The Backbone: a journey inside finance at a startup

Ep. 37: An Inside Look at Salesforce's $689M Acquisition of Buddy Media & Lessons Learned from Raising $150M+ with Oliver Bell, CFO at Springbot

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Oliver Bell, CFO at Springbot

On this episode of The Backbone, I chat with Oliver about:

  1. His your journey into tech and finance over 15 years ago, with stints in companies like Google to Buddy Media, (acquired by Salesforce) to the SVP of Finance and Operations at Braze, prior to Oliver’s current gig as the CFO at SpringBot.
  2. SpringBot — what the company does and what is it all about and why he decided to join the company.
  3. The experience leading up to the Buddy Media acquisition and exiting to Salesforce for $689M. We go behind the scenes to the months leading up to the acquisition discussing things that Salesforce did really well as an acquirer and what could they have done better.
  4. Lessons learned from Oliver’s 4 years at Braze, leading 3 fundraising rounds, with $150M of total capital raised including Series E (Sept ’18) at a $850M valuation. During Oliver’s tenure, the company grew from 40 people and $5M ARR to 300 people. 
  5. The biggest misconception about the finance function within a technology company.

    6. We close things off with a quickfire round:

    • Your go to online resource for all things startup finance related
    • Your favourite productivity hack
    • Tech jargon that makes you cringe
    • The best advise you’ve received
    • One thing you don’t leave the office before finishing

      • At Springbot, Oliver oversees Finance, Legal, HR, and Revenue Operations. Prior to Springbot, Oliver spent four years leading Finance and Operations at Braze (formerly Appboy) leading the company through multiple funding rounds including its most recent $80M raise in September 2018 at a $850M valuation. Before Braze, Oliver led the Revenue Operations team at BuddyMedia which was purchased by Salesforce for close to $700M in 2012. Post acquisition, he spent about three years leading a variety of teams inside the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. A Boston native, Oliver graduated from Harvard College, where he also received his MBA.

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      The Backbone: a journey inside finance at a startupBy Shubham Datta
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