This episode of the CFO Playbook features an interview with Manish Sarin, CFO at Sprinklr, a leading enterprise company for all customer-facing functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr's unified customer experience management platform helps companies deliver human experiences to customers across modern channels.

Manish is an experienced public company executive leading finance teams, investor relations, and corporate development. He has extensive experience in building finance systems and processes for high growth SaaS companies, defining inorganic strategy, identifying and evaluating acquisition targets, structuring and negotiating transactions, and integrating acquired companies. His prior experience includes working with major Wall Street investment banks. He started his career at JP Morgan / H&Q and earned an M.B.A. from Columbia and B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT, India.

In this episode of the CFO Playbook, Manish talks about how he got into finance so he could be in a position to make impactful decisions for businesses, and explains why the role of a CFO is very different now than it was just a couple of decades ago. Manish also describes what he feels are the general misconceptions of the CFO role, how technology is important to the finance function, what current CFOs must do in order to raise capital, and how he achieves cohesion within his team when hiring and retaining employees. In addition, he provides his view on the current fintech market and how to navigate the new normal when dealing with restricted funding availability.

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“One of the things that I look for, and probably the most important thing when I'm interviewing people, is what I call fire in the belly. So unless I see somebody's really passionate, the fact that they have lots of years of experience, relevant experience, have worked at compelling businesses, all of that is good. But to me, a motivated individual who wants to succeed is way more important than trying to find that square peg for that, you know, square hole.”

“We live in a world of soundbites. If you look at how companies go public, investors have 30 minutes to understand the story, look at some financials and figure out, do they want to make a big multimillion dollar investment? And that squarely lies on the CFO. So distilling complex technology aspects or business aspects, and the ability to explain it in an easy to understand fashion. Super important for a CFO.”

“A CFO shouldn't really view that he or she has a particularly well defined swim lane, they should view the entire business as something that they can actually have a say in, and the more comfortable they are with that, the more successful they will be.”

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01:45 How Manish got started in finance

05:20 What makes a good CFO

07:30 Views on the predominant model of founder led companies

12:47 Finding balance in the tech industry

15:30 Financing and raising capital

18:05 Views on the current market

20:36 Advice to other CFOs

31:00 Achieving cohesion with your team

27:56 Views on technology within finance

36:15 Advice for aspiring CFOs

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