Joining Intel Corp. in 1999 as a recent college graduate, David Freeman began his finance career as part of the tech giant’s plus-size finance team that supported various business groups. Looking back, Freeman finds that few aspects of the tech giant’s business were more influential in shaping his early career years than the company’s direct and “confrontational” culture.

“They expected excellence,” he recalls. “They expected details, and they expected you to know your business.”

Along the way, despite the many opportunities that Intel regularly offered him, Freeman came to realize that he wanted to open his next career door somewhere else.

“I didn’t really love being at a large company, so—after 7 years there—I decided that it was time to move on,” continues Freeman, who opted to join a pioneering cloud company known as NetSuite.

At fewer than 500 employees, NetSuite was aiming to be among the first SaaS companies to go public, and Freeman tells us that he ultimately had a hand in drafting the company’s S-1—a hands-on role that ultimately led him to spending 16- to 20-hour days at the printer.

However, Freeman believes that the greatest takeaways from his time at NetSuite may have come from the exposure that he had to the decision-making done by NetSuite’s CFO during the IPO process.    

“For the first time, I could see day-in and day-out what the CFO did, and this really gave me kind of a better sense of the role,” he remembers.

We can see that as his career moved forward, Freeman’s pursuit of experience and opportunities left little doubt that he had the CFO office in mind as a destination. Still, when the head of sales at Nutanix invited him to step into a VP of Sales operations position, he didn’t hesitate to stray from what might have been a more traditional finance path.

Says Freeman: “To be honest, I really hadn’t thought about this type of role that much, but I kind of felt like, ‘Hey, if there’s ever a time to do it, why not now?'” –Jack Sweeney