The first thing to know about Nic Malianni is that he loves to hustle. Since the age of 12, he’s always had a job: construction, at a golf course, and, most recently, as Head of Accounting at the connected workplace, productivity software company Notion. While in college at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, he found himself without a job and felt the itch. So, Nic saw a Craigslist ad from the Donati Family Vineyard and got in touch. “I was 20 years old and you can’t really work at a winery when you’re not 21, but I just said, ‘Hey, I'll do your gardening. I’ll rake your bocce ball court. Whatever you need me to do, I'm happy to get my hands dirty,” he remembers. “So that got me in the door.”

For the next three-and-a-half years, Nic became an indispensable cog at the winery. He took naturally to sales and to systems, getting the young winery’s offerings into local restaurants and grocery stores and managing sales reporting. “Their first vintage was 2003 and I started there when their 2005 was being released,” he says. “So, I consider it my first startup.” He is still a proud wine club member today.

Vineyards to Spreadsheets

Nic graduated with a Business Admin degree with a focus in Accounting, Finance, and Economics and dove into accounting. Many accountants focus on debits and credits and closing the books, but he’s always started with the needs of the business and viewed the problems with an accounting and systems lens. “It’s always been top of mind to help businesses run more efficiently through scalable systems and processes,” he says. He’s held onto the one feeling that’s proved a motor for his work life: “Curiosity.”

“How do we do this? How can we do it better? How can we make it simpler to help us provide the best service for our customers or to alleviate some sort of pain that my team is feeling?” he says. “In general, finance systems have been pretty underserved for a long time. There's always the hottest new engineering tool or the hottest new marketing or sales tool. Finally, we’re seeing more and more new finance tools like Neo.Tax. I'm really excited about what I'm seeing in the market.”

Nic sharpened his accounting skills at Grant Thornton for four years after college, working on the audit side. “I personally chose Grant Thornton, because I wanted to have as many clients as possible to get a broad set of experiences,” he says. He worked with 50 companies, some private and some public, and got a rare look at their practices, their challenges, and what worked and what did not. He tapped the knowledge of colleagues who had extensive experience in audit but also on the technical side. “It’s a very research-driven profession,” he says. “It gives you a window into the why behind the decisions of how a company makes their accounting decisions.”

But after those four years, when Nic felt he understood the why, he began itching to answer another question: “The missing piece at an auditing firm is the how,” he explains. “Or put another way: the actual execution.”

From Why to How

So, Nic joined Intercom, the AI-empowered customer service solution, in 2016 as the Accounting Manager, eventually moving up to the role of Assistant Controller by the time he left in 2021. “When I joined Intercom, I felt ready to exercise my entrepreneurial/building mindset,” he says. “‘How can I help build this thing and translate that why and to the actual execution behind it?’ That really excited me and it was challenging. Very, very challenging.”

The biggest challenge he faced which he hadn’t been expecting was how essential it was to be a champion for your accounting advice. On the audit side, he’d existed in a place where there were clear rules; it was sometimes confusing why best practices weren’t always followed. But on the other side, he realized that a skilled accountant or controller needed to have the ear of a decision-maker to guarantee that the resources were made available. 

“You have to be able to compellingly explain the why in order to get the resources to build the best systems,” he says. “If you don't have resources, then you need to figure out a bandage to account for this in a way that is going to be acceptable until you can build that long-term solution.” Nic realized that was why so many startups struggled with their systems and books early on. “It often falls on the grit of the accounting and finance function to actually go in and just get it done,” he explains.

At Intercom, he used the technical skills he gathered in his years at Grant Thornton and then expanded them by becoming an operator. Eventually, as the company grew, he moved into a management role. “I felt like, ‘Hey, I want to get back to building mode,’” Nic remembers. “That's what attracted me to Notion. And, you know, I've been building ever since.”

The Notion Love Is Real

Nic wanted to get back to “building mode” but he also wanted to join a company that people loved. “If you look at Notion’s YouTube following, Twitter following, and all the socials, it’s insane how much people love the product,” he says. “The affection for a business software product is just absolutely phenomenal. And it's really rare.” 

So, he started talking to people at Notion and realized that their engineers and executives were at the top of their game. “I wanted to be a part of it,” he says. When Nic arrived at Notion in 2021, the company was still just 65-70 employees. He took over as Head of Accounting.

Intercom grew rapidly in Nic’s years there; Notion’s growth has been even more exponential. “I had to grow just as fast as Intercom did and then I joined Notion and the speed has been even faster than that,” he says. “When I first joined, there were a lot of great people and there was a foundation that was put in place. But we’ve had to continue to uplevel the way that we worked, and the way that we serve the business and our customers, and how to do it in a faster manner.”

In his two-plus years so far, his team has added 16 people, Notion’s gone through two acquisitions, and they’ve had to implement numerous systems. ​​With all the steps that I've made in my career, it's kind of been out of curiosity,” Nic says. “If I ever feel like I’ve stagnated from a learning perspective, I know it’s time to change course.” Obviously, the Notion ride has been a learning overload. He’s loved every minute of it.

“It's been a journey,” he says, grinning. “The thing that I've enjoyed the most is that every quarter, there's something new to do and something new to learn.” Obviously, there is ongoing accounting work to be tackled, but “for the most part, it’s not that stereotypical 9-to-5 where you show up and know what you're gonna do every day. That has been very fun from a learning perspective.”

At a startup, the role of accountant becomes a mix of traditional and strategic, which Nic loves. “Especially earlier stage your role is to help the company grow in any way. From a financial side, there are core accounting things like bookkeeping and taxes but there are also strategic tasks like, ‘How can we help design the pricing and packaging to ensure that they’re going to work both from a systems perspective and a customer experience perspective while helping the business grow?’” Nic also mentions that it’s the accountant who looks at every bill and contract, so they should be providing valuable insights to the Go-to-Market teams about how other companies are building their sales engines, pricing their products, and designing their checkout flow.

“The true back-office transactional side is just table stakes,” he says. “But for a startup to succeed, the finance function really has to be strategic. You can live in that land of customer experience and sales strategy, and drive strategic decisions if you want to. I think every accounting and finance person should.”

In September 2022, Adobe announced that it was buying Figma, the extremely popular product design tool, for $20 billion. Since its founding a decade ago, Figma has become an indispensable part of the tech world’s product design toolbag, so the news reverberated across the Valley and beyond. For Figma CFO Praveer Melwani, it wasn’t a ripple compared to a much bigger wake rolling through his life. “​​It’s funny how timing works out,” he tells us, grinning. “My wife's due date was the same day we were scheduled to announce.”

Praveer is from Toronto and went to school at Western University in Ontario where he studied business administration. His dad was a dental supply salesman and Praveer always envisioned that he’d join the family business, but he had an itch to get out of Canada for a while before coming home. So, he applied for jobs in San Francisco, landing a role at Union Square Advisors in the summer of 2012. “It was just a little bit of luck and good fortune,” he says. Based on where it all went from there, that framing seems like more than a bit of an oversimplification.

The Rise at Dropbox

Dropbox was scaling rapidly in 2014 and the Strategic Finance team was interviewing hundreds of candidates in an effort to hire the best handful of people to come join. Praveer wowed in his interviews and was offered a spot on the burgeoning team. “Rather than go through the standard venture, hedge fund, or private equity route, when the folks at Dropbox presented this opportunity that sounded like more than finance, I said yes,” he explains. “I had the fluency and understanding of what's going in the P&L so I could help drive some of the business-oriented tasks forward, but, ultimately, I was more excited to learn how this business ticked and moved. That's what drew me in.”       

The StratFin team that Ajay Vashee had been tasked to build was designed to attract high-achievers who thought differently about finance. The mandate at the time at Dropbox was “get the very best people in the world to join,” as Ajay explained it, to keep the company on a best-in-class growth trajectory. It proved a perfect fit for Praveer. “I view my capabilities as someone who can come in as a structured thinker and help someone frame a problem in a thoughtful way,” Praveer says. “But I get excited about learning and I get excited about having a much broader footprint than just like the core spreadsheet and operating model.”

Eventually, that desire to expand his footprint led him to leave Dropbox for the Business Operations team at NerdWallet in September 2016. Ten months in, he was laid off. “Within six months, I was already getting to the place where I was itching to do something a little bit different. Soon enough, it was a last-person-in, first-person-out situation,” he says. “But, had I not gotten that kick in the pants to go and look, I don't know if I would have found Figma.”

He credits good luck for much of his success but does admit it’s not the whole story. “Timing, the relationships you have with the people around you, and your ability to react are what make you successful,” he says. “But I think so much of it — the majority of it — is luck.”

Designing Finance at Figma

When Praveer was hired at Figma in July 2017, it was still a small startup. He was the first business ops hire; his role was amorphous but he quickly was tasked with managing finance and accounting. “My first set of projects was setting up our Stripe instance, making sure that the data was flowing in the right way,” he remembers. “We were using Gusto for payroll and so everything was on autopay. I was just hoping and praying that things were going right.”

Quickly, Praveer began thinking strategically — once a StratFinner, always a StratFinner — and began spending time working in concert with the team launching Figma Pro. “I spent a lot of my energy making sure that the data pipelines were really flowing between our financial systems and what we were seeing on the product side,” he says. That ultimately became my foray to drive conversation around how our users are navigating our funnel and what they’re doing once they're actually on one of our paid plans.”

That first bit of insight gave Praveer entry into high-level leadership conversations. “I found myself being able to provide insights and it actually informed some of the product decisions and the ways in which we structured our sales orgs.” It became clear to the Figma executives that Praveer could deliver strategic advantages if they let him build a finance team. 

“Over the next couple of years, we then went from a one-tier company to having a couple of tiers. We went from purely self-serve to having a sales team,” he says. “The team that I was going to architect would tackle building the business infrastructure that would keep pace with the company as we were scaling.”

As he hired, Praveer would give applicants a “silly Excel test” — he figured: “If you understood the ins and outs of the financial statement, you can build a model.” Soon, he built out a team that could tackle any financial task that was thrown their way. “I still would say that today, I'm by no means an expert, but I have tried to hire around myself so that I can feel confident in the collective expertise at Figma,” he says. “I brought on Tyler Herb as our controller who previously was at Slack for a number of years. We brought on an audit committee chair on our board, Kelly Kramer, who was previously a storied and tenured CFO at Cisco. So, I think surrounding myself with the right people was essential.”

Finance Thrives By Mastering Product and Sales

Praveer has always been curious to understand all aspects of the businesses he’s worked for and he stressed that same curiosity for his team at Figma. “I pushed my org to always have a pulse on the core sets of drivers and metrics for what is actually the heartbeat of Figma and how can we use that to help drive conversations with the product or to go-to-market teams,” he explains. “I’ve always had that desire and excitement to go and learn about an area that you may not necessarily need to know everything about for your core craft on the finance team. But if you do, that knowledge will make you that much more of an impactful partner, which is part of the core fabric of the culture that we built.”

His finance team was first and foremost focused on driving good financial accountability and hygiene, because “we had aspirations of where we wanted to go,” he says. “We felt that if things keep going, we're going to be in a position where we're going to have wanted to have the rigor a couple of years prior, so that we have a set of financials that folks feel are reliable and thoughtful.” 

But that didn’t mean Praveer’s team focused solely on accounting. He’d created a culture where finance could be a motor for innovation and he always encouraged his team to explore every aspect of the company and see where they could lend insight. “And individuals were getting rewarded for it. They were seeing that the conversations that they were getting pulled into were really unique,” he says. “The experiences that they were having at Figma were materially different than they had in other places because they were pushed to do more.”

Building a Tool Customers Want to Pay For

Early on at Figma, the team offered the service for free. As Praveer sees it, CEO Dylan Field and his team were craftspeople and wanted to keep tinkering until their tool was perfect enough to charge for. 

But it was clear to the investors and the business side that Figma had found a pocket of users who knew their product design tool was indispensable. Everyone at Figma finally agreed that charging was the best way to make certain their business — which designers had come to rely on — would be sustainable for the long run. “Customers explained, ‘The only way that we can continue to invest in Figma as a tool for our broader design team is to know that you guys are actually charging for it because that's how we can know this tool isn't going to go away,’” Praveer says. “And so, part of our story is: if you've got something, charge for it, because people will know that you see value in it. They’ll invest in the solution you’re delivering and the system will grow as well.”

Figma took the lesson to heart. They knew their core customers were designers and they wanted to be as transparent as possible with them. They believed there was value in that trust. “We don't discount our product. What you see on the website is what you get. We're really transparent with it and we wanted to use that to our advantage over time,” Praveer says, explaining that their competitors approached pricing very differently than Figma. “We would lean on that transparency and then we’d put our money where our mouth is by delivering outsized value to the customer. That's been one of the core values that we believe continues to be true: we want to make sure that as we invest in the community of designers who ultimately will become our advocates. We want to make it feel like it's a no-brainer decision to pay for the tool.” 

A Network of Expertise

Praveer came to Figma when there were fewer than 30 employees as the first biz ops hire. Today, the company has over 1,300 employees and has announced a pending $20 billion sale to Adobe. So, how did Praveer grow in his role as his responsibilities and Figma expanded? “When someone asks me what they should do when they're new in a role, I always say: find that individual that you can ask questions to and not feel any shame. Honestly, no question is a dumb question, especially when you're trying to build something for the first time.”

He leaned heavily on peers from his days at Dropbox who had moved on and helped scale other businesses. There isn’t a situation he can think of when he took on a new task for the first time and didn’t make a call to someone to ask a question or two. It’s that network of expertise that’s allowed him to feel confident as he makes decisions on a larger and larger scale. “Being able to just pick up the phone and learn from folks, whether it’s an idea either for benchmarking or for the type of person to hire, I don't think I could have been able to do it without having folks in my corner,” Praveer says. “So, when given the opportunity to speak and share or have a conversation, I'm always in this like pay-it-forward mentality. I will have a conversation with nearly anyone because I also get a lot of energy from it, but I also think that's what's gotten me to the place that I'm in right now.”

So, yes, he’s been lucky. But clearly, good fortune is just a small part of the equation.

A reminder from Neo.Tax: The tax deadline for S-Corps is coming soon!

For any S-Corp — defined by the IRS as “corporations that elect to pass corporate income, losses, deductions, and credits through to their shareholders for federal tax purposes” — the extension tax deadline is September 15, 2023. So, now is the time to get your books in order and to file your R&D tax credit.

Set up a call with one of our tax experts who can walk you through our automated, streamlined process — because you’re filing in September, you’ll be able to claim the tens of thousands you’re owed by the start of Q4 rather than waiting until 2024.

An important note for California S-Corps: though the state granted extensions for all California companies impacted by last winter’s storms, S-Corps still need to file in September rather than October along with all other companies.

Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions — we’re here to help!

What’s the best path to the top finance job at a unicorn? And how does a first-time CFO who guides a company to an $8.2 billion IPO get his start? For Ajay Vashee, General Partner at IVP, who spent 8 years at Dropbox, it started on Wall Street. “I actually had a really good experience in investment banking,” Ajay tells us of his time at Morgan Stanley with a smile. “Most people don’t.”

But for Ajay, who parlayed an internship at Morgan Stanley while a student at Columbia into an analyst role at the bank, the experience was illuminating. The training programs allowed him exposure to Excel, three-statement modeling, and IPOs — all of which would inform the rest of his career. “It was a great way to learn the nuts and bolts of finance,” he says. And another perk? His work on cleantech financing brought him to the West Coast and eventually led him to the world of software.

Ajay went from Morgan Stanley to NEA. He spent time studying Series A startups at a fascinating moment for tech: 2008-2012. There were some misses — “we invested in Fisker over Tesla, which was not a good decision in retrospect” — but also some big wins. “We were one of the earliest investors in Tableau,’” he remembers. “Eventually, Salesforce bought the company for $15.7 billion.”

At the stage of company that Ajay was investing in with NEA, the real strategy is to “bet on the team and the potential,” and one company stood out from the rest: Dropbox. They did their diligence on the firm and tried to invest, but Dropbox didn’t need money at the time. One of his colleagues, Sujay Jaswa, was so taken with Dropbox that when they offered him a job, he decided to leave NEA for the growing startup.

StratFin at Dropbox

For the next year, Sujay and Dropbox cofounders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi recruited Ajay. They finally convinced him. “The pitch which resonated with me was, ‘If you’re convinced that you want to build a career as an investor, a lot of the best investors are folks who were operators themselves,” Ajay says. “‘They understand the businesses and companies they’re looking at better. They’re able to empathize with the founders and entrepreneurs that they fund. They are able to genuinely help the companies they invest in on their journey to an IPO and beyond. And you’re just going to have a better nose for the business.’”   

Ajay arrived and felt like he had “this unfair advantage” because of his time working as a VC. “Dropbox totally was in the early innings, but on that trajectory at the time,” Ajay says. “As a VC, you know how every company is doing and I knew that Dropbox just had something special going on.”

He’d been observing board meetings, so understood what would eventually differentiate Dropbox. “It is bi-directional because you walk in armed as an operator now with all this context on what great looks like across your portfolio: what does a great software company look like? What’s a great growth rate? What are SaaS metrics that matter? When can you tell someone’s going off the rails? How do you have difficult conversations with folks that you have to let go on the team? What do you look for in great talent?” he says.

He had joined a company with “a bare-bones finance organization”: a couple of people on the accounting team and one person working on payroll and accounts payables. He was the first financial planning and analysis (FP&A) hire. Right away, he got started on getting a company model up and running. “Just having a view of the business that was reflective of what was actually happening at Dropbox and working through our first planning process and building a budget and things like that,” he says. “Then there were some one-off projects: ‘Hey, we want help modeling what this new product could look like if we were to launch it’ or ‘We want to understand: if we add this feature, then are we going to improve monetization?’ That's how it worked initially.”

Eventually, Ajay was tasked with building an entire Strategic Finance team. The mandate at the time at Dropbox was “get the very best people in the world to join” to keep the company on a best-in-class growth trajectory. “It was about team building and hiring really smart, high-horsepower folks to join our finance team. We wanted to hire folks who were coming out of Goldman Sachs or top venture funds or awesome consulting programs and a lot of them didn’t want to join in like a traditional FP&A role. They wanted to do something that was a little bit more strategy-oriented; that could have more impact,” he says. “So, we created this team called Strategic Finance to facilitate bringing that talent in. That was the genesis of StratFin.”

Growing Along With the CFO Role

In 2016, Ajay was promoted from Dropbox’s Head of Corporate Development to Dropbox CFO. He’d spent time getting to know “the nuts and bolts of finance” in his first position as Head of Finance and then spent “a lot of time in a more strategic role on M&A” in his next role, which prepared him for the CFO position. But still, Ajay admits that he was an unconventional choice for the position. “Our CEO Drew didn’t feel like he had to go hire the person who’d done it three times if he felt like someone had that potential internally,” Ajay says. “Not all leaders and CEOs operate that way. But he really had a leaning towards that and he had an eye for talent.”

So, Ajay took the reigns of the finance side of a company with 500 million users in 2016. Right away, he looked for mentors and found them on Dropbox’s board. “We had a couple of former CFOs on the board who felt like they could play a really active mentorship role with me when I was there. The former CFO of Priceline and Booking and then the former CFO of Nike were both on our board,” Ajay says. “They were like, ‘Hey, we’re willing to take Ajay on as a mentee and mentor him through stepping into the CFO role through Dropbox’s IPO and beyond.” 

He leaned on those mentors, and his unique experience — starting in investing and then building and growing with the finance team at Dropbox — to master the role. And, critically, Ajay continued to hire the best people for the role and lean on them to get to the best result. “So, I had a CEO who was willing to make that bet. I had a couple of former CFOs on the board who had a lot of credibility. And then I built a team around me that had much more experience than me working at a public company in a finance function and who'd been through the IPO process in the world of accounting FP&A, tax treasury, those kinds of functions,” he says. “So, it was the three different elements there that allowed me to do what I did.” 

The Dropbox IPO

“I became CFO, a year later, we were on file with the SEC to go public, and then three months after that we were public,” Ajay says. “So, like 15 months after I became CFO, we were a public company.”

It’s a staggering feat to imagine going from zero CFO experience to a public offering at $8.2 billion. But Ajay nailed it. He’d spent years watching the finance side of Dropbox from every angle and helped walk everyone else through the intricacies. “We ran mock earnings calls and we had a really buttoned-up accounting-close process. We had world-class auditors we were working with,” he says. “We were operating like a public company almost right away.”

He’d seen the differences on the finance side of a growth-stage private company and of a public company. “The level of rigor with which you’re examining the business, the way you’re running your planning process, the way you’re holding every team accountable to what they deliver for the company, the way you’re narrowing down your forecast accuracy and running your budget versus actual, the way you’re talking about the business and measuring it and writing about it, all that changes,” he says. “It really was night and day.”

But Ajay and his team actually loved the process — I know, it sounds strange! But the guy who’d started as an analyst was invigorated by the process of drilling deep into his own company. “For us, our IPO was actually a very energizing and illuminating process. It forced everyone to come together and think really hard about who we are as a company, what we want to be in the future, and to communicate that in a way that the world could understand,” he says.  “For investors who knew nothing about the business until we walked into a meeting as part of a roadshow, can we communicate in 30 minutes exactly what we do in a way that would be very compelling and get them to invest? They'd have to understand. The press would have to understand. Anyone reading our S-1 would have to understand. So, it forces you to go through that exercise, which is like strategically very beneficial to the company if you get it right.”

Clearly, they got it right. Dropbox’s stock rose more than 40% the day it first traded as a public company in 2018. 

Strategic Financing is Key for Companies

In 2021, Ajay left Dropbox to become a general partner at IVP. But he leans on the lessons he learned at Dropbox when considering investments. He tells us a story about Dropbox which helps illuminate the power of strategic finance for a growing company. 

Dropbox initially scaled on AWS, but there was a moment when they realized they should invest in building their own cloud-based infrastructure. Finance was brought in right away to tackle issues like investment timelines and depreciation schedules for infrastructure. “Our team was really intertwined with everything we did as a business,” he says. “They were intimately involved in: What should we build next? What should we buy next? How is that going to inflect our trajectory?” There was intensive modeling done in unison by the finance and infrastructure teams, and eventually, the decision was made to take on the massive effort. “It was a four-year project. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build out our own data center footprint across the country and then migrate exabytes of data from AWS to Dropbox,” Ajay says. “That project allowed us to grow from a 42% gross margin to an 80% gross margin. And speaking of what allows you to go public: moves like that opened up the IPO option for the company. Because the 40% gross margin SaaS business is not super exciting for a public market investor. But an 80% business is very exciting.”

Today, he tells the CFOs and Heads of Finance that he mentors to be pushing for 30-40% of your dollars to be spent on future growth — whether that’s people or other investments that can pay off down the road. “The thing that is a red flag for me is when I hear a finance leader, the go-to-market team, or the sales team, and part of their planning process is asking, ‘What’s the plan for next year?’” he says. “We have a major issue if that’s the way your finance organization is operating versus them saying, ‘Here’s the plan for next year.’ The ones that say, ‘Here’s the plan, and here’s how we’re going to make it happen,’ are the ones who will realize the full potential of a company. If your finance team is not doing that, then you are not realizing your potential.”

For the last few months, Neo.Tax has been working hard to secure SOC 2, Type II Compliance Certification from the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). SOC 2, Type II Compliance is a voluntary certification, but at Neo.Tax, we believe ensuring the highest level of security and data protection for our customers’ information is a mandatory requirement. We built our product to help innovative companies streamline their tax and accounting needs — ensuring their valuable data throughout the process was not optional to our minds.

“We are thrilled that Neo.Tax has successfully obtained SOC2, Type II compliance. This achievement is a testament to our unwavering commitment to data security and privacy,” Neo.Tax Co-Founder and CTO Firas Abuzaid says. “Our customers can and should have the utmost confidence in the protection of their sensitive information when they use Neo.Tax, and we will continue to prioritize their trust and maintain the highest standards of security going forward.”

What is SOC 2?

SOC 2, Type II stands for Service Organization Control Type 2 and is a cybersecurity compliance certification created and verified by the AICPA. The goal of SOC 2, Type II compliance is to make sure that third-party service providers store and handle clients’ data in a safe and secure manner.

The certification was designed specifically for cloud-service providers that handle customer data — often, this data is highly sensitive information that companies are entrusting to B2B firms. 

‍

At Neo.Tax, we use an automated platform to continuously monitor our internal security controls to the highest standards. We have live, 24/7 visibility across our company to ensure that our systems’ end-to-end security and compliance are seamless and secure.

Why does this matter?

In this connected world, cyber security is only as strong as a company’s weakest link. If any backdoor is left open, a hacker can find a way into a system and capture sensitive data. 

At Neo.Tax, we work with innovative companies and strive to deliver maximum value to let them keep growing and creating. That’s why it’s essential for us to ensure the highest standard of security for the data founders and finance teams entrust to us. 

Innovative businesses are partnering with more and more companies to help streamline processes like accounting, sales, and so much more. To make the process maximally valuable and efficient, we ask customers to entrust us with sensitive and confidential business data via the cloud. That’s why SOC 2, Type II compliance was an essential step — we want you to know we have the highest security standards. We would never ask you to share data if that were not the case.

To meet the AICPA’s rigorous security and confidentiality standards outlined in SOC 2, Type II, every member of Neo.Tax from sales to engineering has committed to cyber-security best practices throughout our practice. Data security is paramount to everything we do.

Neo.Tax is committed to data security

At Neo.Tax, we know that security is paramount to our ability to serve our customers; we understand that the payroll, accounting, and tax data you share with us must always be protected—at all costs. That’s why, when we connect to your accounting software or HRIS system, we never fetch more data than we need to, and we never modify those systems, either. And all of that data, once it’s stored in our systems, is encrypted both in transit and at rest. 

But, if you don’t feel comfortable connecting Neo.Tax with your tools via an API integration, we can always support you with a simple import/export instead (e.g., a one-time file upload). When it comes to sharing data, we don’t believe it’s an all-or-nothing proposition, you should only share data you feel comfortable sharing.

Still have questions? Contact us at support@neo.tax.

The Cult of the Founder was the story of the 2010s, so it’s not hard to imagine a kid growing up wanting to start their own company. But what sends someone on the career path toward the finance side? For Joe Ayers, Vice President, FP&A and Business Intelligence at Epicor, it was a path he was born on. “I have a lot of close friends and family members who are accountants, so growing up, I always heard about the profession and it sparked my desire,” Joe says. “It was always coached into me that it's a good foundation to start a career to build upon and that you have a lot of optionality to go from there.”

So, Joe got his degree in accounting and then secured his CPA certification before taking a job at KPMG in 2009. He spent five years working there until reaching audit manager. “The biggest value for me was I understood how the numbers worked across various industries,” he says. “I could hone in on industries that I found interesting, and from there, I began to think: ‘Where do I want to pivot?’”

First, he jumped to Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) but his move to the Bay Area eventually sent him toward the technology space. At Lithium, the community and social media management software company, Joe began to understand the way an accounting background could be used as a strategic tool for a company. He spent more than 5 years at the company, continuing to move up through mergers as Lithium became Khoros. Since having that initial realization about the strategic power of finance, Joe hasn’t looked back, eventually landing the role of Chief of Staff and VP, Finance Operations. “Traditional accounting has always been: ‘What are decisions other people have made and how do you make sure they fit within the bounds of GAAP?’ And that excites some people,” he says. “But for me, I wanted to understand the decision-making process and how accounting can align with strategy. So, I've kept kind of going further upstream.”

Postmodern Finance

At Khoros, Joe wore many hats: Revenue Accounting Manager; Senior Manager, Revenue; Director of Revenue, Sr. Director, Strategic Programs, and Chief of Staff to the CEO; and VP, Finance Operations. He evolved in his own roles along with an evolution he sees coming to the finance side of innovative companies as a whole. “We can call it Postmodern Finance,” he says. This term is something Joe learned to appreciate from Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research.

Postmodern Finance, as Joe defines it, is the shift from the finance team as a gatekeeper for compliance and accounting that sits on data in a static manner to something more strategic. “If you're intellectually curious, the accounting and finance team typically have access to more data than almost anyone else in the company,” he says. “So, it's an untapped opportunity, where you can sit on the data and be dynamic.” 

At Khoros, Joe had a bird’s eye view to see everything from customer-facing interaction to the work of the engineers on the backend. He learned how his reading of the data could be an influential tool for decision-making at the company. “The engineers have their day jobs and the product team has their day jobs, but finance can be influential by saying, ‘Here are some insights into gross margins. Here are some interesting things about the selling process with this product relative to the others. Here are some things we may want to think about,’” Joe says. “We’re sitting on a lot of potential insights that should be dynamic. So, accounting and finance need to move from the static forecast process to a rolling forecast where you're moving beyond forecasting and becoming a strategist for the business. That, to me, is where finance is going, and that is way more motivating.”

Data-Empowered Insight 

Joe has taken his theory of Postmodern Finance to the Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) and Business Intelligence role at Epicor, an enterprise software company that connects the Make, Move, Sell industries with ERP and supply chain capabilities. “Finance is moving away from that compliance, gatekeeper, Federal Reserve Bank of the company role — you know, ‘We're here to dole out dollars, don't ask questions.’ That's no longer a helpful approach,” he says. “Our mission statement for finance at Epicor is to maximize the company's ability to make the best decisions possible with data.”

Notice that the word “finance” is not in the mission statement. Joe tells us that’s on purpose, and it completely aligns with the value Epicor is working to deliver to its own customers in the form of data-driven insights to uncover opportunities. “See: I believe a lot of status quo outputs within finance and accounting are prone to significant transformation in the form of automation. I don't think the legacy finance team mindset passes muster anymore,” he says. “You have to lean more into the data and understand how to build models and equip the business to make the best decisions. We work for the business, the business doesn't work for us.”

For years, finance and accounting teams have often had the reputation of representing the back office and therefore far removed from the nuances and appreciation for dealmaking. Joe says that the old model put finance and innovators in opposite corners, which hindered companies’ ability to grow strategically and responsibly. “A lot of times, finance has the deserved reputation at a company of ‘Gosh, I have to include finance.’ Instead, they should want to talk to us at the beginning and the onset of an idea,” Joe says, “We're on your side; we can provide the goalposts of how to scale towards a north star and maximize both our financial and strategic goals. They are not mutually exclusive.” 

Joe’s not saying the importance of audit and compliance will disappear; instead, he’s just pushing finance teams to expand their roles within companies by adding strategic thinking on top of the more rote functions. “Those things serve a purpose, but I think there's a broader mission that finance needs to lean into,” he says. “And we're certainly trying to do that here at Epicor.”

From CPA to CFO

Coming from a family of accountants, Joe entered the business world with eyes wider open than most. But what was he wrong about back when he was getting his start on the finance side? “In accounting, you have to have an appreciation for the minutia, but I was a little naive to think that all of the details are how the world is run,” he says. “Occam's Razor is generally right: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. But it takes time to get to that point where you can sift out the signal from the noise.”

The other thing he’s learned is the value of translating the minutia into actionable data for non-accountants. He’s watched ”front office”, “back office” and every function in between struggle to understand each other for years and knows that the power of the finance side is only as strong as its ability to communicate with sales, engineering, customers, and leadership. “The sooner you can appreciate the importance of making it simplified for the business, the better,” he says. “I see a lot of finance professionals ineffectively translating their knowledge to a decision-maker outside their domain.”

His foundation in accounting and career wearing many hats has bestowed Joe with a rare ability to translate the language of accounting to the business side and vice versa. It’s what has let him set Khoros and now Epicor on the path toward Postmodern Finance. As he explains it, automation + expertise will lead to data-empowered, financially strategic decision-making. And it all starts with making the finance team an ally instead of an adversary for innovators.

For years, we’ve been working to make sure innovative companies claim the money they’re owed via the Federal R&D Credit. It’s never been more important to extend runway, and claiming your credit is the best way to secure non-dilutive capital.

But even as we’ve watched the Federal R&D Credit become more widely known by founders and CFOs, many innovative companies still aren't aware that 38 states offer an additional State R&D Credit for companies. This is tax law built specifically to incentivize innovative companies like yours to, well, innovate. Not claiming it is just leaving money on the table…

What is the State R&D Tax Credit?

Like the Federal R&D Tax Credit, many states have a state-specific R&D credit to incentivize innovative companies to create jobs and products within their state. Currently, 38 states offer specific R&D credits — each differs slightly, but many follow similar frameworks to the Federal R&D Tax Credit when it comes to Qualified Expenses and deadlines.

Which States Currently Offer an R&D Tax Credit?

As of 2023, 38 states offer their own R&D Tax Credit in an effort to incentivize job creation, and as a means to stimulate the local economy. Those states are:

Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin.

While each state has different rules on which expenses qualify, what type of companies can file for the credit, and how much the credit is worth, it’s always valuable for a company to claim every R&D credit they’re owed. Go to Neo.Tax and we can help calculate how much you’re owed and help you prepare your R&D tax credits today!‍

You’re a California-Based Company; How Much Can You Claim?

To give a sense of how valuable these credits can be, we wanted to share a case study of a California-based company that used Neo.Tax to claim both the Federal and State R&D Credit. For any research and development done within the state of California, the California State R&D Credit is equal to the sum of: 1) 15% of qualified expenses that exceed a base amount + 2) 24% of basic research payments.

A Series A IT Management Software Company approached Neo.Tax to help with their R&D Credit filing. With a revenue of $1.5M and $9M in expenses, the rapidly growing startup was able to claim $150,000 via the Federal R&D Credit. And how much more could they claim via California’s State R&D Credit? $50,000! 

That extra $200K in their coffers was a game-changer during this precarious economic moment. And all it took was reaching out to Neo.Tax. As founders know, there’s almost no such thing as free money. But this credit was built by Congress and by 38 states to incentivize innovation within their borders. So, the money is available to innovators. All you have to do is claim it.

Book a call with an expert at Neo.Tax and we’ll walk you through the entire process. It’s easy and takes less than 30 minutes. So, what are you waiting for?

When Sachin Sood was in college at UC Irvine, a friend asked him what he planned to do with his economics degree. In retrospect, Sachin now knows, “You can’t do s*** with economics, quite frankly, unless you’re an East Coaster who wants to go into banking,” but as a 20-year-old college student, Sachin responded confidently. “I said, ‘I want to be a CFO,’” he remembers, grinning. “No joke.” 

In the two decades since graduating, Sachin has taken a winding path to the CFO chair at CRV, the venture capital firm that invests in early-stage enterprise and consumer startups. “Now, did I know what CFO meant while at UC Irvine? Hell no. I had no idea what a CFO was going to do at that point,” Sachin says, laughing. “And now, in retrospect, it's completely different than I ever anticipated. But I knew I wanted to go down this route.” 

Like most career paths, the route only looks linear when seen through the rearview mirror. “Economics went into tax when I took the job at PwC. Tax went into a finance operational role when I was a controller, and that actually ended up changing to more global thinking and finance models at e.ventures,” he explains. “And Social Capital was a completely different mold altogether.” 

Since entering the workforce in 1999, Sachin’s “done a little bit of everything.” As he explains it: “For me, it's been hop, skip, jump.” 

A Foundation in Taxes

Sachin credits a lot of his success in investing and venture capital to his time working on the tax side early in his career. He began at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as an associate before moving to the role of Tax Manager at Delloite and Controller at Saints Capital. Those 8 years getting deep on tax allowed him to understand the foundational aspects of alternative investments such as venture, private equity, and hedge. “Taxation is the fundamental basis of a lot of what we do, especially in venture,” he says. “When government creates a tax credit, you'll see more money going into that type of business because companies know there's a tax incentive behind it. So, tax drives a lot of what we do. People just don't notice it sometimes, but it's critical.” 

While so much of the focus for pre-IPO companies is on valuation, those numbers are projections for shareholders. Taxation at the time of an IPO is the tangible reality for a VC firm. “People will mark up portfolios and down portfolios in this market, but it doesn't mean anything,” he says. “At the end of the day, it's all about when you exit, what price do you exit, when do you sell it at, what do you IPO at? You want to ensure that when there is an IPO window and there is an exit, it's structured properly to give the best tax structure.”

His background in the fundamentals of economics and his years on the tax side has allowed him to remain laser-focused on the tangible reality. It’s the superpower that’s allowed him to thrive in his role as CFO. “I had an economics background. I went to work at a tax firm. I did portfolio management at Saints; a lot of it. And then I went to Social, where I did a little bit of everything, including working as a CCO at a RIA and sharpening legal skills,” he says. “Now, I’m in a role where all the skill sets are needed.”  

The Five Types of CFOs

Over the last seven years, Sachin has been on the finance side at the global investment fund e.ventures, at Social Capital, and now at CRV. His time as VP of Finance at the two former companies and as CFO at his current company has allowed Sachin to dive deeply into the wide breadth of leadership styles across the tech world. “The investment side is all about learning,” he says. “At times, it's not just about one business that you learn; instead, you have to figure out how that business works across the different companies that focus upon. Each sector is so different. It's so nuanced.”

But from his bird’s eye view, he’s identified what he likes to call “the five types of CFOs.” First, there’s the startup CFO, who is involved across many different slices of the company and must be a master of shareholder desires, cap tables, and much more. Next, there is the small-business CFO, who has to have a mastery of all that but also have a specialty that is specific to the company’s focus. The medium-sized CFO who takes on the role of scaling the business — they are a strategy specialist. “Then you'll have a division CFO at a public company, and finally the public company CFO,” Sachin explains. 

“What we end up seeing is, in the early stages of the company, you usually won't hire a CFO. You will hire an external firm to help you scale. You’ll hire a CFO when you have the breadth and the vision and when you have scale. The best way to say this: you have revenue, at that point, you bring the CFO,” Sachin says. 

But how do you select the correct CFO for your growing business? “It really depends on what the CEO of the firm is looking to do,” he says. “If you're looking at an exit, you're bringing someone a bit more strategic. You're bringing a banker who has a better understanding. And then if you're looking for an IPO, you bring in somebody who actually understands the business in the long run.” 

The real key is for both the CEO and CFO to understand the job of the Chief Financial Officer. “Quite frankly, a CFO’s job is just to know facts. At the end of the day, I always explain: ‘I present facts; it's up to you to make a decision,” he says. “If you want my opinion, I'm happy to provide it because I always have an opinion. But first I present the facts. This is what you're spending. This is what the org is struggling with. This is where costs are compared to our competitors. Ultimately, those choices get brought up to the CEO and then eventually a board member.” 

Delegation Can Power Strategic Thinking

When Sachin first started as CFO at CRV, people kept asking him why he was always reading. He explained that to do his job well, he needed to dive deep into the weeds to fully understand as many aspects as possible of the core business. But now four years into his role, he’s come to understand the power of delegation. “It was really tough for me to be strategic because I knew I first had to learn the core business,” he says. “That’s why you have to rely on another partner. You have to rely on your controller. You have to rely on various controllers or people that are specialists.”

Today, Sachin works closely with two controllers: one who is a tax specialist and the other who is a portfolio analyst who is a data analyst. Each controller can focus full-time on their specialties, ensuring every aspect of their slice of the business is perfectly in order. “I have people that specialize in specific components because I can see the value of having experts in the weeds,” Sachin says. “They're going to be better at that than I am, quite frankly.”

Because Sachin worked in a controller role earlier in his career, he respects the value of great controllers. “It’s rolling up your sleeves. It’s ensuring the fact that your books and accounting records are in place, so there are no surprises at the end of the day,” he says. “They can allow the CFO to focus more on strategy, on thinking ahead, on tax savings, on thinking about how your portfolio is affected, and what the CFO can do to help out your portfolio companies. A great controller opens up a CFO’s mind to do more deep, strategic thinking.”

We aren’t breaking news to tell you that the language of taxes is remarkably obscure. There are tax code numbers, endless terms, numerous IRS tests, and so much more, which all become extremely important on Tax Day. 

You’re not an accountant, but for founders, CFOs, and CEOs, understanding the language of taxes can help you strategize from a position of strength. So, we’re proud to present “The Language of R&D Taxes, Translated”, a helpful cheat sheet from your friends at Neo.Tax :) 

Tax Lingo

Capitalization - capitalization can be understood as a limitation on the timing in which you can take a deduction. There are two different subgroups of capitalization: depreciation (for physical assets) and amortization (for intangible assets).

Deduction - a deduction can be thought of as an expense that is subtracted from taxable income. So, if you made $10 mil in revenue and spent $5 mil on R&D, deducting that amount would make your taxable income $5 mil ($10,000,000 minus $5,000,000).

Doing Business As (DBA) - a DBA is a name other than one’s legal name that a person or company does business under.

Employee Identification Number (EIN) - a nine-digit number assigned by the IRS, used to identify taxpayers who are required to file various business tax returns.

NOL - a Net Operating Loss means how much in the red you are in a given tax year. So, if your startup is pre-revenue or early-revenue, every dollar you spend on payroll, marketing, R&D, or rent over the amount brought in via sales would be counted as an NOL.

Unused NOL - if the loss is not fully used up in the carryback years, any unused portion of the loss may be carried forward for up to 20 years after the NOL year. Any NOL that is not used up in the carryover period is lost. 

Taxable Income - the portion of your gross income that's actually subject to taxation. Deductions are subtracted from gross income to arrive at your amount of taxable income.

Total Expenses - The cumulative sum of expenses from your accounting and payroll systems. 

R&D-Specific Lingo

R&D Credit - enacted in 1981 to encourage research and development (R&D) activities in the United States, the R&D tax credit reduces tax liability for organizations that perform certain activities to develop new or improved products, processes, software, techniques, formulas, or inventions. You can get about 10% back on qualifying expenses such as wages, contractor costs, cloud hosting and infrastructure, supplies, and legal costs.

Expenses allocated to R&D - direct expenditures relating to a company's efforts to develop, design, and enhance its products, services, technologies, or processes.

Qualified Expenses - these are the expenses covered by IRC Section 41. They are the expenses eligible to be claimed as part of the R&D Tax Credit (they must pass the IRS’s 4-Part Test to qualify), such as:

• W-2 Employees (W2, Box 1 Wages) - all taxable wages including bonuses and stock-option redemptions
• Payments to contractors
• Cloud hosting and infrastructure
• Patents
• Cost of Supplies

The 4-Part Test - for an R&D expense to qualify for the R&D Tax Credit, it must pass the IRS’ 4-Part Test. It must:

• work to eliminate a technical uncertainty.
• experiment via modeling, trial-and-error, simulation or other methods.
• use an experimentation process relies on a hard science.
• have the goal to create a new or improved product or system.

New or improved business component (product/process) - the first part of the 4-Part Test: The research must be focused on developing a new or improved business component for the company. A “business component” means any product, process, computer software, technique, formula, or invention held for sale, lease, or license or used in a trade or business. This can include improving the function, performance, reliability, or quality of an existing product or business component.

Technological in nature - the second part of the 4-Part Test: The research relies on principles of the physical or biological sciences, engineering, or computer science, including software development.

Attempts to eliminate uncertainty - the third part of the 4-Part Test: The research aims to eliminate uncertainty concerning the development or improvement of a business component. For example, the method or appropriate design is not apparent and not readily found in the public domain. Essentially, an uncertainty can be “How can we develop this new application?” or “Could this material make our product lighter without sacrificing durability?”

Process of experimentation - the fourth part of the 4-Part Test: The research must be a process of evaluation and generally should involve comparing alternatives looking for the best solution. This includes the iterative trial and error process inherent in version-controlled software development.

Non-qualified R&D (IRC Section 174) - these are R&D expenditures that DO NOT qualify for the R&D credit: 

• R&D after Commercial production
• Internal use software
• Foreign Research
• Funded Research 
• Social sciences, art, humanities

Deductible R&D - In years prior, companies were permitted to deduct R&D expenses in the year they were incurred. Beginning in tax year 2022, that is no longer the case. Instead, you are now required to amortize those expenses over five for domestic R&D or 15 years for foreign R&D.

Foreign R&D - R&D performed abroad by U.S.-located companies.

R&D Capitalization - as part of the TCJA, you can now only deduct a fraction of total R&D expenses. That means companies may now find that they have a taxable income, even through they are not yet profitable. The graphics below highlight this point:

Before these changes were written into law, 100% of your R&D spend could be deducted from your income. If you brought in $1M in revenue and spent $2M on R&D to develop your innovative product, you would end the year with $1M in Net Operating Losses (NOLs). Now, you have to spread the R&D deduction over 5 or 15 years depending on if the spend is made in the United States or abroad—this is called amortization. Worse than that, only 6 months of the first year of R&D spend can be deducted. So, if the $2M you spent on R&D is domestic, you’ll only have $200K to deduct from your $1M.

‍

How does someone become VP of Finance and Capital Markets at Ramp, the finance automation platform helping over 13,000 businesses save time and money? “Right place, right time,” Alex Song says. “It can look like everything was deliberate, but I kind of got lucky with this opportunity.” If you believe that, we have a bridge to sell you…

In reality, Alex rode a double major from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard into a series of positions where his unique brand of precision, accuracy, and academic rigor allowed him to thrive. His decade in the investment world taught him valuable tools that he now uses at Ramp as an operator. Most of all, the unforgiving natures of the public markets instilled one especially valuable lesson. “Across every job I've had in the investment world, there is a respect for rigor and hard work,” he says. “If you're intelligent and you have the aptitude, you're resourceful and you work hard, you should be able to get to the answer, whatever the answer may be.”

Thoughtful Work and Entrepreneurial Grit

After a few years at BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, Alex made the move to Bain Capital, where he worked as an investment analyst. Bain is based in Boston, far from Wall Street and its sales culture. “You weren't in the flow of things in New York City, where you have to contend with brokers calling you up and inundating you with all sorts of ideas,” he says. Instead, Alex had time in the office to dive deep into research, working through data to identify good investment opportunities. “I really liked the sheer academic rigor of that particular job. It was a large organization run by academically-oriented people, who were deeply thoughtful,” he says. 

Alex left Bain to pursue his MBA from Harvard and took a job at Crayhill Capital Management after graduating. The firm had just been founded by two portfolio managers from Magnetar, which is a $30 billion, well-established, 20-year-old hedge fund. He chose the firm because he would be the first employee at the burgeoning company. It was exciting to get in on the ground floor; he loved the startup energy. 

“That experience taught me two things. One: I’m drawn to more entrepreneurial experiences. And two: there’s real tangible value in entrepreneurial grit,” he says. “To succeed at a startup, you can't just be an investment manager; you have to build a business. I love the business-building component.”

He stayed at Crayhill for almost four years, and more than any other job, that was the one that most prepared him for his role at Ramp. “I joined Crayhill as the first finance hire, and wore many different hats while also being an investor,” he says. “When I first started, I had a specific set of mandates, but at a startup, the reality is: you also have to pay attention to the business-building stuff. You have to build a team, be able to communicate effectively, and be able to be a mentor and a friend to the people around you.”

Ramping Up

A decade into his career, Alex began to have the entrepreneurial itch to help build a business again. He was working at Sculptor Capital by then and had begun searching for the next opportunity. Always the analytic thinker, Alex realized that hedge funds were dwarfed in relative GDP share by companies on the operator side. “On top of that, accelerated personal and professional growth also mattered,” he says.  

In July 2020, when he joined Ramp, the company was barely a year old. Alex arrived with a mandate to build out a capital markets program and a strategy around the balance sheet. His years on the buy side gave him specific insight into how Ramp’s business should operate and how they should manage working capital. But his other important role was to bring Ramp’s financial reporting in-house. 

Alex had honed his entrepreneurial skills in his years at Crayhill and began to build a finance team at Ramp. Accounting was an important first step, and he knew he needed to create a dynamic finance operation. “As a leader, hiring is integral. There was probably one point when I was probably spending more than 50% of my time recruiting, interviewing, and sourcing candidates,” he says. 

But finding the right candidate is only the first step in team building. “I certainly place a lot of emphasis on nourishing and mentoring new talent,” Alex says.

Over his three years at Ramp, Alex has grown the finance team to 13 people — they are divided between strategic finance, FP&A, accounting, payroll, and capital markets. 

How Finance Can Superpower a Company

Alex recommends a book called The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success. “The main thesis is that your job as a CEO or a management team is capital allocation and thinking through how to efficiently allocate capital,” he says. “Ultimately, that's the role that finance plays: as a startup, you are constantly making a series of short-term and long-term bets.”

Some companies lean towards instant ROI plays like Facebook ad buys, while others invest in hiring engineers for projects that may not ship for several quarters and may not monetize for multiple years. “The question really is, if you're trying to maximize long-term value for your stakeholders, what is the right decision there?” he says. “If you think about it, that capital allocation exercise is an investment decision. So, having the lens of an investor in an operating role is a valuable combined hybrid view.” 

For any company, capital-allocation decisions are paramount, but it’s especially important for a rapidly growing startup like Ramp, which more than doubled its revenue run rate in the first six months of 2022 and doubled headcount YoY. “It's kind of like chaos theory, where any initial bump can have unintended consequences years down the line. We want to make sure that we are curating and course-correcting constantly,” he says.  

That’s why Alex stresses that good reporting is table stakes for a growing business. “And I don't mean just accounting. Accounting is essential, but you also need good business intelligence, good internal reporting, and good metrics,” he says. “If you can't collect and measure good data, you can't make good decisions.”

At Ramp, he’s built a financial team obsessed with creating and leveraging clean, unbiased data. His years in investing demonstrated how advantageous good data can be. It’s helped Ramp grow into an $8 billion company in under three years. “In the hedge-fund industry, when you are collecting data, sourcing data, or buying data, it has to be statistically significant and it has to be accurate and unbiased. Those are the table stakes; you just need mastery over statistics,” Alex says. “I find that, by and large, most people, most of the time, work with very biased data sets and they don't even know it. They think they're making good decisions, but most of the time they're not.”

Hedge funds taught him the value of hard work and getting to an answer. He’s brought that same ethic to Ramp. “If you have questions that you want answers to, there's always going to be an answer,” he says. “In almost every other industry, you can just say, ‘Well, this data just isn't available’ or ‘I don't know who to ask for that’ or ‘that data probably doesn't exist.’ But in the hedge-fund industry, uniquely, there's a lot less respect for the status quo and a lot more respect for just sheer grit and hard work. If the data set doesn't exist, create it, or go buy it, or go partner with subject-matter experts and create that data together. The public market is unforgiving.”