Village Global Podcast - Recall Sessions_ Why Two Finance Leaders Are Ditching Excel for Claude Code _ Jeff Cobourn _Gusto_ _ Rohit Divate _Tide_

0:00We've got a board meeting tomorrow, investor meeting tomorrow. A year ago, that would have been two weeks of work, five people updating a slide deck, updating the backups in Google Sheets and trying to get the right data in and reconciling all the pieces. And today, our team is creating pull requests in GitHub, because it's an HTML file that is on board back. I want like a company Jarvis, right?

0:26ingest everything and I can ask it to the voice, you know, give me the answer of all the meetings you ingested, all the Slack and all the Google drives. My guests today are Rohit Devade and Jeff Coburn. Rohit recently joined Tide as VP of Finance after seven years in corporate finance and strategy at Gusto and Jeff is approaching nine years on Gusto's finance and strategy team. Between them, they've spent the better part of a decade inside one of the functions that determines how a hyper growth company actually scales.

1:02The finance stack is being built in real time. Today, we're getting into what that actually looks like from the inside, how the role of finance is evolving, how teams are using AI to transform the work, how that's shaping headcount decisions and where the actual debates are happening, from token management to build versus buy. Let's get into it. Jeff, Roy, I've known you guys for a long time. I've been wanting to do this. I feel like finance is the center of everything right now.

1:29given the amount of kind of tension and spend that's kind of going off the roof. So at least that's what's been written about these days. I'd love to just see what's happening in your world. Maybe we can start, you know, Rohit, Jeff, both of you guys are finance leaders in your own short respect to domains. Tell me what's happening in your role and function and how it's changed over the last few years as AI kind of hit the hit the road. Yeah, I can go first, if you'd like. So I think, you know, when I think about AI, I don't think it's really accelerated until probably the last three to four months.

2:13I think even before, like if you look at the last two years, we've had chat GBT, we've had Claude, mostly chat GBT. And it's been used for writing research, but not necessarily doing anything like really finance centric. And I think it's because the models haven't, you know, you couldn't really use it for modeling purposes. It was more like writing and research. But over the last three months, it's, it's, I would say it's, it's gotten quite crazy in terms of the the change. And I predict it's going to continue going on like that, at least for the next, you know, six months a year that I can think of. I think even thinking beyond that is I don't think anybody really knows. What has changed specifically? Is it just how the models have just gotten better? Or is it like, you know, we are started, we've played with it the last few years, and now we're like willing to lean into it more like what is what's going on? Because, you know, every for the last, you know,

3:10few decades, you know, the spreadsheet was king, like what really changed here? Yeah, I think for me, personally, it was, you know, using cloud code that changed. And the fact that you can throw in a model, talk to it, and actually model things out.

3:26is what the big changes because before you put something in chat, you kind of were just getting like a summary of it. You couldn't really do anything with that. You could just ingest whatever you put in there. But I think now you can actually start coding, right? You can start coding. You can start building things as a non-technical person, not as a non-engineer. You can write databases. So that's the more exciting piece is you can use it as a partner.

3:53to build things in the finance domain that you couldn't do before. So I think for us, you know, a year ago, let's say, our day-to-day was using Google Drive, was using Microsoft Office, right? Those were our main tools. And using SQL as most of our team, you know, having no SQL and using Redash to get data out of our data warehouse. And that was kind of our core toolkit. We're in meetings, creating presentations, you know, creating models and spreadsheets.

4:22And today, all of that is gone. And 90% of my day and my team's day is just using CloudCo. And so all day, every day, we're running multiple sessions. And accomplishing different tasks. When we get a question, we immediately go to CloudCo. And we're leveraging the tools there. And so when you think about the recurring processes versus the one time or project based, the recurring processes have changed massively. We've gone from We've got a board meeting tomorrow, investor meeting tomorrow. A year ago, that would have been two weeks of work, five people updating a slide deck, updating the backups in Google Sheets and trying to get the right data in and reconciling all the pieces. And today, our team is creating pull requests in GitHub. I think it's an HTML file that is on Boardback and has all the same functionality because

5:17You know, I built the Google slide commentary. I built edit inline and they came out, so you don't need to do a pull request to edit one word. And so it's massively, massively changed, you know, those recurring processes, and then we're leveraging those for the profits as well. And our instinct is just we're using Cloud Code, drafting up a new session, leveraging skills we've built, and that's our day-to-day. So it's been night and day, and I think I can really remember like the day that it changed, which was February 3rd.

5:46February 3rd, we all had access to cloud code and everything changed after that. I mean, are you even going back to the spreadsheet anymore? Or is this like, what's, you know, spreadsheet was like the killer tool for finance? Like, when do you still use a spreadsheet then? We're not really. So we were migrating on the referring processes. We're migrating all of our models and financial models that were in sheets into Python back web pages, right? That are hooked up directly to our data warehouse. So those are kind of, we're still using some of the old ones in spreadsheets on a recurring basis, but we're moving those in. So we're building with Cloudfield. And then any new projects, any new analysis that we're doing, it's a web page. It's not a spreadsheet. But it's just, you know, just double click on this. Like, I know there's like BI, you know, just, you know,

6:43there's BI infrastructure, you know, whether it's Tableau or whatever companies are using to sort of provide sort of FPNA analysis for various types of work streams. Is that just what's gone on BI then? So we were using Tableau and Redash. Those are our kind of two main tools. Redash is really easy for like quick assets for SQL queries and dashboarding. Cloudflow can work really well with Redash and can build dashboards, but The much richer experience is building an HTML in web page, hosting it on either switchboard or streamlet or Google Apps Scripts and sharing that with folks. And so I've replaced all of what I use Tableau for in an Apps Script dashboard. So my daily dashboard is going to have to pull up every day. I built it with CloudFood into an Apps Script, and I don't use Tableau anymore for visuals. Now we still have it, but I've rebuilt all of my needs.

7:42What I have a question about that, like, what does that mean for like the role of finance today, right? And I'm being more abstract. I mean, obviously there's different functions. So maybe you have a point of view of, of, you know, fpna versus being, you know, what the functions of the underlying functions like, if you're a young finance professional and you're kind of like, you know, listening right now. And you're like, Oh, I spent years on learning about modeling and so forth. What skills do you think?

8:11Are sort of really foundational for the function and what do you think is like no longer relevant? Yeah, I don't think that goes away the foundational skills because I think Jeff and his team and When I look at myself and my team we can do the things we can do using cloud code because we know how to build you know We asked about the spreadsheet. It's like you can think about how to build things because you've done it in spreadsheet a million times. So you know what the scaffolding needs to look like. What are the relationships? What are the lookups need to look like? Now you're not building it the same exact way in code. You're more or less telling Claude code, but you know, you know how data needs to come in, how it needs to be structured, how you want it to build. And I think that's one big fallacy that I see everywhere in the news right now. When I look at like some, you know, bunch of companies saying, oh, we're going to, we're going to basically get rid of.

9:00Excel or we're gonna in remit something new it's like well you can do that but We somebody still needs to know how to build things and that only happens if they knew how to build things because if you never like Went behind the scenes and did something like you're not you're not really gonna know if it's right or wrong at least initially And I think you can fix that in the future, but right now you need to know how to build. So if you're young and you're jumping in, I would say you still need the modeling fundamentals, like you still need to think about how to build something. But the key thing I think you do differently now is you got to pick up personally, if not to work a subscription for cloud code or codex or whatever it is and just and just play around with it as much as you can. I kind of break it down into like there's skills and attributes, like the skills are changing.

9:50The attributes have not changed, right? The attributes of being curious, having a high attention to detail, and taking the first principles, that has not changed. But that, in fact, those attributes have become even more important. I think from a technical perspective, it's expanded because you now need to also know how to learn and use CloudTrode and be super proficient at building skills and checking its work and knowing what questions to ask and how to interact with it.

10:18Do you think just finance teams are, when you think about your own, the own org of finance right now, there's all this sort of conversation about, hey, we can do less, we can do more with less people. I mean, that's always been kind of the goal. And I know that finance particularly, even just, you know, a lot of the legal functions, GNA functions have always been kind of strapped with resources just in general, you know, what's your, now that you're in this sort of place of doing more, I mean, you just said two weeks to do a board deck. Do you really believe that you can do more with smaller teams? Or do you feel like the responsibilities of finance is now going to increase because now you have increased productivity because of what you can do with AI? Yeah. So I think what I would say is like the, there's supply and demand. So supply of hours, right, is what the financing provides, right? We're doing, we're doing a lot of work, we're adding value, we're asking questions, we're pushing the business.

11:14The demand on the team comes from the number of products we have in the surface area. While we're a lot of the referring processes for us are getting much easier and taking up a lot less time, the surface area continues to expand. The demand on the team is growing because product roadmaps are accelerated. As a result, I think the tension there, what we're seeing is our teams are just able to add value and cover more areas that we previously maybe didn't cover as much as we should have or give it as much support. And so that's what we're seeing right now is that tension of more and more demand coming from the business because of accelerating roadmaps on the product side and accelerating work on that. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I like I've never been in a situation where somebody has when I've been in finance, somebody like an executive come tell me, hey, the finance team is doing enough analysis stop.

12:13Right? Like there's always more and more and more we can do. So I don't think it necessarily makes you do more with less people. I think eventually you kind of get through the curve. You realize, okay, I can do a lot more. Our teams are doing a lot more. Maybe we do need more people to do even more than we could. Because right now, I think a lot of the work, at least, you know, pre February or onwards. It was a lot of like, let me find this information. Let's figure out, you know, let's go back, look in the data warehouse, what's going on. Let's, you know, we spend like hours just trying to figure out to get the information to do what you want to do. But now I think in the future it's more or less at your fingertips. So you're ready to go when you have a question. So you can answer it much faster and you don't need to spend all that time trying to figure things out. So I think you do more.

12:59And I think you also probably have more people doing even more things depending on your business. Like our business, there's a million things we can hit at any given time. I don't think I will stop hiring. I think each person will just do way more than they have been producing right now. Do you think this idea that is being at least discussed a month or at least in the VC ecosystem of like, oh, well, you know, previously there was certain amount of ratio logic, you know, if you just looking at your, there was always kind of logic. I don't know, you know, when you describe Jeff, the surface area, there's probably some sort of like, you know, ceiling of like, Hey, once we get to this surface area, we need to go hire another headgown. Well, now there's tension to be like, well, now you can have, you've, you've eliminated certain buys work. So I'm trying to understand that I know there's always more work to do, but what is the ceiling now?

13:54of what is possible for a single resource or a single area in finance. And by the way, this kind of applies to other departments too, because I'm sure you're going to engineering and say, hey, why do you need five more engineers? Isn't cloud code just making it easier to do more with a single engineer? How do you reconcile that? And you guys are doing it across your own personal departments, but you're also advising other business leaders across the organization to sort of think about this. How do you all think about that?

14:22I think we're in the midst of an insanely fast accelerated curve in a transition period where there's a lot of people who may not get to the point where they are that 10x and near that 10x finance person, right? And those people, I think the difference in impact that folks are going to see from across teams is going to widen and there may be a transition period, right? But would I rather have 20 10x people?

14:51then five for sure, right? Because the business will move faster. The surface area will expand faster. So I think we're in a transition period as we learn what the limits are and it's frankly changing every day. Like what someone could do two months ago is very different from what someone can do today. And I think that'll continue to change. And I think it's more about the attributes and the skill sets of the folks you have in your team and whether those are well suited for the new environment that we're in with you know all the tools available. Do you feel like there's any functions that are just gonna be in and we'll talk about finance particularly because you guys are closer to it that are just gonna be completely eliminated or just any jobs to be done that you're like hey you know obviously there was a specific function you just mentioned hey I spent two weeks which I do every quarter to like work on this you know with across five resources to like build a board deck now I can do that in a matter of hours and minutes and as you guys built the infrastructure for it.

15:50Are there other functions like that in sort of full resource roles that are just going to be eliminated? I know we're pontificating here about some future state, but how are you seeing it? I think when I look at this, it's the middle layer, the people and the roles that are essentially doing a lot of the scaffolding work right now, coordination work. I don't think you have as many of them anymore, because you don't need all that.

16:18All those people outside in the business trying to connect the dots because you already have that if you were looking at roles, you know, I would say Customer success is is one, you know, you have now chat agents voice agents We're already seeing that and I think when you look talk to investors and board members, you know One of the key questions they keep asking is like, you know, whenever we're gonna use or you know, how are we using AI to reduce this so we can increase our gross margins like are you using voice agents or using chat agents email agents so I think that that one is the first one to go but down the stack I think across every team the connectors the people who are not necessarily doing things in general will be I think impacted quite a bit because as Jeff said you know somebody producing 2x versus 20x like you're gonna take the 20x because they can actually do get things done

17:10I think there are, I totally agree. Like those coordination rules, I think you're going to change. I think there's also a merging of rules. And I think it's probably something we've seen for the last couple of years, but is now magnified. When you think of an IR role, right, we've had a finance scene. That's something that as companies get bigger and bigger, perhaps in the public company, it's a little different. But I can speak for ourselves. We used to think we needed someone who would just do IR. And now I don't think we need that.

17:38I think another example of that is, you know, business intelligence, some kind of data visualization. I think folks who were just building dashboards in Tableau and just writing SQL queries, I think those roles are changing. I think finance and different teams are taking over those responsibilities. So rather than us being blocked by, you know, ABC team to go build a dashboard against a query like that, that's gone. And so I think those roles are merging very much.

18:08across teams when you look at data, what we call kind of causing management or insights and operations, finance, I think there's a lot of emerging rules. One of the things that's being discussed right now a lot when we're talking about headcount and the adoption of AI is just how token usage is kind of skyrocketing. I mean, you all are doing it. I imagine there are more extreme use cases across the organization that's also using tokens in a very aggressive way to streamline work. How are you all approaching that sort of trade-off of, because it's a new type of, and now agents are having its own life of its own, how are you thinking about this from managing spend, making trade-offs between

18:57you know, token you should spend across different departments, agent, new agent spend budgeting for like, how do you plan for this? And you guys are in your planning cycles? Yeah, I break it down into there's, you know, internal tools and internal filter demand. So the demand that I'm putting and the spend that I have my senior has and then there's the products that we have that are demanding, you know, topics, right? The other product side and the external facing side, I think the pricing models have to adjust.

19:26and you've got to incorporate that into your gross margin and your cost of service. Internally, I think it is a productivity enhancer and I think you have to look at it like an additional people cost, right? It's another cost of your people and you just have to account for that. What do you look at your total budgets? Obviously, everybody in a department sets off for budgets. Maybe it got down to an individual level. Is there a rule of thumb that you all have or now are you just asking the departments to sort of say, hey, people had always had software budgets. Now there is an AI budget, or is all just kind of bundled together? How do you all think about that? Yeah, I think we're definitely moving to a world where there's, in addition to headcount, you have tokens, and you have that cost similar to how software budgets and things for different teams. I think it's pretty similar to that. And I think we're not in a place where that's really stabilized, where we really know where that's going to settle.

20:25And so we're doing our best to forecast and plan for that. But right now we're kind of seeing, you know, a really wide dispersion from what people are demanding. So there's some average that we're going to settle into depending on kind of model cost and that kind of thing. But that's what we're seeing. So you're just right now for the case of budgeting. And I love to hear what you guys are doing here. Is you're just sort of sort of looking at historicals, forecasting some sort of usage patterns across different departments and saying, hey, for every ad count.

20:54Is it just an average across different departments? Or like, no, we think sales is going to be using more. Obviously, engineering is going to be using the most versus other departments. And you're just kind of blanketing a percent of overall spend, which previously headcount was the largest now against token. Token use. Yeah. So here's my perspective on this one. So cost is one, right? Token cost is one side of it. The other side I always think about, or any cost in general, it's like, what am I getting for it?

21:23How are you increasing the enterprise value? I think a lot of that is unknown, especially for the internal spend. So for me, you know, when I think about spend, like you can can be department specific or you can be individual specific. One person in any in a separate department finance can be spending probably way more than somebody in engineering.

21:43And how do you measure that ROI? I think it's hard right now. It's really hard because it's all anecdotal. It's all person to person at this stage until we have some kind of measurement system that says you put this many tokens in. This is what you got out. This is how we measure the ROI value. And I don't think we have that yet.

22:02until we have a system like that that says what got spent what was the ROI I think you basically just say okay here's a heuristic you know dollar amount that I'm gonna give you maybe it's 500 bucks a month maybe it's a thousand bucks a month token usage per person in a particular department or maybe it's more for engineers. And I think you just have that there as a budget because you also need stability in terms of forecasting costs. And then as you see demand go up and down, you adjust that. And I think you have to be able to adjust that on a, almost on a like a, on a monthly basis or even, even faster than that. You have to be fluid. I think in this, I would say at least for the next six months until we get some kind of scaffolding that can

22:40that can measure ROI. And then we can say, you know what, this person is spending $100,000 a month. That's fine because they're doing everything. They just refactor the whole code base to work way better. We'll spend that money there. But we don't know right now the true ROI. I think of all the tokens spent on that. Are you guys requesting this just out of curiosity when you guys are, when someone's making a request for additional headcount or, you know, budget?

23:06How does AI fit into the ask here? Is there something you all sort of systemically doing to sort of say, hey, do you have an AI strategy in your department in a role? Or is it just an assumption that that's just what we expect everyone to do now? So I think what we're doing, we have AI fluency scores across every person across the whole company on the same grid.

23:31And so that's done monthly by managers. And what that tells us is which teams are leveraging AI and which team they're not. But I think the teams that are not have a much higher bar to clear to get incremental investment, right? Because the first ask is, okay, how are you using, how are you leveraging AI and how is your team, you know, increasing its impact with AI first? Jeff, how are you measuring that? Like, yeah, I'm curious about, tell me about, let's see, this is really interesting. Tell me how you're doing it.

24:02So we've got a grading scale across five and every company, every person in the company is rating on that. There's a first cut of that that AI does as an input that the manager then reviewed. And so the manager has input on that based on the impact of the basic. And so right now what we're doing across the company to better demonstrate whatever those impact is, is we have a lot of sharing going on.

24:29Every week we have an hour with every team and we're, or at least for our team, the financing where we're sharing different products. If you stand up and you're sharing projects and other people are leveraging your skills that you've built in a marketplace and other people are excited about the learnings that you have, you're clearly, you know, amplifying the work that you're doing and the rest of the company and you're the higher end of that scale. And so that rating scale is done monthly across our teams.

24:58and which gives us real-time input for distribution across individual teams and across the company. It's not self-reported. You're actually analyzing actual usage behavior. Not usage in-tap. What have people actually built? What are each manager? How do you know a CX person is building something?

25:28How do you guys, do you guys build some internal tool to do that? I mean, it's kind of all fast days, right? It goes into our quarterly performance reviews. So we do performance reviews on a quarterly basis. One of the key measurement measuring points is a fluency that every manager is expected to have for everyone on their team. Oh, well. And that's all we'll know. So, but a manager basically determines that score, but do you have an input to sort of say, hey, there's evidence of that?

25:54actually happening, or is it just sort of like the manager has observed it and they have a deeper understanding through their, you know, sort of managing that individual? It's the same way that we do performance reviews, right? You calibrate, you make sure that, you know, across teams, across managers, we're being consistent. And that's brought up. So the inputs to that is looking at the impact of the work that they're having, you know, and that we talk about that every quarter.

26:24Interesting. You guys doing anything like that? Not yet. I think we're a little bit earlier stage. So I think this is the thinking that we have to do. So when you ask a question, like, you know, when somebody's coming to me for a headcount, what do we do now? It's certainly not something that we're deeply asking every role. It's like, what is the individual AI strategy? I think we're thinking more from a company perspective of, OK, what does next year look like? I think next year looks like probably very minimal headcount growth, but maybe a reconstitution of headcount.

26:53in the headcount that we already have, right? We maybe get rid of certain areas. We downsize certain areas a little bit, and then we grow in some other areas. We kind of keep headcount flat, more or less. So that's kind of the first, I think, decision of this to say, OK, we're making a big investment. This is something that we want to see as an output. And I think we have to measure that and see if that's actually true once we have, you know, six months, three, six months when the whole companies leveraging individual AI tools. And right now, we're not there yet. But I think that's how we want to want to want to play it. And eventually, I think, you know, Jeff has said it where, you know, the individual managers.

27:32doing the analysis. I'd love the world, you know, like a year or two from now where you have some AI system that's just kind of looking at ROI, looking at impact, you know, whatever artifact you created, is that being shared across the business? Does it understand what it does? Et cetera. So that'd be really cool. I think that's a good way of measuring it with given the expectation that now there's fluency across the org, you know, Jeff, as you kind of end that expectations kind of top down. Are you the ratio is changing?

27:59Like, you know, there's always kind of rule of thumbs of like, you know, inch ratios, sales ratios, marking ratios to revenue and so forth. Like, are you guys pushing the boundaries here to say, hey, we should be expecting to do more with less or, hey, or, you know, at the same headcount staying flat, we should expect different growth curves because now AI is part of there's fluency across the org. And, you know, how do you think those ratios are going to change over time? Yeah, I think we're kind of in the middle of that transition phase. And I don't know where my head.

28:29But certainly, the expectations from teams is they're going to be getting more efficient. And so from a headcount perspective, we expect teams to become a lot more efficient and the ratios to get better. Some teams are further ahead. Other teams have more work to do. Those are the same teams we knew about a year ago. You've grown headcount a lot relative to the size of the company. And so the spotlight's on certain teams more than others.

28:57But everyone's expected to become more efficient given the productivity expectations we have. One of the things that is being discussed right now as I talk to founders and other leaders is this sort of build versus buy. Like, hey, you said, hey, you've built, you've done a lot of building in-house. You've re-orchestrated certain workflows. There's all software founders that are saying, oh, I had this.

29:23thing that I have that's going to solve that unique workflow that you just did and it's going to be better and so forth. You know, obviously there's a lot of founders listening to this right now and being like, oh my god, like, is cloud, you know, can will will every department just vibe code a solution to every single problem? How do you think about where is an app? Where do you go buy something versus we can go build ourselves, especially, you know, the larger the org it is, the more talent you have of engineering talent. I mean, there is a tendency towards build, but the attention has always existed, but it seems like it's a little bit more challenging now for founders today. So I think a lot of that question comes from like, if you look at X, the echo chamber there in there where VCs and startup founders talking each other, you know, somebody's just replaced a CRM, they're like, oh, we don't need Salesforce anymore. We don't need this anymore. We're going to get rid of everything. I think that makes sense.

30:14Mostly right now in this moment if you're a small company, so if you have let's say, you know Salesforce you have a 10 person rep Company it's like sure you can build your own CRM and it's highly customized to what you want and and you don't have to pay for Salesforce but when you think about an organization that has thousands of people and You have to build something that is that has to scale that has have to have an uptime when you know things need updating from the back and things break in the engineer I think you have to make that decision of like, OK, do I build this and maintain it for a large organization and just pay for it? Or do I, you know, build something myself or just pay for Salesforce? So I think the real question is, is that your core competency, right? As a as a company, do you want to build a Salesforce clone? Or do you want to say, OK, that's not something we're good at, you know, let's use a cheaper tool or, you know, let's just

31:13not do that. So it really just I think I didn't have to make that decision every single time. I don't think these some of these larger software are going away by somebody just kind of vibe coding something internally. I think you can do that when you're small. But as soon as you get big, you need you need somebody else to do the job because you don't want to maintain it in my opinion. And just to push on that, I mean, clearly, you know, Jeff just said, hey, we used to use Tableau for a lot of things. Like now we can basically Do a lot of the insight analysis directly in cloud like what's going to go happen to bi as a category For folks that are like building, you know bi start bi new startups. I think it depends It's it's hard to cast, you know a blanket over every company and say this is what's gonna happen there I think there are certainly some companies who would rather have you know a bi solution Then have a bunch of different formats kind of spreading around the company

32:11and not consistency and have the financing how we can build those. I think it will depend and it will range quite a bit. I think we're also talking about like this is mostly internal tooling, right? The same argument can be made, build first buy on expanded product before it. I think the bar hasn't risen for what you buy versus what you build for sure. There are point solutions.

32:38rules-based workflows on top of the database, it's pretty simple to go build, right? If you are that, then I think the bar has risen if you're looking, you know, if you have bought one day by a business or differentiated yourself. And so I think if you're a platform and if you're taking actions for customers, I think those companies and those businesses will, you know, have much more durability over time.

33:04Well, since you guys are both kind of in the in the center of approving new purchase, you know, hey, I want to buy this new tool, you know, from a department kind of, you know, department head kind of comes to you. What questions are you asking them? Obviously, are you just deferring to them to make that trade off between, hey, it seems like this one that you can kind of like build yourself, we already have, you know, enterprise license to you know, cloud code or whatever it is, we can probably just build something. I mean, even the IT teams that you have in your organization are probably making that sort of trade-off. Like, when is it to sort of say, oh, this is definitely something to buy versus build ourselves. And by the way, it's someone who invests in companies that are kind of, you know, building technology for this. Like, it is something that is always discussed, but I'm curious how you'll think about it.

33:58Yeah, I mean there I think there's some good examples of things you might not want to buy Right, so when I think about like going forward a productivity tool like like a task management tool I'm not sure if I want to sign a contract that's like for a big business like ours like a 200,000 300,000 contract for something that you know where people can do task management like that's not That's not where I see buying software going like that can be easily built. But if it's if it when I now get the buy decision, even my my own Oregon finance, now I'm looking at, OK, does this You know, is this technology forward-looking? Does this have an MCP? Like, do they have an AI strategy? Like, can I take the data that's out of this software and use it in Claude or any other tool so I can bring it all in? I can have like a master workflow that is bringing ingesting all company data. Because if it doesn't have that, it's not connected to, I think, the broader business. And it's just a silo tool.

35:06I think you lose that. So I think anybody who's like building software now has to think, okay, I can't build this walled garden where all my data is protected. You have to make it open because we're demanding that. Like I'm demanding that out of our financial planning tool, for example. I think that demand is coming from everyone. So I think that's one criteria.

35:26that you look at. And the second criteria I think is, you know, always ROI, like, is this worth building? Is this worth buying? Is this a specialized tool for your org? And you have to trust, you know, your business partners there, because they know best. But, you know, as somebody who holds a purse string, you have to ask all these questions. I think there's all those questions still exist. And then there's an echo, which is, you know, have you tried to build this yourself? And what happened? And if they hadn't, if they hadn't tried it yet, and it's like possibly something that could be, then I think you've got to go evaluate that. Same thing with incremental hint here, right? It's like show me your AF fluency scores across your team and tell me why your ratios aren't moving at 20, 50% year-to-year. Same kind of a test. I think there's just a higher level, a higher bar that needs to be passed.

36:19So let's talk about some categories that are close to finance. So ERP, we obviously have the SAPs and the net suites of the world. Sage kind of been around for a long time. You have new players like Campfire, Rillet, and some other ones. Puzzle, to just name a few. I think numeric is kind of entering this category.

36:46How do you think about this emerging category of AI-native ERPs? And if a startup comes to me and says, hey, I got a new ERP play, what do you think? What's your take on this category? No shade on, let's do NetSuite, for example. I have never heard anyone be satisfied or happy with NetSuite in my life, ever.

37:15I think you don't get fired for buying NetSuite though. You don't get fired for buying NetSuite but maybe that's not true right now if you're a startup. You might because of how cumbersome it is to work with NetSuite. The total cost of ownership in NetSuite is insanely high in these legacy ERPs. You not only need a few people in your company, you need consultants to install it. You need consultants to maintain it, you have lots of headcount just doing kind of low level work to make sure you're posting all your entries properly. So there's, there's just a whole bunch of manual work still that's being done on these ERPs, like tons of people that you're spending probably for mid-level organization or when you get NetSuite, you're like at least half a million to a million plus in just total costs and ownership per year, even if the software costs like 150 or 200k. So you don't get fired for

38:13being on net sweep but i think if you're a smaller company and you're doing that transition where you're like i'm on quick books now or zero and i know i need to go to an erp a much more robust erp i think i think you have to make choice out of one of the the AI ones you talked about either it's you know real late a campfire one of those because otherwise i think you get stuck in this net suite world where you can't you can't get out of and that's it goes all the way to it's like do i see people switching out of net suite and go into one of these and the answer is no i haven't heard of a single person doing that because once you're in there you you're basically stuck so you have that moment once you hit let's say 200 person company 150 200 we have to make a choice

38:53And it's either NetSuite or it's one of the newer players. And if you're on NetSuite, you make a choice of like, would I stay on NetSuite and use NetSuite or do I layer something on top of NetSuite like a numeric? I know that FPNA is, you know, having used these products and having worked with you all both and engaging in adaptive planning and anti-plan and now there's BigMint and so forth. Very crowded category right now, runway another player like What do you think about this credit card? I mean, and you're literally saying hey this spreadsheet is you know, I have to log in a spreadsheet or what do you think of this category? I think that's another area FNA software that's right for building your own solution You know a lot of those solutions are kind of really super powerful spreadsheets is what they are And I think can you can you replace that with something, you know, put a custom Python model built by flawed?

39:51I think that's one that's certainly worth questioning. Rowan, what do you think? I'm not sure about that just yet, because I don't think I want to make, like a lot of this, yes, it's a database, right? It's a big database. There's certain rules you put in, certain dimensions you put in, and you say, okay, here are the rules and dimensions of my business. And I think with a lot of these players, like, you know, Pigment of Left, some of the newer ones, they're also opening up their data so that you can use that in Claude.

40:18So there's no restriction in terms of you being able to take that data and build other things on top. So if you want to build your own Tableau dashboard in HTML, you can do that. But in terms of the rules, the business rules that need to sit in there and the maintaining of the software, I think.

40:36I think it would require some time and also maintenance to do that from a technical perspective. And I think if I zoom out and say, okay, do I spend maybe an engineer's worth of time, maybe half the time, maybe tickets here to fix this, or do I just buy it? In this moment, I think you buy it. Maybe in three years, two years, I don't know. That could certainly change. But I think...

41:01it's from today's perspective that has to be there. I also think about, you know, you generally talk about this from a startup lens, but as you get a bigger organization and perhaps a public company, you think about, you know, maybe keeping something separate, maybe keeping it in a system that can track this data over time, not necessarily in a data warehouse. So I don't think we've answered that question yet. So that's another lens that I look at, especially for like ERPs and FPNA software.

41:29Yeah, I mean, it's obviously public markets getting hit that, you know, SAS is dying, you know, even if they're doing their own transformation of, you know, in each of these companies, like, it seems from both your perspective, seems like at least Jeff, you're a little bit more bearish on the buy versus build. But like, is application software kind of like, at least in the enterprise, it's like, no, no, large enterprises, there's need for it. But what's your take on application software, all these startups that are building apps these days? I think it's hard to categorize every single one under the same bucket. I think when I talked to other companies, what I hear is the use cases that they're solving for are so ingrained in the technical nature of that specific problem.

42:30And I think you could see how either there's a lot more startups to come after that because it's easier to build. That's one threat vector. The other vector is your customers building themselves for, let's say, tech companies and the fortune of the past, let's say. That's kind of the buyer category we're talking about for a lot of that. But there's a lot of willing buyers out there, right? Six million businesses out there in the US that their backhand looks quite different.

42:59Right and what they need is very different and so and then and there's certainly you know, what do you look at small businesses? I don't think they're going to be the ones who are going to go build their own software like and then They're just they're just not it's not what they want to do and there's a lot of maintenance costs So I think it depends on the end market. I think it depends on the application And depends on the problem that they're solving Are there things that you would love to see like you know as you kind of go on your own?

43:26kind of journey of build versus buy, building your own things, automating stuff that you previously were doing manually. Is there stuff that you still want to see? If I was thinking about what do I want to do? Like, what's one software that's going to change my life right now? And I think even leveraging Cloud Code, it's not there yet, which is I want like a company Jarvis, right? In just everything.

43:51And I can ask it to the voice, you know, give me the answer of all the meetings you ingested, all the slack and all the Google drives, all that. And I think there's some software out there that can do this, like Glean, for example. I think, you know, maybe South Slack will do something like that. But I don't think it's just there yet. And this is a problem people are trying to solve for a very long time. And I think in larger organization or even small, this this is the one that that works across every department.

44:20Everyone's trying to solve something and everyone is looking for information that either happened. Somebody made a decision in a meeting. That decision got lost. Maybe there's a transcript somewhere that's saved down, but who's looking at that? Who's tracking that decision over time? You also lose sight of the business going backwards or forwards. It's like, okay, would it be cool if I could see a timeline about all the key decisions that were made for this particular thing over time? You don't get that yet. So I think that's the one thing that I really want to see.

44:49Jeff, anything you want to say? I'm having too much fun building with Cloud Code. I think I'm right now removing a lot of the tools that I used to need and use. I think with MCP access and transcripts in Notion, really reusing that for what you're talking about is that central repository. And that's been pretty powerful to use with Cloud. And so I think that's one of the notions that I'm always has to create MCP, a better MCP in what Google has.

45:18and to Google Docs. That's been an amazing tool for us and helps kind of solve that problem. But I would have said maybe six months ago, a year ago, something that could help create a presentation, right? Be linked up directly to the data warehouse, OnePlay Update, and we built that with Cloud Phone. If you're the first finance hire of a company right now, and they're sort of planning for their own finance org future, Right. It's 2026. They're just building their department and they're growing fast. What do you think that finance leader needs to be thinking about? Like, especially if you were building it, like, well, what's what's like, was there, here's the first hire we would have or, you know, is it just like by cloud code right away? Like, what would you say for those folks that are listening in that are just new to the finance function, but they're the ones in charge? I would over invest.

46:16in your data architecture and instrumentation. Number one, it's the first thing I want to do, because that underlies anything else that you can do with Cloud Code or any other system. But that was always the case for you just saying, hey, now it's even more important. I think it's even even more important. I think a lot of companies under invest early in that. And there's such an opportunity early on with a cleaner start to really build that robust data architecture that's reliable and stable. Rowan, what do you think? 100% agree. I think I was going to say, if I were to hire somebody, and I was in this role about a year ago, if I were to do that now, the first person I would hire is like a data engineer on my team, not even another analyst to get things up and running. Because I want to connect, again, all these systems together in one place. I want to set it up in the right way so that I can then take Claude and

47:11and get my answers. And you know, as you, as you know, garbage and garbage out. And I think in the past, it was always, you know, garbage in, but you had all these humans, smart humans to be used to, you know, beautify that garbage a little bit. But now I think you want to do more with less. You kind of need to set it up. And these things grow over time, right? There's a massive amount of tech debt after a while. If you don't fix it in the front, that just keeps on going, going, going. So absolutely.

47:39The second person that will go higher, the second thing I will go get is a head of IT and security who's on the front foot and he can navigate and how to set all these systems up in a secure way. That is probably the number one most valuable person at the company right now. It may feel like, hey, if you don't get the data right, it's not secure or it's not set in the right way. None of this stuff is going to really catch up and hurt you guys.

48:05Awesome. I know we have we're running out of time here. I have some fast fast questions. One of you can answer really quick and we'll just use rapid fire. We don't both have to answer. So let's first Excel. What is your dad or dying? Yeah. Okay. Netsuit in 2030 still here are gone. Still here. Still alive. All right. AI agents will place your what?

48:34data analysts. Okay. This is no judgment to these startups out there. Most overhyped finance startup right now. Point solutions, I would say. If you're not a platform, you're gonna die. All right. Any underrated finance startups? I think payment architecture is a difficult one that has more barriers for AI to go get. Is there a tool outside of the labs ones that you're piloting that you're like pretty curious about or interested in. That's tough. I think everyone's just on, at least I'm just on cloud code trying to build everything I see. Well, wrap it up with, you know, think about the finance team in the future. Where are you going to be spending most of your time? Hopefully make decisions. Hiring for me. All right. Well, hey guys, I know we're a little over, brohead, Jeff.

49:29I think when we plan for this, we probably had five X number of questions to kind of go through. So we're gonna have this again in a few months, since it's moving so fast, and we're gonna revisit these topics and see, hey, what's changed. So appreciate both of you. Appreciate all the work that you do for the world and for all the listeners out there. Appreciate the advice and guidance you shared about the world you're living in and what's changing in finance. Thank you. All right, see you guys. All right, bye.

50:02Hey, this is Ben Keznoka, co-founder of Village Global. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Village Global podcast where we go deep on all of the biggest topics in tech. If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can check us out on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to see you for the next one.