When Long Dinh joined Ada as the company’s first finance hire, he was thrilled to build the finance function and kickstart growth for the pre-seed startup.

Fast-forward three years and Ada has become a powerhouse player in the customer experience space. In this time, Long has helped grow Ada’s employee base by more than 10X and raised over $200M in funding. 

According to Long, the most important factor in being a successful finance leader is the ability to understand not what the business needs immediately, but what it will need in the quarters and years to come. 

This forward-looking lens served him well when the unimaginable happened: COVID-19. The start of the pandemic stalled growth for companies everywhere and like many leaders, Long had to make some tough financial decisions. 

Rather than stalling, however, the AI chatbot company took off as more businesses needed to scale remote customer support operations. In May 2021, the company announced a $130M Series C financing round. 

In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Long shares how he broke into finance, his main considerations when building out a finance team from scratch, and his top two pieces of advice for finance leaders early in their careers. 

Connect with Long on LinkedIn.

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