The world of FP&A is having its day in the spotlight. New pricing models, a new focus on near real-time business planning, the increased focus on balancing revenue growth and profitability, coupled with the dynamic impact that AI is having on the SaaS market, are all making the role of FP&A a more strategic asset. Albert Gozzi, is the founder and CEO of Aleph, a modern FP&A platform and company that recently raised $29M in their Series B financing from Khosla Ventures. During today's episode, our host, Ray Rike is joined by Albert Gozzi, Founder and CEO Aleph, to discuss the strategic future of FP&A including:The vision behind founding AlephThe evolution of AI in FP&AFP&A’s role in developing corporate strategyGrowth strategies being used in a crowded category If you are a finance leader, FP&A professional or fellow B2B SaaS founder with a product purpose built for the Office of Finance, this conversation with Albert Gozzi is full of unique insights, ideas and opportunity to make your Financial Planning and Analysis organization a strategic asset! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Think about the unparalleled growth that OpenAI has experienced since the public introduction of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Now, think about being in finance, or being the controller who had to scale their financial processes, including closing the books to keep up with a company that has scaled from less than $100M in revenue to $10B+ in less than 3 years!?!? That was the situation that Sowmya Ranganathan, Former Controller OpenAI and CEO, Lumera found herself facing in the early part of 2023. During today's conversation with Sowmya, our host Ray Rike discusses several important lessons and use cases of AI at OpenAI in the Finance department including:Why there was no existing playbook for scaling Finance in a company like OpenAIChallenges in one of the fastest growing software companies of all timeUnderstanding compute expenses is critical to understanding the financial performance today and tomorrow at an AI companyWhy excel could not work at the scale of OpenAI (1M+ rows)Using OpenAI to enable finance to write the python code to write the statistical model to analyze financial dataWhy historic analysis is not a good place to start for forecasting in a hypergrowth, compute intensive companyLeveraging AI in the Financial close process - leveraging data warehouse information to build a repeatable processTracking GPU costs in real-time throughout the month - not an excel scale requirementHallucinations are a real concern - but once your AI is encapsulated as standard code - the concerns are minimizedHuman review on any stochastic model is a best practice - such as contract data fields from signed contracts to establish billing A long description would not do the conversation justice - so jump in and be ready to pause the audio to capture the highlights. Sowmya has been in financial leaderships at Square and Rippling in addition to OpenAI, so she has a very unique perspective on not scaling finance to meet the unparalleled growth at OpenAI, and two other hyper growth companies. If you are interested in learning about real-life stories of using AI in Finance at the world's largest AI software company - this episode is a must listen!!! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Christina Ross is the founder and CEO of Cube. Prior to founding a SaaS platform purpose built for everyone of those companies still using Excel (majority of companies) for business modeling but want to enhance the collaboration of business budgeting, planning and performance across the company, Christina was a corporate audit executive at GE, financial transformation consultant at Deloitte and a multi-time CFO at companies including Rent the Runway, Criteo and Eyeview. During today's episode, Christina and our host, Ray Rike discuss multiple aspects of the Financial Planning and Analysis role, department and the strategic opportunity for FP&A to materially increase the impact on business strategy and performance. Topics we discussed include: How the experiences at larger companies including GE and Deloitte shaped her view on the strategic role of FP&AThe biggest challenges facing CFOs with the FP&A function todayThe role of FP&A in business strategyThe impact of FP&A on business performance If you are a CFO, FP&A leader or even the CEO this episode is full of great insights and ideas on how to increase the business impact of your FP&A function! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Exit Ready Analytics is a concept that any B2B SaaS company CFO and CEO should become familiar with before entering into any potential strategic company acquisition initiative, deal due diligence and/or data room preparation

Imagine leading Finance for a B2B SaaS company that has made 31 acquisitions over the last six years and you depend on having near real-time insights and data to inform decisions immediately upon monthly or quarterly close - this is the environment Josh Schauer, CFO at insightsoftware has operated for the last 15 years!

Casey Woo, Founder and CEO of the Operators Guild has a very interesting journey, from being a West Point graduate, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a multiple-time CFO and now the founder and CEO of the Operators Guild, and General Partner at Fog Ventures. With this background he has been able to both live and identify the critical role of the "scaler" at early stage companies.

Melissa Howatson is the CFO of Vena Solutions, a $100M+ ARR cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that helps companies streamline budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and financial modeling, with a strong emphasis on Excel integration. During the episode, we covered multiple topics with Melissa including:Latest trends in B2B SaaS FP&AAI in Finance - the importance of change managementMetrics that Matter at > $100M ARRMeasuring the Impact of a podcast The 30-minute conversation hit upon multiple key trending topics including: 1) how FP&A is evolving as a strategic business partner to the other key functions; 2) why the CFO needs to lead a culture of experimentation with AI; 3) how EBITDA increases in importance as a company scales and; 4) how to measure the impact of a company sponsored podcast! If you are an aspiring CFO, or a CFO looking to scale your company beyond $100M ARR or are interested in how a world-class CFO came to be this conversation has something for you!!! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marcos Rivera, is founder and CEO, Pricing I/O and joined our host Ray Rike to discuss the different strategies, tactics and frameworks that B2B SaaS and AI-Native companies alike can leverage to develop, test, deploy and evolve their pricing strategies - a key strategic level in 2025 and beyond!

Shane Murphy-Reuter, GTM President at Calendly, has been part of multiple B2B SaaS companies during their hypergrowth phase, including Webflow, ZoomInfo, and Intercom and joins Ray to discuss his vision to create a seamless customer experience across the entire customer journey, while evolving into a multi-product, Product-Led Growth company.

Josh Aharonoff, better known as "Your CFO Guy" and the founder of Might Digits, a consultancy specializing in accounting, finance and fractional CFO services joins Ray to discuss when to consider going beyond your outsourced accounting function, and hiring your first VP Finance or CFO. Josh has amassed 450,000+ followers on LinkedIn, which is extremely rare for anyone, especially someone who caters to the corporate finance community!

Dan Miller, CFO at RightRev has been at the center of Usage-Based Pricing with senior executive Finance roles at Fastly and previously as the VP Finance and General Manager at NetSuite. During today's episode, Dan and Ray discuss how Usage-Based Pricing and AI Outcome-Based Pricing is impacting ARR Reporting and Revenue Recognition Management.

There is a famous saying that goes something like "Half of my advertising (marketing) investment is wasted, the trouble is I do not know which half". During today's episode Ray discusses how to change this reality in 2025 and beyond with Pranav Piyush, Founder and CEO Paramark.

B2B Marketing and AI Trends are evolving rapidly in 2025, and who better to discuss those trends with than Sydney Sloan, Chief Marketing Officer at G2 - the leader in B2B Software reviews!

The Data and Sales Intelligence category includes a list of well known players such as ZoomInfo, Seamless and Apollo, and are now joined by new entrants like Clay and Lusha. But where does a pure play Data (Sales) Intelligence provider like People Data Labs fit - their CEO, Brian Eisenberg who has grown through the ranks at People Data Labs from Data Engineer to CEO provides his insights in how the Sales (People) Intelligence category is evolving!

Bill Koefoed is the CFO of OneStream which went public in 2024 after being acquired by KKR in 2021. The CFO journey from being a Private Equity owned company to preparing for an IPO and beyond, while also transitioning from a perpetual license model to a subscription business is a fascinating experience and story.

Aviv Canaani, is the Chief Revenue Officer at Datarails who recently transformed their Go-to-Market motion to be primarily inbound from the traditional outbound motion. During today's episode Aviv and our host, Ray Rike dive deep into the transition and the measurements Aviv used to measure the returns on this new strategy.

This episode of the “Metrics that Measure Up” Podcast features James D. Wilton, Author of Capturing Value - The Definitive Guide to Transforming SaaS Pricing and Unshackling Growth and Managing Partner, Monevate. If you are evaluating updating an existing SaaS pricing model or introducing a new pricing model for your SaaS product this episode is chalked full of ideas and even a framework to help create your new pricing model.

SaaS Pricing is evolving to better align the value received to the pricing model. The trend to using new pricing models including Usage-Base Pricing, Value-Based Pricing and Outcome-Based Pricing is evolving quickly and Bill provides his insights into the current trends and future of SaaS and AI pricing.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been the foundation for larger companies dating back to the introduction of SAP R-3 in the late nineties. Sandeep Chopra, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Everest Systems says that ERP vendors have lost their "customer focus" and believes their is a large opportunity to re-invent ERP in the cloud to help companies run their business more efficiently.

The Rule of X is a recently published SaaS metric that factors in the importance of growth rate and operating profitability for B2B SaaS companies - Sam Bondy is the co-author of this metric and shares the catalyst for creating the metric, the latest trends and how the Rule of X impacts Enterprise Value to Revenue multiples.