Glenn speaks with Anna Talerico, the CEO of CFI, a powerhouse provider of training and productivity tools for finance and banking professionals (serving 2m finance professionals, offering 5,000 on-demand lessons and 200 courses) including the famous – including the famous Certified Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA®) accreditation. She is also CEO of Macabacus, a top enterprise productivity add-in on for finance teams.
In this episode:
- why anyone can be a world class financial analyst
- leveraging technology to democratize education at CFI.
- Giving finance leaders “Desk Ready Skills” from financial modelling to AI cryptocurrency and risk management (and what’s hot right now)
- CFI acquiring Macabacus and the opportunities and challenges of being a dual CEO over 2 companie
- How Excel remains the backbone of finance
- Are you losing sleep over the AI revolution in finance?
- Basics of coding in finance
- Best courses to stay relevant in finance and ride the wave of AI
Full transcript:
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to FP&A Today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper, and today I’m thrilled to welcome Anna Talerico, CEO of Corporate Finance Institute and Macabacus. Anna is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor with over two decades of experience leading high growth startups across finance, education, and software known for her expertise and go-to-market strategies, people development and building positive organizational cultures. Anna is passionate about leveraging technology to democratize education at CFI. She’s driving the mission to deliver world-class financial education to professionals around the globe. Anna’s leadership and vision have positioned her as a key voice in transforming health finance professionals, upskill and grow. Anna, welcome to the show.
Anna Talerico:
Glen, thank you so much for having me. I’m such a big fan of the podcast and of your work. I mean, you know, I gobble everything up that you write and your courses and your work, so I’m excited to be here and thanks for having me.
Glenn Hopper:
So thanks so much. And I love, I love how much you and I have gotten to talk lately, because I think, you know, when we first talked before, well, before we, uh, knew each other, I went and got the FMVA certification myself. So I’m a long, long time fan of CFI. So excited to finally have you on the show.
Anna Talerico:
I love it. And I have to use this moment then to share the story of how we got first connected. I was like looking at an AI panel, thinking about attending it. I was looking at who’s speaking, you were speaking on the panel, and I said, wow, here’s this AI and finance expert, and he’s in my home state of Tennessee. That’s, that’s really random. So I just reached out to connect with you, and then you said, wait, I’ve got the FMP from CFI. So that was very serendipitous, and I did, did, uh, start a great friendship and relationship.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s great. And I’m, I’m gonna say one thing on the FMVA because we, you know, all of our listeners, um, you know, there’s all kinds of certifications out there, and we, we’ll talk about this more later, but when I went and got the certification, I’d already been a CFO for over a decade. And for me it was, I came up through the FP&A ranks. And for me, when I was early in my career, I sort of prided myself on how, you know, as we all do and how well we can maneuver around Excel and all the stuff we could do. And I realized the longer I’d been the CFI, uh, the CFO, the I, the more I’d been removed from it. And I was so excited to dive back, back in. And I loved the way that the, uh, material was presented and getting back deep in it, and it made me feel like, all right, I got hands-on experience again, I can get back into these spreadsheets. So it was, uh, uh, really, really enjoyed doing that certification.
Anna Talerico:
Thank you. And, you know, I love all of our members, but I will say my favorite stories are the CFOs that come and take the FMVA because they’re the unlikely, right? You’ve been sitting in the seat, you’ve been having a successful career, but I think it just shows everybody’s got new skills to develop or brush up on. And so those are always my favorite stories.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s start with Corporate Finance Institute with the core mission of the organization and how it’s evolved to meet today’s finance professionals. And we talked a little bit, um, you know, before we, we came on about Excel is, is changing and, and sort of the technology that we’re using. But kind of, let’s go back to the basics here though, with CFIs core mission.
Anna Talerico:
Yeah, they, so we were founded in 2016 with this core mission originally that anyone could be a world class financial analyst. So we were really just focused on analysts and this idea of democratizing access to world class training. Um, historically in finance, you know, firms that we’re hiring were providing all the training, and that’s still done today on Wall Street and everything. Obviously you get the role and you go through training. Um, and one of our, our co-founders had been doing that training with, you know, all of the largest banks and Wall Street and really throughout the world. And, you know, I think there’s this, just this idea that, well, what about people who need to start with the skills already? And we started to see that trend even back in the mid, um, two thousands, uh, you know, 2015, 16 when we were founded that banks and, and firms and, you know, uh, organizations that were hiring finance professionals shifted from, we’re gonna train you on everything, you know, to, we expect you to have the skills.
So it was really great timing and that we started to see this trend shift anyway, but really started with if you wanna be a world class class financial analyst, you can be. And then over 2019, 2000, you know, 20, we started to introduce a lot more programs to serve just like a broader audience across finance. So today our mission is to help finance professionals advance their careers. It all comes back to, you know, advancing your career, working more effectively in the role that you’re in, uh, maybe shifting from one part of, you know, finance into another, but it’s really about helping finance professionals advance their career. Because our kind of guiding purpose, like our core belief is that anyone who wants to have a successful career in finance can, if they have the right support and knowledge and training. So that’s really kind of the, the core of CFI and why we were founded and what we believe in. Gotcha.
Glenn Hopper:
And I’ll tell you what I, to to your point, you know, I, I have an MBA and a master’s in finance, and in both of those, you know, we, we used Excel and we, we used the, in, in, in different tools in, in different courses as well, but we didn’t talk a lot about sort of the mechanics of the formulas in Excel and everything. So it was for me, and for a lot of people, I, it’s, you come to that first job and, and like you said, there’s training there, but there’s also sort of the informal training that goes on when you, you’re just working with a lot of other people that are using the same tools and they teach you those shortcuts and everything. But that, that’s a shortcoming, I think in the educational programs. It is great that you guys are able to come in and focus that.
And I think as the, the sort of, the technology has changed, you can’t train people on every tool that’s out there, but the shifting requirements and, and what people do and, and, and I’m thinking of all the traditional historic courses that you’ve done in a new era of maybe Python being incorporated into Excel and, and copilot maybe getting more and more powerful as you would expect in the, in the coming years. It’s gonna be interesting to see how those very same courses change to meet the new technology. And I would imagine that, yeah, maybe there are some things that are automated, but there’s also gonna be so many more powerful things that you can do. So I can see a whole new slew of courses coming around that.
Anna Talerico:
Totally. Because we have to train on the tools that people need when they hit the desk. And I, I use this phrase to your point about like, you learn certain things in school, but maybe they’re not the most practical or like applicable things, but we use this phrase, desk ready skills. So when you sit down, you’re ready because it is different than the theory that you learn in school or might learn. I think the other thing, to your point of like you, things that you learn on the job, the world’s so different now. So many people are working hybrid, even in finance that, you know, maybe, you know, 10 years ago you could turn to the person sitting next to you and tap them on the shoulder and ask them, or they might give you feedback in the moment. And now with everybody distributed, you get less of that.
So how can we kind of, how do we fill that gap that you don’t have somebody to turn to and tap them on the shoulder and ask them for help or advice on how to do something? So we think a lot about that kind of like desk ready skills and knowledge. I, I’ve always, um, I I, my secret is when I can’t sleep at night, I’m on Reddit and all the, you know, you always see somebody every day is like, ah, I have to build a model and it’s my first job and I’ve never done it, and I don’t even know where to start. And it’s like, we wanna fill that gap for people for sure.
Glenn Hopper:
There’s another, uh, certification you guys do, which is, uh, near and dear to, to, to my heart as well. There’s the building the model, and there’s the FMBA and the basic stuff. But as the landscape has changed, and I, and I’m thinking in particular about data and automation and, and technology out there, but you guys have also expanded. So it’s not just the, the sort of excel and sort of basic model building skills, but you guys have some other offerings now. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the other programs that CFI offers?
Anna Talerico:
Yeah, we started with that flagship FMVA, and then again, about three or four years after we founded, we started introducing new programs. So we’ve now today got six certifications, and our business intelligence data analytics is, is probably our second most popular because that core FMVA customer really is interested in, in what we call the beta, um, skills and, and needs those skills too. But we have, you know, programs and commercial banking and capital markets, so really a wide swath. And then we have 12 specializations, which are the secret sauce to like learning something super concentrated and specific that will help advance your career. We think about those as kind of career accelerators, and we’ve got 12 today, but a whole bunch coming in the new year that I’m super excited about. So if you look at something like our beta certification, that business intelligence, data analytics, we also have specialization.
So maybe if you don’t have a few months to, you know, over the course of a few months to, to tackle something like the certification, well, you can spend a month getting really deep into a sub-segment of that beta certification and learning something really specific. So I love the specializations because they’re shorter, super specific and concentrated, but we kind of view it as there’s a wide swath of skills that people need today, right? It’s not enough to just kind of know those evergreen things that you need to know. You need to know about AI and finance and the new tools, like any new evolution of things like Python, but you also might need to know about cryptocurrency, or you might need to know about ESG. And so we wanna kind fill all of that knowledge gap because the one thing that we do know is you can’t just rely on those fundamental skills. You’ve gotta kind of push your own knowledge and skillset.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. So I know you guys just rolled out, and I guess this would be an example of one of the specializations, but the new risk as risk assessment.
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. Risk management, which actually
Glenn Hopper:
Have a course in a risk management. Yeah.
Anna Talerico:
Risk management. We actually just launched that this week, and that will probably turn into a certification as well at some point, because risk management’s a really good example of, yes, there are risk management roles in finance across, you know, everything from, from banking to fp and a, but today everybody needs to know the core concepts of risk management. So it’s a really good example of something we think every finance professional should be taking that specialization, not just risk management, you know, professionals. So it’s a really good example of that type of content where as things evolve and adapt, you’ve gotta know these things. I mean, the AI courses are a really good example, even, you know, if you’re not going to adopt ai, which I think is, is foolish at this point, you’ve gotta at least understand what are people doing in your, you know, roles with this so you understand what the new normal is and how you can, you know, yes, of course you, and I think we should be leveraging these things, uh, you know, but even if you’re not gonna, you’ve gotta understand what’s happening.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, yeah. And I do, I wanna come back to that, but I, this is, when I was looking at the questions I had prepared for this episode, I, I could tell where my head was when, when we talked the first time, because I think it’s, I, I think I only recently realized that not only are you the CEO of CFI, but there’s also the Mac abacus piece. Yeah. And to me, I, while it, while they’re complimentary, there are two very distinct businesses, so it to, to my mind, I just can’t get over. This feels like two full-time jobs. So I guess I want to talk a little bit about first from sort of CFIs, uh, approach here. So walk me through the rationale of CI, um, acquiring Mac Abacus and how it sort of compliments CFIs offerings.
Anna Talerico:
Oh, I love this one because Macabacus is like, I have two children. C iba, right? <laugh>, yeah, soba, I think it was in, I wanna say 2020. But it is a Microsoft add-in for productivity and brand compliance. And what it does fundamentally, is it just for somebody that’s like living in Excel all day, it’s saving that person hours a week. I mean, at a minimum, our customers are telling us it’s saving them, you know, four to six hours a week and drastically reduces errors and mistakes and things like that. So it’s an enterprise product today, but it got its start as a tool that individuals used, right? Like it started because our, our founder of MEbA, who’s still with us at CFI today, he was working in banking. He was using a product called Deal Maven. It got acquired, he didn’t have access to it at work anymore.
So he said, I have to build this, I can’t work without this. So he started it as like a replacement tool for something he was using. And then it just, you know, he started sharing it, it got wildly popular with individuals who needed it. Um, so it started as an individual product. And then, you know, we, over the last few years, we really just continued to focus on serving the needs of the enterprise and organizations, but our core audience, our financial, uh, analysts and aspiring financial analysts, so the audience of people who know and passionately love Macabacus is a big portion of our CFI, um, audience. And so that was a big part of why did we wanna bring Macabacus into our family, was that we, in thinking about, you know, training financial analysts, we believe that analysts should be using tools like Macabacus, and we think that Macabacus is the best product on the market, of course.
So a big part of it was, you know, we’re training on the tools that are best in class and Macabacusis that, and we can make you a financial model, a great financial modeler, uh, without any tools, but why wouldn’t you wanna amplify your productivity and be even better? So that was a big part of why did we acquire MEbA, and it’s, to your point, as you mentioned, like a, a separate brand. Um, but we, you know, I think there’s a lot of overlap. We do a lot of just, you know, bringing the brands into the shared customer base, but at its core, we’re focused on financial modeling as like our core audience at CFI. And, um, although it’s an enterprise product today, you know, you can still go get Macabacus today a free trial online, you can buy it as an individual, and there’s just so much overlap there with the two, um, the two companies and the two audiences.
Glenn Hopper:
Gotcha. And I think I, I can’t figure out if this is a personal question or a CFI question <laugh>, because I, I’m, I’m thinking of like, you know, you as, as CEO, how you manage, but also, I mean, it’s important for the, for the, the company, but how do you balance maintaining, you know, maintaining brand integrity for CFI and MEbA as distinct in entities, but there’s also those opportunities where you’ve got the cross-promotion and the integration to kind of serve the, the shared, you know, finance focused or finance focused clientele. I mean, yeah.
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. That’s,
Glenn Hopper:
That’s gotta be an interesting balance system there.
Anna Talerico:
It’s, it’s, you know, on the personal side of your, the, the start of your question, I’ll say that balancing it has definitely been a challenge. It’s taken me a few years to get the balance just right. I, I use the, you know, I the analogy of children a lot in that just like, it’s sort of like having two kids. You love them both. You love them equally, but they’re different and they need different things. And the good thing though is like, one kid’s usually needy when the other’s not, and vice versa. So I would say my, like, the tension and where I’ve focused has definitely ebbed and flowed, and I’ve, I’ve often struggled with finding just the right balance, but this past year has been great. Like, we have a fantastic team for both brands and, you know, they really run like product and go to market or run separately.
So I think today the reason I’m able to strike the balance is just because of the fantastic teams we have for each of the brands on the more, you know, less personal side on just kind of like operating two brands. I do think about it like a family that serves the same audiences. And so we do, um, and we keep these brands separately. And again, like our product teams are separate. Our go-to-market teams are separate. We do a lot as, as a company, you know, we’ve got shared values and purpose and mission and things like that. Um, and we do a lot of things together, but we do a lot separate as well. And so what we do is we just look for opportunities where it makes sense to share and show the brands into the other customer bases. And a really good example is like, we’re the best trainers we think at CFI, right?
So when we acquired Macabacus, we created fantastic Macabacus training material, because that’s something that’s so core to our wheelhouse, but also, so it’s great for Macabacus customers, it’s got a nice benefit that it, it exposes CFI to the Macabacus customer base, right? Where they can see the quality of the training that we provide. And then on the other side, we’re always going to train a concept like in Excel, just straight up the way you need to know it. But then if there’s something that we’re training in Excel that you know, is made better by Macabacus, we’re gonna create a module about that. So it’s separate that you opt into, you’re not forced to learn Macabacus way, but we feel, you know, if there’s a better way, we wanna show it to you. So there’s a lot of things like that where we’re taking and leveraging, you know, we want want a financial analyst to know this great thing that they can do in Macabacus, even if we’re gonna show them the sort of non Macabacus way as well. And then we’re gonna do the best damn training we can for all of the MEbA customers. So we do a lot of like organic kind of exposure between the two brands. That’s
Glenn Hopper:
Great. And I think about, you know, just the, the commonalities between ’em and the, I feel like for both, you’re watching the exact sort of same technological advancements that are going on and, you know, you know, I mentioned, uh, copilot and like Python and Excel, and I’m sure those, I mean, whether it’s CFI or MEUs, they’re both, uh, you know, sort of the same technologies are gonna have similar impacts across both companies. But I was thinking with that, with all this tech advancing so rapidly, I mean, how do you see tools like, like copilot and maybe in Python and, and, and AI just in general, changing the way that you teach and support finance professionals? Yeah,
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. So what we’re, what we’re always gonna do, and we’re always gonna come back to, so that we don’t get caught up on every, every single little, you know, trend or thing, is we’re always gonna come back to this idea that what we do is teach the skills that people need on the job, the, the practical things that they have to have to sit down and feel confident at work. And well, I call those, you know, like sort of creating desk ready professionals or desk ready skills. And so that’s always gonna drive our curriculum. So we are very thoughtful and careful about, is there a need for training, right? Like Python, so clearly there’s a need for that and people are hungry for it, and that’s gonna help people work more effectively. It’s kind of similar, right? Again, you and I, I think, share a lot of the same philosophies around that, but if you look at something like, um, copilot, right?
First, it’s really still early days, like a lot of promises and big ideas that are just slowly coming to fruition. So we don’t look at that as a need today because first, not everybody even has access to it. And then it’s such early days that if we were trying to like chase some training, well, you can really get that from the Microsoft ecosystem. Like, what, what need would we really be serving? But that, we have to watch that carefully because there might be a need in the future, right? There might be some training that has to that where there’s a gap, but until everybody’s got copilot, until things are further along, it’s a place where we kind of sit back and we do a lot of, like, let’s watch and see before we kind of jump in this year, you know, as you know, uh, thanks to you we did a lot of AI training and content, because that is clearly a need that people have to, you know, if we’re gonna create a desk ready professional, they’ve gotta know these, you know, how, how to navigate, how to use it risks, and you know, how to kind of, um, leverage it as a tool that do it mindfully and correctly and thoughtfully.
So that was an example where maybe those first six months going back, you know, if we talk about 18 months ago, we were dabbling, we were doing a two or three minute video here or there. We were just watching and seeing, and then coming into this year was like, let’s go, you know, pedal down on the gas because people need to know this
Glenn Hopper:
Fp and a today is brought to you by Data Rails. The world’s number one fp and a solution Data rails is the artificial intelligence powered financial planning and analysis platform built for Excel users. That’s right, you can stay in Excel, but instead of facing hell for every budget month end close or forecast, you can enjoy a paradise of data consolidation, advanced visualization reporting and AI capabilities, plus game changing insights, giving you instant answers and your story created in seconds. Find out why more than a thousand finance teams use data Rails to uncover their company’s real story. Don’t replace Excel, embrace Excel, learn more@datarails.com.
I do a lot of courses. We were talking just before the show about this too. I do a lot of courses that are just high level, that’s talk in the abstract, but to what CFI does, it’s that, like, to your point, it’s desk ready. It’s, we’re, we’re not gonna talk high level. Yes, great. You need to understand that, but also how can you apply this today? So, um, what I’ve found in diving in and doing the courses for CFI at that deep level, and it’s really changed how I talk to business people right now, because e even if they’re not gonna pull, you know, if I’m talking to A CFO, the chances that A-A-C-F-O is gonna pull some spreadsheet out and go load it into a, an LLM and and do all this stuff, you know, themselves probably, you know, not super, super high. Some are, and, and some are having, you know, because you can, the whole, one of the whole points of the, these chat bots is in conversing with them in in natural languages. They can become like a, a partner that, that you’re yeah,
Anna Talerico:
Working
Glenn Hopper:
With. But, um, when while the CFO may not be the one who is actually doing that work, understanding what these LLMs can do and when to use them. So even for A CFO, if they’re not gonna go into that level of detail, if they see that level of detailing and open up ideas and then it, it’s important for them, for their departments anyway. So
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. You
Glenn Hopper:
Know, hopefully there’s, um, and I’m, it’s, it’s interesting when you talk to people when, because I’ve spent so much time, you know, just really deep in, in what we can do and really for CFI pushing the envelope in a lot of cases of where you should be able to do this, and then sort of waiting for the next version of, uh, chat GPT to come out or whatever and hope that it yeah, you know, has a little bit more compute or something. But it’s, uh, you know, but the truth is we were pushing the envelope, but we saw some amazing things that you can do with this, with these tools. So the classes are out there, but also on the other side, Mac Abacus, you guys have rolled some AI features into that. So you’re, you know, not just talking about it, but you’re also, um, deploying some of that. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done there and, and kind of, and maybe what you’ve learned from that, how you envision AI influencing other finance productivity tools and, you know, especially obviously our audience with the fp a community?
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. Yeah. And I should say, I gotta take, make a little plug that, uh, we we’re launching some cool things for CFI next year too, that I’m really excited about. Um, ’cause I think that, you know, AI changes training, to your point about just having a thought partner and things like that, you know, at the C level. But for MEbA, what we did right away, when, you know, we really was clear that AI for finance professionals was gonna, was not, wasn’t going anywhere. And this was part of the conversation. Um, and this was gonna evolve rapidly. We took this kind of like wait and see approach, but right away started r and d. I mean, I think we were starting r and d, you know, maybe it’s 28 months, you know, 24 months ago, 18 months ago, started r and d. But we’ve discarded a lot of things in that, and that, that is, because in finance and banking, the standards are so exacting, right?
You cannot have something that’s mostly reliable in our view, right? You can’t have something that’s somewhat predictable. So we’ve done a lot of experimenting and saying, Hmm, that’s not commercially ready, but that’s great and let’s put it on the shelf for right now. So what happened was we did launch an AI feature, a tool that I love, um, and, and what it’s called formulate. And essentially it’ll, you can put in a spreadsheet that’s got hard coded and it’ll turn the things that are hard coded that should be formulas into formulas. Now, this is not groundbreaking, right? And it’s, there’s like, let’s say an investment banker, though, it’s an annoying part of the job. They get these kinds of spreadsheets with hard codes all the time, right? So it’s maybe saving them 20 or 30 minutes, but it’s a really annoying 20 or 30 minutes, and it’s something that we can do with a high degree of accuracy.
So when we think about it in Macabacus, we’re thinking about what are rote things that are also annoying and time consuming, right? That, uh, people are having to do that we can do with AI in a, with a very, very high degree of accuracy. So that’s how we think about it. We’ve got a couple other things coming next year that I’m pretty excited about that are, you know, we’re pretty far along in development, but we’re gonna discard a lot of things because to us, we’ve got a really high standard of, of the expectation around this stuff for Macabacus for sure. Yeah. So that’s, you know, we’ve just a lot of experimentation and being willing to throw something away or put it on the shelf if it’s not quite right.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, I, it’s so funny when you were talking about the, uh, replacing the hard-coded values with the formula. I was thinking about early in my career when you were going through the budget process and you would intentionally strip out all the formulas and send the value, the vo the value only versions of the spreadsheet so that some knucklehead wouldn’t break your formula or whatever as they were going through and, uh, and all that. But then as someone, you know, and, and later in my career, especially when you receive it, you know what the formula is, and you, you’re like, ah, yeah,
Anna Talerico:
<laugh>, yep,
Glenn Hopper:
I’ve got values only here. So that’s actually, that is a, that is a thoughtful tool that is, uh, it’s built by someone obviously who’s been in that situation. So that’s great.
Anna Talerico:
<laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
Maybe now’s a good time to talk a little bit for, for users who aren’t familiar with it, could you explain a little bit more about what Mac Abacus is and how it, because I know we talked about, uh, using MEbA to sort of optimize workflows and, and the productivity gains, just like what you just referenced there. Can you walk us through the Mac Abacus product a little bit?
Anna Talerico:
Yeah, yeah. So it’s a Microsoft A in, so it works, um, you know, uh, in Excel, PowerPoint and Word, and it’s great for an individual who’s living in, in Excel all day that I, I’ll say again, we’re an enterprise product, so I have to talk about that. But I would just say that if you are working in Excel, you in with the, between the shortcuts and the things like that CAB is, is gonna save you tons of time. Um, and it’s gonna also help you reduce errors. And, you know, as we know in our roles, right, errors can be very costly and very big numbers. So just at its core, it’s a great time saver in terms of the shortcuts and things like that that you can do. It’s really though the real value is when teams and organizations use it, because now you’re talking about things like brand compliance, right?
And you’re talking about things like linking PowerPoint and Excel in a way that’s just best in class, you know, so you’re thinking about people that are making pitch decks and, you know, all these decks are going through, you know, investment bankers are, they’re doing that all day long. And now they’re not manually updating PowerPoints at midnight. They’re, you know, just clicking buttons and these things are automatically updated and refreshed and things like that. So with MEbA, it’s great on its own, and this is why we have such a loyal kind of customer base, but it’s real power is when whole teams and organizations are using it because of just the brand compliance and the linking and things like that. Yeah. And we think there’s other productivity tools that do things that are similar, but if you look at the MEbA feature set, like, it’s just so deep, it’s, I I often say it’s the only productivity tool that’s built for the desk and for the enterprise. So we’ve got like every enterprise feature that a customer needs, but if you look at that person that’s working every day, eight hours in Excel, it’s got everything and more that that person needs to.
Glenn Hopper:
And when you’re developing it out, do you, I mean, so obviously, you know, you’ve said it’s an enterprise product, but there are so many people who are just individual users. When you’re looking at product development and sort of mapping out what you’re doing with it next, do you, do you keep both of those in mind? Or is it more, okay, we’re an enterprise product, we have to focus there and the individual stuff will just kind of follow on? Or how do you, how do you approach the, the product development and evolution?
Anna Talerico:
That’s a great question. So, lucky for us, for the early years of MEbA, the team was really focused on individual users. So we have this existing super deep feature set for people, right? And then we started building on top of that the enterprise, what we call, I always like to say enterprise features itself, like the enterprise features that, you know, large organizations need. So this is why I feel like we are the, the only solution for the, for the desk and for the enterprise, because our foundation of our founding years, we’re all about the individual. So a lot of that doesn’t change. Now, we certainly things with like, formulate and doing some AI things, and when we’re constantly LEAs like leasing features that, that serve the individual, but they’re always gonna be through an enterprise lens at this point. So anything we do like, like a really good example is, you know, we’ve got this kind of like what, you know, you could call, think about it in investment banking, like a tombstone generator for example, creating shapes and like doing this at scale, that’s something that enterprise needs and for brand compliance and for like, having a large shared library of assets and PowerPoint, but it’s saving the individual hours and ensuring that they, you know, getting, they’re, they’re pulling the right assets.
So it’s a good example of today, like we’re gonna create an enterprise feature that a whole organization needs, but it’s still gonna impact the individual. But we certainly index to the enterprise today because that’s how we can impact more people. Um, and I just feel really lucky that those early years of MEbA, we did so much deep feature development for the individual.
Glenn Hopper:
I guess because of the evolution over time, it ends up being a unique way to develop an enterprise product where it’s really focused on the UI mean, yeah, if I were running any sort of SaaS tool or whatever, and thinking that I spent that much time thinking about the user and how they use it and solving their problems and then fit it into an enterprise solution, it’s like, well, that’s the best UX design, you know, and, and feature set and everything probably you could come up with
Anna Talerico:
Glen, you’re so right. And I feel, I feel so lucky to get to work with MEbA and, and have that as part of our, our, you know, family of brands because it is, first of all, I’ve never worked on something that has such incredible product market fit. Like when people use MEbA, they use it and they are loyal and they take it with them from job to job. You know, if you look at like our, when a customer downloads a a, a free trial, they open it up and start using it. They are going to buy like, it’s just kind of best in class best. But it was built like a product led meaning, you know, in the early days it was just this tiny team. And really our founder, Ryan McGregor was doing it off the side of his desk. He was still working in, in finance and banking.
So it was designed to be very self-service. So you could download it, you could buy it, you could get your support, your tr everything could be, you know, you would never have to interact with a human. And that’s called product led, you know, in Software today. And McCab has started as product led, and then we layered in the sales organization, we layered in the enterprise features. So like, I just feel like we get the best of both worlds and I feel it’s, we’re so lucky we don’t have to struggle with a lot of things that software companies have to struggle with. Um, you know, thanks in large part to Ryan and his, you know, his great work on creating an incredible product. Really.
Glenn Hopper:
I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole here,
Anna Talerico:
Okay,
Glenn Hopper:
Because I think, so CFI, Macabus data rails, there are so many companies out there who are, you know, they, they tie into Excel and Excel has been the backbone for years and years of all finance and, um, you know, it’s just, it’s ingrained in, uh, in finance departments just around the world. And it’s hard to picture that going away. But if I’m doing a SWOT analysis for CFI and Macabacus or, or data rails or, or so many other companies that are out there, I’m thinking about AI right now. And, and we’ve talked about this not in a non-interview setting as as well, and this is, I don’t know how long it’s gonna take, but Satya Nadella was talking about agents, uh, the other day. Everybody’s talking about agents right now, including me, which I’m, they’re fascinating and I think they’re gonna be the next thing.
But thinking about how everything we do right now, so think about all SaaS apps that are just, I don’t, NetSuite or any, any kind of ERP or whatever, they’re basically massive databases with a UX over ’em. They’re, you know, uh, they’re just, you know, create, read, update, delete databases with different bells and whistles added on and in, in that where you’re extracting data from databases and you need to manipulate it, it all comes into Excel. And, you know, there’s, the nature of how we’ve worked for 30 plus years is really been, you know, yes, there’s, uh, data that lives elsewhere. And yes, if you can do SQL queries and you know, there’s great things we can do there and there’s different front ends, but Excel is all in, in the background. But I’m thinking about with generative AI and how all, maybe, maybe all SaaS software, certainly ERPs and related to finance, it’s gonna change.
It’s not like whatever this backend structure and whatever the wrapper that’s on top of it, if you’ve got, you know, all these rules that your employees, like, think of an SOP for a task or for a, a, a job description and what people are doing, and we go into Excel right now, and, um, there’s a whole industry around being able to, to use Excel and, and, and things that tie into Excel. But with ai, you know, it potentially it’s gonna be, we’re not gonna have to write queries anymore. We’re not gonna have to do these formulas. We’ll just end natural language, you know, be able to query it, and it’s gonna be structured and unstructured data, and it’s gonna be, you know, we have to get to the place where things are, are fully integrated. But I wonder, do you think, I don’t, I mean, this is a <laugh>, do you think rock and roll is just a fad, <laugh> or <laugh>?
I mean, it’s, I I wonder how long it’s gonna be and, and I’m a terrible futurist and I I, with these questions Yeah. But I, I think if I’m looking at sort of our looking, what are our risks that are out there for, for kind of all everything that we do, this would be a full upheaval of the industry, but do you, you’re maybe not losing sleep at it yet, but do you, do you kind of think about what, whether it’s MEbA or or CFI or, or any of these, you know, or an if I’m a, if I’m an old SaaS ERP system, I mean, yeah. Do, do you have thoughts on how far out some sort of transition like that might be? Where does, or does it, or does copilot get so good that your interface is just like, you might as well be just in a chat box and not in the, uh, Excel <laugh>
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. World
Glenn Hopper:
That we all are used to? Yeah.
Anna Talerico:
<laugh> at some point, right? I think so. I, first of all, I’m a horrible futurist as well, so here we go. Well, two too bad futurists are pining. But here’s how I personally think about it and how it, it won’t keep me up at night, which is like, it is changing how we interact with software extract what we need, you know, how we approach tasks. Like, it’s not a question that that is gonna change. I think the thing is, is how long is it actually really gonna take? So CFI and Macabacus for me personally, as I think about, you know, as being an investor, like I think about you have to stay light on your feet. You have to be ready, you have to be curious, you have to be doing r and d. You have to be looking at things and thinking at any moment it could change, but the reality is these things are gonna take a long time, right?
And your product is going to evolve with it. So I might not know what that looks like today, but I can guarantee you that as, as we change how we interact with software, well, we’re gonna change how you interact with Macabacus too, right? Or if, if how people learn and get trained changes, well, we’re gonna adapt and evolve too. So I think you have to stay light on your feet, be ready for anything. But the pragmatic, the real, the realistic thing here is these things take a long time. I mean, I’m always shocked at people who have never used ai, have never even opened chat, GPT. Like, we look at the numbers and we think this is happening so fast, and it’s, you have to stay light on your feet, but it’s gonna take a long time. And an example that I think about is actually a non-finance example.
About a year and a half ago HubSpot did a demo of the AI things that they have been building. And I will never forget looking at this demo, thinking tomorrow the world’s changing. Because look at how you are no longer interacting with the interface of the software. You are basically interacting solely through chat and getting everything you need. Well, you know how many people I know that are using that HubSpot interface? None, <laugh>, everybody I know that works in HubSpot is working in a software just like they always have. Like there’s a lot of promise it’s absolutely gonna change, but like, these are such early days and the the, this is, it’s just not happening. I think at the pace people think, and yet it’s happening quickly, don’t get me wrong.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, yeah. And I guess here, and here’s the softball for you. Um, <laugh> <laugh> with everything going on. So for years, and when I was coming up in, in my career, this was certainly the case. Everybody, you know, the, the, the common wisdom was if you want to get ahead and stand out, and this is kind of how I sort of def tried to differentiate myself as a, as a finance person, but everybody used to say, learn coding. And now, and, but even I will say, so I, I, I do, I’m, I’m a terrible coder. I doesn’t stop me from doing it all the time, <laugh>, it just, I’m not as, yeah, I’m not very efficient at it, but I am much more efficient getting LLMs to write code for me. So a lot, I, I do hear a lot of people say, well, you don’t have to know how to code anymore.
The LLMs can just do it. But if you’re, if you don’t even know, if you’re not familiar with the kind of the basics of, of coding, you’re not gonna know if your, uh, loop, you know, if your for loop is, is <laugh> not closing or whatever, or whatever the, the case is, you, you know, and if you don’t know the syntax, so I, I still think that there’s an argument for learning coding, but if knowing sort of the environment and not knowing when, but sort of seeing the reading the tea leaves and seeing where technology’s going, what courses or tact with training would you recommend that a young or mid-career, or heck, even a, a senior career <laugh> finance professional, if they wanted to stay relevant and be able to kind of ride the wave of, of where we’re going with technology. What, what types of courses or what certification would you advise these, these people to take, to be sure, to ki to kind of future proof their careers?
Anna Talerico:
Yeah, yeah. So what I would enc always encourage people to do I, is to get curious and think about it as nobody’s coming to you with the knowledge, right? You’ve gotta experiment, you’ve gotta practice, you’ve gotta be curious. You’ve gotta look at lots of things. You’ve gotta start a course for 10 minutes and say, this isn’t it. You go try something else. You’ve gotta read an article, you’ve gotta play around. What really struck me when ai, you know, because of, ChatGPT really became part of our, the, the conversation that everybody was having, you know, professionally at work in all sectors. What struck me is that you instantly had this curious self-educating group that dove in immediately, right? And then you had these other people who were not curious and kind of sat back and had never even, let’s say, tried at. And I just think that the people that get propelled forward in their career are the curious people that explore, that teach themselves thing a thing.
So for me, it’s less about like, what course would I recommend? Because of course, like for finance professionals, I’m gonna recommend our AI courses, for example. Many of you, which, you know, you created that are fantastic. But I think bigger than that, it’s just, I think today as a professional, we can’t wait for others to, to teach us things or move us forward. We have to take that upon ourselves. And that means exploring, learning, teaching, getting curious, you know, skimming through a course or deep diving into a course. And I just go back to curiosity and creating this and, and empowering yourself as an individual. It’s so important. And to your point about, you know, you’ve gotta learn how to code. I, my, my son’s 26, and this is, by the way, when are things gonna change? It’s when the people that are in their twenties today are, you know, in their thirties because they’ve been working totally differently, right?
But my son, um, has, you know, built an app through help with chat GT’s help, but it’s not that he doesn’t have to put his fingers in the, and do the code too, right? It’s not that chat GT can’t build you an app, but it can teach you so much and it can generate so much code that it can get you to the point that if you’re a self learner and you’re curious, you can get there. So it’s like, to your point earlier, it’s about this thought partner, whether it’s a teaching partner, a thought partner, whatever it might be. But I just, I really encourage people to, like, you’ve gotta take it upon yourselves, get curious, drop any fear you’ve got, go get tools, play around, try things, and just continually being pushing, you know, your own skills and knowledge forward.
Glenn Hopper:
Well said. And you are definitely preaching to the choir with that <laugh>. So this has been great. And I do, we, I, I think I told you before the show, we have two, uh, two questions that we always end the episodes with. And the first is, um, and I, I’ve heard some pretty interesting things o over the, uh, times that I’ve, uh, um, asked this question host on the podcast. But first, uh, is what is something that most people don’t know about you? Maybe something that we couldn’t find quickly just by googling you real really quickly.
Anna Talerico:
I knew you were gonna ask me this, and I just was like, what am I gonna say? Because I think one thing that, that people will know from googling me is that I’m a really boring, open book <laugh>. I, um, my, my hobbies are my family and my work. Um, and I, I have two adult children. My, I’m so lucky that my husband and our kids were really close. So I am either working or with my family. I spend a lot of time working. I love working. Like, I think some people just like, they just love work and it’s not a burden or whatever. So I am really boring, you know, I, I, uh, I have very little, like, I was thinking, what would somebody not know about me? And there’s like, not a lot there. I’m pr <laugh> <laugh>, yeah. So I don’t have a great answer, unfortunately. <laugh>. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
It’s weird that you said that because my, uh, the subtitle of my latest book is Boring Open book. I don’t <laugh> and it’s not selling as well as I thought it would. <laugh> darn.
Anna Talerico:
Yeah. I mean, I have no extra skills, no hobbies. I mean, I do a lot of meditation and yoga, but that’s not really like a secret. Like <laugh>. So <laugh>,
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And our last question, and uh, I was told that, uh, my answer on this, ’cause I was on, I was the guest on the show before I was the host of the show. And, um, I, I said that my, my favorite, um, Excel feature was vlookup. And someone told me the other day that there’s no better way to date yourself <laugh> than by saying V look. Not even X lookup, not index Match, not, not <laugh> Power Query. Yeah. But V Lookup, it’s like, yeah, Mr. Nineties here, <laugh>. So with with that, uh, with, with that caveat, what is your favorite Excel feature and why?
Anna Talerico:
Well, I’m about to out myself here. Okay. Um, my favorite Excel feature is, uh, the, the Help. Um, so here’s my big expose. I’m really bad at Excel. I, um, I have like, it’s one of those things like, you appreciate art, but you’re not an artist or you like love music, but you can’t even, you know, touch a tambourine. I think that a beautiful Excel model is a work of art. My Excel skills are so bad that the number of times I’m using help and Microsoft help has gotten so good and I can’t wait for like co-pilot to get better because I can’t, you know, like I’ll be the number one user of co-piloting Excel. So there you have it. The truth is help is my number one, uh, favorite feature, <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
I love it. And when you said that somehow I immediately went to, when you mentioned copilot and help, I sa and, and maybe it’s because I’d already anchored myself by talking about the nineties. I want Clippy to come back. I want a useful clippy to be there, <laugh>. Well, you know what? That’s what I want copilot to be
Anna Talerico:
<laugh>. It’s so funny you say that because my answer was almost clippy, but then I’m like, I’m really dating myself and the users, probably the listeners won’t know what Clippy was. <laugh> so friendly. So yeah, I’m with you.
Glenn Hopper:
I guess finally, how can our listeners connect with you if they wanna, uh, learn more and reach out?
Anna Talerico:
Yeah, well LinkedIn’s a great way ’cause I’m usually on there, I’m responding and commenting, so find me on LinkedIn and then, you know, check out Corporate Finance Institute. It’s the longest domain you’ll ever type in <laugh>, so you gotta be careful there. But Corporate Finance Institute, MEbA. Um, but yeah, I think LinkedIn, I’m, I’m there, I’m responsive. And, um, love to connect with people.
Glenn Hopper:
Anna, thank you so much for coming on the show,
Anna Talerico:
Glen, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for, you know, we’re big fans of your podcast here, data Rails, I mean like everywhere you cannot, I mean, it’s just what an amazing story over the last couple years with Data Rails of just like how ubiquitous that’s becoming. So, um, we’re big fans of the podcast and big fans of ease. Thank you.
