Preparing a Company for IPO: The Treasurer’s Critical Role

This week's show, we hear from Steph Lane. I originally reached out to Steph because I saw that she was talking about in a LinkedIn post about how treasurers can be key to a successful IPO. I wondered whether she'd be on the podcast where she can answer some of these questions. I'll tell you what, here's some insights from Steph first of all, before we kick off the show.

Yeah, it was a lot of phone calls and texts and do we pull the trigger or not? I think the biggest thing on my mind was, if I pull the trigger and move this money, I'm going to be part of the reason a bank failed because we had a significant amount of cash sitting with the bank and the bank was an incredible partner to us. Technology first, we had a great relationship and there's nothing like breaking up on a single day when there's noise in the market, when there's a run on the bank. And so for me, relationships are super extremely important. And so a lot of it was the debate internally with myself of, I'm really going to disappoint these. Yeah.

So how did you make sure they didn't burn through as treasurer? Just say, no, I'm not signing that, or what?

Yeah. So we had our debt agreements in place to draw on if we needed them. But post-IPO, as when you go public, the goal is to bring in a lot of liquidity. And so what we were able to do, we had actually promised the street and some of our investors that we would be free cash flow positive after the first year. And so I led an initiative across the entire company to to bring awareness to cash flow and working capital within the company, no matter what your role was in the company. And we called it Yo Free Cash Flow just to make something catchy. Every month I would get up on stage and talk about how cash comes into the company, how cash goes out of the company, how you and your role can influence how cash is used in the company. If you're a sales rep, getting a prepayment brings cash in the door quicker than if it's a monthly payments, for example, AP, T&E, all those little things that you as an employee can influence. Even though you think you can't when you're not in a finance role. So it became very catchy. You would see people walking around the hall saying, yo, free cash flow, if they saw somebody wasting money or traveling extravagantly and stuff. And ultimately we made it free cash flow positive after that year and we made something fun out of it.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast, where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let's get on with the show. In this week's show, delighted to be joined by Stephanie Lane. Stephanie is a finance leader and she's been through 3 IPO journeys, prepared companies for public company rigor while operating effectively in private company environments right the way across. But As always with the show, I'm going to let Stephanie chat us through. Steph, if you would take us back to the beginning. How do you discover finance or treasury? I'll shut up and I'll let you do the talking. Over to you.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. I'm really excited to be here. This is going to be fun. So treasury career. Yeah, I have to say it started with somebody believing in me. I actually had no idea what treasury was and— excuse me— the treasurer at the company I was working for came over to me one day. I was an accounting administrator and said, hey, why don't you come work in Treasury? I think you can do this. And I had no idea what it was. And so that was early, early on. I joined as a junior Treasury analyst of an energy company, and that started my career in Treasury. So 25 years later, it was one guy who came over to me and said, hey, I think you can do Treasury. From there, I did Treasury at an energy company, Calpine, for 5 years, experienced the Enron debacle, bankruptcy, and all the fun that comes along with working in oil and gas. After that, I joined PayPal and that started my tech career. Spent 8 years at PayPal, eBay, and from there joined multiple tech companies, Box, TripActions, which is now Navon, and ultimately landed at Klaviyo.

And then if we go back to those early days when you were— you joined PayPal back in the early 2000s, if you like. What was it like then versus now? And it's evolved a heck of a lot. What was it like in the treasury area in particular?

Yeah, that's a great question because it used to be eBay and PayPal were one company, right? And so at the time I was working in the PayPal division for the first 5 years and it was a really awesome role because treasury actually gets to manage the customer's cash. And so my role was to manage, we'll put a B behind it, billions of dollars of PayPal money that sits in the infrastructure within PayPal and making sure the currencies and the money is where it needs to be. When a customer needs to use their PayPal funds. And so it was really interesting to see the network behind a consumer-facing product like PayPal and be able to manage the cash. At the time, we actually were able to invest the cash in the US and earn a yield on customer cash, which was really cool. And so that was also really interesting to make money on customer money and then ultimately make sure it was accessible when the customer— to use it. Yeah.

So it's a bit like insurance in a way where you have customer client funds and things. How do they keep the segregation without going into too much confidential detail? But how do they keep the separation?

Yeah. So there's actually separate bank accounts. So across the globe, there's PayPal corporate accounts and then there's PayPal, what you call FBO for the benefit of others accounts. So you keep the cash completely separate. There is a process that used to be monthly called upstream. And what you would do is you would take the balances of the customer cash and any profit or any excess funds, you would upstream it to the corporate. So almost like an intercompany and you would make sure you had a 1-to-1 liability-to-asset ratio on the PayPal funds, the customer funds, and everything else, quote unquote, was extra. And that would move over to corporate to run the business.

And you're talking about treasury operations over hundreds of bank accounts and different currencies. Yes. Is early on in your career And relatively early technology-wise. So how did you manage all that and avoid mistakes and things like that?

Yeah, it very manual actually, but believe it or not, back then we launched SAP as a treasury workstation, but we did a lot of wires, a lot of intercompany ensuring that the money, like I said, was in the right bank account at the right time in the right currency. So when you're looking at 30 currencies across the globe and somebody in London needs to withdraw their funds. You have to make sure you have enough sterling in the account to cover it. And so it was a lot of intercompany. We didn't do a lot of the corporate AP payment type of work, but a lot of intercompany funding to make sure the cash was where it needed to be at the right time.

Yeah. And then you did the Finance Leadership Program there. What was that like at the time and how did that develop you as a treasury person?

Yeah, so I was 5— by then 10 years into my treasury career, 5 at the energy company and 5 at PayPal, and I got the itch to do something different. My team was rocking and rolling. We were doing great. And I went to our treasurer at the time and said, I think I'm going to leave the company. I think I want to do something different. I want to be challenged. And she actually encouraged me to apply for the FLDP, Finance Leadership Development Program. And I got selected. There was 6 of us each year. It was a 2-year program across 4 different 6-month assignments, including an opportunity to go live in Berlin, Germany, and do work at the PayPal office in Germany for 6 months. With my husband and 2 boys. So that was really cool. But I really wanted to see if Treasury was my home, and I wanted to try accounting and FP&A and ended up landing a job at the end of that in M&A integration, which was very different than Treasury, but working on the integration of major acquisitions like Venmo and Braintree at the time. And so, yeah, so that gave me a little bit of exposure. I ended up leaving PayPal to go do a Treasury job at Box. But it was nice to kind of see different functions in finance.

And how was it different then? You went, as you said, you went— what was Box? I mean, people know PayPal, eBay, but who are Box? I know them, you know them, but can you explain who they were at the time? Sorry, probably as well.

Yeah, a private company, a cloud content management. So many people know Dropbox, which is more of a consumer-facing product. Box is more of a business-facing product. And so we were a private company at the time, took the company IPO after a couple of years. And that was a really interesting role because they were burning cash. All of the headlines at the time were, Box is going to go public, but they're burning too much cash. And so to be in a treasury role at that time was really interesting because yes, we were fueling the business with cash at the time.

So how did you make sure they didn't burn through as treasurer? Did you say, no, I'm not signing that, or what?

Yeah, no. So we had our debt agreements in place to draw on if we needed them. But post-IPO, as when you go public, the goal is to bring in a lot of liquidity. And so what we were able to do, we had actually promised the street and some of our investors that we would be free cash flow positive after the first year. And so I led an initiative across the entire company to, to bring awareness to cash flow and working capital within the company, no matter what your role was in the company. And we called it Yo Free Cash Flow, just to make something catchy. Every month I would get up on stage and talk about how cash comes into the company, how cash goes out of the company, how you and your role can influence how cash is used in the company. If you're a sales rep, getting a prepayment brings cash in the door quicker than if it's a monthly payments, for example, AP, T&E, all those little things that you as an employee can influence, even though you think you can't when you're not in a finance role. So it became very catchy. You would see people walking around the hall saying, yo, free cash flow, if they saw somebody wasting money or traveling extravagantly and stuff. And ultimately we made it free cash flow positive after that year. And we made something fun out of it.

And how do you do that, particularly influencing people that aren't in treasury, as you say, in AP or AR or something like that? And they're going, well, yeah, but is that really my job? And you're going, right, it's everyone's job. How do you get hearts and minds?

It wasn't always easy, right? Again, it was hard to figure out how they can influence it. And we didn't want to cut costs. We didn't want to cut headcount or hit expense. We wanted to just be smarter about our cash. And so we tried to do fun things like we had a baller of the month, right? Somebody who thought very creatively about how we're where we were spending money and came up with an idea that we were able to implement. As silly as— this is very petty, but as silly as having 5 different granola bars in the snack room. It's like, do we need 5 different granola bars? Maybe we only need 1 or 2. And just coming up with ideas where there might be a little bit of leakage in any, any role across the company. And it worked. We had a big celebration and I was surprised how many people got excited about it. And we made a little game out of it. So it was, you wanted to be involved in it. You wanted to win a cool piece of swag that said Yo Free Cash Flow on it or something. It was fun.

I want to jump in here. You've just heard Steph talking about Yo Free Cash Flow. And this is where I always get the same reaction from my podcast listeners. That's brilliant. Steph did it. But how would I actually do that? Because it's one thing to understand cash. It's another to make it visible to the business and to get non-finance teams to care about it as much as you do. So we created a short guide off the back of this very episode. It helps you assess where you are today. It gives you a couple of simple, practical steps you can take this week to start influencing cash across the business, not just reporting it. It's quick, practical, and completely free. You'll find it in the show notes on today's episode in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on our website. Check out the link, have a look. Let's get on with the show. And you'd gone from private company to IPO and everything else. What was that like for you in terms of being a treasurer and internally, externally? How did that influence you?

It's obviously a big shift, most, most felt across the whole culture of the company, but as treasury, the rigor obviously steps up a notch. You're now influenced by the external market. You have to hit that free cash flow number that you've committed to. So everything becomes tighter, a little bit more structured. SOX comes into play where you have to all of a sudden manage controls and all of your banking portal access and things like that. So, so I would just say the rigor amps up a little bit in addition to the culture feeling a little bit more grown up while you're trying to maintain that, that startup mentality. It's really challenging on the culture. I think in the 3 IPOs I've done, it's very difficult to stay lean and scrappy be like a startup once you become public, right? But yeah, I would just say the rigor.

So how do you keep the growth mindset when it's— you're not now the big bad wolf and saying, give us your cash, come on, put the granola bars away, you know? How do you then influence it as a treasurer?

I think, I think the simple things. So two of those companies were founder-led, and the founders still being involved, having those monthly all-hands where teams get together and they share the as transparently as possible the key metrics of the business still with the employees. And you talk a lot about it just being a moment in time, right? Nothing really should change for most of the folks working for the company. It's just we're listed on the stock exchange and we have a little bit more rigor, but otherwise continue to do your job and continue to be excited about it. Don't get wrapped up in what the stock is doing because we all know the market is uncontrollable. So So I would just say trying to keep the fun and the transparency as high as you can, given the public company rigor you need to put in place.

And what came next after Box and things? And what was the next couple of moves?

After Box, one of the, one of the Yo Free Cashflow initiatives was implementing a new travel tool, TripActions, which is now Navon. And so I worked really closely as an early adopter of their platform to launch TripActions at Box. In doing so, I got really close to the CEO and the head of customer success. We even went to Japan and launched travel for TripActions in Japan. And it ultimately led to a role working as the chief of staff to the CEO at TripActions at the time at Navant. And again, took the opportunity because it took me out of finance for a little bit to see a full company, how a full company operates across go-to-market, R&D, and G&A. And so I got to be his right-hand person for a year until COVID. COVID hit, and as, as global travel came to a screeching halt—

global travel, zero.

So unfortunately, they had to lay off a third of the company, and I was one of those people that was in that nice-to-have, a partner to the CEO role, and ended up finding myself for the first time in my career laid off. Gratefully, I was able to find a role at Unity next, and I led the treasury team at Unity and brought them through IPO and spent just a short time there before the opportunity at Klaviyo popped up.

So who are Klaviyo and explain them to me and the audience?

Yeah. So Klaviyo is basically a marketing platform that allows you as a merchant to send messaging to your customers via SMS or email. So it's a cloud, it's a marketing automation tool that allows you to target your particular customers with different incentives and programs to increase the purchasing power of your customers.

And when and which customers, who are the customers of Klaviyo and stuff? So would a person on the street have heard of them or would they not know them or not?

Probably not. They're a Boston-based company and I'm sitting in California. So it was really cool to work for an East Coast company. And however, I did realize that a lot of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley had no idea what Klaviyo was. So it was an interesting role to have in a company that wasn't so well known like a PayPal in the Bay Area.

How did you go out? Because as you say, there are some household names, PayPal, eBay, we knew we use it, but yeah, this is, it's got a great story, but talk us through it.

Yeah. So I think probably the closest competitor that many people do know is Mailchimp. And the other way I really explained it is Black Friday, Cyber Monday, when your inbox just blows up with all these special promotions for the holiday, upcoming holidays. Klaviyo is a platform that enables that for retailers. Right. So once you kind of explain it that way, and then a lot of people will say, oh, you're the one that sends me those pesky SMSes. And yes, you have to remind them that today's age, you have to opt in and opt out of those. So if those ever bug you, reply with stop and they turn off. But so once you kind of bring it down to something that they can relate to, it becomes—

they understand that they want to be part of it and stuff.

Yes.

So you've been in the position of treasurer in these three 3 IPOs.

Yeah.

What do you think has been underestimated perhaps on the personal side, professional side, in the lead up to the IPO, do the IPO, you're through it, the sort of 3 parts of that journey each time and you've done it 3 times over. I mean, yeah, and you're still doing it. So it's like, well, calm down.

Yeah.

You know, what do you think people need to prep for or if someone's listening, oh goodness, I'm about to do my first one. You've done 3. I mean, it's a bit rude.

Yeah.

Come on.

Yeah, it's a bit rude. I love that.

Ah, just do it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I think you don't know you need a treasurer right away. It's not the first hire, let's be honest, right? You're gonna hire a VP of finance or somebody, but hiring treasury early on is similar to hiring like internal audit before you go public. Like the sooner you can get somebody in the door that is looking at working capital, obviously internal audit's looking at SOX controls, but looking at working capital. The perfect example I would say is the Silicon Valley Bank crash. Because I was early into treasury at Klaviyo, I was able to create accounts already to diversify if anything happened. And we had places to put our US cash on that day. Many peers in my network were calling me that day saying, I don't know what to do. All of my money is with Silicon Valley Bank. I have a bank account in Poland. Should I, should I convert all of my dollars to Polish zloty and send it to Poland? And I'm like, you don't have another US bank?

Yeah.

And so I think little things like that, optimizing interest, risk management, corporate insurance, you have to double down on when you IPO around all of your policies as a public company, equity planning. All of a sudden your RSUs are vested, right? And you have this massive tax obligation on IPO date. So there's a lot of cash-related things that happen that you don't think about in the journey. And the sooner you can bring in somebody with a treasury mindset, maybe not even a treasurer, but somebody with a treasury mindset that can help set that infrastructure, the more success you'll have when that cash comes in the door on the IPO day.

And you, it's a great example of Silicon Valley Bank and all went, you know, up there. So how do you decide what should be centralized versus remaining local? How do you split that? What's your checklist, if you like? Because again, as you say, you're on the phone going, you, don't have another one, what do people need to do?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of keep it simple, stupid, the KISS model, right? Don't overcomplex things if you don't have to. So don't open a bunch of international bank accounts. It will tie you down and it will slow you down for the future. So I would say keep it simple. Always have 2 US banks at least where you can move money to and from. Internationally, we use a global bank because we found the efficiencies is higher if you have it in a single bank that you could move money more easily. It's get reporting. And so internationally, we, we opted to use a global bank and not diversify internationally. But my motto is to keep it simple. Think about how often you're going to have to move money. Where's AP coming from? Where's payroll coming from? Where are the customers paying into? And just make sure you have coverage that you can manage the risk that banks are not too big to fail. We've learned a couple of times now. And so just always making sure you have a backup.

Now I loved it. You're, when I looked through some of your background and resume and things like that, I often try and tell people what they've achieved. It's not about what you do and it's not your job description.

Yeah.

That's your job description. That's not your resume and stuff. Now on yours, it was great. You've talked about leading the capital preservation, 46% of which is great and it's impressive. Plus also, can you explain to us during that, how about cash within those and walk us through what those first few hours were like from Yeah, it's like everything going pop.

Yeah, it was a lot of phone calls and texts. And do we pull the trigger or not? I think the biggest thing on my mind was if I pull the trigger and move this money, I'm going to be part of the reason a bank failed because we had a significant amount of cash sitting with the bank and the bank was an incredible partner to us. Technology first, we had a great relationship and there's nothing like breaking up on a single day when there's noise in the market, when there's a run on the bank. And so for me, relationships are super extremely important. And so a lot of it was the debate internally with myself of, I'm really going to disappoint these fantastic partners that I've worked with that have helped us get to where we are. We're a couple months before IPO. I'm going to have to pull all my money and be part of what could potentially bring them down. And so that, and consulted with my board. I had a couple board members that I reached out to and said, here's what I'm thinking of doing. I mean, it was early enough in the day. Are you on board with this? The CFO as well, like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. I wanna leave this much money as a cushion because guess what? Payroll's going out today. It's a Friday. And so there were some certain things that I said, is this too much exposure leaving teens of millions of dollars versus hundreds of millions of dollars? And got a couple buy-ins and then we executed. And yeah, that was, the rest is history. Yeah, it was intense. I mean, our money didn't move until at the Fed window close, and it sat in the queue with everybody else's money for the entire day. So it was a very stressful day, but yeah, and then by the— oh, by the weekend things had calmed and there was a plan and all of that. So it ended up being the right decision, but all in all, okay for most companies by that Monday.

And what did that experience teach you or change about how you maybe look going forward about diversification or Because you take away things, this is as much what you take away as what you learn at the time as well.

Yeah. So we didn't actually even have it in our investment policy. A lot of times you don't put a lot of working capital related metrics and controls in there. And so we added that we couldn't keep more than I think at the time, like 50% of our cash in a single institution. So we updated the investment policy to include some controls around where cash sits. Excuse me. And then on the investment side, no more than 20% in a single bank, if you decided to put funds in banking institutions. So we updated the investment policy. I've always been a big fan of having a couple options for US funds. And so continuing to diversify, I think I learned the biggest thing I learned that day is to trust your gut. I had saw a former treasurer make it through 2008, the fiasco of 2008, when Bear Stearns went down and we had a ton of money. And I watched the treasurer make a decision, execute and go and not look back and was able to get money out of the institution on that day. And so from that experience, I knew I had to go with my gut and move the money and I could always put it back on Monday if things were okay, but I just got to get it out and safe.

I originally connected because you did some articles and stuff like that and I just loved it sort of thing where you were talking about why you need a great treasurer on that path to IPO, but also about you're very much into your teams and things like that. What do you think is key about a team leader or without over-engineering it sort of thing?

I think building a bond with your team is important. I'm human first and I'm scared in this AI-centric environment we're moving into. I think your people are extremely important and I think creating a bond with them and a scratch my back, I'll scratch your back mentality where you cover for each other. So for example, at Klaviyo, I lead the money team. We called it the money team, which was pay— payroll, sales, commissions, and treasury. And we came up with the money team because it was one way to unite a payroll person to a treasury person and a commissions person to a payroll person, because ultimately anything that touched money and the cash that went out the door had to funnel through our team. So I think it's super important, especially in a Zoom culture too, to create relationships with your people and keep it human as much as possible. In this tech-forward world we're living in, because at the end of the day, you spend more time with your colleagues than your family on some days. Right. And so making it fun when it can be fun. We used to say, I put the fun in finance because you got to make it fun. It is stressful. It is hard, but building a team of people that care deeply for one another is probably the most important thing. And learning from each other. You never, I never thought a treasury person would be super interested in how payroll was processed, right? Or a payroll person fully understanding what it takes to calculate commissions and what happens upstream by the time that payroll file gets to them. So again, cross-training, building the team environment where you got my back, I got your back. I want to learn what you do. I want to respect your career and what you do and your function, I think is super important.

And how do you build that in, as you say, a Zoom first world sort of thing and virtual stuff? But that's a lot harder, isn't it?

It is. And I believe in, in-person connections, right? Mm-hmm. So at Klaviyo, I, like I said, I live in the Bay Area and Boston is a, not a short flight away. And so depending on your budget, obviously it's best to meet in person at least once a year. I think that's where you really take the layers off. You kick back, you have a drink, you laugh, you do something fun. We always had a monthly meeting where somebody would bring a, an icebreaker and just try to get to know each other on the human level. Mm-hmm. We did a succulent making class, some silly things that we, all the things we used to do during COVID we we try to continue to do just to bring a little bit of joy and then teaching. So when some of our monthly meetings, we would have somebody come and share something they've built in AI for adding efficiencies in a very manual process and then just sharing and building awareness of what the other people around them on Zoom are doing.

Yeah. And you've got these— so you've got a number of the team members, treasury professionals in particular, They want the broader finance roles. You've been through those roles, if you like. What gaps do you see most often, or where do you think people are their head down in their treasury roles? Where are they missing stuff or what should they be thinking about?

Yeah, I think you need to understand what's going on around you in finance. A few examples that come to mind are AP. What is our AP processes? Are they doing AP runs every day? Are they doing them on a Wednesday? Are they doing them twice a month? What makes sense for the cash side of things? Do you need to fund those accounts daily or do you need to have the money there on a particular day? So building strong partnerships with your AP team, for example, your AR team, how are we billing? How are we collecting? How much out there is out there uncollectible? Is there a big customer that we're expecting a payment from that's going to shift my cash flow dramatically, right? How are credit cards processed if you bill and collect in credit cards? Working with those folks on how money— basically thinking end to end on how money comes in and out is super critical. And then on the FP&A side, I would say building your free cash flow forecast is often a very close partnership with FP&A, how they're budgeting, what they're planning on spending, what headcount is doing, which impacts payroll expenses. And so tying a lot of that budgeting process to your free cash flow forecast will give you a tighter, closer forecast.

Yeah. And with yourself, you're, you're in the market at the moment. We're looking for different things and stuff. So what do you see as the biggest issues, the biggest challenges for treasurers coming down the line at the moment when you're perhaps talking to people and you're saying, well, have you thought about this? And they're like, oh, right. I haven't thought about that. No. What do you see as the biggest things coming on? Obviously technology is on front of everyone's mind, but that's been around for years. Yeah. What are you thinking?

I think that's kind of cool. Some of the technology that will make even just forecasting and investing and reporting and some of those things much simpler. I am interested in stablecoin and some of those tech, that technology. It wasn't super applicable in my prior role. So I don't know how that's going to evolve. I'm curious about that. I haven't dug deep into crypto or any of that as a corporate treasurer. I kept it very, again, safe and secure. And so I think there's a lot of cool tech— not technologies, but cool ideas, I guess I'll say, out there that are going to change the way treasury works. It's interesting. We move millions of dollars, but we never see those millions of dollars. So it's always been a digital experience for us, right? People go, oh my gosh, you wired that much money in your— it's monopoly money. It's not real. It's— I don't ever see the money. Right. Yeah. So how much is stablecoin and those things where it's a communication channel between banks or between vendors and it, it gonna change things will be, I think, really interesting. And the role of banks in the future.

And you've had this amazing career so far and all these different things. What advice would you give to you looking back as you reflect on each of the steps and things? What would you say?

I think I've become a Jill of many trades, which can be seen as very positive, but doesn't fit a particular box. And so maybe CFO, maybe CFO someday, because I think a lot of the great CFOs have had treasury experience or understand what's going on in the cash side of the business, not just the P&L. But I often wonder if I should have stuck it out in treasury longer and learned the deep capital markets side of things. I've personally never put an FX hedging program in place. We've analyzed it at all the SaaS companies I've been at, but it's never made sense to put that program in place and all of the, the work and the reporting and the, the idea that you still have exposure, it's just a different type of exposure explained. So every time I've analyzed that, it hasn't been something the company has wanted to do. So I think I would have loved the opportunity to go deeper in capital markets and foreign exchange. Gratefully working for companies that are on the IPO mission, you get to work on the cash side of things and on the investment side of things. So you get a lot of great experience managing cash, but not a ton of experience managing debts and foreign exchange hedging programs. And so I love that I'm a Jill of many trades because I can appreciate all of my partners in finance, but it doesn't pigeon— it doesn't pigeonhole me into a treasurer role. But it does make me wonder, did I go too broad in the quest to continue to learn? Have I gone too broad across finance?

And when you're, you and I go to conferences of various things, which are the ones that you're really attracted to? You've talked about all this new stuff coming through. Are there any other areas you think that people need to be focusing on? This is for treasury professionals who are listening today. And then I've got a follow-up question, but I only ask one question. I've got better at this. What do you think people need to be, which ones should they be sitting in that room and learning?

I hate to be cliché. Today, but I say anything AI-focused, any opportunity to sit down and develop with other finance people. There are several banks and new AI companies that are offering these live coding sessions where you sit down and you build, you could build a dashboard, a reporting dashboard, which has been a huge ask from treasurers in a matter of hours on some of these new AI platforms. It's just not inherent in our skill set, but from some of the ones I've attended, even in an hour or two sitting with some of these very technical folks, we can vibe code and we can create this stuff. So I think that those are the most interesting at this time. And then anything that will introduce you to some of these AI companies that will benefit your team's efficiency in the long run would be where I would spend my time.

And that's what— so the more junior guys should be trying to do that over the next 2 to 3, what, 12 months? 12 to 1 year to 3 years, that's where they need to be focusing on. What other things should— any other advice that they should be thinking about?

I think relationships are incredibly important. And so a lot of your treasury role will be with external partners and not internal partners. I've talked a lot about internal finance, but your bankers are there to help you. And financial institutions, yes, they have their sales pitch, they need to also make money, but they're also a huge resource for, hey, we're thinking about doing a stock buyback, how would you structure this? What has so-and-so company done? What have you seen before in your clients? And so I think your ability to expose some vulnerabilities and build these relationships with external partners is also very important as early on in your career as possible because they'll follow you, they'll help you. Yeah, they'll be there for you if you need them, as well as you become an incredible resource for them, giving them exposure to what's happening in the inner workings of a business. So I think being able to build relationships externally is also super important.

Okay. So we're going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes and we sort of wrap up every week with the advice for the more junior folks, mid-level, senior guys. What are your takeaways for each of those levels?

Yeah. So entry-level, congratulations on finding treasury. It's one of the best kept secrets in finance. Keep it up. It's a really cool job. I think, I think cash is the most important metric of a company. I think accountants can make revenue and expenses look differently due to rules where cash is cash. And so congratulations on finding Treasury as a career. I think you're off to an awesome start. Mid-level, I think I would say when technology isn't going to solve the problem, fight for that headcount. Treasury is always a very lean machine team and very— I find it very difficult to get resources to build the Treasury team. So make sure you're asking for what you need so that you don't put the company at risk. Unknown risks, a lot of times you get overlooked in treasury. And so I would say if you're mid-level and you need that help, help, get it, ask for it, fight for it, because you can't do it alone in most of these companies. And they'll— you can be a silent sufferer in treasury and just run everything as efficiently as possible until something breaks. So I would say that to the mid-level. To the upper levels, I would say continue to partner with your peers that have influence over how the company spends money. Go-to-market was a really interesting partnership for me. I had never spent a lot of time with go-to-marketing, but they're driving all the sales, all the revenue, all the cash, all the contracts. Like, getting to know those folks is extremely— excuse me— extremely important because they're driving how the money comes into the company. And so don't just keep your focus as a, as an exec leader to G&A and in the CFO function. Make sure you understand and get yourself invited to those meetings across R&D, even engineering. What are they doing? What are they building? Can your team build something similar? And especially go-to-market on how are we pitching the product to the customers? What is our contracting arrangement? So to the senior-most people, I would say make sure treasury is known across the company and partner with as many people outside of finance as you can.

Steph, amazing. I'm going to leave it on there because you've got great final words. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thanks, Mike.

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