Achieving FP&A Excellence In Rapidly Expanding Enterprises with Richard Tame

What does great FP and A look like today?

From my perspective, I think I would say it's all about the people. Great FP&A comes from having great people. Are you hiring the right people? Have they got the right skill sets and how do they kind of blend together? And then once you've got a great team of people together, what I would say is how influential can you be in the business? It can vary depending on what the company needs. So I think a great FPA today to me is a combination of great people.

Meet Richard Taine, the CFO of Coas Institute. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Statistics from Newcastle University and recently left the position of CFO at Ogora, a NASDAQ listed self driving company. Being an analytical and insightful executive with 25 plus years of experience, Richard possesses an innate ability to lead fast growing businesses. If you could offer advice to our audience to be a better business partner, what would that be?

You have to make the relationship sort of not about you. You're there to partner with the business and invariably the business knows more about the business. Business you need to have the relationship such that you can influence them. You're serving them.

Abacum is the leading mid market FPA solution trusted by hundreds of companies to eliminate the spreadsheet struggle. Visit Abacum IO today and multiply the impact of your finance team. Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A tomorrow where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host Paul Barnhurst and I will be guiding you through the evolving landscape of fpa. Each week we will be joined by thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in FP&A, this show has something for everyone. Before we introduce this week's guest, I want to take a moment and give a special thanks to our title sponsor for this episode, Abacum, whose support makes this podcast possible. Now let's dive into the world of FP&A. I'm thrilled to welcome our guest on the show today, Richard. Welcome to the show.

Hi Paul. Thanks very much for having me. Very nice to be here.

Yeah, very excited to have you. So let me give a little bit of background about Richard Tame. Richard comes to us from Pittsburgh. He's currently working as a CFO for Coass Institute. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Statistics from Newcastle University and he was recently the CFO at Aurora from series B through IPO and beyond. So there's a question we like to start every episode with in your mind, what does great FP and A look like today?

That's a great. A great question. To start off there, you could probably spend the whole time talking about what great FPA looks like. But, you know, from my perspective, I think I would say it's all about the people, right? Like, great FPA comes from having great people. So are you hiring the right people? Have they got the right skill sets? And how do they kind of blend together? So that would be the first thing. And then once you've got a great team of people together, what I would say is, how influential can you be in the business? And that, again, it can vary depending on what the company needs. So I've been in companies whereby finance has a really strong seat at the table. And, you know, you can't blow your nose unless finance is holding the handkerchief. And then I've been in companies where by finance, you know, it's. It's seen as an inconvenience at best. Right? And then in both of those worlds, the company still needs FP&A, and a great FP&A team is able to use their skills, their experience, and their soft skills in particular to build those relationships, to be able to be influential, to get invited to the right meetings, to provide the right information that gets the business to value what they're doing. So I think a great FPA today, to me, is a combination of great people being at the right tables, being in the right decisions, and being people that the rest of the business looks to for guidance and believes that they're adding value.

Two things I liked about that answer there. One, you started with people, right? At the end of the day, it almost always comes back to people. But the second, I really liked how you distinguish between those companies that want FP and A@ the table and those that we've all been at, where it's like, okay, your back office, just leave me alone, approve my budget and let me make money and do my job.

Right.

You're just a nuisance almost, so to speak. And how do you influence in both those environments? Because that can be very different.

Yeah, for sure. So it's obviously a lot easier in the first environment where the company's culture or structure is being built, maybe because it had a strong finance leadership team in the past, or maybe it's in one of those industries whereby finance is very, very important. Take airlines, for example. So there was no, never any issues at British Airways or American Airlines in terms of need and finance involved in any decision that you wanted to make. Same with Amazon. But some of the sort of the later tech companies I've been at, like Aurora or Lyft, very, very different situation. Like they, they're focused on the product, obviously, they're focused on, on building, they're focused on the company going forward. And some of the leadership there hasn't had that corporate experience, they haven't had to deal with finance in the way that the airline industry has. So nothing exists. So you come in and you're taking over something where nothing exists. And people have been around a kitchen table or in a garage or in the first office and the company's succeeded, right? They've spent money, they've bought stuff, they've made progress without this finance infrastructure. So when you come in and say, well, you know, that's not really the way that the business world needs to be. We've taken VC money, for example. We now need to grow up, right? We need to professionalize, we need to grow up. That contrasts with the freedom that they had, you know, just, you know, maybe weeks earlier. And, and they don't like the friction. And it's easy for people in that position to say, well, look, you know, you just introduced in friction, you're going to put a budget on us, you're going to put an FP and a partner with us, like that's just friction, you're going to slow us down. So if you're aware of that and you've seen that before and again, you've got the good relationship building skills and you can pass that onto your team, then you can learn and the people on the other side can learn that you're partners. But a lot of it comes down to can you deliver on stuff that's useful for them. So if I go back to my British Airways days, I had a very interesting conversation. I got put in this new role which was supporting the Director of Commercial Planning. And I sat there in the meeting room with my manager and this Director of Commercial Planning who reported to the CEO British Airways. He was a very senior person and the first thing he said is like, I don't know why we've created this role. I don't know who this guy is, you know, I don't know how he's going to help us. So that's, I mean, they're in my mid-20s, right? This is not a. I'm very happy that I got this new role. This doesn't seem like A great start. Fast forward a year later, I left, I got married, I moved to the US But I had like a leave and do. And he came to it and like he was, he was sad to see me go. So what happened in that year? Well, what I did is, you know, we just kind of did the work behind the scenes, right. Like everything he asked us to do, I made sure that it was done really well. And it kind of added value and over time it just build that trust. And then you get invited and included to more meetings and more interesting decisions. So I think that's the best way to deal with it. In a world where perhaps finance isn't. It hasn't earned their seat at the table yet or isn't valued as much. It's like you provide that value and then make it so obvious that you're doing a good job and your team's doing a great job that you do get invited to these things, not complain about it, not sit back and cry, you know, not be upset, not storm into the CEO's office and demand to, you know, demand to be taken seriously. Like, you know, earn your way to that seat at the table is probably the best strategy.

Agree. I still remember someone who told me on an episode, he was in a meeting and there were a bunch of people and they were talking about how does finance get a seat at the table? And one of the guys pounded his fist on the table and said, we just demand it. And he was like, no, that's not how it works. Like, I have a totally different view here and his was similar to yours. That kind of always stuck with me. Right. We have to earn it. It's just like anything in life, you have to earn that trust. So next question I have for you is, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, give us a little more of your background and what you're doing today?

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I don't necessarily look it, but I'm old enough to have had 25 plus years of solid finance experience. Came from England originally, so did what all English people do, worked after university. You, you go to one of the big four firms. I did. Went to Deloitte. And you, you pass your chart accounts exams. I also did my chart tax exams, decided I didn't want to be a partner. So moved into airlines, went down to British Airways, got married, moved to the us, worked at American Airlines, and then later got into tech. So in tech, I had the privilege of working at Amazon AWS when it was much smaller, then went to Microsoft then spent four years at Facebook, then went to Lyft. And then the most recent sort of permanent role that I had was at Aurora where I joined them just after series B and in three and a half years did everything that you could do as a cfo really. We acquired Uber self driving business. So we added 900 people to our four or 500 people that we had at the time overnight in the middle of COVID which was super interesting from a cultural perspective as well as a business perspective. We then needed to raise a bunch of money. So we ultimately raised a billion dollars ourselves in a pipe, added that to what turned out to be $200 million in the trust and we went public November 2021, about 18 months after I joined on the NASDAQ via a SPAC. Then we were a public company which was very good experience, really enjoyed that. And then the last thing I did before I left Aurora was contributed to them raising another $800 million to kind of get the self driving dream towards fruition. So you know, in that, in that role, you know, I did everything from everything you need on finance, really build a team, both account and fpa, investor relations insurance, which was important in the self driving industry. Internal audit once we went public and then I also had the chance to, to build on my team. So I ended up looking after real estate and facilities, corporate it, corporate strategy, corporate security, which, you know, that often happens in companies whereby they're spending a lot of money on back office stuff and it's helpful if that rolls up to the CFO because they can keep an eye on all of that stuff. But I enjoyed taking responsibility for some of those more operating factors as well. So I kind of left Aurora and after that I took a nice break because guess what, when you do all of those things in three and a half years and going from series B to public and beyond, you probably forget to take vacation. Yeah, or you just don't take vacation. You know, you should, but you don't. So it was nice to have a little break and then you know, you have the chance to talk to a bunch of different people about what you might want to do next. So where can you best place your experience? And one of the things that I picked up along the way as well as some other smaller consulting opportunities was to kind of go on board and essentially a CFO of a company called Cois Institute, which is a data analysis pen matching company. And it's, it's not like one of these ones that wants to be a unicorn, that wants to get really, really big. It's a, you know, a small group of people, very, very good at what they do. Trying to kind of package something together to sort of perhaps sell rather than sort of do software as a service kind of license. And so super interesting to kind of help them from, from nothing to, to where, where they are today and hopefully where they want to go in the future. But yeah, we will see Always, always on the lookout, having conversations with people about what might come next on, on a permanent basis or something like that too.

Great. Thank you for sharing a little bit about your background. So next question I have for you is you spent nearly a decade working in the airline industry and then you transitioned to tech. Right. I think you had Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook or Meta and Lyft, four really big name tech companies. How did you make that switch from airlines to tech?

Yeah, no, it's a good one. I really liked airlines. You can see the Concorde wireframe above me there. And I had the chance to go on Concorde when I worked at British Airways, which was really, really fantastic. As good as, as good as you can imagine. So it was hard to leave the airline industry. And I'd been a British Airways, I'd been very successful at British Airways. I was getting promoted, getting a lot of opportunities, but I was kind of, you know, naive maybe, right? Especially that early in your career. So when I got married, I moved to the U.S. i did get a job at American Airlines and I just thought things would continue as they had done at British Airways. Very, very different company. Very, very different culture, Very, you know, very different state of the company. Right. This is still 2005, 2006 kind of time. So still suffering the effects of September 11th and very little opportunity. So that kind of took me out of the direct airline industry. I went to a subsidiary of American Airlines and I helped them be sold. It was about 80 people. It was an investment management company. We sold that to private equity. But I realized that I didn't really want to do that. It wasn't very complicated, didn't capture my attention well enough. So I spent 18 months looking after our son. After we had a baby, my wife went back to work. And in that time I assumed I'd end up back in the airline business. So I flew to the Middle east multiple times, talked to Qatar Airways, Eddie had Emirates, and really assumed that that's where we would end up next, because that sounded like it would be interesting, sounded like it'd be fun. And these airlines were certainly growing at the time. Nothing kind of worked out. It's an interesting place to have job interviews. I don't know if you're familiar with it yourself, but it's not necessarily straightforward. And things change very, very quickly. So I didn't ultimately get a job there. So I was in Texas doing some consulting and talking to my wife, figuring out what we want to do next. And we kind of always liked Seattle. So we're like, oh, well, Seattle's kind of cool. It's got Boeing, it's got Starbucks. Maybe we should kind of move up to Seattle. And as we were sort of thinking about that, we hadn't made the move, a job came up at Amazon. And the job at Amazon was working for cloudfront, which was their content delivery network. And what that content delivery network does is it, you know, makes people's websites work better. So it means Netflix works better. All websites work better. So the interesting thing about this is if you sort of take a step up, it looks very similar to an airline, right? You're putting stuff on the ground and there's a network that connects it, and you're essentially selling capacity on that network. So I think part of the ability to explain how an airline worked made sense with how the content delivery network works. And that allowed, you know, that. That allowed my entree into the. Into the wonderful world of tech. And then, of course, once you get into the world of tech, especially in a company like Amazon, you learn so much, and then you become valuable to other tech companies. So then it becomes, you know, I'm at Amazon, I don't want to do Amazon anymore. Microsoft's calling up, saying, hey, come to. Come to Microsoft. Then you're at Microsoft for a year, and then you get Facebook calling saying, come to Facebook. You're like, okay, cool. And then when I, you know, I'd done Facebook for four years and that I was able at that point to kind of look around and look at various different tech companies. Do you want to potentially join Google? Do you want to join a tiny startup? And ultimately, I sort of settled on Lyft. But I think that, you know, if I look back on it, the. The ability to sort of tell people the story about what I did, what I learned in the aviation business and how that applied to the cloud front. Cloud computing business was probably the thing that helped me get the job at Amazon. And then once you. Once you're successful in one of these companies, I think it becomes a lot easier to build your career in that space, especially when it was growing so fast as it was when I was lucky enough to be there.

I agree with you. Once you get into the first, you're kind of in the industry or in the boys club or whatever you want to call it, and it's much easier to move to the next tech company. And it sounds like for you was really showing that what you did was transferable, that, hey, this network I'm doing in airlines is very similar to the network I'm going to do here. It's just different technology, different industry, but many of the same principles.

Yeah. And I think that's kind of important for people to pay attention to as well. It's really easy. And there's a bad side to. Once you're in tech, you can stay in tech that people just think the same or they just kind of take what they did the last company and try to apply it to the next one. And I don't think that that's always successful. And certainly when I try to hire people, I would prefer to, you know, have a mix of people who have done tech before, but also maybe have come in from another industry to kind of make sure you don't get stuck in the, the brain drain or the sort of the echo chambers. So I think that ability to sort of abstract yourself out and say, you know, this is business. These are the, these are the transactions that are happening. This is how cash is flowing. And the ability to communicate that to people is very, very important. And, and I do, and I would go back to sort of my accounting experience, I think, sets you up very well for that. So in England, you do chart accountancy. You have to do audits of various different companies. And being able to pick. Pick up how companies work, how cash moves around through audits is really helpful for the rest of your career.

Yeah, I agree. I've had a lot of people tell me that the audit background in accounting was great for the rest of the career. Very few of them wanted to do it for their whole career, but they really appreciated that deep understanding of financial statements and really having that framework to help guide you as you move forward.

Yeah, yeah. And you understand that many companies are the same. I mean, what are you trying to do in a business? Right? You're trying to sell something for more than it costs you to make and make sure that you have enough cash to pay your bills before you get your revenue in. So, yep, accounting. Accounting for the win.

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Easy peasy. Yep.

If you could, if you could stay with those two things, you can generally stay in business. So pretty simple at the end of the day. So I have one more question on tech and then I'd love to get into Aurora and just learning more about how you built out a finance organization in particular FP&A and what it was like at those different stages and how you thought about it. So you know, you spent some time obviously tech, Amazon, Microsoft, you know, at a time when cloud was really kind of just starting to grow. And I know you did a little bit of cloud work kind of. What did you learn from that experience? What was it like watching, you know, that explode and see the growth in cloud?

Yeah, I mean it was, it was crazy. And it's just continued as well. Right. Like the size of AWS versus what it was when I was there, it's, you know, mind boggling. And now with AI, you know, what's going to happen in the future, maybe it's going to get even bigger. So it was fantastic to kind of be there and see how these things grow, especially in a company like Amazon that is very focused on that growth and growing AWS and you know, they were really the first company to do cloud in that way sensibly. So I think, you know, what did you learn from that part of it? You learned it relies heavily on the people that you have, both on the technology side and then also on the finance side. And you learn at Amazon like the value of data and the value of having principles that are actually stuck to. And you learn the way that they do people management. Now you can, you can like it or you can not like it, but you have to respect the fact that they have built a structure whereby they can bring people in and they can be successful. And then they, you know, they chew you up and then they spit you out, maybe. But the system's designed to perpetuate even when that happens. So I think you learn a whole lot of things like that, right, from how to manage it, how to manage a team, how to grow people, how to get the most work out of people, how to structure data and reporting in a way that it drives business outcomes. So you'd have, like a weekly metrics meeting. People might be familiar with, with Amazon's weekly metric meeting. So you had, like, decks that over time got bigger and bigger and bigger because they added more products and like every. Every kind of number and tiny font that you could imagine about your product, Cloudfront and everybody else's product. And you never knew, you never knew who the. Who the CEO would call on to answer. And there was an expectation that the leaders of the business understood what all of those numbers were. So if you have that as a structure, it drives all of the behavior behind because the people need to be able to deliver on this metrics package, need to be able to understand why their metrics are moving in the way that they're moving. And that sort of forces everything that happens underneath. You also get to learn what it looks like as a challenger. So Cloudfront was going up against some really big companies, Akamai being one of them, who'd been there for a really long time and were dominant. So how do you win a deal versus Akamai? Because Akamai has got so many customers, they could lowball it if they wanted to. And if you're a new company, how low are you prepared to go before it's not cost effective to even take that business? So just a bunch of things that get learned along the way. But maybe the biggest takeaway is, like, the actual output that you can get, the impact that you can have if you have a bunch of people who are working really hard and they have a clear mission about where they want to go. If you go to Microsoft, very, very different, right? It's kind of cool to go to Amazon and then go to Microsoft or maybe vice versa, because Microsoft's like a gigantic government bureaucracy to a certain extent, which doesn't do them a good service, probably, and isn't really maybe very nice. But that's sort of how they're structured, right? They're so big, they have so much money. They. Their jobs are very different, or they were when I was there, which I would consider them to be quite chunked down. So it's almost like, hey, Richard, here's 10 things that we need you to do, and that's it. Amazon's like, you know, you need to do these 100 things and then that's like the basics. And then go do everything else. And when we don't know what you need to do, but go figure it out, Microsoft's like, okay, you do these 10 things, pass it to somebody else. They're going to consolidate your 10 things with three other people's 10 things. And it kind of goes up the chain like that. Maybe it's different now, but that certainly was my experience there. And that was just an interest in learning in terms of how to manage something that big. And, you know, you look at the CFO of Microsoft and you're like, well, they've got the same number of hours in the day as you or I have, but they're managing this, like, gigantic company. How do they do that? And of course, it's what they choose to focus on, what they prioritize. So whilst I was there, there was a monthly capex review where relatively small dollar expenditures, especially in the context of Microsoft, they all had to be presented to the CFO on the infrastructure side for them to sign off on it. And you're like, why are you doing that? That makes no sense. And of course it sets the tone, right? It makes sure that you don't have waste in an area that would be very, very easy to overspend on. So those are probably the key lessons in those two experiences.

So thank you for that answer on kind of differences between Microsoft and Amazon and how they work especially. Fascinating to hear that. I really like the way you explain that and the different lessons you learn from each of them. You know, I know from there you went to some other companies, Facebook and Lyft, and then you got the opportunity to be a CFO at Aurora. And as you mentioned before you joined the company as a Series B, you were there to IPO and beyond. You did some big mergers, some fundraising. So maybe talk a little bit about that experience. And, and in particular, I would love to know how you scaled the FP and A team and you thought about it along the way as you grew this company from Series B to, to public.

Yeah, for sure. So I, you know, I was having a good time at Lyft, then I got approached by the CEO founder of Aurora, who said, come here. You know, We've just raised $630 million ish in, in series B and, you know, we need someone to come professionalize finance. So it's a really good opportunity to take the, you know, take the reins of a finance department. And these don't come along very often. So, you know, it's hard to say no when you get them. When I joined there was six people in finance, four people were doing accounting and then there was a couple of people who were doing FP&A. It was kind of cool strategic finance, but it wasn't very well established in the company. We talked about this a bit before as well, how, you know, they hadn't earned their seat at the table yet and they were doing, you know, some reporting, the bare minimum, I would say. But there certainly wasn't anything like a true sort of budget forecast holding people accountable and certainly not like the finance business partnership that I think is very important to a successful FP and a team. So you join, you recognize that this is an issue, you recognize this is something that you need to get better at. But you're in a tech company and an early stage tech company, so you're fighting for resources. Finance is not going to get flooded with headcount, especially that early in the company's life, and rightly so, I think. So part of the challenge is how do you build the team knowing that you can't just flood people into the situation. So how do you hire the right people? So the way that I approached it, and I would encourage people to think about this the same if they have the same problems and I would definitely do it again is. And it's much harder to do it like this. But you try to find people who can do both things. They can see the future, they can understand the strategic nature of where you're trying to get to and what good looks like at a larger scale. But today they're willing to kind of get their hands dirty. They're willing to do journal entries, they're willing to do reporting. They're not just sitting there trying to direct other people around. They're really involved in the details and like I said, hard to find these people because they're few and far between, but they're very, very valuable. And I was able to bring some people that I worked with in prior companies along and mix them in with, with brand new talent over time, which was, which was a very nice mix. So once you start getting the talent in place, you're then able to sort of set them off on, on the tasks of building those key relationships, become true finance business partners, and then also have people who are focused on the reporting. The consolidation is the chart of accounts. Right? Are we Working well enough with accounting to get the books closed on time so we can, you know, get reporting pumped out, whether it be to the board, whether it be to the CEO, myself, other executives. So that, that's kind of what we focused on in, in the early years. Getting the budget together, getting the forecast together, getting finance, business partnership relationships established.

That makes a lot of sense. I really like the part you said of trying to find somebody that can see the big picture but can also do the detailed work that needs to be done those day to day tasks because yeah, it's often hard to find someone who can be that leader but is also comfortable doing the day to day work. And once you have those people in place, then as you scale, you have those people to become leaders and can manage other people, I'm assuming, and help take that more prominent role as the company scales. And you need more and more of that strategic thinking and other things beyond just those kind of day to day tasks that are often urgent early on.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's understandable, right, like if you've made, you've climbed the ranks and you made it to a director level or above, then you know, in many companies like at that level you are like your, do you know the title tells you what the job is, it's like to direct. And at that point you might have less need to put your, your sort of hands on, on what's going on on a day to day basis. But I don't think that that applies to these quick sort of startup companies like, and, and, and where people come, sometimes people come from bigger companies into these smaller companies and I don't think that they understand the, the variations.

Yeah, makes sense. What was it like going public? What was that experience like? I know you said you did it via the spac, you had to rise a pipe, but maybe talk a little bit about that experience and what that was like.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's one of those ones where you can, you can kind of look back on it and say like, wow, like it's a lot of work. But as we went through it on a sort of day by day basis, it didn't seem like it was a lot of work, much more than a regular day. We did it via specs and we went very, very quickly, but we had built the company in a way that we would have expected to go public at some point. And some of the things that I'd seen at Lyft, for example, I joined Lyft the day after the IPO and It became clear that perhaps they hadn't built the infrastructure in the way that they could have to make life easier. And that was very, very messy. So when I went to Aurora, it's like, I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but let's build the infrastructure, right? You know, let's get the accounts audited, let's get netsuite in place, let's get Cooper in place, let's get the tools and the systems and the processes in place so that we're ready to go public, we're ready to get sold whatever that future might be. So I think that made our, our IPO process, the spec process, go smoothly because we'd done a lot of the groundwork in advance. It wasn't like someone told us, oh, we're going public and we're really starting from scratch. So instead of having to get their accounts audited by a Big four firm completely from scratch for the first time, they'd already been done to like, PC to AICPA standards. So it was just a case of uplifting them to PCAOB standards. You know, it's not, it's work, it's not easy necessarily, but it's certainly quicker and easier than starting from, from scratch. So I think we benefited from a lot of that prior work. And, you know, when you're doing it, some people in the finance team, maybe some people in the rest of the company might be, well, why are you spending your time and energy in some of this, like, back office infrastructure stuff? Because you don't know when it's going to pay off or if it's even going to pay off. But it certainly was valuable and it gave us the optionality. And I definitely recommend people, you know, not going over the top in terms of like, preparation before they need to. But certainly there's ways to make decisions and ways to build things whereby it does give you that optionality going forward. And then once you get into the process, we're not the first company that's done it. Like, there's a lot of companies that have gone public, a lot of people have helped people go public. So you can kind of leverage some of those experts who've done it before. And then it becomes like a project management issue, like giving the tasks that need to get done to the right people, holding them accountable for actually performing them when they need to perform them, and then sort of quarterbacking that and making sure that it all works. And if everybody does their part, then the little pieces of work and the big Pieces of work will add up and suddenly it's like, oh, you know, you stand at the NASDAQ and the bell's being rung. So it's one of these weird, weird things where when you're in it, it's just, do the next thing, do the next thing, do the next thing. And then when you take a step back, you're like, wow, that was a lot of work. We did that really, really well. And, you know, good on us for doing some of the dirty work way in advance of when we actually were called on to do some of this stuff.

Yeah. So it sounds like the experience at Lyft really helped prepare you for what may happen, whether it was a transaction of being sold or going public, knowing the importance of systems data. Those things that you have to have when you're public that you don't necessarily have to have when you're private.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And again, like, having people who been on both sides of the spectrum is helpful in the team as well, because they can kind of help guide with what's necessary today versus what's going to be necessary in the future and make sure that you have a seamless, a seamless transition and even some of the Facebook experience, you know, a very, very big company. But when you're in there and it's been public for a while, there's still things that need to be fixed and you get the sense that it would have been easier and it probably would have been better had different decisions being made earlier because now they have to get fixed. When you're a public company, when you're a bigger company, when you've got other things going on, and you know, you hear a lot of these, like, finance transformation projects, and they can often be sprawling messes with millions of dollars being spent, hundreds of people working on it. And you sit there and you say, could you have not done something different? Could you have not done this better? And I think those are kind of some of the lessons that you take to Aurora and say, okay, I'm in charge now. I get to set the tone and make some of these decisions. And fortunately, I think it worked out really well.

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Yeah, from that, from I guess from the IPO process. I think you know, once you've done it before, once you know, you, you'd be very capable of doing it again. But you have to have the right team on board so often, you know, and I'm sure this happens a lot right at the end of the day, we're all people and everything's a people problem. So having the right team who are prepared to work hard, who are capable, competent, that's what's going to really make the difference. So there's nothing that I would think on the go in public process that I really would do very much differently. Except perhaps we went through a spec specs happen much quicker than a traditional ipo. And you also don't know for sure how successful it's going to be, if it's going to be successful until the very last minute. So we deferred hiring a head of ir, head of investor relations until basically when we. Right when we went public. And I think they joined like either the week before or probably after we'd already gone public right around that time. I think in a subsequent process I would pay more attention to whether or not it was worthwhile getting the head of investor relations on board ahead of the IPO so that they could marinate more in the story that you were telling people as you went public and you could take advantage of their expertise in some of that pre IPO messaging as you go through the ipo. They would be very, very included in that and could help help with that messaging and that would probably make their job easier after you go public as well.

Appreciate that makes a lot of sense having the IR person there, particularly from the story standpoint, having some time to understand the business because they're going to get asked a lot of questions about the story and it's not something you learn overnight, right?

Investor relations is cool, right? Like it's, it is, it's storytelling and there's a financial aspect and then the company is also trying to tell a kind of a more commercial or more, you know, media focused story. And those two things really need to be in sync for it to be successful as a public company. And I think the more time that those two groups have to work together and align on what they're saying can only be helpful.

Agreed. So, going to shift gears here a little bit and just get your take on the autonomous driving industry. You spent some time in that obvious with Aurora. I'm sure Lyft was involved in that. You've been at some different companies, so where do you see that going? How close do you think we are for that to really get adoption at scale, where companies can really start rolling that out?

Yeah, it's a, you know, a super interesting question worthy of a podcast of its. Of its own, most likely.

Yeah, I was gonna say we could probably do an hour conversation on just that. I'm sure.

Sure. But I think the quick answer would be, you know, it's here now. Okay.

The.

The other week I was. I was in LA and I was flying back from LA and I got stranded in Phoenix, which is kind of interesting. So you're like, well, I'm stranded in Phoenix. What am I going to do? I go get some pizza. There's a good pizza place in Phoenix. But then I remembered, like, Waymo had their service. So I actually went on six or seven Waymo rides fully autonomous. The car picks you up by itself. There's no human in. In the vehicle. So it's here. And that was fantastic. And it was like, oh, wow. Like it's, you know, autonomy is really here, but that's only in, you know, a handful of cities. I think they, you know, recently expanded to more areas of California, but it's not, you know, mainstream widespread, but it's. It's sort of here now. And then I guess for them, it's more of an operational scaling problem versus as much is a technology problem. Then you see a bunch of companies who have had issues. Some of them aren't here anymore. You saw Cruise, who were probably the first people to say, oh, we really need to expand this business. Right. It's fine doing this development, but we do need to scale. And then they ran into problems. And then their highly ambitious scaling really got pulled back. So that's potentially a sign that scaling is difficult. And people in the industry and outside say Waymo have been doing this a long time. And look, they haven't really scaled very much. Why not? And I think the difficulty of scaling and what happened to Cruise when they tried to accelerate scaling, you know, probably proves that Waymo's approach is the right approach right now. Then when you move on to the truck inside, you know, Aurora went public. A couple of other companies went public. Waymo was heavily involved in trying to do a trucking product. A lot of those companies aren't around anymore. Right. They ran out of money or they had issues. So, you know, again, I've been in many Aurora trucks driving themselves under human supervision between, between Dallas and Houston. And the technology, you know, the technology is there, it's close, but it's really hard to tell when it's going to be ready and then when it's going to scale. So I don't think I could sensibly put a date on it. I think Aurora's strategy, what it said publicly was it would have the product commercially launched on its launch lane by the end of 2024, and then it would scale from there. But we will always vary and you can see it in our filings and all stuff. We were always very conservative in terms of what scale it looked like because we didn't believe that you could have 10,000 trucks on the road in the first year, like some of the competitors who are no longer around said. So, you know, I feel like autonomy has got so many benefits. People have made a lot of progress on it, but I wouldn't want to put a day on when it would be the dominant form of transportation. I would love it if it was, but I can't see it happening anytime soon.

So we're not going to get a prediction of January 1, 2030. Just kidding.

No, no predictions.

What you said makes a lot of sense. It sounds like the technology's there. Is the technology there to be mainstream yet? Probably some things to work out and then there's clearly a scaling issue that also needs to take place.

Yeah. And I, and I think that's right. And, and with a lot of these very high tech companies, the problem that people are focused on today primarily is the technological problem. And then when that technological problem gets solved, you'll move on to the operational scaling problem. And then that could be even harder to some extent than the technological problem. So it'll be interesting to sort of see what happens. And if you take look at what Aurora wanted to do, the strategy it was following, part of it is to again, abstract that away and say, we're not going to own the fleet, we're going to provide the software and we're essentially going to look like a SaaS business. We're going to have a driver as a service product, we're going to have very high margins, but somebody else is going to own the asset and they're going to operate the freight network. There's a Lot of people who have to be involved, and there's a lot of people who have to be able to scale for it to really hit the value, the valuations and the numbers of trucks driving around. So good luck to everyone involved in it. And I'm sure it's such a benefit to society on so many dimensions that it's going to happen. I'm sure. But when and how quickly I'll leave that for somebody else to speculate on.

All right, well, we'll check back in later on that crystal ball. So this next section we call is the rapid fire section. So I have five questions I'm going to ask you on each question, and you get no more than 15, 20 seconds. So we're looking kind of for quick action, quick answers, just your thoughts. Ready?

All right.

What is your least favorite thing about Excel?

The design.

Okay. What's your favorite thing about Excel?

That it works.

I love that. I may ask you about that design here in a minute, but we'll go to the next one. Are you currently using generative AI?

Yes.

How?

Playing around with IT research.

I like that. So, next question. What is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals need to master?

Financial modeling.

Okay, that's a good one. I like that. What is the number one soft skill that FP&A professionals need to master?

Well, it's tough communication and relationship building, and they're both related. And I guess it depends on your specific circumstances of the job that you're in, which one you need to to be better at.

Agreed. And then is there one of those answers you'd like to elaborate on? We'll give you an opportunity to elaborate on one.

I think. Yeah, I think the soft skills is super important. I think for FP&A professionals who want to get on in their careers, what's going to help them differentiate themselves versus their peers is less likely to be the technical skills and more likely to be those soft skills. Can you communicate your insights, your findings, the data, in a way that is relevant to people, especially people kind of higher up who aren't going to be as close to the numbers and honestly don't have the time to wade through all of the details? And can you build relationships so that people want to work with you, they want to include you, and they value your opinion. And I think sometimes you see people who are very, very technical, but they don't have those soft skills. And they can get frustrated because they don't understand why they're not getting some of the opportunities. And maybe they're not getting promoted well enough. So I think, you know, that focus, practice the soft skills is super, super important and probably will get increasingly so over time. And I think it's incumbent on managers and leaders to tell people this and help them and give them opportunities to develop these skills as well. Like, yes, you need a mix of technical people and you need a mix of good relationship people. But, you know, don't just let your technical stars be technical stars and sort of run into a roadblock in the career. You've got to make sure that they, they're either comfortable with that or if they're not, that you give them opportunities to develop the other skills that they're going to need.

Great point. And yeah, soft skills, communication, relationship building are huge. So thank you for elaborating on that one. So this next one is the get to know you section. It's where we get to know a little bit more about you personally. Get about 30 seconds here for each of these. We have four questions. So the first one is tell me about a favorite hobby or passion you have.

Well, I'm from England, and in England, I'm from Newcastle, which is in the Northeast, which is the richest football club in the world because they're owned. And this is for both a round ball for the American audience.

I was waiting for you to say something like that.

Got to make sure. And you know, so I used to have a season ticket. I used to go to all the matches. So I, you know, I still, I still really like soccer. I don't watch it as much as I once did, but I like it. And the MLS is fun. It's doing well. You can see on Apple tv. And it's, you know, the strips are better, as my son tells me, and the quality of plays better. But yeah, football is probably the most obvious hobby passion that I have.

Great. So we'll soccer for us Americans, football for the rest of the world. I get it. What is one book you would recommend to our audience that they read?

So that's, it's kind of tough. I'm not going to say a book. I, I tend to kind of read books and then I move on. And I don't say like, oh, this is the best book. Everybody should read it. But I do. Like, there's a magazine called Monocle Magazine which is, it focuses on like, travel and it has like a global outlook. And that's always, always worth a read for, you know, all the things that you could do if you had enough money and time to be able to do it, and it makes you think, do people actually get to do all these things on a day to day basis? So yeah, that's, that's a, that's something that I like to read.

Okay. I like it. What's your favorite travel destination? If you go one place in the world, where are you going?

If you put a gun to my head, I would say Billund in Denmark. We were there, you know, earlier this year. It's the home of Lego. So it's, it's got a nice Lego house museum, it's got Legolands there. I think we've been there like three times in the past year and it just, you know, it's a, there's nothing there except for lego. It's like almost like a company town, but it's, it's really kind of enjoyable. And yeah, we really like Denmark. So let's say Billund in Denmark.

All right, Denmark, I'd love to go there. That's on my list. I have family from there, so.

Oh, nice.

My father in law lived there for.

A couple of years, so no, we would move there. Yeah, I keep on trying to get a job at Lego, but I think it's one of those companies where if you have a job, you don't want to leave. So you know, there's not that many senior, senior roles open up at Lego. But if anybody's watching and help out, you know where I am.

There you go. Richard's putting his plug out there. If you're at Lego and you have a role open for him, reach out. So if you could have dinner with one person in the world alive today, who are you going to have dinner with?

So I'm going to say the politically correct answer of my wife because I really like having dinner with my wife if she was busy or, you know, she does a lot of stuff. So if she was, if doing something on her own, I think Jose Mourinho, who is the, you know, the special one, self proclaimed special one, one of the, you know, the greatest football managers in the world. Super interesting guy. Very, very successful everywhere he's been. And I think he, he kind of understands that football's. Yeah, it's a game, it's a game about the football, but it's also a game about managing people. And I think he would be fascinating to, to have dinner with.

Good job on the politically correct answer. If your wife listens to this, you'll have passed.

Yeah, and it's true as well. Which is even better, right?

Like yes, of course. So just have two questions left the first is if you could offer advice to our audience to be a better business partner. If you could offer them one piece of advice to be a better business partner, what would that be?

Yeah, I think that I would say you have to make the relationship sort of not about you. Right. Like you're there to partner with the business and invariably the business knows more about the business. So you need to have the relationship such that you can influence them, but you understand, like that you're serving them. I think would be the best advice I would give to people. Yeah, not focus on yourself, not focus what you're necessarily trying to get out of the interactions and more about how you're going to help them be more successful in whatever they're trying to do, whether it's build their infrastructure, whether it's sell more stuff. I think that's the best advice.

Got it. So focus on the needs of your business, not on your needs.

Yeah.

And then last question. If somebody wants to learn more about you or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, sure. LinkedIn's probably good. All right, I'm on LinkedIn, like all of us professionals. That's a good place to find me. I do some of these podcasts when people reach out to me. But yeah, LinkedIn's probably the best way to find me at the moment. Take it from there.

All right, well, thank you, Richard. Really enjoyed having you on the show. Appreciate you carving out some time for us and really excited for the audience to get to listen to this. So thanks for joining us.

No, thank you very much indeed. It's been awesome. Really appreciate you having me on and look forward to doing it again sometime. Maybe. Good luck.

All right, sounds good. Thanks.

Bye. Bye.

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