This episode features an interview with Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO at Airbase, the only truly comprehensive spend management platform available to small and midsize companies. Aneal has spent more than five years in executive-level finance running companies such as Mattermost and Mapbox. He received his Bachelor of Science in Finance from Santa Clara University and is a member of the Forbes Finance Council. On this episode, Aneal addresses the impact that the pandemic had on the finance world, the importance of holistic data in finance, as well as how the current role of the CFO is changing.
This episode features an interview with Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO at Airbase, the only truly comprehensive spend management platform available to small and midsize companies.
Aneal has spent more than five years in executive-level finance running companies such as Mattermost and Mapbox. He received his Bachelor of Science in Finance from Santa Clara University and is a member of the Forbes Finance Council.
On this episode, Aneal addresses the impact that the pandemic had on the finance world, the importance of holistic data in finance, as well as how the current role of the CFO is changing.
Quotes
*“The really awesome part that I love, and something that I've kind of just embraced... is you know, we've all worked at businesses where we end up needing to build the support functions, FP&A, accounting, capital markets, stock administration, all these things for a company for which we may not be the ideal customer or the product for which the company builds. Well, at Airbase, we are fortunate enough to be a part of a business where we do have input into the product that's being built because we are the number one users. We are the groups that you're selling to at other businesses. And so that has been probably one of my biggest joys of being here.”
*“A few things changed right when the pandemic hit. Number one, you saw a big shift in the financial markets. You saw a big shift in terms of folks trying to understand, 'Is this here to stay? How long is this thing here to stay? Do we need to reconsider our operating plans that we had put in place?' Keep in mind, I think COVID hit around the March timeframe, right in 2020. Right around March, the majority of companies are already done with their annual planning and into their Q1. So, having to replan and retune their model and ultimately their plan for the year, many companies did that. And I don't claim to be an expert as a CFO, but I do claim to have really good people around me that I've seen a lot, that I can call upon, and that was one consistent thing that was occurring across my network was folks were double-clicking on the models that they had built on the assumptions that they had made for growth, for burn, and ensuring that the company could downside protect itself.”
*“Do I have conviction that being data-driven is a good investment for a company? I do have conviction about that. I think that there's a lot of merit to it. Because I think what it instills is the idea that from an early stage of a company you start paying attention to the metrics that drive success for your company. And in the long run, that means that you're able to build a higher predictability around your business. The managers around the company are paying attention to that data consistently and making decisions off of it. So that last part there is the most important piece.”
*“I think that the first thing finance needs to accept is the idea that they can be that agent of change, that catalyst for change at a business... And so I think one of the biggest things that finance leaders need to have conviction about is that they can help the company get to a better place when it comes to being data-driven. And it's not just a finance issue. Everyone else around the company is feeling it, but finance is in a unique position to actually steward that change and be a catalyst for it. And I think that once you accept that, then we become truly a strategic partner to the rest of the business in ways that a sales leader or a marketing leader, our go to market leader, a product leader will embrace finance versus just being the budget stewards.”
Time Stamps
*[01:32] Why Aneal got into finance
*[03:19] How the role of the CFO is changing
*[05:04] Operations at Airbase
*[08:34] Segment: Cash Crossroads
*[11:20] Adjusting business for the pandemic
*[14:58] Segment: The Playbook
*[17:25] The importance of holistic data in finance
*[20:04] Segment: Report From the Future
*[22:18] CFOs are agents of change for the future
*[26:19] Segment: Quick Hits
Sponsor
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Links
Connect with Aneal on LinkedIn
Aneal Vallurupalli: The first thing finance needs to accept is the idea that they can be that agent of change, that catalyst for change at a business. I think one of the biggest things that finance leaders need to have conviction about is that they can help the company get to a better place when it comes to being data-driven. And it's not just a finance issue. Everyone else around the company is feeling it, but finance is in a unique position to actually steward that change and be a catalyst for it. And I think that once you accept that, then we become truly a strategic partner to the rest of the business in ways that a sales leader or a marketing leader, our go to market leader, a product leader will embrace finance versus just being the budgets stewards.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to The Invisible Vault.
This episode features an interview with Aneal Vallurupalli. He is CFO at Airbase, the only truly comprehensive spend management platform available to small and midsize companies.
Aneal has spent more than five years in executive-level finance running companies such as Mattermost and Mapbox. He received his Bachelor of Science in Finance from Santa Clara University and is a member of the Forbes Finance Council.
On this episode, Aneal addresses the impact that the pandemic had on the finance world, the importance of holistic data in finance, as well as how the current role of the CFO is changing.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsor…
Narrator: So please enjoy this interview with Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO at Airbase, and your host, Daniel Shaffer.
Daniel Shaffer: So Aneal, thanks so much for joining the show. The Invisible Vault has been a real fun opportunity to get to know very influential, thought provoking and thought leading CFOs, who have really made a shift in the thinking of classic finance in terms of really being more out of the box and solving problems that potentially didn't have real playbook in the past. There's been a lot of, as you know, and are sure well aware of, significant crises, sanctions and just geopolitical tension beyond the control of any corporate, but certainly has an impact on international business and what we're finding, especially with the proliferation of data and technology and the faster movements of payments is that, you know, your peers and yourself are dealing with more information at a more rapid pace. And in order to do that, it takes a little bit of new things. So we're excited to have you on The Invisible Vault today Aneal to hear about your thoughts going forward. And I know you have a particular interest in data, we'll get into that. But before we do, I’d really like to hear about you, Aneal, the CFO and the journey that really took you to this place. And just doing a little research about you, I read that you were very serious about tennis. How did you get here?
Aneal Vallurupalli: It's a great question. What's funny that most people don't know is that I grew up in a family of physicians. But somehow at a younger age, uh, math just came naturally to me. And, it was not something I had to try very hard at, unlike most other things. I'd say that actually for the first couple years in college where I played D-1 tennis at Santa Clara, I was actually a combined science major, and was very much going down that path of trying or thinking I wanted to become a doctor much like the rest of my family and ultimately, what changed my mind was organic chemistry and say, oh, this really is not for me. I need to think about something else. And luckily I had folks in my family, especially one of my older brothers who at the time was going through investment banking at Bear Stearns in New York when there was a Bear Stearns, who was like, look.
You've been good at math. I think you should shift. And that is actually why I shifted into a finance major at Santa Clara and ultimately it was something I loved and it came easy to me as well. And obviously a lot of things took effort, but that was kind of the track for finance. But then from there I got very fortunate, right around the recession, to actually land a position at a bank called Union Square Advisors.
That was an M and a technology-focused M&A, investment and banking advisory services company. And, the rest is history there. But yeah, that was the track record of how I came to finance and fell onto my lap. And it's something that I just, I've always enjoyed and, continued to love.
Daniel Shaffer: So many people fall into that category of having a family tradition, sounds like yours was medicine, but you pivoted into maybe something that came more naturally to you. Not an easy choice. Oftentimes those family pressures influence you to do things you might not want to do, so good for you to find your path and stick with it.
Aneal Vallurupalli: I still don't think my family knows what I do, but that's okay.
Daniel Shaffer: Sure. Well, today might be one of those opportunities to unfold maybe a little bit more about the role of the CFO. I think that it is changing. There's a lot of new tracks that lead to CFO. In fact, just in talking to our last guest who is an analyst at IDC, he's seeing a lot of convergence, and what I understand that to mean is that it's not just a typical FP and a track that, you know, is laddering up to the CFO role.
What do you think about that?
Aneal Vallurupalli: The way I like to describe it, and I've said this a few times, is around what is your superpower? And there are various superpowers that a CFO can have and ultimately the track, how they came up is usually one of the superpowers example.
Did you start off your career at a big four accounting firm and ultimately have just an awesome grasp on what was needed to build the accounting and controllership side of the house? Really strong CFOs come up that track. I have a lot of friends in my network and mentors too, who came up that track.
And others have also come up the track of FP&A, traditional FP&A, and FP&A slash strategic finance, whatever you would like to call it these days, is kind of that part of finance that does cross-functionally work consistently across the work to help provide strategic insights to the business.
And then there's the other side of it. Where do you come up? The corporate development side or the M&A track. And so I've seen folks and really good CFOs and financial leaders, heads of finance, come up all three, even some atypical routes, right? Let's say, business operations, which is kind of a catch all for helping companies figure out a lot of the tricky parts of their business. And so I do think there's truth to there being a diversified set of tracks to be able to get to.
Daniel Shaffer: The CFO is an ever changing role. And like you said, it also depends on what type of company you're looking for. Can you give us a sense of the work that you're doing today at Airbase?
Just to help our guests understand, what type of operations Airbase is, what services you provide and how you enable that company to grow.
Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah, totally. And so, you know, air base, we can start a little bit, even premier based. My track record has been working with software. And that was back to when I was a banker and then the last three or four companies being in-house within these software businesses.
And coming to Airbase, what is Airbase? Airbase is a software platform that is streamlining and consolidating all of the company's non-payroll spend into a single software solution. And so companies typically spend money in four ways, right? That's their employee. But as a non-payroll portion.
So the employee payroll there's expense, reimbursements, how you reimburse your employees after they've spent company dollars too. That's your accounts payable, right? So how you pay your vendors externally, and then three there's your virtual and physical corporate cards that accompany to pay folks externally and vendors as well, or leaders may have a physical card in their wallet.
So those three things are what Airbase help consult, which is your accounts payable, your expense reimbursements, and also having physical and virtual corporate cards for your business. And what I always aligned with our CEO, Pedro, prior to my even joining the businesses, I believe we're solving a software workflow issue.
Not necessarily a corporate card issue, corporate cards or butter component of what. So what are we doing here in finance within Airbase? Myself coming in, about a year ago, about 11 months ago, building finance from scratch here. And obviously there were some great folks here that were already helping close the books and get, you know, NetSuite set up as an example, but starting to build on that, we've brought our controller who is really strong, Kelly Hicks, who actually comes from Anaplan.
She was there for eight years, four years per app here, four years post. And she's our controller here. So building that controller foundation support. And we brought on a gentleman by the name of Jerry to run as director of strategic finance to run FP&A for the company.
And this is where everybody starts to get a little different. As I described the other two areas for you, we also have credit. And so we've started to underwrite customers for certain credit limits on their monthly charge cards. So we need a credit team and risk team. And so there's a little bit more of a capital market's focus at this stage of a company than you would typically have at a software only business.
So those are the areas in which finance really helps and the really awesome part that I love and something that I've just embraced, and everyone on my team loves in joining this business, you know, we've all worked at businesses where we end up needing to build the support functions, FP&A, accounting on capital markets, stock administers, all these things.
For a company for which we may not be the ideal customer for the product or to company builds well at Airbase, we are fortunate enough to be a part of a business where we do have, I have input into the product that's being built, because we are the number one users. We are the groups that you're selling to at other businesses. And so that has been probably one of my biggest joys.
Daniel Shaffer: Excellent. Thanks for that background, solving workflow problems and really enabling people to do better work on unlocking that trapped opportunity. It seems to be a core component of software, especially cloud software that you can access anywhere in the world with a stable internet connection, which is great.
That brings us to really, I think our first segment called the Cash Crossroads.
Daniel Shaffer: Aneal, can you share your perspective as a thought leader and a CFO your personal thoughts about what has changed for the office of the CFO since the onset of the pandemic?
Aneal Vallurupalli: You know, when the pandemic hit, I was fortunate enough to be working at a company that was already remote. It had been always operating in that perspective and from that lens, and I'd say that what changed operationally of the day-to-day workings of the company, not as much.
That actually helped us as a company to be as close to business as usual as possible. Albeit, we're in the middle of many folks being personally and unfortunately involved with a pandemic, obviously. But I'd say that putting aside the operation side of how do we actually do work on a daily basis?
A few things changed right when the pandemic occurred. Number one, you saw a big shift in the financial markets, right? You saw a big shift in terms of folks trying to understand is this here to stay? How long is this thing here to stay? Do we need to reconsider our operating plans that we had put in place?
Keep in mind, I think COVID hit around the March timeframe, right in 2020. Right around March, the majority of companies are already done with their annual planning and into their Q1, and having to replan and retune, their model and ultimately their plan for the year, many companies did that.
And I don't claim to be an expert as a CFO, but I do claim to have really good people around me that I've seen a lot that I can call upon. And that was one consistent thing that was occurring across my network was folks were double-clicking on the models that they had built on the assumptions that they had made for growth, for burn and ensuring that the company could downside protect itself.
And so that was probably the biggest thing that shifted at the onset of the pandemic for a CFO or any financial organization out there a company was to understand how do we make sure we control our own destiny? Because there's something here for which we don't have a definitive timeframe.
Daniel Shaffer: Not an unfamiliar story. I'd be interested to know when you talk about that scenario modeling that you just had to tap into, reassess, reevaluate. What were the components and how did liquidity factor in that kind of headroom that you were looking for?
Aneal Vallurupalli: I think the biggest things that are the components of it, obviously, especially in a growth technology business, fortunately last four companies have been that, number one, clearly its revenue double-click into revenue. Is it going to come in as we had predicted or thought or not, especially in the short-term, but what about three to four quarters?
Do we need to sensitize our assumptions on the next 2, 3, 4 quarters example, if we missed a beat by 10, 20, 30%, what kind of cash position would that leave us in. If we had the same hiring expectations, the same program spend expectations across the company, and so the first thing you do is you sensitize revenue.
And then by doing so you also sensitized your cash. Sitting in between revenue and your cash burn is all the expenses and the headcount hiring and the program spend. And what I did see consistently of the onset of the pandemic was companies took a beat there. They took a breath and they said, wait a minute, let's pass.
It's figuring out what's going on first and then we can reopen it. And I know we did that at my last businesses as did many companies out there, that didn't mean we froze hiring. We paused it for a short period, call it two to three months to figure out what's going on. And that's the biggest piece, your revenue, your head count, your program expenses and sensitizing.
Daniel Shaffer: Sure, it makes sense. Little cash forecasting involved in understanding what you have on hand and what you need to operate. Did you interact with the board at that point? Was there a bigger conversation happening or was it more business as usual? Did you feel like it was different in the way that you were treating the data that you were analyzing?
Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. I mean, it was different. And we already had a plan approved as I I mentioned, I think that company was a January on business, so it was March. And so we had already delivered the financial plan for the year in February, 30 days, pre COVID hitter. And so when COVID hit, we as a management team, proactively replant and then went back to the board and.
We think based on what we're seeing out there, we want to make some of these changes with our expectations around revenue, hiring and burn for the year, to ensure that we don't end up in a less favorable position at the end of the fiscal year. Some companies I know were reactionary to their board stepping in saying, you need to rethink your plans for the future.
We're the opposite. We went proactive with it and said, we need to rethink things a bit here. And if we did, are there any changes that we would make in our financial model for us, there were right. And there were, it wasn't drastic by any means, but there was some fine tuning that needed to be done and aligned the border up.
Daniel Shaffer: Excellent. Yeah. Do you think those kind of retooling that new insight that you gained to react to the crisis will be retained post pandemic?
Aneal Vallurupalli: Yeah. I mean, look, given post pandemic. Who knows if that's pre-recession I think for the next 12 to 24 months right now, given the uncertainty out there in the markets, the fundraising environment, the public equity markets. The macroeconomic situation with interest rates and a whole bunch of things going on, it behooves the business to be quarterly, not replanting, but obviously re forecasting and providing an update as to what is the latest two or three months showed us not just about our own business performance, but taking into account what's going on externally to the company.
I think we're going to be in that environment for the next 12 to 18 months at minimum. I think it's a good muscle memory for the business to have that habit, to make sure that we're building a business that has long-term viable.
Daniel Shaffer: That's a great segue. As you started to talk about some of those risk factors to move into the next segment of our podcast called the Playbook.
So Aneal, just curious, what are you thinking about when you're addressing this volatility, as you said, what kind of risk are you concerned about?
Aneal Vallurupalli: For a financial leader at a high growth business you think about risk at times in a monetary way, right? If I had to say, I don't want to take on any risk. Well, it wouldn't be at the stage of a company. But I think it's about feeling comfortable about the risks that we are taking as a company.
And feeling like those are the right bets. And so for me, risk is around not being focused as an organization and a business as to what our goals are. And that's not just financial goals, that's product and where we want to go with it. Ultimately product and the investments made there being leading indicators to where we think fruitful commercial outcomes will come from.
And having a focus on to the target markets, we want to identify the ideal customer profiles and all that is how I think about how can you de-risk the current market environments. We've all seen it where, especially after what happened just six to 18 months ago.
We're in a period in which unprecedented levels of cash are being raised and deployed to businesses. For that to, in many ways, be turned around in a four or five month timeframe. It forces us to really look internally at our companies and say, are we focused in the areas we want? To ensure that this latest round of capital is the last round we’ll ever need.
And that's a dramatic thing to say, but in going through that exercise, albeit an exercises is still an important one to do, to just double check and verify that, that we are spending our time in the right areas.
Daniel Shaffer: Great advice. Absolutely. And I wanted to ask you about this idea of data. You mentioned many different data points. I know your peers are easily understanding and picking up on the multiple elements that you talked about. Investing cash in terms of lines of credit in terms of paying your employees, really thinking about all the kind of fundamental access points, where you are stabilizing the business and de-risking the enterprise so you can move forward.
According to the company plan, what does data drive really mean to you Aneal? In a software, like you said, a fast paced, soft high growth software environment there's going to be different expectations for 20, 30, 40% year over year growth. How important is real-time data and having that holistic view of those data points to really help you drive and steer the ship?
Aneal Vallurupalli: It's very important. We can state that. But there's a difference between investing the time and effort to build scalable infrastructure that can allow for as close to real-time data reporting as possible. That varies, by the way, by area of the company, whether it be in product, whether it be in finance, whether it be in sales, whether it's marketing, et cetera.
And the biggest piece I'll say there is, do I have conviction that being data-driven is a good investment for a company. I do have conviction about that. I think that there's a lot of merit to it because I think what it instills is the idea that from an early stage of a company, you start paying attention to the metrics that drive success for your company and in the long run, that means that you're able to build a higher predictability around your business. The managers around the company are paying attention to that data consistently and making decisions off of it. So that last part there is most important. It's one thing to be able to set up the infrastructure and report on data and just have a dashboard of Tableau or whatever visualization you tool you use to report the specific metrics, whether it be bookings or marketing, MQL, ELLs, or the stages of your pipeline or closed one deals or product usage.
It's one thing to have that at your fingertips. And it's a completely different thing to be data-driven as a company, as part of your DNA. And what I mean by that is, how great would it be for product decisions and the features you prioritize to be based off of data-driven decisions and theses, right?
How great would it be for a customer success manager to have product usage at their fingertips before they go to speak with the customer about. Probably important to know that the customer is at 130% usage or where they're 50% usage may change the kind of conversation you have with them ahead of time.
And so these are just basic examples of how data can actually help you in your day to day company across the business. And it's super important that we make our decisions as a company and support our theses of company, leveraging that data on it.
Daniel Shaffer: Excellent. I'd love that. It's so real and achievable today, especially with the kind of modern API open API approach that is allowing companies to connect these remote resources and draw them into a unified data flow and solve that workflow problem that you talked about earlier by creating greater access to data through a connected or bespoke series of apps throughout the company.
And that really takes us to the next segment called Report from the Future.
And I'd love to dive into more, Aneal, on finance specifically, as opposed to the holistic view of the company and why data matters. And in this case I'm considering how the next generation of finance leaders will need to leverage data or technology in order to become a CFO of the future.
Aneal Vallurupalli: I think that the first thing finance needs to accept is the idea that they can be that agent of change, that catalyst for change at a business. Oftentimes, my track record coming in, in Corp dev and then working in FP&A and strategic finance, I'd say that it always felt like I was working off data that I didn't truly own and systems I needed really someone else to really help me update and fix example Salesforce and opportunity ideas and fixing the fields within Salesforce or Marketo.
Not the finance team, doesn't own Salesforce, Marketo, but we're stakeholders of that information. And so I think one of the biggest things that finance leaders need to have conviction about is that they can help the company get to a better place when it comes to being data-driven.
And it's not just a finance issue. Everyone else around the company is feeling it, but finance is in a unique position to actually steward that change and be a catalyst for it. And I think that once you accept that, then we become truly a strategic partner to the rest of the business in ways that a sales leader or a marketing leader, our go to market leader, a product leader will embrace finance versus just being the budgets stewards.
Daniel Shaffer: Neil, that is probably the core of what we've heard the core theme throughout all the episodes and CFOs that we've spoken with here on The Invisible Vault and aligned to that, as I mentioned, our APIs and data management at scale.
I'm just curious what your position is on artificial intelligence and big data. How do you see those opportunities in the future? Let me just dive into that question a little more sharply, because you just said that the CFO of the future needs to be an agent of change.
So how does managing big data enable CFOs to be an agent of change for the future?
Aneal Vallurupalli: I think any leader who came into a company that was a series ABC business would come in and see systems for all. You may end up having two or three tools that you're using to visualize the same piece of data, and that's one. But the bigger piece, I think the more meta idea is that GNA as a whole is really one portion of part of the business that's there to help the company and the rest of the company bring the best versions of themselves to work every day.
And that is what we provide to the work that we do to help the sales team, either be able to sell that extra dollar or be able to tell them, look, based on this data we could be spending more time in this stage of a company or by the way, if we actually change this part of our process, potentially, I think that we could close our deal cycle time, bring it down by 50%, so much faster flywheel. I think artificial intelligence can play a role.
It's not there yet, in my opinion, but we're starting to see some of it where companies are starting to take their big data and essentially the systems that are connected to their data warehouse. And they're starting to leverage that information in a more consistent manner for them to understand the historical performance of the business, such that they can forecast the future.
And so where does AI play a role? It plays a role problem, right? In between those two, AI plays a role of trying to understand the historical and trying to help us out with the future. And I think that fundamentally what tool is best for that TBD, and I think depends on the stage of business.
But that's where I see AI playing a role specifically within the finance industry.
Daniel Shaffer: Sure makes sense. And great to hear your thoughts and transparency on AI. There's a long way before it makes the kind of predictions and prescriptions that it's touted to offer at the moment, but we know that's not happening. So there are some milestones along the way in the evolution of technology that can help get us there.
Are you seeing the value of APIs in your workspace and how that's helping companies become easily connected whether it's to banks or to other systems and to help gain access to more data?
Aneal Vallurupalli: Totally. That's the architecture of Airbus, right? And also, we leverage a significant number of emerging technologies within our internal data stack here at the company. Whether you talk about using tools like DBT analytics on top of our data warehouse, to be able to model on top of the information in the warehouse, or whether you talk about certain pieces of middleware that can actually then take what the warehouse is creating and modeling on top of a DVT.
And then push that information back to all the systems that may need that one data point example. Do you want to use your warehouse and DBT to calculate ARR, that an error can actually be pushed back to your ERP, to your CRM, to Marquetto to wherever. That you want it to go. And so I think that we like to think that we're doing a lot to understand the future of the data stack and adopting emerging technologies within that.
And the other piece is, I'd like to think we're not building for today. The things that we're adding here at Airbase are going to help a company for the long term of the business. And these are areas that we talk about where the efforts we're putting into our systems across the company right now are foundational pieces that will be there forever.
Like the way we're setting up our Salesforce infrastructure, our Marquetto infrastructure, our NetSuite internally, our European NetSuite, ultimately with one another as is, I think it ended up helping the company.
Daniel Shaffer: Well, you have done a lot of phenomenal work to drive valuations for companies like Guidewire, a company you enabled to become a multi-billion dollar, and it sounds like the key is to unify systems together to provide optimal visibility into company data in order to create leading edge software to help the company grow and scale.
Let's move on just quickly here, Aneal, as we round out this really robust conversation around the future of the CFO, how data collection and aggregation is essential, especially to have it at your fingertips in real time.
Daniel Shaffer: This section is called Quick Hits.
The future of digital currencies for treasury and finance seems to be a really hot topic. People are talking about NFTs, tokenization. What are your thoughts on managing digital currencies? Do you see that happening?
Aneal Vallurupalli: I do. I think it depends on the stage, and the risk as we discussed risk earlier, the risk appetite of the business. I think we've all seen a lot of movement in every form of digital currency over the last six months, whether it be NFTs segments or whatnot, but you are seeing digital currencies.
I'm signing partnerships with some of the largest businesses out there. I think the Dallas Cowboys were the first NFL team to announce a large partnership with one, two days ago. And so is it becoming more pervasive across industries? It is. And once that starts to occur, I think, we in finance and treasury start to take it more seriously.
No, I think there are obviously much larger stage companies than Airbase that are starting to think about actually accepting digital currencies and how they can make that part of their commercial operations. And once that occurs, it'll start to make its way down market. And so how fast? I don't know, but it will be.
Daniel Shaffer: Yeah, a little off script here, but related to managing and accepting digital currencies sounds like the future. CFO's going to have the right pipeline and ability to ingest and analyze that data at a faster pace. What types of concerns do you think that raises for you today, or maybe in thinking about the future?
Aneal Vallurupalli: More specifically, when you talk about data and being able to leverage it quickly, I think it's about setting up the right people, process and systems. And I can't stress enough the people part of it. Because yes, you can set up a great process. You can set up great systems, but ultimately, really good people help the company de-risk itself for the future.
And so I think about how do we set the company up for scale and set it up to be more data-driven? It's those three things, people process systems. And in my parents' experience, bringing the right people has always de-risk the company for future.
Daniel Shaffer: I think I know your answer to this. So if you say people process systems, would you ever say AI process systems? In other words, will AI replace people?
Aneal Vallurupalli: I would think it's already doing so in specific areas. The real question is, how consistently across what processes and accompany will it do that, I'd like to think it won't be able to replace a CFO. Otherwise I'll be out of a job and we'll have less people going into finance for sure.
But, I would think that we're seeing core processes, whether it be compute, at the Ross form around product usage, we're starting to see definitely not where I think that 80% of a company, anytime soon, it's going to be the people that a company will be replaced by AI.
Daniel Shaffer: Aneal, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for joining us on The Invisible Vault.