E4: The Unexpected Qualities of Great CFOs with Public.com’s Sruthi Lanka

On episode four of Run The Numbers, Sruthi Lanka (CFO of Public.com) joins host CJ Gustafson to discuss the unexpected qualities of great CFOs, how to manage your team well and achieve great retention, how to build relationships across company stakeholders, and more. If you’re looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/metrics 

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Episode Preview: CJ’s learnings from Sruthi

(03:40) SEGMENT: CJ's opening “Off the Books” monologue - listener mailbag: where to allocate engineers who maintain infrastructure

(05:17) Start of interview: Sruthi on how a CFO and CEO partnership should look like

(09:59) How do you define important metrics for your team?

(13:03) Data ownership at Public.com

(14:36) Sponsor: Netsuite

(16:00) Sruthi's favorite frameworks for decision-making

(20:57) What separates a great CFO from a good CFO?

(24:25) Tactics on how to be more embedded in different departments within your company

(29:24) The biggest differences between a traditional SaaS CFO and CFO at Public.com

(31:33) On retention

(34:45) How to deal with situations where you are wrong

(38:15) Tactics on modeling

(39:20) On mentorship, management, giving advice

(45:31) Balancing being a mother with being CFO

(47:52) Long-ass lightning round: an example of when Sruthi screwed up on the job, Public.com’s finance software stack, the craziest thing someone has tried to expense

X / TWITTER:

@sruthilanka (Sruthi)

@cjgustafson222 (CJ)

@TurpentineMedia (Turpentine)

SPONSORS:

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