CFO THOUGHT LEADER

• 1127: Lean Finance in a Volatile World | Damon Lee, CFO, C.H. Robinson

  When Damon Lee reflects on his first conversations with C.H. Robinson’s CEO, he recalls how natural the alignment felt. “We spoke the same language. We were finishing each other’s sentences,” Lee tells us. For a finance leader whose ambition had long been to step into the CFO chair, the clarity of vision he encountered at Robinson made the opportunity stand out.Lee emphasizes that Robinson’s longevity mattered. “A company that survived and thrived for 120 years—that’s special in its own right,” he tells us. The business, rooted in logistics services, relies on people as its core differentiator. “Our people really make the difference with our customers,” he adds, underscoring why the culture resonated with him.What sealed the decision, however, was the simplicity of the CEO’s plan. “We’re going to outgrow the market, we’re going to expand our operating margins, we’re going to do both,” Lee recounts. Complexity, in his view, often derails execution. A straightforward mandate with conviction behind it gave him confidence that transformation was possible.The CEO, Lee notes, wanted more than a traditional finance executive. He wanted someone who could “show up like a CEO,” bring lean discipline, and act as a true partner in reshaping the company. For Lee, this aligned perfectly with the operational mindset that had guided his career.After more than a year in the role, he reflects simply: “We’re winning in the marketplace. We’re winning in the eyes of investors. So certainly it was the right move for me, no doubt.”

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• 1126: Turning Signals into Strategy in Hypergrowth | Holly Grey, CFO Horizon3.ai

  When Holly Grey first examined Horizon3.ai, she saw more than a cybersecurity startup. She saw a technology that could change the way companies safeguard themselves. Traditional pen tests, she tells us, are human-driven, vary widely by auditor, and usually happen just once a year. Horizon3.ai, by contrast, “started out as a technology alternative to pen testing.” Its platform can be deployed “within minutes, not hours or weeks or months,” Grey tells us, and has already executed “over 100,000 pen tests.”The system identifies exposures, connects them to known threat actors, and—most critically—prioritizes which vulnerabilities to fix. It integrates directly with tools like Jira, creates tickets, and confirms results after remediation. “Even as a CFO, I want to know we’re not exposed,” Grey explains. That value proposition has already attracted more than 4,000 customers, she tells us.Her decision to join Horizon3.ai was equally deliberate. Grey noticed two respected colleagues had recently come aboard, including the CRO. That relationship, she says, is vital: “I need to know that I can trust that CRO implicitly.” After doing her own diligence, Grey was convinced of the company’s momentum: “It’s hard to grow over 100% year over year, and do that multiple years, without having product market fit.”The timing was fortuitous. Just as the company raised $100 million in Series D funding, its VP of Finance resigned. Horizon3.ai was ready to appoint its first CFO. “Here I am,” Grey tells us, “and I could not be happier in terms of joining.”

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• 1125: Finance Lessons in the AI Era | Jay Peir, CFO, Pigment

  At 30, Jay Peir stepped into the CFO role at SunPower, a high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer. The appointment came after leading M&A and venture investments at Cypress Semiconductor, where SunPower was the largest portfolio company. “I had my first CFO experience at the age of 30,” Peir tells us, recalling how corporate development responsibilities opened the door to finance leadership.That early leap reflected a broader pattern in his career: moving fluidly between finance and strategy. With dual engineering degrees from Stanford, Peir began in economic consulting before earning his MBA amid the rise and fall of the dot-com era. His background in technology and data analysis, he tells us, formed “my first chapter” and prepared him for navigating growth in fast-moving sectors.A decade at Tableau deepened those lessons. When revenue slowed and the company’s stock “dropped about 50% in one day,” Peir was tasked with helping lead a shift to subscription. He emphasizes that success required aligning stakeholders across sales, marketing, and finance, ensuring teams could both understand and articulate changes to customers. “There’s both internal and external change management,” he tells us, noting the importance of investor communication as well.Today, as Head of Strategy at Pigment, CFO Peir applies these experiences to scaling an AI-native planning platform. Pigment’s tools unify financial and operational planning, enabling companies to act on data with speed and flexibility. The company’s AI roadmap includes predictive analytics and autonomous agents, helping finance teams drive variance analysis, expense tracking, and forecasting more efficiently, Peir tells us.

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• 1124: Rewiring the Marketplace for the AI Era | Craig Foster, CFO, Pax8

  When Craig Foster talks about artificial intelligence, he begins with scale. Pax8, the enterprise marketplace where he serves as CFO, connects vendors like Microsoft and CrowdStrike with 43,000 managed service providers. Those MSPs, he tells us, serve between 700,000 and 800,000 small and midsize businesses worldwide.Against that backdrop, Foster describes how AI is reshaping both internal operations and external opportunities. Inside Pax8, teams are experimenting across functions—from customer support to accounting—to automate what was once manual. The company, he tells us, has set a target “to do 20% more with 20% less,” relying on AI tools that are already available. Efficiency gains are not hypothetical; they are part of the current planning cycle.Externally, Foster sees what he calls “agentic marketplaces” emerging—ecosystems where AI modules act as labor components. Vendors are already building such agents, and Pax8 is designing its own. “We’re a marketplace,” he tells us, “so we need to incorporate those different… AI components and enable our downstream clients for efficiency.” He believes this wave, unlike earlier technology cycles, is reaching SMBs with unusual speed.The finance leader is also watching economics evolve in real time. Data aggregated across Pax8’s network shows strong interest, but pricing remains unsettled. Foster compares today’s uncertainty to the early days of API marketplaces, when usage-based models became standard. The question now, he tells us, is how to split value between provider and customer—whether by consumption, per interaction, or shared outcomes. “That’s probably the biggest challenge in industry right now,” Foster says.

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• 1123: From Accounting Rigor to Strategic Leadership | Jim Rogers, CFO, Tempus AI

  The pivot began when Jim Rogers raised his hand. Groupon was shifting from mobile daily deals to a goods business in Europe, and—still early in his career—he volunteered to help lead the finance work. That step, he tells us, bridged his path from technical accounting into FP&A and set a pattern: seek out the build stage, then make finance a partner to the business.Rogers started in audit at Ernst & Young before moving through technical accounting and controllership into planning. He earned a master’s in accounting at Northern Illinois University to qualify for the CPA, he tells us. At Groupon, he advanced to head of FP&A for North America, experience that informed his philosophy at Tempus AI: “we’re not here to report the news,” he says—finance should enable decisions.Joining Tempus in 2017 as the first finance hire—when the company was pre-revenue, he tells us—Rogers built the function, became CFO in 2021, and helped steer the company public. He also stood up investor relations, initially outsourcing the function before bringing it in-house by the end of 2021, he tells us, investing time to educate analysts on a business that spans multiple categories.AI runs through Tempus’s work. Externally, a physician portal (“positive”) and the researcher tool “Lens” aim to make diagnostics and data more useful. Internally, large language models sift “hundreds of petabytes of data,” Rogers tells us, and surface real-time finance insights. The strategic throughline is discipline: double down on oncology, keep pilots siloed, and expand only when the core is ready—because, as he notes, “no two days are alike.”

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