Entering a Mature FP&A Market as a Start-Up - with Julio Martinez Co-Founder and CEO, Abacum

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We are joined by Julio Martinez, the co-founder and CEO of Abacum. We're going to be covering four key topic areas with Julio today. First, the vision behind founding Abacum.
Second, the three most common FP&A mistakes that Julio sees. Third, FP&A's role in developing and helping to shape corporate strategy. And fourth, the unique challenges of a startup and what many could consider a crowded category. So Julio, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics at Measure Up podcast.

**Julio Martinez** (1:17)
Right, thank you so much for having me. This is a blast. Super excited to be here. Very briefly on me, I have to spend most of my career in finance, both in advisory roles like investment banking, but also operational roles. I'm very close to FP&A and M&A.
After that many years in the finance tranches, then I had an awesome opportunity to, let's say, redeem myself and move into tech and particularly product. So I spent over four years building and launching FinTech products from scratch to market.
It was in that context that I acknowledged and realized the massive opportunity and pain that FP&A teams were having. Look, my career has brought me to live in New York, Sao Paulo, Zurich, London, Mumbai. So I take pride of how those places enriched me and how my family grew during that time.

**Ray Rike** (2:12)
So Julio, what a broad background. Global citizen, coming from the investment banking industry, then kind of FinTech products, but what was the motivation, the founding a company and developing a platform that's purpose-built for FP&A?

**Julio Martinez** (2:29)
So the motivation there was dual, right? First of all, I had spent close to 20 years in finance and I had worked with finance teams, FP&A teams, M&A teams across advisory and again, operational roles. So I felt I was bleeding in the head. I felt that pain, that problem, you know, intimately in my flesh.
So when I was actually building products, I was actually building fintech products, I realized, wow, if I have to tackle an opportunity, if there is a problem space I uniquely understand and where I have a unique advantage, this is in the FP&A category.
I think I have an unfair advantage. I think I have strong opinions as to what to build and how to make these teams heroes in the organization, how to make them uniquely successful. So that was a part of the motivation. Like I think it's classic, a founder that has had that pain for years. And once he knows, once I knew how to build product, then I thought, yeah, this is the product I'm gonna build. On the other side, more from a founder perspective, and you've been there as well, you want a unique challenge, you want something that really takes the best out of you. So this is the motivation.

**Ray Rike** (3:51)
Well, many great entrepreneurs face the business challenge, and they went and said, I'm gonna go find a solution to that. Oh, there's not one, I'm gonna build it myself. So who better to ask than you? And what are the top two or three most common challenges you see facing the finances, specifically the FP&A leader today?

**Julio Martinez** (4:11)
Let's go for the top three, or, you know, you guide me here, but the most important one that we typically see, and that's our entry point, is that FP&A teams today are missing access to real-time, connected financial and operational data.
They are demanded to deliver strategic insights, and we can go about it later, but when it comes to making sense of all the data, when it comes to having all metrics that matter, operational and financial at their fingertips, so that they can understand and take the pulse of the business, drive performance, you know, there is a lot of manual work to get there if it's even possible. So that's a very unique problem that is, you know, unfortunately in this era of AI, still very, very common, right? So still some of those data layer foundations are not there in many, many companies. That would be the first one. I will stop there.

**Ray Rike** (5:13)
Let's double click on that because you mean all my macros in Excel aren't getting the right information from operational systems, but let's be serious here for a minute. I agree they have a hard time getting that information, but you mentioned kind of in real time or near real time.