Building a Well-Rounded Treasury Career with Robert Lau

What you should always be doing is always looking for external ways to kind of build up your experience and that, you know, that could be joining a Treasury association or that could be going out and doing independent study in an area of focus that you're really interested in. I really thought the CFA was a very key springboard for me because bankers, when you work with bankers, the key with being successful is getting through all the complexities that they kind of present and trying to understand exactly economically what is this going to do for us and how do you look at it. And I think with my training, it was helpful for me because I was able to interpret these things pretty carefully and pretty easily, able to communicate or formulate how to look at it, how to present it. How do you evaluate the different opportunities? Like when we did the tender offer at Agilent, was the tender offer the right thing to do or was it big structured, accelerate share repurchase program, et cetera. So I think you're right. It's like to be a treasurer of a company, you have to build the various components that cover Treasury. The key really is to find an environment where you're given the opportunity to try. When I was at HP Agilent, I only did fx, I only did capital markets. When I was at Yahoo, I only did investments and cash management. But going to a smaller company, I can actually do everything. And believe it or not, software companies are much less complex. So we were sub $1 billion of revenue, whereas the other companies that worked with were heading closer to 10 billion of annual revenue. So the scope was totally different. But it was a good career move for me because I was able to use a lot of the experience I had at large complex companies. Understand how do you approach things? When I was talking about the investment philosophy, I was able to use those learnings and really start thinking about, well, how do I manage investments of 300 million versus 4 billion? How do I manage an ethics program that may be 100 million a year versus a billion? It was really, it was very interesting because I think what helped me succeed at Informatica was all of those experiences at large complex companies helped me figure out how do I structure the organization, what areas do I really need to focus on? The one area that I would encourage people to look for, as you're interviewing, for new opportunities is if you're working for a large organization, do they have a program where they're moving people around every couple years to develop people, to give people different experiences that they need to have in treasury to really be kind of that all around treasury professional. And so I did it through multiple companies. I'm sure there are companies out there who have more structure programs, and those are all obviously really good opportunities to go into. But as I look back, I think again, the key is building that technical expertise, that background, that's a key. But then also having the opportunity to kind of structure an organization, build an organization. That's another key in terms of growing your career. SA.