The CFO Corner

Kenny Jen is a member of Pilot's CFO Services, where he advises startups at various stages on finance, fundraising, and strategy. 

Before joining Pilot, Kenny managed product development, supply chain, and strategic finance for a consumer goods startup in Los Angeles. Before that, he was an investment associate at a venture capital fund. 

Kenny has consulted companies in a wide range of industries, including health and wellness, SaaS, CPG, marketplaces, and retail.

In this episode, Kenny speaks about the role of finance and the CFO. He believes the role has changed over the last 5 to 10 years from data collection and accuracy to systems building and interpretation of that data. 

He sees the role of finance and operations coming together, with CFOs and finance teams becoming a part of the strategic element and working closely with operations. Kenny mentions that the most exciting innovation in accounting and finance is around automation and streamlining manual processes. He highlights the challenge of balancing execution and data collection with the processing time and brain power to interpret that information. 

You can learn a lot from someone who spends a good deal of time with CFOs and Controllers.

Lindy Antonelli, Partner, Armanino LLP, highlights the rise of the Controller as one of the key trends of the last few years.

Lindy gives her perspective on how technology can improve finance and accounting at all companies, not just the largest firms.

She also provides perspective on how COVID-19 has altered the landscape of corporate finance forever.

In 2002, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act dramatically reshaped the accounting landscape forever. What happened in the last two decades to continue that evolution?

Robert Goldenberg, CFO of 6sense, helps make sense of today’s modern finance and accounting departments’ critical trends.

Rob enlightens us about the challenges—and the opportunities—of running a distributed F&A function during a pandemic.

He also gives some great advice about corporate finance’s exciting new phase of innovation and how it benefits accounting people just starting their careers.

According to Ray Langhaim, CFO of NICE inContact:

Ray has some sage advice for up-and-coming Finance professionals as well. Learn to use data to tell a better story. Embrace tools like AI and machine learning to gain a competitive advantage. Help the leadership team understand and move the levers of growth.

(He also makes an on-point pop culture reference to actor/rapper/film producer Will Smith.)

Janelle helps us understand technology's role in the lives of finance and accounting teams. She also describes what the CEO and board expect from the CFO and how data and insights make the finance team an integral part of a company’s growth.

As part of the new generation of finance leaders, Janelle Gorman is responsible for financial reporting and analysis, compliance, and financial operations to support and drive York IE and their portfolio companies’ growth.

Welcome to the very first episode of the CFO Corner.

The podcast is hosted by Nick Ezzo, the VP of Marketing at Auditoria.ai. 

So what can you expect to hear when you listen to each episode?

For our first season we’ll be releasing some classic episodes from our CFO Corner show. You’ll hear from CFOs primarily about finance automation and AI. This season will be released for 16 episodes.

In our second season, we’ll be switching up our style to a primarily conversation-based podcast.

We’ll bring on CFOs and corporate finance professionals to hear about the innovative approaches and technology they have used to scale and grow their organizations. Episodes will typically be around 10-15 minutes. We’ll cover topics such as automation, new technology and disruptive trends in finance, how to reduce errors in data, how to improve forecasting, and more. 

CFOs and corporate finance executives will share the challenges they’re facing with mundane repetitive tasks and give their takes on what they’d like to see in the corporate finance function that can help achieve a stress-free working life. 

This is the podcast for you if you’re ready to learn about the innovative approaches that are out there to quit copy-pasting PDFs and finally free yourself to analyze data and guide the business.

If you have any ideas for possible episode topics that we should cover on the show, or you know someone that would be a perfect guest, make sure to connect with us via email at [email protected]. The more input we get from listeners, the better this podcast is going to be.

Thank you so much for listening to the CFO Corner. Make sure to subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. Until next time!