Julio Martínez: Turning Finance Teams Into Growth Drivers with AI #247

Hello, hello everyone.

This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode In today's episode, we'll be talking about turning finance teams into growth drivers using AI. Today we have our special guest, Julio Martinez, joining us. Julio is the co-founder and CEO of Abakum, which is an AI-native FP&A platform built to help finance teams drive efficient growth and drive real business impact. With Abakum, he focuses on turning finance into a strategic function by giving teams real-time visibility into their KPIs, automated reporting, and providing better forecasting, planning, and decision-making. Before founding Abacum, Julio spent over 2 decades across finance and technology, beginning his career in investment banking, working in New York, São Paulo, Zurich, and London. He then transitioned into tech where he launched multiple fintech products and deepened his focus on building solutions for finance teams. So Originally, he's from Spain, but now he's based in New York. And Julio brings a global perspective and a practical, operator-driven mindset, which will help companies, which we'll talk about today, scale with greater clarity and control. So welcome, Julio. Super excited to have you on the show today.

What a blast to be here, Akeel. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, so like you said, we've chatted. You've spent many, many years in investment banking. You spent many years working with fintech. Where you then you finally decide to go and build your own SaaS company, which is today, you know, Avacom. Maybe you can just start off sharing a little bit about your global perspective and your experience and how finance should operate inside a SaaS business to help our listeners.

Yeah. So I think fundamentally, finance teams oftentimes still today in SaaS businesses are very stuck as a back office function. Right. And they are optimized through efficiency, right? We think of them as, you know, this is a cost, it belongs to the G&A, right? To that part of the P&L where it's a pure cost. And then it's, it's a back office. We want them to close the books very fast and then pass the audits. And look, that's okay. And it makes sense, right? That part of operational finance is very relevant. And definitely you want to judge that part of operational finance. Through efficiency, right? So for founders out there, yeah, you gotta pay your bills, you need to collect your money, and then you want to close the books. And you know, so cool, like make it very efficient. And then through technology, and we can talk about it, like you can get that very efficient. However, I still think that a lot of founders keep on underestimating how much value a well-equipped finance team can bring to the table when it comes to providing clarity and helping in decision-making, which is the strategic part of finance, right? The forward-looking And maybe we want— we want— we will unpack this during our conversation today. But I would encourage, you know, SaaS founders to really think through, you know, is my finance team today similar to revenue operations? Are they really helping me inform pricing decisions or product expansion decisions? Are— do they belong to the table? And sometimes, you know, the conversation starts with, do I have the right talent? Right. So to start with, right, so you gotta, you need the right team to, in order for you to accomplish that, but then you need to go to then to process and technology, right? Team, process, and technology to then build a very strong, fastest scaling finance function, which is what matters, right? As you scale, how do you have a finance team that, you know, keeps up with that growth?

Yeah, it's able to guide you and make sure you can stay ahead with the forecast of what you plan, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because it depends on the stages, right? Like, obviously, if you are a seed, even a seed stage company, yeah, probably you don't need much, right? Like, if we are very honest, right? So maybe a little bit of planning for your next fundraising round, maybe a decent budget that you share with your board and a few things, but it's mostly getting the operations right. Like that, that should be mostly enough. You gotta know, you know, your ARR, a little bit, your gross margins, a few things, make sure you have money in the bank, so runway. And, you know, in seed, almost A, well, you see very big A These days, arguably, things are changing, but in general, you can keep things very simple. Really, you want to spend your time in, you know, some other functions and obviously product market fit and distribution and so on. But as you continue scaling and B, C, D, and beyond, right? Like in that, you know, B and C especially, like this is the time to build your foundation so that when you continue scaling, it doesn't break. So you want to— make sure you have the right team, but also the right tech stack and infrastructure across the different tasks that the finance needs to be doing. And especially I would throw the invitation that, hey, a finance team that is well-equipped can provide a lot of strategic clarity to the rest of the organization, revenue teams, you know, sales, marketing, and beyond.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, before we, you know, get more into the weeds and deeper into that, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background. So you worked in investment banking, And then maybe if you can share a little bit, what prompted you to start Appicum? What was the core problem in SaaS that you saw in finance that needed to be solved? And you're like, this is what we need to build.

Yeah, a few things, right? So I spent many years in investment banking, right? I think this is a great training ground in general, in life, for many reasons. But I also work with a lot of organizations that were working at scale with a lot of systems. And, you know, certain things were going very well, but they really lacked the agility, right? So, you know, there were some systems and infrastructure in there, like legacy systems that, you know, lacked the agility of equipping the finance team to really keep pace with the business, right? To have insights that matter at the time that it mattered. So then I moved into fintech, as you said, and I think that the problem was almost the opposite, right? We were launching fintech products to market very, very fast, right? So there was, almost no scale. There was almost too much speed and not a lot of thinking about how to scale this properly. And so we made a lot of mistakes actually, like probably too many. And we call them learnings. Sorry, we call them learnings.

Yes, exactly.

And so what prompted me to connect the dots and say, hey, like this is a problem space I understand very well, but like what we need to solve Was first of all, the data foundation, right? You want to have a single source of truth with all the metrics that matter to the business in one place, always clean and in real time to be analyzed. And that essentially means not only accounting data, which probably is a lagging indicator and the business doesn't care too much. You want to have your CRM data, right? HubSpot.

Mm-hmm.

Salesforce, you want to have your HR data for headcount planning. So stuff coming from the HIRS, so, or the ATS, like the hiring systems, right?

Yeah.

Um, and then, but also even oftentimes in SaaS, we have a lot of metrics that matter that are operational and that, that matter to the business, right? Not, not details that, you know, maybe only matter for marketing, but, you know, that move the business plan, uh, where you need to make decisions and they are in a Snowflake, in BigQuery, in Redshift, in Looker, in Tableau, in a BI, so elsewhere. You really want to connect everything and have it always clean in one single place, right?

Right.

That data foundation is critical. So, this was the very obvious problem we started with. We'll speak, I'm sure, about AI at some point today. So, we cannot miss that. And of course, we are building a lot, but hey, I talk to a lot of finance teams and founders, and we oftentimes want to run before we walk and before we crawl. And then we all want to deploy a lot of AI to scale the business, but then the data foundation is not there. So it is imperative that we do the right investments at the data foundation level so that we can 10x our impact. We can multiply our impact through AI. And a lot of people are not doing this in the right sequence of operations, right? In the right order of operations.

Yeah.

So this is the start at the starting point for us, what we wanted to accomplish. Okay. Single source of truth. And then on top of that, then you can start running algorithms. You can start doing your forecasting. How do you see the business? You can start running scenarios, scenario analysis. This is critical. Like all the what-if questions. What if we launch this new product? What if we change this pricing? What if we reduce a little bit of cost? What happens with our runway? You know, all these. more business-minded questions that allow us to make decisions in startups.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think we see that a lot, right, in our M&A experience as well, right? Like, it seems so intuitive that, you know, data is all collected and it's managed and reported in one place. But yeah, marketing teams, sales teams, HR, you know, accounting, and being able to get it all together, and it just takes so much time and trying to gather that data and put it together and like, It's like months wasted just trying to understand it. Also, hopefully understand, like, this is just having that in one place and being on top of it, you're just able to make decisions a lot quicker and move, right?

Totally.

Yeah. So in SaaS companies, you know, like you said, you know, when you're moving really quickly, you start becoming reactive, right? Like you get to this point where people are asking you for data or for information or what decisions to make and you're like, wait, we don't know, we have to— we start scrambling looking for the data and trying to make sense of it and what to do. What do you think needs to be, what needs to change for it to become like a real driver of growth?

Yeah, that's a great question. So what you just described is what we always call the human API problem, that finance teams, also revenue operations teams, they become the human API problem, they become the bottleneck. Why? Because, you know, it's, hey, imagine it's Monday morning, right? And then, you know, you've already got A question from the marketing team, you know, about whatever things in pipeline generation, the sales team, whatever, you know, qualified opportunities. And then, you know, the CEO wants a couple of scenarios because they just had a conversation with the board, you know, quick and dirty and this and that. And then you have 5 questions going on and then all of them are then channeled to you in finance, right? Or to your revenue person. Like somebody is, because that somebody is the bottleneck and the API between the rest of the business, the rest of the organization and stakeholders and the models and the data. So all that data foundation, it's not only the data, right? You need to have the business logic, which we call models, right? What you would model in a spreadsheet, probably that spreadsheets break and are not enough at some point in time. Like for a long time they are awesome. So then you have this human API problem where You know, this finance person gets screwed all the time because all the questions are channeled there. So what you really want to accomplish is to have a data foundation and a single source of truth that scales beyond finance, right? And with AI, this is more possible than ever before, right? So obviously at Adcom, we have, we provide this single source of truth. This is what we've always done. where all the metrics and all the answers that you need to run the business are always there sitting, waiting for you. But very importantly, and this is critical, anybody in the business can consume that data. And not only through, you know, tailored dashboards that everybody can check in a very collaborative manner, and then you can run approval workflows and, you know, be very decentralized for people to consume information and make decisions. But even more importantly, you go to your Claude instance, And then you start chatting with Avacom, right? Very conversational. You go to Slack and then Slack is connected to Claude and then to Avacom. So then, you know, you come from— so we meet the customer where they are. So a lot of these questions that marketing has, like they are just chatting now and then, but finance know, hey, the answers are accurate. You know, they are coming from Avacom. So we have no hallucinations, right? Like we have all the security measures, all the governance measures, all the guardrails, all the scalability, so that we ensure the answers are correct. And then, yeah, the rest of the teams are unblocking themselves, and then they make better decisions. That's the cutting edge, really, of a finance function that is meeting the business with the right information at the right time. Right.

So I'm assuming before this, you know, this, a lot of this sit in different, you know, kind of spreadsheets across different departments. And, and now you're able to bring all this into one beautiful place and a unified place.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, speaking about, you know, AI, which is kind of the heart of this, this, this conversation is like, you know, love to hear kind of, you know, what maybe you can share a little bit. What AI trends are you seeing specifically in that SaaS finance teams and the office of the CFO are using and interested in?

Yeah. So, well, AI is in high demand in finance. This is what I know. I see it in high demand everywhere else, but we'll get back to what you mentioned about spreadsheets in a second, given also the question on AI. Look, finance teams are today mandated to embrace technology and embrace AI, not only in their own teams, but also to oftentimes You know, make sure like the rest of the organization is adopting AI with the right ROI. And I think first of all, we are moving from adopting AI at all costs to, you know, what's the ROI of some of the token consumption that we are seeing. And this is more of a prevalent conversation that, you know, as the hype cycle normalizes a little bit, yeah, we'll start having Some of these conversations, right? And I think this is key in finance and beyond. But still, CFOs and VP finance and head of finance and finance teams are mandated with, you know, driving efficiency, driving productivity, ensuring scaling with less, more with less, right? Efficient growth, like the same mantra that we had before. And then, of course, AI is a critical lever today to accomplish that. Within the finance. So it'll be an ROI conversation for AI adoption in finance teams, in marketing teams, and elsewhere. Within the own finance team, how can you use AI to scale your own AI function, right?

Yeah.

Look, I think very critical use cases that we are building in the platform are gonna be, for instance, you mentioned spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are awesome. Don't get me wrong. I used to be in banking. I used to model without touching the mouse and I was very proud about it, which is very embarrassing in retrospect, but I was that guy, right? So I love spreadsheets. So don't get me wrong, but at some point in time in your scalability journey, they become a burden because they don't scale anymore. You cannot collaborate in spreadsheets, data volumes, like it's operational risk. There are human, a lot of human errors always. So they break and this is the reality of spreadsheets and you can always have them here and there for some ad hoc calculation, but really you want to have your data and and the core of the business logic in a robust system that is very flexible and easy to manipulate, which is obviously why we built Avalon. The thing today is that, for instance, with our AI modeler, like you can, you prompt the platform, hey, build me the 3 statements, the 3 financial statements, and then build me 3 scenarios on this ABC. And then the platform builds it for you at a level of accuracy that You know, then the human in the loop will check, will audit a little bit. Oh yeah, this makes sense. Like a couple of provocations, like what you do with Claude, right? Or GPT or whatever you like to use, right? Yeah, you know, you continue prompting, you adjust, but then all of a sudden, like something that took before, you know, scenarios that took, you know, a very long weekend, long nights and this and that, then people are doing in a couple of hours in our platform or models that used to take like 2, 3 weeks to build when it comes to the next budgeting cycle and stuff. Like, yeah, it's now, you know, one day and a half and everything is done. So like, this is the critical impact through AI modeling. But also you have a lot of other types of, like, what we've built is a multi-agentic experience naturally. So you have AI agents monitoring your data, detecting anomalies, right? You have AI agents surfacing insights. proactively, and then communicating that in Slack or elsewhere to different people in the company that want to be in those loops. Yeah, so you can do AI-driven variance analysis with a lot of explainability. So there is a lot that you can, hey, not only automate, but actually enrich in the conversation with AI, right? So it's, given your finance team and your revenue operations, and we also work a lot with revenue operations, And then they do the pipeline review and everything with us. So like, it's given them superpowers. So really, it's built tailwinds in very, very tangible ways.

And, you know, kind of going deeper into that, like, how are you seeing maybe, you know, with AI tools or within Avacom, when you're working with some SaaS companies, how are you seeing them work with it for specifically do forecasting, maybe for planning, and then also revenue predictability versus how they did it previously, what are the changes you're seeing in efficiency as well?

Yeah, totally. So what we used to see before was, you know, hey, maybe an Excel file with a lot of complexity and then, you know, many tabs and copy paste and from CSV files from different systems and then finance teams doing VLOOKUPs, INDEX MATCH, and Some ifs to clean the data and then start copy pasting that data into maybe 30 different Google Sheets and collaborating, you know, by department or product or country and then consolidating this data. And then all of a sudden the board or the CEO needs a scenario and then like, shit, like I have now all this complexity. And then, you know, by the time some budget owners give you data, like your versions have already evolved because you're running that scenario. And Look, if you're running a very small shop like that, that's okay. This is when it breaks, right? Or even with volumes of data. So, you know, doing scenarios and relevant forecasting with that setup where, you know, all the data is siloed in scattered systems, and then you need to manually be keeping it alive and making sense of it. Like, that's That's a very old way of doing things, right? And it breaks. I think going forward, finance teams and actually SaaS companies, really, this is in my mind way less about finance these days, but actually board of directors, management teams. You want to have a democratic use of data where there is a high confidence, high trust on the numbers. There are no 4 CAC definitions in the business for, you know, whatever it is, ARR oftentimes even these days and cross margins, this, that, no, like there is clarity on the definitions. There is clarity on the data. Everybody's in high confidence. We are all looking at the same metrics. They make sense. They are in real time. They are always updated. They are clean. So, so the conversation is never about data quality and things like that. Like you are just jumping into the conversations straight to the insight. So this is very important. And then layering AI on top, like AI has been very powerful with finance use cases and revenue operations use cases very recently, right? Like we're talking about months tops. Before that, it was okay, but not, you know, not that promising. Since the release in February of, say, Opus 4.6, and then some other ongoing releases, It's been a quantum leap for us. So really the value that you get from an FP&A platform like ours has been multiplied dramatically. So we used to, you know, we would assess ourselves, we were growing very fast, we were growing very fast already in the day, and we already added a lot of value to our customers. But arguably today, like, given these tailwinds that, which, you know, have nothing to do with us, right? Like, we are just benefiting from them. So like, We need to acknowledge what is out of our control, but we are really capitalizing on the AI trend and incorporating all of those use cases into the product. And that is giving finance teams a capacity to, you know, with the right data foundation, surface the insights and the information that matters when it matters for the business to make that decision. Prior to us, finance teams usually show up in the conversation pretty delayed.

Right.

The business decision has been made. Like maybe they even have the right information, but it's, you know, they show up the 15th of the month with information from the previous month, say, hey, like, this is my investor report. And then seriously, who in the management then takes a look at that? Like oftentimes not even the CEO, like they don't care. Like they send it to the board, like whatever they did. So how do you make them timely?

Mm-hmm.

You know, how do they show up the first day of the month with maybe not 100% closed books, but still directionally correct information so they can inform decisions? Because through AI, they, you know, take an ML and some other algorithms, they can predict what's going on better. They are more timely. They can inform decisions on like, you know, from products to launch, geographic expansion, performance, anticipating that pipeline coverage is not high enough or it's too high, and then we need to hire more AEs. You know, how do we get them to bring that information to the table when it matters? It's totally doable today with, with Avacom and with that technology.

Yeah. And, you know, maybe for SaaS founders who are listening in today, you know, they have some kind of system in place. They may think they're doing it well. They think they have their data clean and they're making decisions based off of that. Maybe real time, it may not. They may be checking it once a month, like you said, but Maybe you can share a little bit what you've seen. Where do maybe most SaaS companies get it wrong when it comes to financial planning and scaling efficiently so that they can maybe think about applying it today and helping them become more efficient and plan better?

I think, hey, a lot of SaaS companies, you know, imagine go through a yearly budgeting cycle because maybe the board forces them to do it or because they care, I don't know. So they go and usually it's going to be, hey, some of the fastest people out there, they do it in a month, but most people will do it in 2 months. And then of course you have the horror stories of 3, 4 months, which is a total waste of time and highly inefficient. And then, you know, obviously they start the year, the fiscal year, and, you know, they don't touch it much. And then maybe halfway through the year, maybe after Q1. So like, some teams do it, you know, quarterly. And sometimes even, you know, half, first half of a year, and then they revisit that, those numbers. And so you get where I'm going, right? At the speed at which SaaS is moving today, that is a useless exercise that maybe you're going to keep your board happy or to pretend that we are good operators and diligent, but really is not helpful for the business. Like, why does that matter for the business? The reality today is very, very fast-paced. So, and this is in SaaS, but also beyond SaaS, right? In other industries as well that are heavily adopting technology. But I think SaaS is even more changing than other industries. So I think we have a more compelling reason to adopt technology faster. But in SaaS, like, of course, monthly, what we call rolling forecasting or monthly reforecasting, quickly revisiting like that, that's imperative. But I would think I would even argue that, you know, you want to have those real conversations almost very weekly, almost weekly. There is a capacity to be having pipeline conversations, pipeline coverage conversations, close rates conversations, and understanding like all the go-to-market topics that typically you have in SaaS, but also some other metrics and some metrics you want to review monthly, right? Like probably gross margins, you don't want to review every week. But from a weekly perspective, like you can, you can get finance very embedded and very helpful in, in revenue teams, for instance, and be driving performance for you in the organization. So you as a SaaS founder, you know, you might have revenue operations teams, you might not have them, whatever, but it's a very powerful partnership to have finance together with revenue operations driving performance for you in the business, in the pipeline reviews, in the deal reviews. So because they have the wealth of data, they see the evolution of stages in the funnel, they know how to ask those questions, they know the pipeline coverage, they see the acquisition channels, what's working, what's not working week after week, they can have a very meaningful conversation with marketing. Hey, what are the campaigns that are performing the best? And why don't you double down there? What's the ROI here? What's the ROI there? So you have a true force multiplicator for you as a founder, for you as a CEO, for, for for many stakeholders in the business, to leverage finance to go the extra mile. This is how really best teams are operating. And you would be surprised, like there is a lot of people already today, at least in the markets where we operate and definitely here in the US, you know, in New York and, you know, anyway, working at this level of rigor and quality.

It was really about, you know, speed of making decisions and better decisions because, you know, you're able to see, you know, real-time updates, whether you want to check it daily or having these conversations weekly, but then you're able to, you know, make changes and make better decisions and move quickly, which is all the point of growing and scaling and, you know, and operating as a SaaS company, especially if you're VC-packed, right? So, Yeah. Yes. So, you know, maybe for last question here to leave with our audience for maybe for For SaaS founders and finance leaders, maybe what's one shift or change they can make today that you recommend to help them turn their finance into a strategic advantage?

Look, I would say the first step is always getting right the data foundation, and I think a lot of people think they have it, Hmm. But they don't, right? There is still a lot of manual steps involved, that there is some aspects in the data that are not covered. So getting the data foundation right is what matters most. Like, I think for founders, they need to evaluate if they have the right team or not for what they want to accomplish. But in any case, regardless, having the right data foundation for revenue operations and finance for business decisions Matters a lot. So that single source of truth is critical. That's, I would say, the first step in the right direction. From there, then you can 10x your operations. From there, you can 10x your operations and the value that you get from finance and revenue operations. From there, you can really deploy AI. And I think the provocation that we have with our customers oftentimes is, you know, hey, unburden us in Avacom, like all the finance engineering. This is complex, by the way, right? This is complex. I think we have a lot of, you know, young finance professionals that, you know, they build a lot of things and it's fantastic. And we always encourage that. I think as you continue scaling, you know, hey, we have a team of 80 engineers and, you know, and growing, right? We continue hiring and increasing their productivity with AI. They are just obsessed about these use cases. So, oftentimes, like, the provocation is, hey, you know, I'm obsessed with, you know, SaaS companies and, you know, how to add more value. And so is the rest of our team. So, once you start building that data foundation, we, you know, we do it. You can start extracting all the value that you need without worrying about security and scalability and compliance and governance and, you know, You know, all the guardrails that you need for this to be consistent. So, but anyway, so getting started with the single source of truth is the right first step. Yeah.

Yeah. Get the data and then you're able to just, you know, make sure it's clean, make sure it's all in one place and then you can move, move, move and run as quickly as possible without feeling that you'll break your business, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So, I think also the collaborative workflows. So, Oftentimes at the data foundation, we feel, hey, I'm stuck behind the desk and I'm still siloed. I have my data foundation. Now, what do I do without it?

Yeah.

I think having structured collaborative workflows that engages finance and revenue operations with the business in a structured way is also critical for finance teams to have a broader impact, right? And those collaborative workflows means You know, from headcount planning to OPEX planning to revenue planning, right? How are you doing that collaboratively? How do you get these teams embedded in their rituals and operational cadence of the company on an ongoing basis so that they can unlock their value?

Yeah.

And from headcount approval to making sure, you know, we see that all the time in our customers, right? Like, you know, finance teams and revenue operations teams, they're identifying that the pipeline for account executives is slower than what you wanted, right? So the sales capacity, you know, so you start seeing that problem coming, right? It happens a lot the other way around, right? It's like, you know, maybe your pipeline generation functions are still lagging, but then you, you know, you're moving. Like, if you don't have the right coordination and the right workflows, it is oftentimes like we see a lot of companies still making those same mistakes or, yeah, we hired too many EEs and now we don't have the pipeline. Well, that's a very old problem for us to continue having, right? Like, you know, how do we, how do we, or the other way around? Like, now we have a lot of pipeline, but then we don't have enough sales capacity, which is arguably a better problem to have. But still, you're leaving money on the table that that pipeline is expensive to generate. And now you don't have enough capacity to take care, good care of the, you know, and allocate enough time and resources and love to each one of those conversations. So then How do you get finance and revenue operations really dialed in to those weekly conversations so you prevent that from happening and you run a tight operational shop that is optimized? Yeah, that matters, right?

Absolutely. Now, at the end of the day, we're allocating capital. You have capital, you have to deploy it, and it's like, where, how do you prioritize that and where's the best place to put it based on the data that you see versus, you know, being wasteful or inefficient and And not seeing, you know, like guessing versus being like very clear, like this is working, this is the best solution, this is where we have to put our money, where we need to double down, this is where we're no longer spending, where before it's like, hey, let's try this, let's try that. And it was maybe works, but now it's like, it was very clear. Let's— this is where we need to allocate to grow, right?

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, love it. This has been great, Julio. I think our listeners will get a lot of value. I'd love to shift gears here, move towards the rapid-fire questions. Are you ready for that?

Awesome. Yeah, ready for it. Yeah.

Let's do it. All right, Julio, what's one activity you enjoy outside of work and spreadsheets maybe that gets you into a flow state?

Yeah, I think oftentimes it's either surfing or martial arts or, you know, some of the training I do that, you know, these are sports that force you to be in the present for sure. You need to be 100% devoted, so it's easier to get into the flow. I mean, I try some other activities, but then maybe I don't get the flow.

Yeah, yeah, love it. Julio, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known, and if you could go back, you would tell, let's say, your 25-year-old self?

Yeah, so I think I'm telling actually my kids, and I mean, and they're 14, right? So definitely the younger me is, Maybe a couple of things. So one is pretty important to me. Learn to enjoy the process as soon as possible, right? Learn to enjoy delivering the inputs and don't get attached on the outcomes as soon as possible in your life. Because I oftentimes feel I have not learned it yet, and that's a shortcut for unhappiness. So, and I think it takes many years to really learn this for real, and I've been trying, but, you know, I'm working on it. So, uh, I wish I had started this journey of really focusing on what you control, getting about the inputs, really, you know, focusing on the love for the craft, the love for the game. And then maybe, you know, delaying a little bit that obsession and that focus and that attachment to the outcome and the results that we get in, which of course in SaaS is difficult. Like, you know, you're looking at the ARR numbers and all these metrics we talked about, and then you want to grow and deliver. And, you know, if you are venture-backed, then, you know, it's even worse and this and that. And then you're trapped into that. When really the only thing that matters is that you are really obsessed with the inputs and that you enjoy those inputs. And so that's something that I'm actually trying that, you know, my children are competitive in sports. And so I'm trying them to, you know, to foster that in them. And I think it's a great opportunity for them to learn it now rather than later. So I would add that one.

Love it. Yeah. So it's a lot of patience, right? And like enjoying the reps that you're putting in and just Day in, day out, put in the reps, so be patient and don't be impatient for the results of it.

Yeah.

One day you'll just wake up, you're like, wow, there's results. But yeah, you gotta go through it. Julio, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow? Meaning, you know, what keeps you up at night these days?

Hey, pushing the brand forward, right? I think we are growing very fast and then our brand recognition has grown tremendously, but like, it's of course not enough. And We we we need to be known by every finance team in the markets where we operate. We have customers in more than forty countries, and and we have global ambitions. And obviously, the U.S. is our not only the biggest market, but it's a very broad market. And and our brand recognition, you know, is is is today my my great obsession. I think hey, the product we you know the product is very strong. We have the we know we have the best product for our ICP, and we continue investing, and we are all increasing the moats. But I think until we are not top of mind for every freaking finance team and CFO out there, like we won't stop. So that is definitely my obsession today. Love it.

Who or what are some of the best 3 resources? These can be books, maybe mentors or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been most instrumental to your success over these last few years.

I read a lot. Well, I shouldn't say a lot. I read what I can or, you know, whatever. So But I would say, well, I'm a big fan of Stoicism. So I think there are some Stoicism books that are awesome, right? By Epictetus or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, that is critical for anybody, I think. But I think more business related, I would say that it's not that recent, but maybe, you know, maybe 5 years ago or something like that, Amp It Up by Frank Slothman. He's the former CEO of Snowflake and previously ServiceNow. So, so not a founder, but definitely took SaaS organizations from arguably oftentimes zero ARR to the billions, right? So like awesome successes. And Amp It Up is a great book of how he thinks of leadership and prioritization in a company. So I think this was It's a simple book, but I remember it being very influential for me. Maybe another book that I've promoted a lot as well is The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh. It's an older book, so definitely not recent, but this is all about how in sports, focusing on the inputs that matter. You know, is, you know, with obsession and precision, uh, will eventually yield results. And then to your point, Akeel, like you gotta be patient. I think Bill Walsh had to wait at least 3, 4 years of doing, doing with obsessive precision, uh, all the inputs that matter before he saw any results. But then when the results came, he, he, he won the Super Bowl like 3 times in a row. Like, you know, some, some crazy records back in the day, but hey, it took time and it took, a lot of discipline and the toll was very high for him and the team. So that's a great book as well.

Love it. Good recommendations. We'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, I think I've read, I can't remember if it was like the Golden State Warriors team, the coach who like, you know, really focused on, you know, just having them like tie their shoes, you know, very carefully and like precisely. It was like, you know, just focus on these little details. But yeah, it's like these little things that adds up and then eventually, yeah.

Totally. He had a different position, right? Because he was not only the coach, but also the general manager. So he wrote scripts for even, you know, the people picking up the phone as to how they would answer the phone to enhance the brand. How would players dress, right? Tucking in their shirts. Nobody's eating on the field, like the helmets, you drop them here and there. And this is big stars, right? This is Joe Montana and all these fellows, right? He wouldn't, he wouldn't give a damn, right? Like he would be very, um, very obsessive with every single detail, right? And running a very, like everything is written down, everybody, you know, very clear expectations. So almost running a business, right? Like, you know, in a way, probably you want to have it written down, managing very clear expectations with the team. This is precisely what is expected. You're expected to follow. And then, you know, these are the consequences if you don't do it and this and that. So.

Yeah.

And then with that, the results will come, but then don't waste your energy in craving for those results, right? Which is basically what he suggests in the book.

Yeah. Awesome. Julio, what does success mean to you today? Whether it's personally, business, financial, life, I guess there's no right answer.

Yeah, from a business perspective, Um, to me, it's clearly having that customer success that we have today, right? That customer praise and recognition. Um, I, I used to be like, my co-founder and I, both of us come from finance and food industry, right? Like we are both our persona. So we are the classic story of, um, you know, we were in the trenches bleeding in the head and now we're building the product we wish we had, right?

Mm-hmm.

So by, by nature, we are very customer obsessed because, because we, you know, we have this high sense of identification with them. So like recently one of our customers, like in a very large organization, actually close to 2,000 people, she was sharing that she rejected a position, a job offer, because, you know, they wouldn't implement Avacom in the short run. And then she saw no way back to the spreadsheet hell she used to live in. And, you know, she just thought like, hey, these guys are dinosaurs if they are not ready to implement, you know, top-notch technology. So stories like that is what really give me energy and get me going and what I identify my success with. I think more at the personal level, I'm a family guy. So, you know, spending time with my wife and kids is, you know, really all the success you need.

Yeah, absolutely. This has been great, Julio. I think our listeners will get a lot of value from what you've shared and hopefully they can make sure to check out Appicum. Is it appicum.com? We'll make sure to put the links in the show notes. But where's the best way that founders or listeners can get in touch with you and learn about you and your company?

Yeah, I'm very active in LinkedIn posting about all these topics. So Julio Martinez from Avakum, you type that and then please find me in LinkedIn. I love to have conversations and we are very active with the founder and finance community out there.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Julio. Appreciate you joining today.

Yeah, thank you so much, Aguil. It was awesome.

Cheers.

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