study, Adam Swiecicki noted that ServiceNow had 85% growth endurance while Box had 70%, a 15% difference that led to vastly different market capitalizations over time despite similar scale and growth rates at one point.
At Rippling, the finance team uses its long-range plan to ensure it can maintain a growth endurance level of 80-85% or higher on a sustained four-to-five-year basis.
Rippling enforces a firm guardrail of 18-month CAC paybacks for sales and marketing, and will freeze headcount for R&D teams that fall below their benchmarks for incremental ARR generation.
Rippling's annual "operating system" consists of a 5-year long-range plan, an annual operating plan, monthly re-forecasts, monthly business reviews within functions, and quarterly business reviews with the executive team.
Snowflake's finance team combines the budgets for R&D headcount and platform costs, allowing teams to make trade-offs such as hiring more engineers to drive platform efficiency.
Michael Miao admires OpenAI's finance team for its use of AI, citing reports that they reduced their financial close process to one or two days and have accountants writing Python code with ChatGPT.
Adam Swiecicki predicts that the current distinction between "AI companies" and "software companies" will disappear, and every company that is successful in the future will be an AI company.
At Rippling, the finance team judges forecasting accuracy not on total revenue, but on net new ARR broken down by subcomponents like new logo sales across its over 100 sales segments.
At Glean, there is a direct correlation between achieving a very successful quarter and having a certain percentage of the opening sales pipeline consist of deals greater than $1 million.
Rippling's board deck is approximately 200 pages long and is highly systematized, with many charts automatically generated using its own product, the Rippling Data Cloud.