00:01:26 · Martino Cadoni
[00:01:26] S0: Yes. I mean, the first thing I always say to to everyone is, like, finance should be an accelerator and not a break in a company. Right? So the way I see the CFO role is truly as a strategic partner to the business. Right? That... That's how I build my career. So I started at General Electric, GE, with their leadership programs. And these programs are a bit less known in Europe, but in corporate America, they are really truly seen as some of the best CFO factories. And substantially, it works. The first two years after university, you get to rotate across the different areas of finance, across different geographies, across different businesses. For example, you start... I started personally in Budapest in a g energy business. I was doing commercial finance for six months, working alox... Alongside sales, helping them from my finance perspective, and then moved to Italy, another different business, doing financial planning and analysis, working very closely. For example, my boss's boss back then was Thierry Pieton, which until recently was the CFO at Renault Group, and now he's the CFO at Medtronic. Right? So one of the major advantage of these programs, you truly get to work with some of the best people in the industry, across different countries, across different businesses. So you learn a lot of new business models very quickly. Right? So I've I've done this for four years where every four to six months, you get launched into a totally new space. You need to learn extremely fast. We were working truly nine nine six. The only day off was Saturday. Sunday was a working day. And we... You would be assigned to a specific problem to solve, and then you had just a few months to really identify the problem and and solve it and implement the change. It was like doing a mix of investment banking, McKinsey, and Harvard Business School type of things. Because on top of the day job, we also had exams. Right? So we had classes every trimesters and then a lot of training on leadership, strategy, corporate finance. So it was very intensive years, but some of the most rewarding. Right? And, again, one of the best thing was really I was surrounded by amazing leaders. For example, when I finished those programs, the head of the program was Khozema Shipchandler, who is now the CEO at Twilio. Right? So you you get to learn from the best.
00:04:29 · Martino Cadoni, Guillaume Moubeche
And the program had amazing alumni, like, for example, John Elkann, who is, you know, the the president of Stellantis and one of the main main heirs of the family. [00:04:42] S1: Can you share like some of the example of problem you had to solve? Because you mentioned like, you know, we were assigned, like, some problems and and we need to solve. So what what what are these kind of problems?
00:04:54 · Martino Cadoni
[00:04:54] S0: Yeah. I I mean, I I give you a few which are very relevant. For example, when I was... One of the rotation was in in France, GE had just acquired a company called Converteam, and I was part of the integration team. And I was responsible to ensure that the fax and cash management of the new company as part of the... All the processes were compliant, and they were, you know, according to SEC rules, according to IFRS, and things like that. And for example, I found there were issues with the process, and we found over 20,000,000 of opportunity in term of FX savings. Right? Another one, I was in The Netherlands. I get a call and say, hey. Tomorrow, you fly to Budapest because the Hungarian government just issued a law that is banning any mortgage in nonlocal currency. And we want you to go to Hungary, and you need to evaluate how big of a risk this is. Right? So I jump on a plane, go go to Budapest. I got handled, like, a huge database with all the mortgages in foreign currency, mainly was Swiss francs. And I had to revalue... In two... In just two weeks, I had to reevaluate, like, a multimillion dollar reserves, which then got adjusted, that then was announced to the... In the earnings call of GE. Another time I was in Russia. For example, we had customs compliance audit. So I had to ensure that no employees or no government officials were doing anything against the the rules. Right? So very different scenarios, very different areas, but you you really truly learn how to solve problems, first principles, how to work independently, high agency, and in a totally different environment, which I think it's... For me, has been a huge advantage for them transfer to private companies and more startups and scale ups because the modus operandi is very similar. We were working within GE programs with the lean startups and Toyota factory principles, which are some of the best principles if you work in a high growth environment. Can you share, like, how these principles, like, apply in in real life? Like, how does that look like? Yeah. I mean, it's like UI, for example. Yeah. All things like agile working, like daily stand ups. You have, like, a weekly retrospective, always really trying to... Whatever you do, usually go back and understand what went well and what should have done better.
00:07:55 · Martino Cadoni, Guillaume Moubeche
Then extremely frequent feedback, like you would have every week or every other week, one on one and getting feedback about your performance, what you can improve on, and what you are good at. I think this extreme frequency of feedback makes you a better person and a a better professional. Right? And then it's truly a lot also about processes. Right? So every time we will get us to jump into a new problem space, you were to map the process step by step. For every step, you had to identify what are the risks, what are the controls, and then how you can automate the process. So there was no AI back then, but we did a lot of automation work exactly using those principles. For example, when I was in The US in g treasury, we had over 100 treasury systems across g because g was a huge company. We had to consolidate. And after four months that I was there, we decided to go down from 100 to 20 systems. Right? So again, same principle. There was no AI, but the logic were the same that we are, you know, facing today. [00:09:16] S1: And can you explain maybe, like, what's what's a treasury system and why... Like, how how things got improved on that side?
00:09:16 · Guillaume Moubeche, Martino Cadoni
[00:09:16] S1: And can you explain maybe, like, what's what's a treasury system and why... Like, how how things got improved on that side? [00:09:24] S0: Yeah. I mean, so a treasury system, usually, you... In a big company, you have multiple bank accounts. Right? These bank accounts needs to be managed. And usually, there is a a treasury system, which is like where you manage the... These bank accounts from. Right? Because GE was a combination of a lot of m and a acquisitions, over time, the amount of these management systems exponentially grew. Right? We... Drives friction, extra cost because you are paying multiple providers. So there was an opportunity to consolidate and improve processes, and that's what that's what we did. [00:10:03] S1: Okay. Nice. And I think at g, you did around like 20 exits and IPO readiness work. But also at HSBC, you were like a deputy CFO, and I think the business unit was around like 2,000,000,000. Where... How do you think, like, this this corporate jobs, like, kind of, like, help you transition to to start up? Like, what are the thing that you kept and also the thing that you had to unlearn to make that transition?
00:10:33 · Martino Cadoni
[00:10:33] S0: Yeah. I I think also what what you keep is the depth of analysis that you need to do because the devil is in the detail when it comes to value creation, optimizing the outcome of an M and A exit or an IPO. Really, you really need to go deep. And I think one of the things that is often underrated in tech is the balance sheet. Like, every time I go and work with tech companies, they are obsessed about the p and l, which is great. But you should be equally obsessed with the balance sheet because there is a lot of opportunities in a balance sheet, obviously, in... Depending on the business model more... Some more than others. But I think that balance sheet obsession is something that has benefited me quite a lot along my journey after public companies at Klarna, but also now at DeepL. So understanding the treasury side of things, how to optimize cash flows, I think that's something which I learned during those days. Also because, for example, at at HSBC, I was responsible for strategic finance, meaning deciding how much buyback we should pay. Right? How much dividend we should issue. Right? So managing the capital at the balance sheet of a company, which were back then, you know, was doing globally 50,000,000,000 in revenue and had a multitrillion balance sheet. Another thing I think a lender is institutional knowledge and also how to lead with central banks, with institutional investors, with other banks. I think that ability to build and manage those relationship is definitely helpful in my today's job. In term of what I had to unlearn, definitely, you know, when you move to a scale up, I think you need to understand the earlier when it's good enough because speed is as important as quality. So you don't wanna kill velocity because you wanna be too perfect. So you need to be... To get more comfortable in the good enough and just move on. Right? Because speed is critical in in private markets. So the one is definitely something to adjust. In general, be be a bit less polished. Right? Because, again, it's it's all about speed. It's all about execution. And sometimes it's better to be slightly imperfect, but be fast.