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.
00:04:39 · Praveer Melwani, Seema Amble
[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. [00:05:09] S1: I was talking to someone who was in their early twenties who was complaining about how long a prompt takes to run. And I was explaining to them, you've not lived the pain of hours on hours of waiting for a SQL query to to run and then only to come back and be like, shit. It didn't totally work. And so, yeah, it's... It is just an order of magnitude.
00:05:09 · Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov
[00:05:09] S1: I was talking to someone who was in their early twenties who was complaining about how long a prompt takes to run. And I was explaining to them, you've not lived the pain of hours on hours of waiting for a SQL query to to run and then only to come back and be like, shit. It didn't totally work. And so, yeah, it's... It is just an order of magnitude. [00:05:28] S2: Totally. Yep. Yeah. The time is really interesting. Right? Especially the era that we've lived through. When I was at Webflow at Figma, we saw, for example, a huge spike in usage in COVID that I could not believe in the beginning. Know. It's experienced it this way too, where I thought our data was broken or something else was broken, but it took us weeks to figure it out. Yeah. And I feel like today, in this day and age, we live in a day where you could figure it out to an hour. With some of the spikes, some of the usage revenue as well. This is a very different world we live in. Did you experience that as well?
00:05:55 · Praveer Melwani, Ivan Makarov
[00:05:55] S0: I mean, yeah. I mean, our business took off during the early days of the pandemic. I think that was actually the time where we started to partner with the folks at Andreessen. It was, like, right at the early stages over there. But, yeah, I mean, I wake up every day. I mean, I have the ability to go and rebuild my context on what's happening, and then at any moment during the day, the team loves it when I'm... I don't know if they love it, but they know that I'm constantly in there going and taking a look at, you know, hourly dashboards or sort of daily metrics on things to make sure that I'm also sourcing things that I think maybe look like anomalies or asking the right questions. And I think they view me similarly to how they view their role within the organization as, you know, a counterpart who has ideas, who wants to come to them, and truly build the best business possible, all using and having access to the same data available to each other. [00:06:33] S2: Yeah. What's interesting, like, when you and I went to college around that time, that was more of a monthly or quarterly cadence, and then it became a weekly cadence. I remember maybe... Especially with data moving more into the cloud, it became like, let's have a big weekly dashboard to where now what's possible is daily. Has that changed your habits the way you even just look at...
00:06:51 · Praveer Melwani
[00:06:51] S0: Think about data? How often you think about it all? Honestly, I view data and having access to it as the key unlock to how I can run my day effectively. And so throughout my time at Figma, was the thing that I would wake up every day and I... Yeah. I remember there would be, 30 people that would sign up for a paid plan in those first few days when I joined, I'd go through line by line who are they? Are they personal addresses? Are they business addresses? Are they people that we can reach out to? What can I learn from this to help us inform what we eventually built, which was our organization's product? And I think early days, it's extremely important. And then now, I just understand the repercussions of movement in any one direction. And if you catch something before it becomes a big deal, it can actually save the business, like, hundreds, thousands of dollars. But if you catch it in the other direction, you can really put more juice behind it and really seek to unlock in the other way. So if anything, like, I view this as, like, a daily, if not more than that rhythm. And I think the goal for me is how do I empower other folks on my team and across the business to similarly feel the accountability to those same metrics and truly act as business owners and want to go and triage things and not say, like, hey. I can wait till next week. Like, you do need to solve it sooner rather than later because I do think the rhythms here are moving really rapidly.