Aneal Vallurupalli on Financial Data Management

[00:00:00] Aneal Vallurupalli: When you start to feel like you can be an agent of change within a business, and you can see you’ll find that it makes you more inclusive, it makes you want to ask more questions and accept, “I don’t know everything.” So, I literally ask a lot of questions or I go speak to a lot of people externally, and what that means is that it gives you just a holistic understanding or better understanding of the company, the company you’re at, and then, eventually, the next company you go to.

Aneal Vallurupalli Introduction

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Role Forward Podcast. My name is Joe Michalowski, and this episode is brought to you by Mosaic, a strategic finance platform that changes the way business gets done, and I’m joined, as always, by our co-founder, COO, Joe Garafalo, and today also joined by Aneal Vallurupalli, the CFO of Airbase, leader in spend management space, and we’re just really excited to have Aneal here to talk to us about financial data management, but, first things first, Aneal, thanks so much for being here. 

[00:01:14] Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:16] So, just to kick things off, pretty, pretty basic. Can you just tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up at Airbase, what your, your career path has been like? 

[00:01:24] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah, happy to. So, I think, you know, in finance, you can, as a financial leader, you come up, you have the potential to come up many different tracks and, and my track started off early on, on the tech M&A side. So, I started during, during the recession actually, back in 2008-2009, in investment banking and more specifically working with technology companies, and even more specifically, 90% of deals I worked on were software businesses.

[00:01:51] And so, that was the track I came up, and since then, the last 10 years, actually 12 years has been working within software businesses and anywhere from the smallest series, and to, to post public, and 4 or 5,000 employees, 10, $15 billion. So, ideally what that should help provide is some, some, some ability to see around the corner for, for these companies as we’re in an earlier stage. And Airbase specifically, you know, I actually met Thejo about two and a half years ago, three years ago, actually, and, and, and right when he was thinking of building the product and, and, and right around when they were coming out with the first, the first look into it, and at that time I was at a company called Mattermost. Mattermost essentially was a more secure version of Slack focused on, on developer collaboration and, and were open source

[00:02:42] Aneal Vallurupalli: and because we were open source, we were very international. So, we had, I think, when I joined, it was, it was fairly small, around 30 employees or 30 staff, and we had already been in 15 countries at that point, and so, international payments, international subsidiary, support was super important and yes,

[00:02:59] Thejo mentioned, you know, “You still need to come onto Airbase, trust me, I’m gonna build it some day, I’m going to build international subsidiary support. I’m going to build international payments,” and obviously today we have those, those items. So, Thejo and I kept in touch and, and ultimately I’ve used all those products out there.

[00:03:14] I’ve used Bill.com, the Expensifys, the Divvys, the Ramps, the, the, even Accrualify, not many people have heard of Accrualify and, and I can 

[00:03:23] say that what compelled me to come here is ultimately I believe our product is the best product for both SMB early-stage businesses, all the way up to mid-market and, and an IPO and beyond businesses. 

[00:03:34] Joe Michalowski: Wow. Very cool. I always love to hear from any guests about how they’ve used the actual products that they are now a part of selling, like, you’re not actually selling the product, but it must be pretty cool to just be there and know that they’re working on something that’s so important to you every day.

[00:03:50] So, yeah, like I said, really, really excited to have you here. Main topic is based on an intro article that you did when you joined Airbase mid last year, I think it was July, and you know, something that really stuck out to us at Mosaic, it’s just something that’s, that’s close to what we do, is this idea you had of Airbase being at an inflection point and how, kind of, because of that, one of your first priorities would be building out a more robust data engineering infrastructure

[00:04:17] to support where Airbase is going. Can you just talk a little bit about what, what you meant when you said that, like, what, what prioritizing that means and why it’s such an important project for you all? 

How to Build a Data-Driven Business

[00:04:28] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah, I think, if, to take a bunch of buzzwords out of it, it’s essentially, how do we make Airbase a data-driven business at our DNA? Right? How does every part of the org leverage data to make faster decisions and more informed decisions? And so, ultimately what you’re looking to do with that is selfishly from finance, it makes our lives 

[00:04:51] much easier, yes, but we are ones who are oftentimes looking at datasets that touch various parts of the organization, everything from product usage, to customer, to customer data, and, and, and, and, and, and I call it your software subscriptions and your renewals and et cetera, right? You can see that literally spans the whole gamut, even down to our internal usage of our own product or internal usage of our own software systems.

[00:05:17] And so, with that being in mind, you can see that if we can’t answer questions quickly, then we’re unable to, to make strategic decisions quickly, and 

[00:05:28] at this stage of a business, when you’re a series A, B, C, D business, waiting months, or a month or two months to make strategic decisions compete, the difference between having that incremental or hockey stick growth, especially when you compound it across tens of decisions that need to be made in every part of the org.

[00:05:45] So, I think that’s the focus around it, and, really, the article that I wrote was, was around, the earlier we can start that muscle and build that muscle memory up to becoming data-driven as a business, the better off the company will be at a later stage. 

[00:06:00] Joe Michalowski: Gotcha. You know, something that, that Joe asked you, like, right before we started recording this is, like, how finance builds that, that technical muscle. And so, before I kind of want to shift into that, which is, I guess, the question is, is there a difference between building a data engineering infrastructure, as you called it, versus

[00:06:18] focusing on financial data management or are they kind of just one and the same because finance does touch all of those different parts of the business? 

[00:06:26] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. I mean, it’s there’s, there are similarities, yes, and ultimately I think that it comes down to, what are you doing? How much of the data are you leveraging for reporting purposes and how much of the data is actually being used to operate the business? Example, on the billing systems, like, you can literally revamp your entire billings architecture to go-pay as you go,

[00:06:50] right? You can actually, to low touch, no friction, ask for a credit card swipe up front, but in order to enable that on the data engineering backend, to go to a low-friction or zero-friction adoption, call it a product-like growth motion, what that means is you literally need to integrate something like a Stripe,

[00:07:08] you then need to create a billings and licensing API provisioning tool that automatically knows that this customer has inputted a credit card. I need to then send out a subscription link for them to click and to start going on the product, right, and then to start billing based off of that. That’s just one example of, of how it can be a little different.

[00:07:27] And then, do you leverage architecture, meaning a data warehouse on the backend that uses that information? Yes, to then enrich your ERP on, you know, did this customer get billed and then to enrich your CRM, did we sign a new customer, closed one, done, right? That minute, or does it take two hours?

[00:07:47] Does it take 10 days? These are all ways that it’s all really interconnected.

[00:07:52] Joe Michalowski: Gotcha. Joe, so I guess I would ask you, Joe, is, I know you’ve had trouble or challenges in the past for, for your careers being pushed to have that technical skillset in finance when that’s not traditionally, like, a finance sort of skillset, so I’ll turn it to you, Joe, and just see, you know, what your experience has been,

[00:08:09] and maybe the two of you have more in common or maybe, Aneal, maybe you have more of that technical background, how do you guys kind of work through that? 

[00:08:16] Joe Garafalo: Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s an age-old debate, right? Is, does, does finance own the intentional architecture and how the systems flow or is it, is it an IT-led project and I think the right answer is, it should be collaborative. If you think about Aneal’s example that he was just talking about, it’s just, like, the customer lifecycle.

[00:08:35] Your customer is going to go through so many systems by the time they’re closed one, starting with, like, you know, the lead in the marketing software, HubSpot potentially, close one deal in Salesforce, then it comes time to invoice the customer in Stripe, and then you have to collect the cash. It’s, like, right there, that customer journey is broken across, you know, four differences,

[00:08:54] and if you’re not linking your customer records across those four different systems, it’s really hard to answer questions, like, how are these cohorts performing? When did we sign this customer? How long was the sales cycle? How long did it take for us to complete the first upsell? But what I really like about what Aneal said is, like, being data-driven.

[00:09:10] I think it’s finance’s responsibility to make the org become data-driven, whether or not they can implement the technology behind that is a different question, we’d love to get your thoughts there on that piece, but generally in, inline.

[00:09:24] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. I think that, I think when we in finance accept that we hold the rest of the org to a certain level of, of accountability when it comes to prove out that business thesis. Tell me, why does that make sense? Why do we need to invest more? Why are we putting more in the PLG motion versus our outbound BDR, outbound motion,

[00:09:46] right? How does that pan out? Right? Does it mean we have higher conversion ratios and the PLG, even though we have a more delayed time to actually get a customer to pay us a dollar, right, especially if you’re a freemium-based PLG motion, right? I’ve been at a couple of companies now where we’ve had both, PLG credit card swipe, and at some point, based on usage, it converts to enterprise agreement, right? Then you go the different route where you actually end up going the typical NetSuite Invoice and prototypical MSA route. And so, having both of those motions can be important. But I think, the main piece is that, {}finance can accept that by, we can get better answers selfishly if we actually make the rest of the org have the ability to surface the data sets they need faster, then we actually take the ownership away from us, putting it in a model and making our own assumptions

[00:10:39] and we’re actually pushing it out to the org for them to self-serve that data and come to us with recommendations as to why they would change something. So, I think it’s kind of similar to what Airbase does in terms of spend management. We don’t just make it a part of finances job to look at how are we progressing on our Heroku monthly card spend.

[00:11:00] The owner of that card at the org that sits in called the engineering department, we’ll look at that card and say, “Wait a minute, why am I at max usage already for this card, and it’s only midway through the billing cycle?” So, it’s one way to surface the data to people such that they can take ownership of it versus finance feeling like we’re reacting to them. 

[00:11:21] Joe Michalowski: I, I, I love the self-serve conversation. I feel like it’s, it’s something that comes up in a lot of the conversations we have, not just on this podcast, but in webinars we’ve done. When we talk to finance people that self-serve idea comes up again and again, and I feel like, obviously it’s, it’s kind of, like, an ideal state.

[00:11:39] Like, this isn’t something that you just overnight, you say, like, “Great, now everything in the company is a self-serve a piece of the finance function,” and so, you know, to roll it back to how this is going for you at Airbase, you said that it was an inflection point when you joined and it was time to start putting this in place.

[00:11:56] So, what, what did this look like at Airbase when you joined? And, you know, it’s been 6+ months, so, like, maybe, if you’ve started some initiatives, like, what were, what were the first priorities, things like that? 

Top Priorities to Build a Strong Data Infrastructure

[00:12:08] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. So, let’s talk about what it’s like when you’re coming into a company fresh, 

[00:12:12] right, and this has happened a few times for me now, where you come into the company fresh and you’re like, “Wait a minute. What are we using to report? What information? Where do I go for this? Where do I go to understand what we signed and closed on bookings last month?

[00:12:27] Where do I go to understand of those closed one bookings? Have those customers gone live yet? Where do I then go to understand that those ones that have gone live or they have 50% usage or max usage of their product that they’ve signed up for?” And what you start to find out through that discovery is that your systems, the visualization tools you use on top of those systems and to, to understand what data that those systems are telling you are oftentimes very disparate.

[00:12:53] Aneal Vallurupalli: They’re all, all across the org and with various ownership, and, and one thing that I found helpful when coming into a company is to just literally take a step back and say, “What are the metrics that we care about as a company to run our business? And, let’s start to define those metrics.” That’s everything down from what is an a, a, booking. Definition of booking is almost as different, like, at literally almost every company, right? And then there’s certainly market standards for how you think about a booking. Do you base it off of ARR, or ACV, TCV, there’s so many different ways you can look at it, but if you align the business around those definitions, around what is new ARR?

[00:13:33] What is expansionary ARR? What is contraction? What is churn? What’s resurrection, right? What’s the definition behind resurrection? Is it considered resurrection within 90 days or after 90 days? Like, these are all just examples of where you start to have this feeling, where the org is. If you can provide clarity around the definitions, then we can start to figure out, how do we track those metrics? Once we figure out how we track those metrics we can say, “Wait a minute, the way we’re tracking these metrics and for them to be actually accurate is really painful, and it’s not really built for scale or automation.” Then you figure out, “Okay, actually, our existing architecture to define these things and to automate these things and to visualize these things is very suboptimal.

[00:14:17] What should it look like? What should our data architecture and data map look like for the business?” Once we’ve done that at Airbase, which we have done all of that in the last six months, and we’ve aligned with product, with sales, with CS, with marketing, right? Those are the big ones, and finance,

[00:14:36] and we have a different animal or different beast here at Airbase because we also have financial services component, in that we have billions of dollars flowing through our systems that are not our money. So, we need to be able to reconcile all that real time. And so, now that we, we, we figured out the data math, we can say, “Hey, wait a minute.

[00:14:54] Aneal Vallurupalli: I need to go hire someone to own this.” So, we actually have someone starting very soon here as who’s going to be leading and owning all of our business systems and financial analytics efforts, and they’re basically called “The Quarterback”. If 

[00:15:06] you were, if all of your systems and all of your teams call your product operations, sales operations, marketing operations, CS, rev ops, finance ops, are all positions on a football field,

[00:15:17] the business systems analytics group is kind of your quarterback. They’re the ones who are helping understand, you know, what changes can you make within NetSuite or within Salesforce or within Marquetto or within Zendesk? Can you make that won’t break the data model of the business? And so, that’s kind of how I think about, like, step by step, by step,

[00:15:36] how do you just start to peel back the onion 

[00:15:39] and start to figure out, what do we do next?

[00:15:43] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. 

[00:15:44] Joe Garafalo: Quick follow-up question, Aneal, where does, where does that business-systems hire or that team sit within the organization?

[00:15:50] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, ultimately it comes down to who on a leadership team has what superpower, right? And, and it’s reports to me now, and, and, and that’s because I built it before, I built the BI team, I built the data and analytics team at two companies now, and, and, by the way, that doesn’t mean it has to sit here forever, right?

[00:16:10] Like, we are all in, when we’re in a super high-growth phase, every leader at the company is literally doing everything we can to make the company successful, and it’s not about Empire Building at all. But me, selfishly, I want everyone around the company to make decisions fast and with more information,

[00:16:27] and so we, in the finance, especially if you, you, you bring in a strong FP&A person that can help play that glue across the orgs, right? Think about your, your marketing, sales, CS funnel metrics that you look at to build your financial model. If FP&A and finance are building a really good relationship with those teams, you’re actually co-building the needs around the data together, and everyone understands why you need that information. And so, I think it has a natural place within finance, especially if the finance leader takes ownership of that spearheading effort. I’ve also seen it take place within product, right? Product leaders have seen product leaders own that function before as well, because, especially in a product-led growth motion, so much of data usage within the product dictates the feature you built,

[00:17:15] or, and so it’s really kind of down-to-the-business rationale behind why that person needs to do it. You know, what I do see though, is that there starts to become a couple of nuances, one who leads the effort, two, does that team immediately need some data engineering team? Or, can we leverage the tech team’s data engineering team to help us at least build out some of the plumbing with, like, your snowflakes, et cetera, and the connections to the product warehouse and the product information that you need?

[00:17:47] And, then the next piece comes around, you know, centralized or decentralized data analysts, right? So, at a certain stage, it makes sense for us to just keep all of the SQL and data analysts centralized so teams can come and ask questions, and another stage when you get much larger, you need to de-centralize it.

[00:18:06] Aneal Vallurupalli: You need people who are actually writing, you need SQL experts, potentially within each one of these groups. 

[00:18:13] Joe Michalowski: This, this topic is really near and dear to Mosaic’s heart because we’re, not me personally, but I think the company as a whole is a little bit spoiled in this regard because we have, our three founders are all finance-background people, so, like, there’s probably a delay in, like, how early we need to set up, like, all of these different finance functions, because

[00:18:34] they bring that expertise across the whole company, but it’s also a problem that we’re trying to solve, like, trying to take some of that tech expertise out of, like, the list of requirements for getting this done, and so, I will probably butcher this if I try to say it myself, so I would love for you to take, to get your take on what we call, like, a “golden framework”,

[00:18:56] and it’s, it’s really Joe’s babies. I’ll, I’ll turn it to Joe and let him explain kind of, like, how we’ve approached this data management problem in the past, and maybe just see, like, what, what your thoughts are and how that would work in the context of how you’re handling it at Airbase. 

[00:19:10] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah, 

[00:19:11] Joe Garafalo: Yeah.

[00:19:12] I know you, you, you said that so eloquently that you almost made it sound easy, but it’s certainly not an easy thing to do, right? Like, it requires a lot of, and it requires a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of thought and a lot of people. So, the concept of golden framework is, is really, how can, how can we

[00:19:32] help build this thing that every company needs internally without reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch each time? So, for us, it starts with, you know, easy integrations to core systems, a lot of the ones that you mentioned, like, NetSuite, like, the sales forces of the world, the stripes, the HubSpots, Marketos, so that we can pull that data into a central data repository,

[00:19:53] and rather than writing code and having to pull your tech team resources which many people don’t have the luxury of doing, right, at high-growth companies the engineers are focused on building product versus, you know, building the decision engine internally. So, how can we, how can we kind of jump start that process with a piece of software that

[00:20:13] Joe Garafalo: doesn’t require a team of SQL experts, but, like you mentioned, I think that’s more and more aware of the role of finances headache is, if you don’t have these technical skillsets, if you, if you can’t write code in SQL or Python, you’re probably not going to be able to get the answers to the business that you need just with how the world is going.

[00:20:32] So, the golden framework concept is, how do we integrate those points solutions into a central data repository and, and do the joins and the mappings of data without the need for SQL. So, near and dear to our heart but I’m sure you’re building your own version with all the complex data that you have at Airbase.

[00:20:49] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. I mean, look for us, I think that it’s kind of funny, right? But, as I mentioned, we have, we starting soon who 

[00:20:57] we’re all very excited about and, and who, and who’s not only done this before, but also done this before for FinTech business, right? Processing billions of dollars, so 

[00:21:07] not only are you 

[00:21:07] Joe Michalowski: Or 

[00:21:08] higher right there. 

[00:21:09] Aneal Vallurupalli: Exactly, and so, but, what’s so important is that we understand what are the priorities for the company right now, right? So, this person could come in and you could look everywhere and find something broken, and then 

[00:21:24] it would seem like an insurmountable task to try and, to try and get everyone what they need,

[00:21:29] ’cause everyone’s literally banging on the door, and so, that’s why oftentimes people who have some level of business operations background or, you know, consulting background, or, can help in this type of a role because they are very good at prioritizing and ruthlessly prioritizing what matters most to the business,

[00:21:47] and at this stage, it’s oftentimes revenue, right? And so, what are the changes you can make or the things you can optimize in terms of reporting that drive that incremental dollar of revenue faster? And so, I think that it becomes, as you mentioned, Joe, the benefit of using a software when you don’t have the ability to make large investment around this, right, is, is ultimately that you can get to this type of a framework faster,

[00:22:15] right? We, at Airbase, are doing it, it’s all depending on company situation, it’s literally always dependent. I always get scared of people who come in and say that I’m very afraid of a leader who comes in and says, “I have a playbook,” because I’ve never been able to take a playbook from another company and literally apply it to the existing company, because I think there’s scenarios,

[00:22:35] there’s, there’s context every company has, that’s a “Why?” Behind why something is situated or done a certain way. And so, I think what’s, what’s so important is that Airbase, we are literally four or five exing in, right, in terms of our pace, and that means that we have to answer questions really quickly and make that investment around this because very 

[00:22:58] soon, we’re going to have to teams, data engineering teams and InfoSec and all of this built out at the company. But what I do like, you know, about Mosaic is that you can kind of get to that framework quickly and nimbly, and you can probably do it without needing five FP&A people as an example. And so, I think it all is, it’s a balance between stage of business and kind of where you’re going.

[00:23:21] Joe Garafalo: Exactly, and it also puts in that intentional architecture that you need across the business, at the earliest moment, but totally hear you. It makes a lot of sense.

[00:23:32] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, to take this, to take this out of the, this is not, you know, Mosaic plug or anything, to take it out of the software equation, you know, you’re coming in at series B and you’re saying that this is an inflection point, what advice, like, let’s say Airbase was actually a year earlier and now you have a chance to start even sooner,

[00:23:49] is there, like, a piece of advice you would have, Aneal, for somebody, maybe, like, a year earlier than, than Airbase would be? It’s like, “Okay, like, great, you’re in a better position than even we are at Airbase to get this done sooner, here’s step one,” and is it, maybe it’s the same as your steps before

[00:24:05] ’cause I know you started kind of at first principles with metrics, but very curious what your approach would be.

Investing in the Short-Term and Long-Term

[00:24:10] Aneal Vallurupalli: It’s funny, right? Because there, there’s a fine balance, and I always say, I use this word “balance” or you’ve probably heard me say it many times already. There’s a balance between how much do you invest for the future and how much do you invest for now? A lot of what we’re talking about here really helps drive decisions in the future,

[00:24:32] and once it’s in a good state helps you drive decisions now. But, there’s a painful period between now and then, 

[00:24:41] and so, one of the things you try and find is, is the company found its product market. 

[00:24:48] Joe Michalowski: Hmm. 

[00:24:49] Aneal Vallurupalli: You found that product market fit, I found that investors, your board, your leadership team are more open to undertaking these data, data revamp, did architecture type products, because you say, “Okay, we’ve got the thing, we’ve got a thing that people want and they want to pay us a good amount of money for it,”

[00:25:07] and now that we have that we can invest in these things. So, I will say, as you, as, as someone who’s going, you know, series A or C, when you start to see product market fit is when you start to really look into, is it worth starting to track these things and look at these things, and also accept it’s not going to be perfect.

[00:25:26] Like, my vision for what Airbase can be and what we can accomplish with, with the business systems, analytics, data engineering, all that, I mean, it’s, it’ll take years, 

[00:25:39] Aneal Vallurupalli: right? It’ll take a year or two where you literally have every person at the company with the, you know, the, the information at their fingertips regarding, you know, their, what they’re trying to achieve at the business. 

[00:25:51] I’d love to look forward a little bit and talk a little bit about, what, what advantages are you hoping to have as a team? I know you said this could be a really long-term project, but in the next, like, six months, as, you know, you bring on this new hire, what immediate advantages you’re like, “Great.

[00:26:08] Joe Michalowski: I can’t wait until June when our team is able to do X, Y, and Z, because we’ve taken these steps.” 

[00:26:14] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah, I think, when you try and do, when you’re building out one of these teams is, I’m a big believer that you showcase material wins, and this is for anybody in any part of the org. If you can find someone material wins within their first 90 days of being at a company, like, there’s, like, literally data showcasing with the hierarchy square that they’re with the 90%+ likelihood are going to be sticky at the business and feel successful in the job.

[00:26:38] So, this is really important to me, right? And so, number one, how do we get ARR reporting down from X to within five minutes?

[00:26:47] My prior company used to take us two minutes, two weeks to actually finalize all the data around ARR and work that out. We got that down to two minutes in real time, right, and that actually happened within six months.

[00:26:57] So, that’s an example of what one quick thing you could do, bookings reporting, ARR reporting. The next thing I would love to see is a surfacing of, of our product data by customer in a way that our go-to market teams can actually make better decisions, and one of those big examples can be, how amazing would it be if you are a customer success manager and you have a set of 10 accounts you need to go renew next month

[00:27:24] or two months from now, and you could look at, “Okay, I’ve those 10 accounts that I have to renew next month or two months from now of those customers, how many are sub 50% product usage? Because that probably means I shouldn’t just send out the renewal form, probably means I need to go have some conversations there.

[00:27:39] Oh, by the way, do they even have, those customers have a champion change internally? Well, if I sum 50% usage and the champions changed internally, probably looking at churn, 

[00:27:48] right? And so, these are examples of how you can surface that information faster. Another piece, right, is we have now Airbase Essentials, which is our free product, is, it’s important for us to understand, within our free product,

[00:28:02] now how many bill payments is a customer sending, right? How many reimbursements are they processing? Because oftentimes those business don’t understand that we could actually save them money by going to our pay product, right? And so, I think those are things that we will do within the next six months, and we’re excited to see what they can do for the team soon. 

[00:28:20] Joe Michalowski: Crazy. Love to hear real-time reporting, I hope, I mean, I think I’m going to have to send this to the entire product team at Mosaic, because this is just, like, a laundry list of things we need to make sure we can solve for, for people in finance. This is a total tangent, just based on what you mentioned just now,

[00:28:35] how new is the free program at Airbase? I didn’t realize that that was something that, it sounds, like, you just put it in? 

[00:28:42] Aneal Vallurupalli: Well, what’s actually interesting is we had a freemium product about, I think, eight, nine months ago, and 

[00:28:47] it’s only within the last three months we’ve started to, to, to really showcase it, and, you know, one of the biggest values too here at Airbase is that not only do we have an awesome essentials product, but we also offer the highest cashback rates in the industry at 1.75%.

[00:29:02] If we are to underwrite you, 2.25% if you’re in a pre-funded model for your cards. So, you know, both of those things came out at the same time, where we said, “Wait a minute, we know we have the best mid-market product out there, and it’s actually pretty easy for us to strip away some of those features that, you know, SMBs or some 50-employee companies don’t really need. You may think of that as, you know, international payments or an international subsidiary support or SSO, one login, Okta support, or HRS integrations.

[00:29:31] I’m sure, you know, your 20-person company is not prioritizing your HRS integration across your systems yet. And so, that’s kind of the, the, the, you know, the, the, the evolution of it. 

[00:29:45] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I’d, I’d love to know a little bit about how that transition’s been just for the finance team, like, such a big product change, and, Joe, maybe, maybe you have a better way to ask this question than I do, but obviously prioritizing that more product-led growth and shifting models there, or at least kind of bringing that to the spotlight,

[00:30:04] I feel like it must change a lot for how your finance team operates, and, yeah, like I said, Joe probably knows. 

[00:30:10] Aneal Vallurupalli: You know what’s interesting though, is that we, we are focused on servicing end customers, right? I mean, that is where the majority of our effort goes because customers are seeing value in using Airbase. I mean, we have public companies now that are using Airbase for all of their spend management,

[00:30:28] that’s their accounts payable, their expense reimbursements, their virtual and physical corporate cards. We’re doing that for a public company, we’re solving big issues for them, right? And so, we will focus on those customers 

[00:30:39] and we will ensure that we have a product at the lower end or the freemium that can help solve problems for customers immediately and be a frictionless adoption,

[00:30:48] and I’ll say that I think that’s important because we really do believe here at Airbase that we have a product that can take care of your company from idea to IPO and beyond, right? And so, and there’s always that balance of how much of the company’s effort, dollars, headcounts you put in each one of those, those focus areas. 

[00:31:07] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, it must be such a tricky challenge, just trying to dig into the numbers. Are there ways that you can dig into the numbers and kind of decide how to prioritize those things? Is there a headcount planning model that you can put into place to make sure that you have the right support staff for the different levels?

[00:31:22] Like, how are you all approaching 

[00:31:23] that? 

[00:31:24] Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. I mean, honestly, we’ve, we’ve, aligned with, with, with the leadership team internally, as well as investors as to, what is this type of focus we will put on essentials? What does quantify? Right? So, for me it’s coming from multiple companies where there were first-time CEO founders, which is amazing here at Airbase,

[00:31:44] they just found a company before, sold a business before, and I’m sure learned a lot from that and brings a lot of those learnings here, but oftentimes I’ve worked with five first-time CEO founders in a row, and they were all product-led CEO founders. And so, it was always, as a finance leader in those businesses, it was always difficult to, to, to get them to agree to something.

[00:32:05] Aneal Vallurupalli: And so, you know, they would, they would say, “Wait a minute, don’t worry, we’re not gonna focus too much on freemium, we’re not going to focus too much on this sub-segment,” well, then it turns out our hiring plan for the next six months is entirely in that area or, or, or program dollar investment is entirely in that area.

[00:32:23] And so, you know, bringing some of those learnings here, it’s, it was important for us to quantify that a bit, to put it in context. 

Finance Career Advice from Aneal Vallurupalli

[00:32:30] Joe Michalowski: Gotcha. Cool. I guess that total tangent just heard you mentioned that the free, free tier was a little bit new or a new priority. I was just curious about how that was going. We’re, we’re coming, I mean, we’ve been talking for awhile, I could probably just keep you here and keep asking you questions, and Joe could probably get you deep in the weeds on some of the finance topics, but there’s really just one question that we leave every guest with,

[00:32:52] and it’s a, it’s a real basic one, just this idea, what is something you know now that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career or advice that you would have for somebody, like, earlier on, in a finance career? 

[00:33:04] Yeah, I think, you know, it kind of goes back to what Joe had mentioned. I think that, as a finance professional, as early in your careers you can accept that finance can actually be a change catalyst within, within a business, versus, you know, that person that people feel beholden to speak with on a monthly or quarterly or bi-weekly basis, right, I think that it’s important that you accept that early on and what that means when you start to feel like you can be an agent of change within a business, and you can see you’ll find that it makes you more inclusive. It makes you want to ask more questions and accept, “I don’t know everything.” I don’t know everything, so I literally ask a lot of questions or I go speak to a lot of people externally. We’ve seen this before, and what that means is that it gives you just a holistic understanding or better understanding of the company, the company you’re at, and then, eventually, the next company you go to. 

[00:33:57] Joe Michalowski: I think it’s great advice. I love that, selfishly, my favorite question that we ask among guests mostly because, you know, I, I, I work in content and it’s just nice to hear people that have reached, like, a C level or some sort of leadership role, especially in finance, talk about what things were like when they were younger and what would have helped them get to the next step.

[00:34:18] So, always loved that kind of stuff. I think, I think I can wrap up there. So, just a final closing thought, like, is there a, somewhere people should go to learn more about you, where can people follow you? Tell us, you know, give us your, your pitch for, for Airbase, where can we find Airbase, is your time to shine? 

[00:34:36] Aneal Vallurupalli: I’ll tell you a couple of things. One, kind of mentioned earlier, Airbase, essentially what we do is we consolidate all of your non-payroll spend onto a single piece of software. Simple. Easy to understand. What is your non-payroll spend? It’s your accounts payable, it’s your expense reimbursements and it’s your

[00:34:49] fiscal and virtual corporate cards, literally everything other than how you pay your employees. Right? And so, where can you find it as well? airbase.com, A I R B A S E.com. One thing that I will say, selfishly, even if you don’t want to purchase the software and you don’t think it’s value-add which I would strongly, I’m a biased opinion now, but I wasn’t a biased opinion eight months ago.

[00:35:10] I’ll tell you that it is, it will benefit your finance org at every stage. You will save time closing your books, you will save time hiring that next AP staff accountant to close your books. You also have more insights driven across your org to the leader to own the program spend within, within the system, but what I will say selfishly from your end is, is to, is to join Off the Ledger, which is our community of over 3000+ finance professionals.

[00:35:36] Aneal Vallurupalli: You can learn everything on there as to what does Airbase do, but actually more importantly, “Hey, I have this question, how do I handle this one employee in this state and payroll, and, blah, blah, blah,” you can throw the question out there on Off the Ledger, and that’s one thing that I’ve always found is very helpful, is how, you know, back in the day, 10 years ago, it wasn’t easy to ask a question in our expertise. Now we’ve literally, with collaboration softwares out there and, and communities and orgs and forums, we’ve kind of democratized the ability to get information quickly. And so, join the Off the Ledger, check out airbase.com, and we’d love to have you.

[00:36:13] Joe Michalowski: Spoken like a person who has his own podcast, for sure. You have that teed up, ready to go to anyone. When you go to airbase.com, please listen to Aneal’s podcast as well, talking to a lot of finance leaders. Fast. So Aneal, thank you again for taking the time, learned a lot in this conversation. I think there’s a lot of really valuable takeaways that, you know, we can start putting out to people, get people to listen to the episode.

[00:36:35] So I, it was really great having you on the Role Forward and hope we can do it again sometime in the future. 

[00:36:40] Aneal Vallurupalli: Joe, I appreciate it, and, Joe, thank you for having me, and y’all building an awesome product as well at Mosaic. 

[00:36:47] Joe Michalowski: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.