It was the kind of boardroom moment that separates finance professionals from finance leaders. Tony Jarjoura, now CFO of Gigamon, found himself surrounded by audit committee members as a dense, highly technical tax strategy unraveled before them. Despite having pored over legal memos and internal reviews, the room still looked puzzled—until Tony spoke. In just two sentences, he distilled thousands of hours of technical effort into a clear, accessible takeaway. “That was the moment,” he tells us, “when I realized the power of translating complexity into clarity.”

Tony’s journey to that moment began with a professor’s advice back in university: go Big Four, earn your CPA, and the world will open up. He took it to heart, spending 15 years at Ernst & Young in San Francisco, embedded in Silicon Valley’s IPO engine room. At EY, he wasn’t just crunching numbers—he was watching ideas travel from whiteboard sketches to billion-dollar listings. Companies like Atlassian, Okta, and Workday became case studies in how finance underpins innovation.

When he stepped into industry during the COVID years, Jarjoura traded IPO war rooms for the operational depths of Gigamon. He jokes about never having recorded a journal entry before—but quickly embraced the inner mechanics of finance operations. Today, he views FP&A not as a rearview mirror but as a GPS system for business decision-making. “Finance has to be the connective tissue,” he says, “translating data into decisions that shape where we go next.