How Keith Masuda of Modern Treasury is spending during the downturn

In the final episode of season two of the Recession-Proof podcast, Alex and Kimia discuss the most impactful insights from previous episodes with Sam Mallikarjunan of OneScreen.ai, Geoffrey Woo of Anti Fund Investment Fund, Dan Chen of Deltec, Anup Singh of Illumio, Keith Masuda of Modern Treasury, Liz Christo of Stage 2 Capital, Kelly Battles of DataStax, and Ken Suchoski of Autonomous Research.

Each of them share advice on how to overcome the challenges of the current state of the market, prioritize investments, and grow your business through the end of 2022 and the start of 2023.

Here are a few highlights, check out the full episode for the rest… 

Why Sam Mallikarjunan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OneScreen.ai emphasizes the importance of connecting the finance and marketing functions

“I will say there is an adversarial relationship between finance and basically every other part of the company. But to treat the finance team and the finance leadership as if it's an adversarial relationship or to not actually proactively reach out to them, to me, that therefore has always been like, you're yelling at the person who's sitting in the top of the ship's sails being like, Hey, there's an iceberg up ahead, or, Hey, there's land over there that's just like filled with random gold. Why are we ignoring it? And we're not creating clear lines of communication in alignment with a partner whose objectives are fundamentally aligned with our own.”

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund explains why attention is more valuable than capital

“We all have 24 hours in a day times 8 billion people. That is the max limit of attention that exists in this world. You can print money, do weird financial engineering with money, but literally, the max attention cap of humanity is some 8 billion times 24 hours a day. Anything that can wield attention, I think, is going to be increasingly powerful over time.”

How Kelly Battles, a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, and Genesys thinks you can become a more well-rounded finance professional by…

“Get on a board if you can, even as a full-time executive, because it makes you a better executive. When you're a full-time exec, especially in an intense startup or private company scaling company, you can get tunnel vision. And I think having another company and seeing from a bird's eye view what they're going through gives you perspective, context, and learnings, and you start building your pattern recognition.”

Learn more about our season two guests:

• Sam Mallikarjunan on LinkedIn
• Geoffrey Woo on LinkedIn
• Dan Chen on LinkedIn
• Anup Singh on LinkedIn
• Keith Masuda on LinkedIn
• Liz Christo on LinkedIn
• Kelly Battles on LinkedIn
• Ken Suchoski on LinkedIn

Check out the full transcript here.

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player. Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Ken Suchoski joins Alex Song on Recession-Proof this week to discuss the impact of inflation, which types of businesses will thrive in this environment and what your management team should be doing now.

Ken is the Equity Research Analyst at Autonomous Research, where he collaborates with companies like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Global Payments, Bill.com, FleetCor, WEX, nCino, and Western Union. Before Autonomous Research, Ken served as a Research Analyst for First Eagle Investments and Janney Montgomery Scott.

Ken and Alex discuss:

• The role of an equity research analyst
• Short-term and long-term macro trends
• What makes an effective management team
• Which businesses are better positioned to survive and thrive in an inflationary environment

Key takeaways

• Regarding the macro environment, it's essential to separate what we're seeing in terms of current indicators versus what we might see in the future. In the near term, there are excess savings, wage growth remains robust, debt servicing for consumers remains in check, and credit volume growth continues to outpace debit volume growth. Overall, we are experiencing normalization of the shifts we saw during COVID-19. On the other hand, banks disagree over their economic outlooks, investors are concerned about the so-called “white-collar recession”, and that we may see a macro slow down over the long term.

  “In this time of uncertainty, businesses need to put more of their spending under scrutiny. If you're facing inflationary pressures and your costs are going up, you need to be able to manage that.”
  
  

• Overall, inflation is bad for every company in the long run. But in the near term, it might bring benefits and opportunities for specific industries and businesses. For example, if you're in the business of processing payments, inflation might help you because just the ticket sizes get larger. These companies usually generate revenue as a percentage of the transaction value. So as the average transaction size increases due to inflation, if you're charging two percent per transaction, your revenues will increase as that transaction size increases. As a rule, companies with greater pricing power are better positioned to survive and thrive in an inflationary environment.

  “Our view on inflation is that it's not good for any business. But payment companies are generally better positioned to face inflationary periods, at least when compared to companies that are outside of the financial services sector.”
  
  

• When looking at a business from the investor's perspective, you want a management team that will do the right thing in allocating the generated cash flow to high-return projects or maybe acquisitions if that makes sense. You also want a management team that you can trust and that foster an attractive culture. Regarding what a management team should be doing right now: cash preservation and expense management.

  “So you have a business that is producing cash flow. The management team is responsible for being stewards of allocating that cash flow and the earnings that the business generates.”
  
  

Learn more about Ken:

• Ken on LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• Ramp’s 2022 Q2 Benchmarks Spending Report
• The Outsiders by William Thorndike

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Kelly Battles joins Alex Song on Recession-Proof this week to discuss how exceptional finance leaders help their executive team make the best decisions to increase the likelihood of growth during a recession. 

Kelly is currently a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, Genesys, Alpha Medical, Clari, and Plex. Kelly has a thirty-plus-year career in finance through various leadership roles at companies like Quora, Bracket Computing, Wikimedia Foundation, Host Analytics, IronPort Systems, and HP.

Kelly and Alex discuss:

• Quora's mission of sharing and growing the world's knowledge base
• What all economic downturns have in common
• Why all full time executives should seek board positions
• How great finance leaders help their executive teams make the best decision
• The role of a CFO in setting the right company culture during economic growth and downturn

Key takeaways

• When choosing a new company to join, Kelly focuses on culture, market opportunity, product-market fit, and her role in that company. Quora nailed all of these, so she decided to accept the role of a CFO. What sets Quora apart from social media apps is its noble mission to share and grow the world's knowledge base through quality content that aims to help people. Quora is also an example of what makes an online platform succeed through clear policies and processes that match its mission, a great product, community, and team.

  “I was watching what was happening in some social media companies and thinking there's so much power for good in these companies, and there are so many missteps. And I believe in a hundred years when people look back at the internet, they will see some bad actors. History is not gonna treat some of these companies well. And I think Quora and Wikipedia are two examples of where history will treat them very well as examples of the power of the internet for good.”
  
  

• Whether discussing the current recession, the great financial crisis of 2008, or the Dot-com bubble, Kelly recognizes a pattern that she calls the “overreaction to the fear-greed cycle”. Good time manifests the greed cycle, companies being encouraged to spend unreasonably because of growth, and in bad times, the fear cycle, where it's all about hyper-analysis of every spending decision. The best companies are disciplined during the greed cycles and then emerge with strength from the fear cycle.

  “Companies that have been raising so much money in the last couple of years because it was so plentiful and didn't spend it will be able to come out with strong balance sheets in an environment where it's gonna be easier to hire, cheaper to take share, and easier to buy assets than companies that didn't raise the money or raised it and spent it.”
  
  

• The best CFOs are true business partners to the executive team and bring a synthesized proliferation of data to help their business partners make better decisions. The finance function exists to help executives overcome obstacles and challenges during economic struggles. CFO’s must learn from these challenges, take those lessons, and apply them to the future. Finance also has a significant role in setting the right spending culture to ensure the company is disciplined during the good times and conservative during hard times.

  “As a CFO, joining the CEO in the future and understanding the past, understanding what you can learn from it, understanding current performance, what it means for the future, what you need to do differently in the future, or what you need to double down on or stop doing, to me, that is how you do this right.”
  
  

Learn more about Kelly:

• Kelly on LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• Quora
• Wikipedia
• Ramp

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Stage 2 Capital Partner Liz Christo joins Kimia Hamidi on Recession-Proof this week to share why she sees the economic downturn as an opportunity for businesses to optimize their go-to-market strategy. Liz has 14 years experience in sales, and has recently  transitioned to angel investor, partner, and GTM advisor for multiple start-ups such as Gradient Works, QuotaPath, Gappify, Writer, and Vergo.

Liz and Kimia discuss:

• The effect downturns can have on your GTM team
• Shifting from founder-led sales to a your first sales hire
• How to create a comp plan that drives behavioral change

Key takeaways

• Liz shares that during a recession, companies need to resort back to business fundamentals to identify leading indicators, shore up their existing customer base and ensure they have clarity on potential customer churn.

  “There are the very basics of building a business, and it starts with actually identifying what your leading indicators are. Most track revenue and lagging indicators like results and output of the activity. We try to gear everybody to think a bit earlier than that. So rather than waiting to see if your largest customer renews 12 months from now, what things can we track now to understand whether that client is happy, engaging with your product, and activated in the way you expect?”
  
  

• In times of economic prosperity, experimentation is a must. In times of recession, companies should be more thoughtful: you can now longer spend unreasonably. To experiment, you must have a clear hypothesis, timeline and budget, and test one idea at a time.

“I always think people should be experimenting. But it's a question and trade-off of resources. So the companies stop thinking about growth at all costs. And so you're doing the work first to understand what basis you have? What are these proven routes to revenue? How can we exploit them? And then any incremental time, resources, energy, and money you have can be pointed at experimentation”

• In terms of sales incentives, compensation plans drive the behavior change in teams and, respectively, the dynamic of your business. They should be simple, easy to understand, and designed according to the behavior you want to drive. 

“The great thing about salespeople is they do what you pay them to do. The terrible thing about salespeople is they do what you pay them to do. And so, if you put it in that context, your compensation plan can drive a lot of behavioral change”

• Shifting your company from founder-led sales to building up a sales team is a matter of developing people and operations. On the people side, your first hire should be a jack of all things revenue and an avid student. On the operational side, start by documenting what is working and constantly adapt your sales playbook as you learn.

“When I think about the first sales hire, the first go-to-market hire, it's a mix of things. But we often look for somebody who can play a little bit of everything. They need to be able to do some prospecting, they need to be able to close new business, do a little bit of the CS work, they might do a little bit of that early process building the very early stuff. It needs to be somebody who's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades”

Learn more about Liz:

• Liz Christo on LinkedIn
• Stage 2 Capital Website

Episode resources:

• Science of Scaling
• Who by Geoff Smart
• How to Hire A-Players by Eric Herrenkohl
• Quota Path

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Modern Treasury’s VP of Finance Keith Masuda joins Alex Song on Recession-Proof this week to share how to build a financial team of a high growth SaaS business, during a downturn. Keith has extensive experience from 18 years in finance positions at companies such as Sqreen, Segment, Palo Alto Networks, and Host Analytics.

They discuss:

• How Modern Treasury is prioritizing investment
• The different types of A players
• Building a first-class financial team

Key takeaways

• Empowering, not just the finance department, but the whole business to understand financial metrics, and therefore “what is going on in the business” is a worthwhile investment.

“There's some level of education you need to do with the employee base so that they know what is going on in the business. For example, every single month or once a month, I present the financial metrics. But I try to dive into a topic or two about the metrics”

• SaaS is a complex industry in an ever changing world. Layer a recession on top of this and new investments must be made under increased scrutiny to match the future uncertainty.

“What we are thinking about now is making sure we are hiring carefully. And we are still investing, but in the right ways, closing down investments when they don't make sense anymore and investing in new areas where we think there's some promise. We are more cognizant of the spending and hiring now that we're in the mid to late 2022”

• Keith shares that as a software company, typically you will experience less margin pressure, and therefore can discount. But with hardware, you have to ensure healthy gross margins.

“We are more careful about headcount and where we are spending our cash. We are also trying to look a little bit more at efficiency metrics and make sure that whatever investments we make will return either on improving the product, maintaining the product, or driving revenue growth”

• When building a best-in-class finance team, start by evaluating what support you need as a company and who you can bring to fill those roles. Look for the best possible people for your stage of company: A players are different for different types and stages of a businesses.

“I try to look for the best possible people for the company. Everybody is always trying to find the best people or the A players. No one wants to hire a C player. And there are many A players who are perfect for an early stage and some who are perfect for a large public company. So I try to find A players who are good for my company and my stage”

Learn more about Keith:

• Keith on Linkedin
• Modern Treasury Website

For more episodes of Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or add our RSS feed to your favorite podcast player!

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Illumio’s CFO Anup Singh chats with Alex Song on the podcast this week about  strategies for finance leaders to manage their business efficiently during market volatility, IPOs, and M&As.

His insights come from the leadership positions he’s held at a wide range of companies, including Anaplan, Nimble Storage, Clearwell Systems, Warranty Corporation of America, and others. Notably, Anup led the $410m sale of Clearwell Systems to Symantec and the $1.4bn sale of Nimble Storage to HP.

Key takeaways

• Ensure you have liquidity: three to four years of cash on your balance sheet. With this buffer, there should be an opportunity to innovate on and expand your business during challenging times.

  “Depending on the depth and duration of that recession, it impacts everybody because you will hear that deals take longer to close, or maybe they're slipping from one quarter to another. The customers that we have obviously are very cautious regarding the money they have to spend, the budgets, and so forth. And so we are very careful in terms of the metrics”
  
  

• Regardless of the economic environment, a CFO should support the business, control the financial model, automate processes, and build a scalable business infrastructure and a world-class team.

• Before an IPO, have scalable processes inside your business, a great set of advisors to help you on the journey, and clean audits and financials. Do your homework, learn about the process, hire people with IPO experience, and understand how to forecast effectively.

“The IPO is a transaction. It is just a milestone along the journey of growing and building a business, which is the most important thing. I guess employees and executives should consider that, sure, you go to bed the night before the IPO, but as a private company, you wake up the next day, and you become a public company, and you're trading your stock every day. But that's when the hard work really starts”

• Facilitating an M&A process starts by managing best-in-class financial operations and ensuring that your audits build confidence for the acquirer and reduce risk from the process. Emphasize your competitive advantage and leverage this during negotiations.

“You should never try to build and manage a company for sale. Ideally, your company should be acquired. It shouldn't be sold. And there's a distinctive difference between these two. You can smoothen that process by managing best-in-class operations, just having a clean house and clean shop, and ensuring that your audits are clean too”

Learn more about Anup:

• Anup Singh on LinkedIn
• Illumio’s LinkedIn
• Illumio’s Website

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Dan was an analyst at both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs during the dot-com crash where he provided M&A and corporate finance advisory for banks and fintech startups. Then during the GFC, Dan was a VP at Morgan Stanley where, amongst other activities, he analyzed principal investment opportunities, including asset pools backed by consumer credit and auto loans.

Dan and Alex discuss:

• How recessions create uncertainty
• What finance leaders should consistently hold their focus on
• The role of technology in business transformation
• How to lead up to and through a successful IPO

Learn more about Dan and Deltec:

• Dan on Linkedin
• Deltec’s Website

We've condensed some of the major themes from the conversation and summarized them below.

What Dan learned from navigating through three financial crises

“The central element of a crisis or recession is a moment where uncertainty creates a wide dispersion between what people view as the state of the present and the likely states of the future. And they all distill back to a challenge to market-held or core beliefs on how things work”

On how financial leaders should manage market cycles

“Good times build bad habits and bad times build good character. When things are great, it's hard to think about the practices, the processes, the things that aren't maybe geared the way they should because they get papered over by the fact that everything seems fine. When things go bad, you sometimes go the opposite way. Things get thrown out because you're just so concerned about survival. So I think that, maybe, it's a little bit of stoic philosophy, but the goal is to be somewhere between both extremes at all times”

Dan’s thoughts on speed vs agility

“When things are great, it's about speed. When things are challenging or you're experiencing something new, it's all about agility. I think uncertainty, downturns force you to be agile. Things like remote work, hybrid work, or return to the office require a lot of agility for managers and staff as well”

Check out the full transcript here.

For more episodes of Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or add our RSS feed to your favorite podcast player!

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

What do WhatsApp, Groupon and Uber have in common?

They all started during the 08/09 recession.

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund, believes a great business doesn’t need perfect economic conditions to launch: “it all starts with a core problem that you solve for your ideal customer.” 

In this episode of Recession-Proof, Geoffrey shares his fundamental startup principles that every entrepreneur should learn and how business owners can create an appealing narrative that will grab people's attention.

In this episode, Geoffrey and Kimia discuss:

• Startup fundamentals
• How your business should prepare for a recession
• Why your business needs an appealing narrative
• How Geoffrey de-risks new business ventures

Focusing on business essentials

An early-stage business operator should not bother with macro. It's impossible to track all market changes and come up with precise scenarios for each outcome. Better to focus on building a product people want and getting your first customers. Also, make sure you offer a product or service that is better and or cheaper than anyone else in the market.

“Just focus on making something people want and just focus on the fundamentals”

Create your narrative

Your product might be a game-changer. But if you don’t choose the right market and tell a story that will appeal to the emotions of your ideal customer, you won’t grow. Find the core narrative of your business that you want to share with the world and use tools to help you amplify and disseminate that message in the most efficient way possible.

“The core of marketing is just a scale of positive word of mouth”

Grabbing attention

All companies need two basic resources to grow: capital and attention. You could theoretically raise an endless amount of capital. But attention is scarce. The max attention cap of humanity is around 8 billion people, 24 hours a day. So anything that can wield attention is increasingly powerful.

“You want your customers to pull products from you versus you pushing products towards them”

For more episodes of Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or add our RSS feed to your favorite podcast player!

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Sam Mallikarjunan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OneScreen.ai, believes that in 2022, it is more important than ever for startups to be prudent about their marketing spend if they want to grow over the long term. 

In this episode of Recession-Proof, Sam shares the power of out-of-home advertising, what you should do with your marketing budget as interest rates rise, and why every business should develop cross-functional alignment between finance, marketing, sales, and operations.

In this episode, Sam and Alex discuss:

• The surprising cost efficiency of OOH
• Marketing with higher interest rates and CAC
• How the current fundraising environment should impact your marketing budget

Out-of-home advertising opportunities

 OneScreen.ai focuses on out-of-home advertising, a type of advertising that focuses on visual advertising seen outside of the home, such as on billboards, benches, bus shelters, etc. Though it's more complex than digital marketing, Sam notes that out-of-home has enormous potential and is extremely popular among new crypto, FinTech, and direct-to-consumer companies.

“There's this assumption that anything that's not internet-based eventually is going to die or it's not worth spending time on. In reality, the real world is significantly more complicated”.

Adapting your marketing budget

Market dynamics are changing, inflation has resulted in soaring costs, and many companies are struggling. To tackle the challenge of operating in uncertain market conditions, it’s necessary to adapt to a new normal. 

“The best weather to fight in is terrible weather”.

Adapting to higher interest rates

The pandemic resulted in many companies recalibrating their finances, through measures such as cost-cutting and reforecasting. But Sam believes many of these changes could have been prevented. 

“Many people used 2020 as an excuse to forget that we are professionals and have financial operational discipline, and should know what we're doing”.

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player!

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Season 1 of our podcast here at Ramp was filled with conversations, controversial opinions, and practical takeaways from leading finance professionals.

We learnt a lot and judging by the feedback we received,  you did too.

And now, we’re back!

But with a twist…

Season 2 is called Recession-Proof. 

In each episode, Alex, VP of Finance & Capital Markets and Kimia, Head of Savings at Ramp host thought-provoking conversations with finance leaders, executives, and investors on the current state of the market and what this means for your business through 2022 and beyond.

Onto our first episode...

The macro trends of 2022 are putting tremendous pressure on businesses and more specifically, financial leaders. Higher inflation, lower investment, and budget cuts suggest that we may be heading toward a recession if we are not within one already.

Instead of raising capital and driving growth, many are starting to rethink their strategy to increase operational efficiency and expense reduction. Recession-Proof co-hosts Kimia Hamidi, Head of Savings at Ramp and Alex Song, VP of Finance & Capital Markets, join us today to discuss how to save cash, control expenses, and still focus on growth, despite economic headwinds.

In this episode, Kimia and Alex discuss:

• 2022 macro dynamics
• What makes a great business
• When should you bring on a procurement manager
• SaaS procurement negotiation strategies

Learn more about Alex & Kimia:

• Alex on LinkedIn
• Alex on Twitter 
• Kimia on LinkedIn
• Kimia on Twitter

Instructions on how to rate and review Recession-Proof on Apple Podcasts can be found here.