Jarad Backlund is VP of FP&A at JFrog, a DevOps platform streamlining software development and delivery. In this episode Jarad provides frank insights and lessons from over 18 years of experience in FP&A spanning Apple, Google, and Facebook (as well as at bootstrapped startups). From overseeing multi-billion dollar capital projects to leading finance at cutting edge startups, he reveals his secrets to building top quality FP&A teams, bringing strategic insights and creating a builder mentality.
In this episode:
- My journey from failing as an architectural major to FANG FP&A
- Canned reports vs the ability to create new processes and systems
- Facing an “impossible” project at Facebook/Meta
- The skill needed to win an interview for FP&A at a FANG company
- From Bootstrapped FP&A to billion dollar companies
- Raising the cap on Apple Care Products helping it become a $2billion+ business
- Clean data and analytics
- LLMs contextual awareness and FP&A
- Skills and education in the age of AI
- Becoming a builder in finance
- How VLookUp almost cost me a job
Connect with Jarad Backlund: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaradbacklund/
Full blog post and transcript
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to FP&A Today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. And today on the show, we’re thrilled to welcome Jarad Backlund, the Vice President of FP&A at JFrog. JFrog is a DevOps platform that streamlined software development and delivery by managing, securing, and automating the software supply chain. Jarad is a seasoned finance leader with over 18 years of experience spanning iconic companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. Known as a builder and innovator. Jared has a knack for creating scalable systems and processes that drive financial rigor and operational efficiency. From overseeing multi-billion dollar capital projects to leading finance at cutting edge startups, his career exemplifies the perfect balance of strategic insight and hands-on execution. Currently, he’s leveraging his expertise in analytics and automation to revolutionize financial planning and analysis in the SaaS world. Let’s dive into Jared’s incredible journey and learn from his unique perspective on the future of fp and a. Jared, welcome to the show.
Jarad Backlund:
Thank you. Go. I appreciate you having me.
Glenn Hopper:
I love your background, and I, I, I kind of just wanna dive straight into it, so maybe, I know I kind of, I read through and and gave that intro there, but in your own words, could you maybe walk us through your career journey? You know, going back to starting in finance at National Semiconductor all the way, all the way up to your current role.
Jarad Backlund:
Sure. I’ll go even further back. I was a failed architecture major. My mom is an artist, my dad’s an accountant, and I decided to try and pick somewhere in between. And turns out I was awful at it. And after almost plunking out architecture, I, I looked around and I said, Hey, look at all my business major friends. They’re tan and then they have Fridays off. So I went over to business and just kind of picked finance. I was always good at math and so didn’t really know what a financial analyst was. So coming outta college, I had some interesting internships working for the state, making databases and training people. So very different jobs. And so I got a job finally. It took me a while at a place called National Semiconductor. And what was great about that was they had a rotation program. So if you don’t know anything other than being good at Excel, which is what I was good at you, they taught you how to be a financial analyst, how to budget.
And this is back when fp a and accounting were kind of the same job. So I’m booking accruals, I’m doing balance sheet recons, I’m doing SOX controls, that’s coming out. And at the same time I’m budgeting and doing a OP and all those things. So I think like a lot of people in Silicon Valley had been around a while. Uh, I started somewhere in the semiconductor world or Cisco or something like that. And then, you know, at 22, 25, I got tired of knowing the guy across the cube from me with five kids was getting fired tomorrow. ’cause it’s just in a, a shrinking company. And <laugh>, I just vowed to not work in a place that was shrinking. And I had a couple offers and I, I can’t tell you, it actually wasn’t a no-brainer. Uh, there was actually better job offers than the one Apple gave me, but I was like, Apple had just come out with the iPhone and that seemed good.
And, uh, the iPod of course had just come out. So I went over there and then I’ve never seen growth like it, it was just outstanding. I, I always say it was like trying to keep a train on the tracks. And so, you know, I think I went from a junior IC to a team of 10 within five years, and it was just all being in the right place at the right time and supported their call centers and then their extended warranty product. And then rolled up the p and l and balance sheet for the service supply chain and put me in rooms with a lot of, uh, big executives. And, you know, when Tim Cook was the COO and that was always a lot of fun. And then started getting my MBA up at Berkeley. And I, I just wanted a different cultural experience.
So all my friends at Google were happy. Uh, I don’t know if I was happy. I was working hard. And so I went over there and did some FP&A for them and worked in their G&A and that’s when they became Alphabet. So Ruth Porat came on board and being around HR and benefits and finance was just interesting, especially at that time as we were becoming a very different company. And then I went over into emerging products and I, I think I started with one, I ended with 18 within about a year. And you know, it was just the place where we had a cell phone company. Uh, we had government projects, we had all kinds of things. So that was just a ton of exposure to almost like startups within a big company. And then Facebook called, and they had an impossible project.
They needed to scale a system and some processes, and they were going from spending a couple billion in CapEx to, I don’t know, call it eight or nine figures or something like that. I, sorry, more than that. It’d be, uh, like 11 figures <laugh> in, in CapEx and racks and servers. And so went over there and, and I remember I asked the guy who hired me, you know, why did it take so long to decide? He said, I didn’t think you could make it. And I said, me, he said, anybody, I thought this job was impossible and you did it <laugh>. He was very proud of me. It was a very weird moment. Um, but that was really, you know, you talked about scaling kind of my place where I went, okay, this is what I wanna do. And then, uh, and then the pandemic hit and I’ve got a couple young kids at home.
My wife’s a nurse, so she’s going through all the things that you went through as a medical professional before there were vaccines. And, you know, I, I just decided, hey, now’s the time to go jump into a startup. And so I went to a very small startup that I think I was employee number, like 10 or something like that. And we grew up to 50 people. Um, so I ran all kinds of things. I ran ops and HR and I mean, there wasn’t anything. So IT, legal, finance, you name it, real estate. Um, and even ran sales and marketing for a little bit. Came up with like an enterprise product with our head of product. It was a lot of fun. Sold that to a few people. So got to sell a few things. And then that company just didn’t quite hit our stride, you know, came outta the pandemic and, and didn’t quite get the next round of funding.
So then took a little time and went to work for another startup, was a CFO at a place called Skylo Technologies that does basically a telecom network with satellites. And it was just fascinating. I’d, I’d run a cell phone company before, so I knew a lot about telecom and I built three billing systems just in my career. And so I knew how to build billings and those are the two things they needed <laugh>. So when I knew something, got that, and then we had to raise money. And so we raised, uh, that was the other thing I, I wanted to do and had just been through that process, but unsuccessfully. And so wanted to go through it and be successful and had a great time growing that team and adding all the head of FP&A and things. And then an opportunity came up to go back to a public company a little bit, kind of small to medium cap, um, get back into SaaS, which I had done a bit before in my career. And just was a great opportunity to run FP&A and just tremendous boss, tremendous, uh, group of people to work with, really strong company. So it was kind of one of those things where I’d done my time as a startup, CFO realized that I wanted something a little bit bigger again. And Skylo Technologies is still doing an amazing job, but needed something for me, kind of a little bit different.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. I wanna dive in a little bit more on Facebook and, and Google and Apple, but before we do that, you know, you said something early on that, you know, just your first finance role, you were good at Excel, so they kind of stuck you in the role and, and then you kind of learn from there. The funny thing is, I think back on my own career and right after business school, I was a journalist before that, so I didn’t have the experience in finance and accounting and like you, you know, FP&A and controllership were still kind of linked together. But I really thought that the way I was able to move up very early in my career was I could use Excel. And I was, and I, I’d always joke, it’s Excel and PowerPoint. It’s like, I don’t know anything about business, but I can go crazy in Excel and PowerPoint.
But really if you look back at what that really meant was I could build the models and then in PowerPoint, that’s the storytelling part. Yeah. So when you take all the models and you convert them into telling a story, and it’s like, it’s funny watching as FP&A evolves, I sort of said that as a, as a self-deprecating, you know, way to, I don’t know how, the only reason I’m promoted is because I’m good at these. But it’s, it’s funny how those two have consistently contributed in the career. And I know, you know, storytelling, especially if you’re trying to raise money or when you’re trying to scale up and justify expenses and you have to explain these massive CapEx expenses, it’s as much about the models as it is conveying the message across too.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, I, uh, I couldn’t agree more. I’ll probably add a third one on there. And being good with people. And that goes all the way to communication and, and just being likable too, you know, it’s part of your job in finances, I often don’t say yes. I often have to say no. And so you have to learn how to say that in a way that, you know, doesn’t burn down relationships, <laugh> and withdrawal too much from the relationship, uh, piggy bank, the old Carnegie thing. But yeah, you’re spot on. And you know, I think a lot about, you know, if I were coming up today, you’re, you’re right. Like I didn’t know anything about a budget or Hyperion or any of the things I was supposed to know about, but I knew I was really good at Excel and I knew how to simplify it in a way that people understood it, right? Because a lot of people can add a dollar sign to things. That’s what I tell people. My job is a lot is I just add dollar signs to things, but be able to summarize it, being able to present it to a VC or board of directors or another exec so that they understand it ’cause they’re thinking about a thousand things like that, that becomes your superpower, right? And then you can kind of adapt to whatever business you’re working on.
Glenn Hopper:
But the other thing that is I think really stands out in looking at your progression through your career is being at those big companies and being there at these scaling moments. So what are the the most valuable lessons that you learn from being there, you know, scaling the teams and the processes and going very quickly from small sort of hypothetical and, and in theory to getting traction and, and taken off with these things.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, I, I’ve definitely been very lucky, and it’s been very, very fun to be a part of the ride. You know, I’ll come back to the same old basic kind of people process and systems, but the people side to me ended up being the most important because I found out not everybody likes to scale. Not everybody likes to change, not everybody wants to constantly trying to improve things. And so I learned pretty early on that when I would bring people onto the team or we would find new people to partner with, I had to find the right mindset too. And, and Apple, Google and Facebook got really good at screening for those people, but I, I found kind of some of those common characteristics of almost the main thing I used to interview for at Google and Facebook was dealing with ambiguity. Just this ability to walk in on a Monday, work your butt off for two nights, and then me come in Wednesday morning and say, we’re gonna throw all that away and start on a whole new project and not be pissed at me about that.
Right? And, and so finding people who thrived in those situations and finding out myself that that’s where I thrived, right? Some of it was just finding a match for who I was, as well as kind of being in the right place at the right time on the process side. Then it became about figuring out, okay, it’s not about designing the perfect process. You know, I have plenty of friends who work to places where the man, they get canned reports every month on forecast versus actual, they get headcount, it’s got dashboards and everything. And, and I don’t usually walk into a place that has that, and I see that as a good thing. And so when I design a process and even a system, I have to think about levers. I have to think about in a year or 2, 3, 5 years, what are the levers I have to be able to pull so that I can adapt this to wherever it is I’m going next, right?
Wherever the business is going next. And so that kind of became the mantra of trying to figure out and, and trying to frame for people, okay, how do I find the people who have the right mindset? How do I bring them on? How do I encourage them, develop them? And then how do I figure out how to develop a process that isn’t so rigid that I can’t grow with the business? Because at the end of the day, I’m trying to fuel the innovation here. And then from a system side, it’s finding tools that are the most flexible and, and being, you know, you can spend a year and a half putting in a giant FP&A planning tool, and maybe that’s the right thing to do for your company, but usually it’s not. Usually you need supplemental tools, or I’m a big fan of Gorilla Systems. Um, I would build my own analytics teams. I would kind of build my own systems from tools or from hiring people that can do those kinds of things. And, and that allowed me the flexibility on the system side. So really that flexibility and mindset process systems is how I thought about it. And it wasn’t always easy. You also gotta love it because you gotta work hard. Like it’s just a lot of long hours <laugh> just to get it done, you know, <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
Just thinking about, you know, going back to your first job at a, at a company that was shrinking and then being at these, at the big FANG companies and then being at a startup, maybe this is too open-ended a question, but I’m gonna throw it out anyway and see what you think. But compare and contrast, like sort of that, that first FP&A role that you had, and then being in a startup environment where whether you’re bootstrapping or whatever it is, you’re on a, you’re on a specific runway versus being somewhere like Meta where you’ve got this, you know, billions of dollar capital budget. What stands out distinctly from each of those? Or, you know, what, uh, or do you learn from each that you’re kind of able to apply what you take away from, from each situation to the next situation?
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think every time I interview somebody, their first, their first question to me when they, they LinkedIn stalked me is, you know, what was it like to be at these three places? But I actually think to your question, the more interesting part is like the journey within and the different size companies. So it changes at each of these companies too. So again, when I joined Apple, the group I was supporting spent a hundred million dollars a year within four, we’re spending 2 billion, you know, or something like that. And, and, you know, it was a couple million dollars of Google or billion dollars of Google. So we were looking after and, and all those things. And there’s two things, like, there’s some things that are in common, some things are different. So the things in common is that people equals politics and, and people are, uh, important everywhere.
And so no matter big or small, you’ve gotta navigate kind of working with people, influencing folks, um, bringing them good financial analysis, you know, playing that role of, uh, financial steward and helping them to play that role too, you know? And, and so those things don’t change. I don’t care how big you are, what does change is, uh, where you need to spend your time. So at a big place, you know, when you have a lot of resources, you’re worried about the really big swings, you’re worried about that contract with that vendor that’s half your spend and you’re trying to figure out how to shave a penny off of a, off of a rate or something like that. Like, so you spend most of your time and you point your team and your resources at that, right? And you win a couple of really big swings a year, and if you win those and everything else kind of takes care of itself, right?
And then you hire folks that can kind of run the process that keeps the ship lights on. And, and at a smaller place, to your point, it’s, it’s much different. It’s, you have to be so flexible because it’s literally like my CEOs would come in one day with new crazy idea that took millions of dollars we didn’t have and said, we need to pivot tomorrow. And it’s not, you have to have 10 meetings and a committee and a governance and six month project and a project plan. It’s no like, we’re gonna actually pivot the company within a week. Uh, I actually think that’s generous. Let’s give it till Friday <laugh> and let’s figure out the resourcing plan and all of those things. So, um, that one is about like, you gotta really know your numbers. Like at any part of our job in fp a you need to know the numbers, but like in that one, you’re talking people’s jobs here, you’re talking people’s livelihood.
You know, when you’re negotiating salary, it matters. When I’m making offers and I’m negotiating with you, and you asked me for an extra five grand at a startup, I’m really paying attention to that. The big company, you know, I may not even be involved in that. So I, I think it’s, you know, really getting into the details, knowing those numbers, living it day in and day out, and not putting in too much process, like just not worrying about it at a big, at a small company. They just don’t need it at a big company. It’s about, you know, what are the things that could break and go wrong and making sure you’ve got enough safeguards in place around that. And then trying to win a couple big swings a year, right? If you can bring a new system on, if you can bring a new insight or two, I always say one of my parting gifts from leaving Apple is it worked with a group to raise the price on one app Care plus products.
And, uh, because the margins weren’t good enough. And so I remember that whole conversation, and so I think that it was the right thing to do for the company, for the business at the time, but you know, those are one or two big swings that make you a couple billion dollars now, right? So those are the things you wanna win on. And, and so it’s just that mindset and, and, uh, the flexibility too. And, you know, at a startup when you’re raising money, it’s all about that, and there’s nothing else. You’re kind of single-minded focused. Um, at a big company it’s like, I’ve got 25 meetings back to back to back <laugh> talking about 25 different things, trying to context switch. So they’re all just different skill sets. You just gotta find what you like and kind of dive into it.
Glenn Hopper:
I think just having seen both sides of the coin, you sort of take positives from each of ’em. And also, so you’ve had, I’m sure, uh, at the bigger companies, access to much cooler software and, and tools that are built in and, and much better clean data and every, everything, um, versus at a startup where you’re, the data dictionary hadn’t even really been defined Oh,
Jarad Backlund:
A dictionary.
Glenn Hopper:
And the metrics are
Jarad Backlund:
That’s a good one. As if as if they’re dictionaries <laugh>. Yeah. Right. I wrote, I wrote a dictionary, <laugh>,
Glenn Hopper:
Source of truth. What’s, what’s truth? Me, me, I was a source of truth, <laugh>.
Jarad Backlund:
Now you’re spot on, like those big companies, I mean, everything’s custom. Oh, man. Like, so everything is built for you into your specifications, which is both terrible and amazing, right? So the hard part of it is you gotta know what you want and you gotta understand the details, and you’ve gotta lay it out and you’ve gotta design it. And you’ve got a, is it team who’s also talented and really good and has great ideas, so they wanna take what you wanna do, and they wanna put their spin on it because that’s their job too. And they’re very good, but they don’t know anything about finance or, or maybe they do, maybe they have got an MBA or they used to be in finance. And so finding ways to work with people to get the best outcome, you never do anything great alone. And what happens at a bigger company is there’s more people on the boat trying to get the thing done.
And, and there’s maybe less scope and broadness, but at the same time, like it’s, it’s all about, at a startup, it’s usually two to six people really getting a lot of really cool things done. And, and that’ll happen in different parts of the engineering will have that group and sales will have that group and, and you know, finance and g and a will have that group and the executive team, and, and so you’re all kind of doing these things together. But I, I think, uh, at Apple, Google and Facebook, it was great. I was definitely spoiled in that anything we wanted, we would just design. And then it’s just about prioritization. And so you could customize and build, I had a full front end and backend. This is, I mean, this is dating myself, but before Tableau really became a thing, we had our own version of a Tableau that I had someone build.
And he is just an outstanding developer, built us a full security system on the backend. Things you can buy now, but you couldn’t back in the day. And, you know, at Facebook, I mean, gosh, we had things we could produce like a board deck with a push of a button. Like, isn’t that cool? Like, you’re just like, wow, <laugh>. Like, I wish I had that today. I can’t tell you how long it takes me to make a board deck. Um, and it, and the data’s cleaner, and you’ve got it GCs and you’ve got people whose job it is to just maintain the data, and then you gotta a startup and you don’t even know if data’s turned on. Like, it took us a while to figure out we weren’t collecting any data. We’re like, no wonder we can’t analyze it. There’s nothing here, right? And <laugh>, so you’re walking through engineering being like, can you turn this on?
And, uh, you know, it’s two in the morning and you’re testing a billing transaction with your engineering guy in LA and you’re just, you’re having a good time just trying to have a, trying to figure it out. Um, you know, and, and then you get to kind of the place where I’m at now, and it’s kind of a mixture in between, right? Like it’s a fast growing company, and so the data is mostly clean and, and it gives you a chance to kind of put things on top of that, but, but most of the things you do aren’t customized. ’cause you know, who’s got that, you know, a hundred billion dollars budget that these big companies have, right? So you’re buying things outta the box, so you’re having to, having to be a little more, um, selective on kind of picking your tool and then flexible as you think about it. It,
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, and it’s, you know, we were talking before the show about data and analytics and how they’re really transformative. And I was thinking since we were talking about that, about, you know, we’ve been talking about digital transformation, I don’t for 30 years now, you know, it’s really, and as we move in ai, we’ve got
Jarad Backlund:
A cool name. It’s now called Digital Transformation and RPA and it’s got cooler acronyms now.
Glenn Hopper:
<laugh>. Yeah, yeah. <laugh>. What’s interesting to me now is I’ve been, you know, and we talked about this too, I, I’ve been a huge data guy for years. Like, once I sort of leaned into statistics and, um, started playing around with r and then, you know, that’s kind of a gateway drug into Python. And, and like you said, when Tableau came out, it’s like, wait a minute, now we can do some cooler stuff that we weren’t able to do before, and then whether Power BI or whatever, you know, whatever the platform is. But I’m, what’s interesting to me now is when we used to talk about digital transformation, it started in IT, and it was, I felt like, at least in, in the experiences I went through finance and accounting, the office of the CFO was barely even consulted or involved in this at all. And now in my day job, I’m actually, we are selling digital transformation and analytics to the CFO’s office.
And it’s because I think we, you know, sales and marketing, there was, like you mentioned data, like they were the early beneficiaries of some of the big breakthroughs in machine learning, because when everything was online, there was so much data and they actually had big data that we, they could work with versus finance and accounting. We had the gl and it’s like, we, we have nothing else <laugh>. So being able to kind of expand that and, and add other data to it that we’re able to work with. But I, I wanna get back to what you said though about clean data and great analytics, how transformative they are. And I wanna really focus that to the CFO’s office, and maybe you can tell me sort of the evolution that you’ve seen, and you’ve had the advantage at being at these big companies where they did have a lot of data.
So you saw the, you know, the power of data early, even before you came to a startup. So you, you kind of had a mold to follow when you came into the startup space. So I’m wondering, did you take from Apple, Google, Facebook, sort of some ideas, and then, so how do you now approach building analytics? I guess it’s, it’s two parts. It’s the, the collection and aggregation, sort of the processing of the data, and then the team, and then the tools that you use. I mean, you have to think about all that. So walk me through kind of what you learned and, and how you use that today.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, it’s an outstanding question. And, and to your point, it’s, it’s been a journey for those who have been on this road for a while. It’s, it’s certainly changed a lot. So I remember, just like you do, uh, when it was just financial data and you didn’t even think about, oh, let me pull in this metric, or let’s pull in this, and, and getting business data was really hard. And then there was that transformation where we started demanding, oh, you know what? I wanna see the sales in detail. I wanna see what you see. I want access to your data table. And then, then people start having data tables. So you could pull in right to your Tableau or to your power BI even into your cell, and you started being able to marry financial data with business data, and you talked about this early on, but you’re spot on.
Then the storytelling got easier and more fun, right? Before it was, I’m looking for that nugget of insight. Uh, you know, a couple years ago I did this, I did this, uh, interview. I think I was between roles and, and they wanted me to do like an analysis on some department spend or something like that. And I think I wrote them back and I said, great, can I have like some extra data? Because all I have is like a vendor name and some dollars, and like what I’m gonna produce for you, you could get, you know, at this point, you could get Excel to do it for you with an AI plugin, right? And so being able to marry in that business data, I remember when that happened, and that was really powerful. And then there became too much business data, then there became 450 columns, and you only need three of ’em.
But the genius was knowing which three that you needed. And <laugh>, that’s where I started adding value. You know, everywhere I’ve ever been, I’ve built an analytics team. I, I, again, I, I think it comes back to just how you’re wired, but I, I think, I think very operationally, and I think with analytics and, and the things I learned from the big companies I always take with me is you need a set of key metrics and you need the double click on that. So you need your KPIs, and you need your little exact dashboard. Even the nonprofit I do a ton of work with, we just made our kind of nine KPI dashboard for the board, right? And, and we have the metrics underneath it, but we don’t have any data people, we’re just kind of figuring it out. But like every organization needs some version of that.
And that’s what I think finance people are great at, is figuring out what are those nine or 18 metrics that really matter and, and how do they change over time? When you start building analytics team, it, it’s changed over the years. So to your point, engineers used to always live in engineering world, and they would take it all the way up until data’s clean and you put a front end tool like Tableau on it, and folks like you and I weren’t allowed to use SQL or Python or Power BI to even mess with things. I was not, we were not allowed <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s when Citizen Development kicks in and you’re like, I understand, I’m not allowed. And I, I hear you loud and clear, but, uh, <laugh>, guess what I’m doing on my laptop right
Jarad Backlund:
Now? <laugh>? Yeah. I’ll be honest. Yeah. Gorilla Systems, I remember I sat next to like, uh, Apple’s, I guess she was our corporate controller at the time, and I, I had lunch with her and, and she was asking me, what are you excited about? She’s putting a new system. I’m, yeah, I’m building these gorilla systems. And her face went white, and I was just like, oh, I should have told you about that. You’re like, okay, okay, <laugh>, um, <laugh>, I’m just kidding. I’m not doing that. You know? And it, and it’s become different. So the first time I built an analytics team, it was like, just to find, find someone who could get along with engineering so we could talk away into getting data, right? And trying to analyze transactions and things like that. Then it became about, I started to hire engineers, right? I started to hire data scientists, right?
I started to hire people that weren’t just report producers. And so you started, you know, going from left to right, from the, the person who’s the engineer actually doing it to the person who’s actually reporting on it. I, I would hire people all over the spectrum. And it wasn’t just this single person that’s analyst on the front end who can produce a report and tell a story. It was like the people who could put the whole package together. And that’s been very different. And, and even today, it’s, you know, you talk about tools in the last year, two years, like the introduction of AI and just kind of the flood the market with all these kind of FP&A or finance tools has made me think very differently. You know, I went to my team last year and I just said, systems are great. I’ve spent my career building and, and designing systems and, and making sure they work great, but we actually need to spend a bunch of little money on tools.
We need to try out a bunch of stuff because there’s so much stuff going on. You know, one of the startups I advise is a startup called Anchor, and they’ve been thinking about a couple different things, but what they’re focused on now is a, a go to market kind of FP&A agent, like someone to come alongside you and, and give you things like CAC and TCV top 20 and all those things that kind of the, you know, type of a sentence. And that did not exist six months ago, and it didn’t, you know, work as well as it did two months ago, right? Every month it gets better. And so the pace of transformation, I can’t spend 12 months putting in a new planning system all the time, right? I can’t wait. I can’t hope that one of these big companies or even mid-size companies is gonna develop the next great thing.
And, and so you need a great planning system, but you need to supplement it with these little tools, and you need to be trying all these new ones out. That’s the only way I think, to keep up with it. Now, we both talked about at the beginning about Excel being our superpower. Man, if I were starting today, I, I don’t, I don’t, everyone needs Excel, but I would, if I wanted to be in finance today, and I was 22 coming outta college, I’d be great at SQL and Python and r and I know Redshift and Power bi, and I would take some classes on communication and slide building and <laugh>, like I would think I would do some things. I’d take some MBA classes on building out and managing a business and how to do those things because finance, like our role is just evolved. We have to be much broader than we were. It’s not just about producing financials or sticking to a budget anymore. We, those are table stakes now. We’ve gotta know the business, understand it, have insights, provide a different point of view. Um, it’s a great place to be. It’s a more dynamic role than it’s ever been, but it’s also changed kind of what I need as a leader. Now on my team.
Glenn Hopper:
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I feel like financial analysts, we were the OG BI people, we were the, you know, we were the first analysts, but then we didn’t have the, the data that that sales and and marketing did. And so we kind of, we got caught flatfooted, I guess we didn’t evolve. And now I still have a debate with people in the fp and a community. I think that it, if, if I were starting a career right now, like you, it would be, I, I’m gonna get a, a master’s in finance and, uh, extensive study in data science and that I have seen some universities are now offering mm-hmm <affirmative>. An MBA with analytics, and I’m seeing more data science and statistics courses. But, you know, because I had to, before there was machine learning and compute and I had to come up through statistics. I’m, I really think that that’s your basis right there.
And then you go from statistics to machine learning to, to data, data science there. But with AI coming along and you look at, at, you know, copilot in, in mi, Microsoft copilot isn’t there yet, but you know, whatever, 13, 15 billion, however much they’ve invested at this point in between open AI and the, and the other AI companies they’ve invested in copilot is going to be all the stuff that we took such pride in our, our complex formulas, our nested if statements and everything, that’s all gonna go away because people are gonna be able to do that writing in natural language in English, or, you know, English becomes the new, uh, programming language or, you know, whatever your, your natural spoken language is. So the way that we stood out in the past by being good at building models in Excel is gonna stop differentiating us.
So we’re gonna have to, like, we have to know the right questions to ask. We have to have the domain expertise of finance so that we know the difference between EBITDA and, and net income and operating income and, you know, all the stuff that we have to know in ours. But we’re also gonna have to then know the basics of data science so that we know the questions to ask to analyze the data, because we’re gonna be able to do it. Python’s not gonna be a barrier to entry. Now it’s gonna, it’s gonna be great if you know Python, because then even if you’re getting an LLM to write code for you, you can QC your own code and you can give it better instructions if you know it. But I think our whole role is gonna change because, you know, you, you mentioned RPA and I think RPA was great.
It was a pain to set up. It was very rural based and all that, but with, with LLMs, they’re gonna have contextual awareness. And so whatever the, you know, the next flavor of RPA is, it’s not gonna, it’s gonna be much easier to set up because it’s gonna have this contextual understanding. So if you look at sort of these lower level sort of data entry, and then that first level of turning sort of data into information, that’s all gonna get chipped away. So where are we gonna, as finance professionals add value? And it’s gonna be adding that extra level of analysis that you have to have a, a, a data, you know, an analytics data science background to do.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, I, I think you’re spot on and I’d love to add a few things and then we can talk about where this thing is going or where we think it’s going. ’cause it’s, it’s fascinating there. It’s going through quite a transformation right now. I mean, just like accounting is as well, I’m watching that happen as well. But I, my old startup or analytics person put in a company called Mode and Mode answered my very simple questions that I would ping my controller for. Can you remind me what this invoice was for this vendor, right? Can you tell me what revenue was in October? Right? Just, just dumb things like that. And I realized, oh my gosh, like no longer do I have to ping my slack, ping my team on Slack, I’ll ping an AI bot and it will gimme all the answers I need.
You know, you talked about it, like the debate I hear among folks on my team is, you know, this has happened for a long time, but fp a and a lot of the cool things we do get outsourced, right? Like, it’s easier to get headcount if you’re in sales or marketing. So you hire sales ops and rev ops and marketing ops and, and those are cool jobs. I don’t know, I think if I were starting out today, I wonder if I might go that direction. I guess the difference is when you’re 22, you’re in finance, you’re sitting around a t table of executives and you’re watching and you’re learningfrom them, you get to see at the table at a very early age. So I actually think starting in finance is still really smart. I think about where the world’s going. To your point, everything I was great at, I, I think is, is gonna go away pretty soon, <laugh>.
And so, you know, I’ve been demoing some new planning systems, and I’ll tell you like they’ve got four or five different models for forecasting on spend and revenue that I think we’ll do just as well as probably I can. And I remember back at Google, they built revenue models and they pointed it at expenses. And this is 10 years ago, we could forecast it better than a team of a hundred fp a people just ’cause it was, it was easier to watch the trend. And now the, the ML models are just stronger. They’re just better. These aren’t time series like, you know, simple linear trends anymore. There’s some really cool stuff. And as I hire data scientists to kind of supplement who don’t know anything about finance, they find me better insights <laugh> because yeah, because again, they know the data, to your point. Like they have that point of view.
And so as a leader, I think a lot about, you know, when most of my friends who grew up as software engineers started in English or philosophy back before they had majors, right? So all my friends taught themselves how to code my, my 11-year-old knows more code than, uh, I think a lot of us did who took CPAs bus outta outta college in <laugh>, you know, high school. And it’s just fascinating to me. So when I think about finance, one of the things we do really well, one, we story tell, but two, we’re one of that groups that can see the biggest picture, right? We can take a step back and we can take this unbiased point of view and say, I’m gonna think about this with the big, big company picture in mind. I’m gonna look at that. And so the folks who can be creative in the questions they ask, the folks who understand how business in general works, who can look across all the groups and connect all the dots, I think that becomes the new superpower.
I I don’t think you have to be as great at building models or building a chart or doing those things there. There’ll be room for that, but that’ll go away and get automated for the most part. So then it becomes about how do I take the same set of data that all these people have access to and come up with a better insight? And that, that to me is more creative, that’s more artsy, that’s really flexing kind of that right side of your brain, which is fun. I, I think has been maybe missing from finance for a long time.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, uh, what’s gonna be interesting is, you know, there’s sort of this, we’ve always had this notion of paying your dues, like, well, you’ve gotta do the data, you’ve gotta do the low level stuff so that you really, really deeply understand it. And I, I don’t, I don’t refute that, but I also think that <laugh> I think back, this is dating myself a lot, but you know, Excel was around, I’m not quite that old Lotus 1, 2, 3,
Jarad Backlund:
Is that what you’re gonna tell about?
Glenn Hopper:
But I had, uh, several professors who made us, we couldn’t use Excel, we had to use financial calculators. They really wanted you to get to know how to do the net present value and do all the things in the financial calculators. And it’s like, I don’t, looking back, that didn’t make me understand it anymore. And when it was so much, it just took so much more time than if I could just put the formulas in Excel. And I think so, you know, I, I said I wasn’t gonna refute the idea that, well, you have to really know these sort of basic things, but if you understand them conceptually, that’s the thing with the human brain versus ai, you don’t have to go through a million reps to get it to understand what’s happening. And then you can start providing value just ’cause you, you understand what, what’s, uh, going on there.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, and maybe I’d ask you a question like, don’t you think if you were, let’s say, let’s say one of your kids came to you, and I think about this all the time. I have an eight and 11-year-old boy, and the other day my 8-year-old came to me and said, Hey, how do I calculate this thing has a 20% off, I wanna buy it. How much does it cost? And so I taught him and I taught him with a piece of paper and a pencil, and he is like, why are you doing this? Why wouldn’t you use your calculator? I’m like, well, son, it’s good to know. And it, no, it’s not good to know. Like you don’t need to know. So maybe question for you is, don’t you think, or maybe how would you design it of couldn’t you educate and build a different education for these folks?
Like, think about, like, I, one of the things that made me matter early on is they would hire us in cohorts of like six people every six months that not only created a bond, but they actually put us through education classes. They taught us accounting. I didn’t know anything about accounting. They taught us how to use Excel. I, I actually taught Excel classes. That was one of my early things that I was good at. And couldn’t you do that today? Like, and if you were to do that, wouldn’t you leave out all of these like sum ifs and you know, x lookups and everything? Wouldn’t you instead focus on here’s the simplistic of how a business model works and gross margin and all those things.
Glenn Hopper:
I mean, the crazy thing is though, like you have to ingrain that logic in there. So it’s almost like when they used to, they stopped doing this. I’m really, I’m getting into just full old man yelling at the clouds now, but we used to have to diagram sentences and we had like etymology classes and phonics and all, but diagramming sentences at least gave you the structure in, in, in phonics. I get, you know, all those things did too. So I think learning the language of coding in Excel or learning a coding language, I’m thinking back to some of the first, this might have even been high school, even pre-college, but the, the lessons that you learn coding requires a logic. And you have to remember, okay, I’m making a loop here. I have to be able to close this loop and, you know, four f and you know, for whatever in, in range, you know, so that you know what to put in the loop. So I wonder if there’s a way that you could teach the logic of it, but you don’t have to know the language. You just sort of know the, the structure of it. And, and that’s the focus. I think there’s a lot of things that we used to, you know, really pride, like being able to build a, a Black Scholes model and run that. It was like, that’s how you could show that you were, you know, knew your stuff. And yeah,
Jarad Backlund:
I got, I got a reward on that. I remember when 1 23 R came out, we paid one of the big four, I don’t want to guess which one, but I think I know which one. A lot of money and their model didn’t work, and I got it to work and, and they gave me like 250 bucks and they paid them like a hundred thousand dollars even though their model didn’t work, <laugh>. And I just thought, yeah, <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. So I don’t know. I mean, it’s like you need to have that domain expertise. So I don’t know, I don’t know where the balance is. It’s a, it’s, it’s
Jarad Backlund:
A hard thing. It’s, yeah, it’s a hard thing. But I just brought a data scientist into my team and, you know, had done an internship with us and doesn’t have background in finance at all. And so I find myself, you know, my youngest kid uses scratch, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that, but it’s like mm-hmm <affirmative>. It’s the intuitive way to learn how to program, right? So when I had to learn how to do c plus plus, it was the first thing I ever learned, and it was not easy. And here’s my kid dragging and dropping and learning the concepts of code construct. And so for the data scientist, he doesn’t know what gross margin is. So I pull out a pen and a whiteboard and I go, okay, here’s why it matters. And here’s those things, and smart person a lot smarter than I am picks it up in a second.
And you go, oh, okay. So as long as you learn the right concepts, right, it at least gives you a bit of a foundation. And, and so to your point, are people gonna come up that are this combo of data science and, and finance, right? The storyteller and the logical analyst? Or will there be people whose job will just be the storytelling and the interfacing and the business partnering, the decision support? And then will there be people who are more on the analyst side? I don’t know, like I, I saw accounting make that kind of split between technical and kind of operations and systems. Maybe fp a will make that split and, and maybe, maybe we won’t even own forecasting. Like maybe the system will do it and it’ll sit in accounting or something. I, I don’t know. Like it’s those things that we used to get all this value for. I just finished a OP, it was a lot of work. Um, you know, in five years, like maybe it’ll be a push of a button, you know? I don’t
Glenn Hopper:
Know. Yeah. And that’s actually, in thinking about that, where we continue to provide value. So I’m thinking, we talked about data and analytics, so we’re thinking more like classical and machine learning, but you know, you add generative AI now to it, and to me, generative AI is almost, it’s just a, a doorway in to be able to access without having to know Python and sql, A way to get to your data and a way to run these models just using natural language. And I see that really catching on and I do see it, it changing the way who’s able to access the data, what they’re able to do with it. If we, you know, we’ve been talking about democratization of data for about as long as we’ve been talking about digital transformation, but I think with generative ai, you’re actually gonna see democratization of data science. Again, people have to know the right questions to ask. They have to have the right kind of domain expertise to even know the difference. With your strong focus in data and analytics, I’m sure you’ve ventured a bit into beyond, you know, sort of the classical ai, but where do you see with sort of the developments now and all this talk about agents, where do you see AI having an impact and what it might do to areas like forecasting that we’ve talked a lot about, but even in process automation, going back to the RPA thing
Jarad Backlund:
Today, for the last, you know, 20 years, whenever I had an idea, I either go off and do the work or I bring together my team and say, Hey, can we do this work? Right? Let, let’s figure this out. What I’ve started to see with say, this AI agent from, from anchor that I mentioned, or some of the, the demos I’m seeing, they’re not there yet, but you can see this hope that all of a sudden you’ve got this person on your team who’s great at this stuff, who’s, who’s great at the analytics piece, but, but they don’t have all that finance context that you were talking about earlier. They don’t know that they haven’t sat in a room for 20 years and they haven’t worked till two in the morning trying to figure out how to make a, you know, budget file, you know, submitted in an SAP or whatever is broken for that day.
And so what you’re able to do, especially as a leader, but even I see how my analysts do this too, if you can ask it the right questions in the right order, then suddenly things that used to take two weeks for your team to pull together, you’re done in an an hour or two hours. So suddenly you can ask better and different questions. So right now, the way I think about it is, I think about how far can you click down. So you start now and you’re at a startup and you basically, you don’t have any data. So you’re, you start with a high level KPI and that’s all you got, <laugh>. It’s like, how many people do we hire this quarter? And then you go, well, well, I wanna cut that by location and, and p and l function. You realize, oh, like that’s not worth it.
Like there’s just, we hired three people. So like, uh, that’s great, great. We hired three people. Uh, you go to a big company, you hired a thousand people in that quarter. You’re Amazon, you hire 50,000 in a, in a week <laugh>. And you go, okay, well then suddenly the double click. It’s interesting. And so right now I, I find in finance things I used to be able to do in Excel, there’s too much data. So in some ways, like Excel is now this hindrance to me. I can’t pull things out and actually do things in Excel like I used to. ’cause it just breaks it. I have too much data now. So now I’ve gotta have these tools. Then right now I can go, let’s say two clicks down. I can start at, you know, gross margin and I can go click down, maybe two clicks down.
I wanna go five clicks down, right? I wanna trace it back to a deal. I wanna think about it from, you know, if I’m selling a phone at a cell phone company, I wanna trace that margin all the way back to the original po. I can’t do that today. And, and if I do, it’s a very long project and it’s all those things. I think that’s what these tools are gonna do. I think these tools will allow me, instead of going to, um, my group of sales fp and a folks and saying, Hey, can we look at kind of, um, you know, attainment or, you know, kind of contract distribution or industry or things like that, I can go, Hey, I want that. And then it’s done in five minutes and then I go, oh, great. Let me dream a little bigger here. And so suddenly, like again, the art becomes being able to ask great questions and being able to keep digging down until you find that insight that you can bring back. So you’re still in the same business of trying to find insights. You just have now more powerful tools to go deeper and deeper. And so you’re able to, I guess I’d say optimize more. You’re able to kind of bring forth and say, okay, I didn’t just show you a trend. Like I showed you how to change the trend and how the trend is gonna affect us in the next five years.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I love your drill down because that is the way we, you know, we think about dashboards and I do think about what you’ll be able to do with generative ai where, you know, in a dashboard you can click down a couple times, but, uh, there’s that, that problem solving methodology that is, uh, what is it? Ask, ask why five times to just really get down to the root. And if you could drill five times down in, in all these, in your dashboard or whatever, or have, have the system proactively do that for you. Mm-hmm. And identify that, I mean, I think that’s, you know, if I’d been telling you this five years ago that I was dreaming of that, you would say that’s farfetched. I don’t see it. But now with generative AI and the what it’s able to do, it’s like, yeah, we, we may be 24 months away from Absolutely. You know, systems that can really do this. So, yeah.
So I have a lot more I want to cover, but I guess I wanna run out this ground ball a little bit and then I, then I wanna come back to some more sort of strategy and decision making. Sure. Uh, kind of questions, but I’m so thinking about, you know, because you’ve run data and analytics pretty seriously with your teams and you see the value in it, and you kind of see the, the writing on the wall here, but looking at, so this is gonna be a two part question, I guess one, looking at where we are today and, and kind of reading the tea leaves, how different do you think fp and a teams will look in five years mm-hmm <affirmative>. And then, you know, how that, how kind of, how the roles and skills will evolve over that time. And we’ve touched a a bit on that, but I guess the second part of that question is, and, and this goes back to our, our education piece. If you’re hiring now and you’re like, I’m trying to hire people that are gonna be with me, <laugh> for the duration to ride this wave, what are you looking for? What skills are you looking for? You’re hiring for an fp and a position, but you’re trying to future proof it. And then, you know, maybe there’s, maybe there’s, you hire with these fundamental skills and then, you know, there’s gonna be re-skilling and upskilling over the next five years. Yeah,
Jarad Backlund:
And these are great questions on the first part. In five years, we’re a cautious bunch of folks, but I go back and I’ll go to the CFO job. So when I first started, every CFO came from what was then the big eight, no longer now the big four, and you were more of a controller, not even a technical accountant, I don’t think that had really come up, but you’re much more of kind of an ops finance person pulling together the, the financial statements and could explain it really well to a board and to the executives and, you know, would weigh in on things like m and a and debt equity ratios and things like that. So kind of very tried and true kind of, you know, accounting kind of very numbers focused. Then I started to see that evolve and I started to hire people out of investment banking, right?
So instead of hiring people who started in the big four and had some accounting and background, I started hiring people from Goldman Sachs and suddenly, like they had a different view on finance. They were thinking about valuation, and they were thinking about, um, funding. And, and here they are, they’re supporting, you know, uh, engineering team and, and they’re thinking about it from like an ROI perspective in a way that maybe those with the accounting background weren’t. And now I think what we’re gonna see is you’re gonna see folks probably like you and I kind of continue to march up the train. You know, I, I am one of a many of my friends who, who think this way who are gonna eventually be in charge in the next 10 to 15, 20 years. And suddenly you’re gonna see these, these teams become the source of truth for data, right?
And I, and I think they’re gonna have to figure out how to use that data to be amazing storytellers. I think if they’re gonna evolve, I think the brand that we should actually be pushing is storyteller. I’ve been thinking a lot about 25 and kind of what I want to do with my team, and I keep coming back to the what and the how and, and the what I think is gonna get more and more automated, more and more kind of data reporting. We gotta keep the data clean, but we’ll figure that out and, and other people are interested in that as well. And that’s actually becomes a big part of the job, is making sure the data’s right. And so then the what changes instead of the what, becoming 80% of your job, maybe that’s now 50% of your job, 40% of your job.
And the how starts to really matter. Now, I’ll tell you this, I’ve never met a 22-year-old who’s great at the how. And so, you know, matter who I’m hiring, I’m hiring people who are coachable. Right? You, to your point, it’s too hard to see, you know, I used to hire for people who had been there and done it before, and then after watching some of these giant companies scale and just realize that no one’s ever been here before. Right? And I think we’re in that moment when it comes to how fp and a and finance is evolving, where, I don’t know exactly we’re gonna need, I need someone who is data minded, who’s coachable, who, who does the how really? Well, who treats people well, who, who manages people? Well, finance people are usually terrible people managers. I mean, I, I think I had nine managers in my first two years, and I think it made me realize I just, I learned how to be a better people manager <laugh> and treat people well.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I mean, it’s straight Peter principle, right? Just because you’re very good at building spreadsheets and models and all that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna be good at managing people and without the training. It’s a, and also a lot of us, if we go into finance, it is kinda like engineers. We go into it because we like that heads down deep work where we would much rather just be lost in a spreadsheet all day or writing code or whatever it is all day than having to deal with somebody’s PTO issues or conflict, you know, across departments,
Jarad Backlund:
You’re spot on. And, and so I think when I hire today, I’m looking for folks who have more of an analytics background, like probably have a finance degree too. Um, though economics is pretty interesting, you know, especially when you hire outside the US or have global teams for most of my career, a lot of them like don’t have kind of a business, uh, undergrad with a finance. They might have accounting or they might have economics or statistics, and, and so they kind of have this mindset towards numbers and, and applying them towards a business, right? And, and then I think more and more in finding myself, once you find those people, then finding those who do the how pretty well, and, and it’s not always the same person. Like sometimes you’ve got this team of analysts who maybe I would never want to put in front of the, the group of people, uh, <laugh> to present something like it <laugh> it, to your point, they wanna be heads down and they don’t wanna be in front of that group of people. That’s not who they are. And I don’t need them to be that, but this version of my team that the people I hire, especially at the leadership level, like they’ve gotta be great storytellers and they’ve gotta treat people really well. And, and like, that becomes the defining thing I think of us. Right.
Glenn Hopper:
You know, kind of on that, uh, we, when we were talking before the show, you mentioned something that really resonated with me just because I’m, I feel like this is my same mindset and I think there are a lot of people, and there’s a, a place for these people as well, but you know, they would rather just build the reports, explain the reports, and they can do their storytelling and talk about the, the data and everything and be that just sort of deep understanding of, of the data, and they want to be the report person, which it’s hard to go from sort of having that expert deep level where you can talk about every cell in a spreadsheet to the strategy person or to the ops person. But you said you described yourself as a builder, and that really resonated with me, and it’s one of my <laugh>.
So as, as, uh, as we record this, 2024 is coming to a close or rolling into 2025, and one of the shifts I wanna make in 25 is I spent so much time in 24, I built a lot of courses, I’ve done a lot of lectures, a lot of, uh, podcasts, webinars and all that where I’m talking about this stuff, which is great. And, you know, hopefully it’s meeting some kind of need out there in the market, but what I’m championing at the bit to do is going back and building something again, which I have not spent as much time as I want to, and I’ve got a lot of prototypes and everything, but they all became kind of secondary to building. So I, you know, since you said that, tell me your approach to it and kind of what is it that excites you the most about creating systems, processes and, and putting everything in place to scale, because that’s almost like the combo CFO slash COO role, which I’ve, I’ve had a couple of positions where that was the case and those were very rewarding to me. And it sounds like you’re kind of in the, in the same mold there.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah, I, I definitely run those roles and especially at the startups played more of that function. And even officially at, at, uh, at Bright, you kind of just go through life and you don’t really know where you’re pointed. At least for me, I’m not super savvy about my career, think about those things. But at some point in my, in my life, I, I was going after a bigger job and it was kind of a long shot, but they came to me and I was like, sure, why not? And it just kept going. It was one of those things you just kept getting further and you’re like, oh, okay, this ought to be interesting. And it was just one of those jobs you’re just like, yeah, of course you would have to take this. And you’re like, but of course they’re not gonna hire me. And I just kept going <laugh>.
And as part of that, you know, I’ve had some wonderful mentors over the years and I still have some wonderful mentors and, um, trying to help out other people as well on, on my side, who are on their journey. But I had someone sit down and, and kind of said to me, you’ve gotta figure out what kind of CFO you wanna be. So it’s a CFO of a big public company. And it’s just like, you know, do you wanna be the operational CFO? Do you wanna be the strategic CFO? Do you wanna be the one who takes ’em public? Do you want to be the one that is there for a turnaround? Right? Do you wanna be more of like the p and e where you’re like, gonna go in and you’re gonna run this business, right? And you’re gonna have the most important seat at the table.
And so I sat down and I thought a lot about the experiences and, and to your point, what excited me the most, because it sounds like for you, what you’re doing is some reflection and going like, you know, Facebook had this great definition of a strength, so strength is something that you’re good at and you like to do. I find there are a lot of things I’m good at that people tell me I should do more of. <laugh> and Bosses is basically like, you’re great at it, you should do. I’m like, okay. And then it took me a while, it didn’t took me to get to Facebook to realize, oh, I, it’s okay if I also do things I like to do. Right? And, and so discovering that kind of word builder came from diving into that question my mentor gave me and working with my exec coach and just saying, okay, like, what would define the things I enjoy the most?
And when I look back my career, it was walking into back to that Facebook story. I love the impossible problem. My superpower is taking a bunch of really disparate data, a bunch of different points of view, and pulling it together into a vision and then rallying people behind it like that. That’s what I’m good at. And I happen to be pointing that at finance, right? But to your point, it has a lot to do with operations and thinking. And so I, I, I think it just came down to like, what gets me excited to get outta the bed in the morning, right? Here’s the piece that loves it. And, and probably in general, I’m a pretty, I like to keep moving. I’m a very busy person on purpose. One of my mentors called me a polymath. I didn’t know what that word meant. I had to look it up.
Uh, but I like to <laugh>. I like a lot of different things, and I’m good at a lot of different things. And, and, and that gives me even more joy. And so that, that’s really what it became, is I love the impossible problem. And scaling is that scaling is the art of the unknown. It is the, I have no idea. All I know is things are going up into the right. I have no idea how they’re gonna get there. I have no idea what the business is gonna have to do to get there. They’re gonna have to go into Kuala Lumpur and sell a bunch of something. Are they gonna have to start up a move our headquarters to, uh, you know, Australia? Like, who knows, right? But it’s gonna take something that we’ve never done before. And, and so, you know, my job is only as exciting as the businesses I support, right?
I work in finance and my function, like, I love serving people, I love serving teams, but you know, I wanna help a team that’s, and I wanna help a business that’s figuring out how to kind of go up and to the right and the unknown of that, and being able to solve the day in and day out problems. Like, that’s what excites me, right? Because it’s, I, I can’t look at a playbook. There isn’t no playbook. I always tell my team, I have a little, uh, have a little slide that I’ve compiled over the years that says how to work for Jared <laugh>, and it’s the good and the bad. I’ll tell you, here are the things that are gonna drive you crazy. And here are the things I’m good at and how to use me. And one of them is have a conversation with me.
Don’t send me a 14 page email. I I’m just not gonna read it. Like I, I will, but like, I won’t digest it the way I would if we had a 10 minute conversation. And so, to me, building’s a bit like that because it’s that ebb and flow of having a conversation, thinking through it as a group, and then picking a path and going after it. And, and those things I love to do. I love to brainstorm. I love to work as a group, and I have no problem making a decision. And, and so that to me is kind of building. And so when I found that out and I found that word, I thought, okay, I’m gonna point my life at this from a career perspective.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that’s great. I feel like we could go all day, but I do, I I, I should wrap it up here. Um, otherwise the, uh, producers are gonna start yelling at me for having another, uh, 90 minute podcast. You know, I guess if you’re, uh, what Joe Rogan or l Friedman or whatever, you just go and have these four hour podcasts, but maybe there’s a limit to, uh, <laugh> how much people will listen to fp and h.
Jarad Backlund:
Whatcha talking about
Glenn Hopper:
Just like Rogan Whatcha talking about Yeah. Sand’s the big bong or whatever, <laugh>, that’s not, oh, that’s not, not what that is behind you. Okay. And then the, uh, and I guess for Lex Friedman, I’d have to wear the, uh, the black suit and tie and all that, you know, the dressed like, uh, the Blues Brothers or whatever, <laugh>, like good reference <laugh>. I can’t let you go without asking our, our canned questions that we ask all the guests. So the first one is, what is something that people might not know about you that they couldn’t find? You know, just from, from Googling,
Jarad Backlund:
You might be able to find this with Google, but some, I got a couple boys, I mentioned eight and 11. My wife’s a pediatric nurse and we live in a, a place in, uh, south Bay in California and kind of the Silicon Valley. And it’s a town called Mountain View. And there are 542 homeless people. And, and that includes people. We have a lot of people living in recreational vehicles and cars. So we’ll call ’em traditionally unhoused during kind of a break between jobs, which is why I always encourage people to take a break between jobs. ’cause it allowed me to pursue some of this. But I met some of the nonprofits working around kind of helping with this problem, I guess. And, and the one that I spent a lot of time with is called United Effort Organization. And, uh, I think I’m on their, I think on the website with me as their CFO.
I’m on the board now too. And it’s just one of those things where you talk about scaling. You know, we, for the last three years, kind of started during the pandemic to help people find housing. And we were making 30 grand a year in fundraising, mostly grants. And this year we will raise 300,000, so we 10 x to money. And, you know, I talked a lot of, with my kids and my, and friends and mentees about like, you, you gotta use your gifts and talents more than just at your day job. And, and so this was an opportunity for me to not only be on the ground and be the hands and feet and helping people, but at the same time, like use my gifts and skills to be part of a team to do this. Like, it wasn’t all me, but I was part of that team and, and played kind of the money part of it.
And so it, it’s a ton of fun. We’re still volunteer driven. The only employees we have are people who are currently homeless or formerly homeless. I think we help 56 people kind of find housing this year. You know, that’s, that’s making a dent in that 5 42, right? And that’s up 50% year over year. And so we’re dreaming big. We just finished our 25 strategic plan and working on kind of the three year plan. But I tell you man, like that stuff, it just doesn’t feel like work. But it’s using the same skill sets I use all day long. I, I, I ran the process for our strategic plan at my company and, uh, and for the AOP, and then I, I ran it for kind of this nonprofit now, very different processes, <laugh>, they’re very different, very, very different time periods, commitments, all those things. But just finding that, that thing that gets you excited, that doesn’t feel like work, but use your gifts and talents to help people, like talk to my kids a lot about that. And I think it’s really important.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And that speaks so much to, you know, we’re all so busy and there’s enough day job work to do that you could work a hundred hours mm-hmm <affirmative>. Every week and still, still not be finished. Yep. And it’s being ambitious and wanting to exceed in, uh, the corporate world, you know, takes a lot out of you. But the fact that you’re able to get that work-life balance and be able to be there for your day job, for your family, and to be able to pursue something in the community like that, that’s, that’s commendable. It’s gotta be, I mean, there’s probably a, a book in there and, and how <laugh> and how to, you know, time management just to, you know, talk about how you do all those things.
Jarad Backlund:
Glen have a great support system. I have great therapist that’s helpful. <laugh>, I have a great exec coach, I have a wonderful wife. And, and you know, Glen, I don’t always do it well, but it’s one of those things too, I think by the, by the grace of God, you kind of just do what you can do and you show up and showing up is half of it. Like, that’s the other thing. You just gotta be there. Like, that’s so much parenting. One of my, uh, one my best friends, he’s having a kid and I’m super excited for him. And he, he’s just like, he calls me, uh, probably a month ago and he’s just like, I’m freaking out. I’m like, why? And he’s like, well, it’s coming close. I’m like, okay. And, and him and his wife are wildly successful at giant FANG companies. Both of them just crushing it.
And he’s like, what, what do I do? And I said, I don’t know. He’s like, well, I’m like, why do you think I need? He’s like, well, you’re a good dad. I’m like, yeah, ’cause I show up <laugh>. It’s like, that’s half the battle just being in the room, paying attention. Not on your phone, not like, on your computer not working. And, and so you talk about work life balance. I don’t know if any of us really have that. I think that’s such a personal thing, but at the same time, it’s being in the moment. You know, my wife talks a lot about it. She’s a nurse, like she’s a pediatric nurse. She screws up, like bad things happen. And so she has to be in the moment for eight to 12 hours a day. Like, that’s really hard to do. And then come home and be a mom. And mom’s always work harder than dads no matter what family you’re in. And so it’s just <laugh>. It just, it’s one of those things where I tell you it’s, you gotta find it though. Like, and I haven’t always been great at it. I, I will confess and say most of my career has been just working lots of hours and enjoying that and focused on those things. But you know, as, as you get a little older and you realize, like, again, how do you use your gifts and talents outside of just kind of your day job
Glenn Hopper:
Now? Everybody’s favorite question. I usually, um, I don’t know if you’re a a, a regular listener of the show, but usually I try to prep people. I did not prep you for this. I’m gonna ask you, uh, just, uh, <laugh> off the cuff. What is your favorite Excel function and why? Oh my gosh, <laugh>. Um,
Jarad Backlund:
Okay. Can I go old school here?
Glenn Hopper:
Okay, please do. Please do. Yeah,
Jarad Backlund:
<laugh>. So like, not too long ago, in an embarrassing amount of time, someone showed me X lookup and I was like, oh, this is really cool. And I’ll be honest, I refuse to use it because I was like, V lookup, I swear to God. And the reason, there’s two reasons that it’s like, I’d say there’s three reasons. V lookup is my favorite one. I’m old school and like I’m, I refuse to learn X lookup two, I took a interview during that time when I, when I got offered a job at Apple, I got offered a job at a different company. And what had happened is this big company had bought this little company and the little company was full of jerks. And the jerks, no one wanted to work with them. So they, they got rid of like six finance people in like a year. ’cause they just, they would, they would, they’d be like, I’m, I refuse to work with this person.
And I remember the question, one of the questions he asked me was, how does V lookup work? And I think I got it slightly wrong. And he is like, you said it so confidently, I still wanna make you a job offer. But I just remember, like, so I’ll never, I’ll never forget that moment. V lookup almost cost me a job, uh, <laugh>. And then third, it’s like, it was like the, it was the first formula. I remember teaching when I used to teach advanced Excel, where like people were like, oh, this is so helpful. And I just thought, okay, this is my claim to fame. I’m great at Excel and I’m gonna teach people v So that’s, that’s why
Glenn Hopper:
That’s so funny because I, uh, I was talking, I was at a CFO conference giving a, a presentation a a few weeks ago. And, um, I was talking after the presentation with a group of CFOs and, um, somebody said something about, uh, about vlookup and then everybody in the room saying, you’ve immediately dated yourself, which I never even realized. But the funny thing is, so I was a guest on fp and a today, long before I was the host of it. And that was my answer was vlookup. And now I realize it’s because I learned Excel in like the mid nineties.
Jarad Backlund:
Yeah,
Glenn Hopper:
That’s right. And it was the coolest thing ever back then.
Jarad Backlund:
It was the coolest thing.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And like you, it’s like, yeah, I get, there’s index match and,
Jarad Backlund:
And
Glenn Hopper:
All that. Who cares? I <laugh>. But also I was a CFO for 15 years, so you, you get out of doing a lot of the formulas and everything, so you, you know, it’s like, I don’t know. That’s what I used to use VLOOKUP all the time when I actually was in Excel all day every day. But, uh, it’s, uh, I did see, next time somebody asks me that, I don’t, I saw this somewhere online, but someone answered that question, merge and center, which just made me laugh. <laugh>, that’s,
Jarad Backlund:
I a right there. Just like, just, yeah. I love that merge and center. I really lazy. I, I use a lot of Count A still <laugh>. Yeah. Like, I dunno how many are here. <laugh>. Yeah. <laugh>.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s awesome. Yeah. Um, alright, so last question. If our listeners want to connect with you and, and follow you, what’s the best way for, uh, for people to reach out?
Jarad Backlund:
Oh, probably right now it’s probably LinkedIn. I think, uh, there’s some things I’ve been thinking about for next year. I think you and I talked about kind of before the show, but I, before we got on here, but I think LinkedIn’s probably the best place to find me. And I’ll be honest, I’m always down for a conversation. I, uh, been lucky enough to have a number of mentees who are now far surpassing me in their career, uh, achievements, which is wonderful. A lot of, uh, former mentees who started as accountants who are now CEOs of companies. And you’re like, wow, okay. Like, you’re way better than I am. Uh, <laugh> a lot smarter, a lot more talented. And uh,
Glenn Hopper:
Maybe they’ll, maybe they’ll flip the tables and hire you at some point. That’s <laugh>.
Jarad Backlund:
No, I’m always, I tell them, I, I said you’d anytime you wanna head janitor, you just call me. I’m right here. I’d be really good at that. <laugh>, I don’t know if I would wanna work for a former CFO. Would you? I don’t know. I don’t, yeah. Yeah. Good, good point. You’re doing it wrong. Oh, am I? Okay. <laugh>. Uh, but yeah, so I, I think find me on LinkedIn. My name’s spelled kind of interesting, so it wouldn’t be that hard to find.
Glenn Hopper:
Okay. And and we’ll, we’ll throw a link in the show notes too. So. Awesome. Uh, well, Jared, I really appreciate you coming on great conversation today and, uh, and, and thanks again. Thank
Jarad Backlund:
You Glen for having me. Appreciate it.
