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Log onto LinkedIn or head to the business section of any bookstore and you’ll find an endless well of stories about the path to CEO. But the road taken to CFO is much less discussed. I’ve always been fascinated by the way finance leaders within companies progress through their careers and how that trail delivers insights into the way finance can be a strategic tool for a business.
For the first in our CF0to1 series, I spoke with Daniel Kang, VP of Finance at Mercury, the company more than 100,000 startups trust for banking. His career has taken him from banking to private equity to tech giant to fintech startups and has overlapped with some of the most fascinating companies and business minds in the space.
“During high school, my dream was to go work for the U.N. but then I read this book by Thomas Friedman called The World Is Flat and talked to a bunch of people who said, ‘Hey, actually, if you work for a business, look at all the positive impacts you can make,’ and my path changed,” Mercury VP of Finance Daniel Kang says. “I knew nothing about business or what I wanted to do within it. Business is such an abstract term, right?”
But Kang followed the vagaries of life in business to NYU, where he was deluged with young people convinced that a life in banking was the dream. Even by his early 20s, Kang was pretty sure he’d be on another path — while classmates wrestled for summer internships on Wall Street, he took a position with Pencils of Promise, the nonprofit that builds schools in Africa. Still, the realities of the world dragged him into banking; his degree wasn’t cheap. “I was like, ‘Crap, I have to get a proper job. I have all these student loans to pay back,’” Kang says. “So, I kind of got suckered into doing banking; the thing I’d told myself I wouldn't do.”
Two years at Bank of America led Kang to a job at Vista Equity Partners, where associates were thrown right into the deep end. “In management presentations, you’re grilling CEOs, talking to people who would have been your boss's boss when you were on the banking side, and talking with them about raising finances,” Kang says. “I was being thrown into situations where, as a 24-year-old, it's really easy to feel uncomfortable.”
Kang thrived in the discomfort — he learned he could hold his own during high-level discussions with executives at the portfolio company. Most of all, he realized he had a passion and a unique talent for problem-solving. As a student, he’d been drawn to philosophy before landing on the business path. “The largest impact of philosophy is the ability to dig deep into a problem, think about it from multiple angles, and try to come to a good opinion about a path forward,” he says. That skillset served him in PE dealmaking, but also in charting his own path.
Kang left Vista when he found himself, being in San Francisco, wanting to work with more innovative tech companies that were changing the world around him versus ones that made good buyout candidates. So, he decided to jump ship, and he picked the perfect time to do it. It was 2014. Uber, Airbnb, and Square were all still private, in their Series B, C, or D stages. “There was a lot of excitement about this new wave of tech,” he says. “I started looking around and Square really spoke to me.”
What drew Kang to Square was a personal connection: his parents had run dry cleaners when he was growing up and he was inspired by Square’s mission to make the lives of small business owners like his parents easier and better. He joined the finance and strategy team a couple years before the IPO — the company was small enough that he was allowed to wear a lot of hats, which was perfect for Kang. “This was the first time that I worked with people from very different disciplines from me where everyone thought about problems through extremely different lenses,” he says. “I partnered closely with our payments team, our Square Capital team, and then also everything that our CFO was supporting. So, like risk, but also random stuff like helping our facilities team with lunch budgets.”
After three years, Kang being Kang went to then-CFO Sarah Friar and asked if he could switch to the accounting side. “It was less about, ‘Hey, I want to be a CFO in the future,’” he says. “It was actually much more so, ‘Hey, I'm working on the finance team. I know one aspect of it decently well. But there's this whole other side, on the accounting side, that I was curious about.’” People scratched their heads when they heard Kang was moving from the more glamorous strategic finance side to a junior role in accounting. But he’d heard the same questions when he left Vista for Square, so he trusted his gut. Luckily, he had a boss in Friar who was fully supportive — so, he spent a year as a revenue accountant. “I'm so happy I did,” he says. “For me, it's never been about role, title, and compensation. For me, it just comes down to the fact that I just want to learn stuff and want to be a master of the field I'm operating in.”
After the IPO, Square grew and changed — for people on the finance side, the move from private to public alters the tenor of the work completely. Kang had learned a lot at Square, especially “that customer-oriented is the most important way to think about a problem, rather than purely from a finance lens.” But he decided he was ready to move again. This time, to somewhere much smaller. “I was really itching for that experience of building something from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2,” he says.
Ethan Bloch, the founder and CEO of Digit, approached Kang and asked him to come on. Kang was again drawn to the idea by his personal history. To create a product that made financial wellness effortless and non-judgmental spoke to him. “I come from an immigrant family. Managing personal finances and our household finance was a very important thing that was top of mind for us all the time,” he says.
But in his first month, he started to worry he’d left Square too soon. “It was not a calculated move. Digit was super early. They were doing probably like 2 million ARR at the time. 30 people,” he says. “It was a gamble but ended up being the best decision I could've made in the experiences gained and relationships built.”
By the time they sold the company in December 2021, Digit had grown exponentially: “We had scaled up revenue by like 50 million ARR, we had done a Series C raise from General Catalyst, and the team had grown a lot. We moved beyond just being a savings product to launch an investment product, and we launched a checking account product. I’m just really proud of what we had built over time.”
After the deal closed, Kang knew he wasn’t ready to go back to working on the finance team at a public company. So, he started looking around again and had a conversation with Immad Akhund, the co-founder and CEO at Mercury, about coming on as VP of Finance. “Square and Digit spoke to me in very personal ways: the way I grew up, my family, and so on,” Kang says. “As for Mercury, it spoke more to my career experiences: At Digit, I ran a very lean finance team, so I was running payroll and all these things that were very much on the operational side. So, I know there's so much opportunity to build tools and products that can make lives easier for startup founders or startup finance teams.”
Kang joined Mercury in July and has loved having the opportunity to run accounting, finance, capital markets, and so on. “I get a lot of latitude with the rest of the executive team to kind of poke my head in a lot of product areas where your finance person probably typically wouldn't be poking their head in,” he says.
His experience in banking, in PE, in accounting and strategic finance at Square, and being a jack of all trades at Digit all inform his work at Mercury. And one unexpected feeling has kept bubbling up: “It's kind of weird but there's a point where you feel like, ‘Man, all my life experiences have led me to this point.’”
So, why did a natural-born problem-solver who dreamed of working for the U.N., had a flirtation with philosophy, and didn’t even know what business meant find his way to a life on the finance side? Because Kang has been exhilarated by the fact the finance role is something like a mapmaker for a company.
“I know this is a bit geeky, but the way I think about it is that there is the whole universe out there. There are a bunch of different forces at work within the universe and there's a standard equation that tries to formulate how the universe works into like very specific different factors and whatnot,” he says. “In a lot of ways, finance is similar. There's a lot of stuff going on within a business, all within the context of the macro environment. But how do you actually make sense of all that? If you want to navigate that universe, finance can be a map, charting a path forward and giving the best recommendations with the best available information.”
For someone drawn to fixing problems by understanding every side of the issue, the macro-elements of finance — the ability to make the intangible tangible — has natural appeal. “The thing that finance teams are uniquely positioned to do is actually stitch together what's happening across the company into a unified view,” he says. So, perhaps the young Kang wouldn’t have been so resistant to the vague idea of “business” if someone had explained it to him that way in the first place.
“This isn’t an original thought but: the best finance leaders are great storytellers as well, in terms of how they understand and interpret the business and can actually tell a story about where it's going in the future as well,” Kang says.
His own career is a fascinating story. Where it’s going in the future? Only time will tell…
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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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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