513: Achieving Your IPO Milestone | Kelly Steckelberg, CFO, Zoom Video Communications

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

A little more than 18 months ago, when CFO Kelly Steckelberg joined Zoom Video Communications, there were a number of key hires that needed to be made if the company was going to achieve its goal of selling shares to the public in the not-too-distant future. Three months after Zoom’s IPO and one month after its first earnings call, those hires are still top-of-mind for Steckelberg, who, while working alongside CEO Eric Yuan, filled the positions of general counsel, head of investor relations, and head of FP&A. Next, Steckelberg says, she wanted to make certain that finance and sales “had a great cadence” as far as how the teams interacted went and established a level of visibility into the sales pipeline that would allow Zoom to forecast on a weekly basis.

Looking back, Steckelberg says that visibility into sales and spending was good when she stepped into the CFO role–but not where it needed to be. “When I arrived here, there was one FP&A analyst. She was doing a great job of holding it altogether while using Excel–but it was just not enough. We had the good fortune of being a company that was growing very quickly, and the spending was appropriate–but we needed to be a little tighter.” —Jack Sweeney