00:00:00 · Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov
[00:00:00] S0: I think we're gonna be able to attract and build the world's best finance organization because so much what people want is the ability to learn and feel like they're being invested in and surrounded by people that wanna go and become the best at their craft. [00:00:11] S1: We'd love to hear a little bit about what made someone a great hire on your team, a great person. [00:00:17] S0: I want folks that feel extremely intellectually curious. You're coming in and trying to solve and try to understand the business really well. You wanna use AI as a tool to help you and empower you, but it's really, really critical to still be that thinker. [00:00:29] S2: We're in the era right now where a lot of slop is being called out. I've heard one CFO talk about how using AI just led to unlimited amount of docs that [00:00:37] S0: are being created every day. Anything that you're putting out there that you're asking someone to consume, it's gonna take them time, effort, and energy. 95% of the challenge there is just, like, getting your data in the right spot. [00:00:46] S1: What do we think changes in the next twelve to eighteen months? [00:00:49] S0: If our business complexity was staying the same, I think we probably wouldn't need the same number of people a year from now.
00:00:49 · Praveer Melwani, Erik Torenberg
[00:00:49] S0: If our business complexity was staying the same, I think we probably wouldn't need the same number of people a year from now. [00:00:56] S3: For decades, finance teams spent enormous amounts of time figuring out what already happened. AI is starting to give them more time to decide what should happen next. In this episode, a16z partners Seema Amble and Ivan Makarov sit down with Figma CFO Praveer Melwani to talk about what an AI native finance organization actually looks like. Praveer joined Figma in 2017 as its first business operations hire, years before becoming CFO and helping take the company public. Back then, automation meant writing hundreds of lines of SQL, waiting for queries to run, and stitching financial and product data together by hand. Today, team is building very differently. Collections workflows are automated. Corporate finance can reconcile messy data across multiple systems in minutes, and the corp dev team can use AI to prototype an acquisition target's product and run investment memos against simulated versions of Figma's own leadership team before presenting them. But Praveer argues the real shift isn't simply about doing the old work faster. It's about changing what finance people spend their time doing in the first place and turning the CFO organization from what he calls a traffic cop into a business enabler. They also discuss what should never be outsourced to AI, why Excel isn't going anywhere yet, and what founders should actually look for in the next generation of CFOs.
00:02:16 · Seema Amble, Praveer Melwani
[00:02:16] S1: Welcome to the a 16 c podcast. I'm Seema Amble. I'm joined here by my partner, Ivan Makarov. We recently wrote a piece called You Need a New CFO. Our argument was that AI takes finance to the next level, and the c f... CFO's job increasingly includes building an automation and really designing the systems and the team to do that. Today, we're joined by Praveer Melwani, who's the CFO at Figma. And we'd love to explore what you have seen over the course of your career and what you and your team are doing now. Praveer, thanks for joining us. [00:02:48] S0: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited. [00:02:50] S1: Maybe to kick things off, both Ivan and Praveer, would love to hear a little bit over the course of both of your careers how automation has changed the role in finance and what the team does.
00:02:50 · Seema Amble, Praveer Melwani
[00:02:50] S1: Maybe to kick things off, both Ivan and Praveer, would love to hear a little bit over the course of both of your careers how automation has changed the role in finance and what the team does. [00:03:01] S0: Yeah. I've always felt like the role of a finance individual should be this operational leader. And when I joined Figma, none of the automation pieces were in place at all. And I felt like in order for me to be effective at the time that I joined, a lot of my work needed to be living in SQL, building the data tables, really understanding how I can orchestrate the financial information to drive the conversations I wanted then have across the company. And I continue to kinda go back to that initial days that I had in that seat and what I was doing as the force multiplier, the piece that actually gave me the ability to have the scaled impact across the organization. And if anything, think what I was building way back then is that much more possible and plausible and accessible to individuals by the tools available to them today. So I hope that more and more folks feel like they can be empowered to take that operational sort of lens to the way that they actually go and position and work with their counterparts across the business. Because I do think that's the magic of shifting this role from what can be viewed as like a traffic cop sort of finance y type function to one that's a business enabler and a true change agent within the organization.
00:03:01 · Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble
[00:03:01] S0: Yeah. I've always felt like the role of a finance individual should be this operational leader. And when I joined Figma, none of the automation pieces were in place at all. And I felt like in order for me to be effective at the time that I joined, a lot of my work needed to be living in SQL, building the data tables, really understanding how I can orchestrate the financial information to drive the conversations I wanted then have across the company. And I continue to kinda go back to that initial days that I had in that seat and what I was doing as the force multiplier, the piece that actually gave me the ability to have the scaled impact across the organization. And if anything, think what I was building way back then is that much more possible and plausible and accessible to individuals by the tools available to them today. So I hope that more and more folks feel like they can be empowered to take that operational sort of lens to the way that they actually go and position and work with their counterparts across the business. Because I do think that's the magic of shifting this role from what can be viewed as like a traffic cop sort of finance y type function to one that's a business enabler and a true change agent within the organization. [00:04:00] S1: And to double click on what you were using for automation new pre AI, maybe explain to people what exactly you were doing. Was it macros in Excel? Was it using OCR for documents?
00:04:00 · Seema Amble, Praveer Melwani
[00:04:00] S1: And to double click on what you were using for automation new pre AI, maybe explain to people what exactly you were doing. Was it macros in Excel? Was it using OCR for documents? [00:04:13] S0: Yeah. Honestly, was like everything under the sun. So, like, it started, like, living in SQL, looking at all of our product metric and utilization data, mapping it to all the financial information we had in Stripe. I'd go and create these four or 500 lines of SQL that I'd wanna then use to create the golden tables that I'd go and pass off to someone or then be able to pass the different go to market systems that we'd be using. So I felt I spent my day living in that query editor. I'd then go into [00:04:35] S1: And and, of course, waiting for the query to run for Totally. [00:04:39] S0: By many hours. Yeah. And you hope you got it right the first And then we eventually hired data scientists, and I'd go and tap them and say, hey. I have this thing I went and built. Can you go and add it to our ETL process so it goes and there's a recurring job that I can then use that same information and pass it to Salesforce or Marketo or whatever systems that we were using at the time. And that was like the initial sort of unlock for me of, oh my gosh, if I can get consistent in our definitions in the way that we're talking about things, no longer are we ever debating, like, what's true and what's fact. And we can just get past that and really focus on how are we actually gonna go and drive the business.