Strategic Finance in B2B SaaS - with Bijan Moallemi, Mosaic CEO

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talk to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bijan Moallemi, founder and CEO of Mosaic.Tech, and formerly the Senior Vice President of Finance at palantir Technologies. Today, we will be covering three main topic areas. first, finance, the opportunities and challenges in a hyper-growth B2B cloud company. Second, strategic finance. Is it more than a phrase? And third, metrics and benchmarks. Are they a strategic asset or just a tactical reality for a strategic finance group? Bijan, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Bijan Moallemi** (1:15)
Definitely. Well, first off, Ray, thanks so much for having me on the podcast today. A little bit about myself. I started my career in corporate FP&A down here in San Diego at Qualcomm. After two years, I made the jump to palantir. palantir at the time was roughly 100 people. The finance team was very nascent and really fortunate to go on an amazing journey there over the course of six years. I met my future co-founders, Joe and Brian, and really at palantir, we're responsible for building and leading the finance function. Along that journey, we're dealing with the company and hyper growth. I think we were more than 2,500 folks by the time we left. Really had to solve a lot of the modern day challenges that a finance team are facing.
Along that journey, to solve those problems, to really be an asset to the business, ultimately had to build a lot of internal tools to solve those challenges. We tried every off-the-shelf tool that you can imagine. Really struggled to keep pace with the growth of the business. That was the palantir journey. Post palantir, me as well as my future co-founders went on to be finance leaders. I was the CFO at Piazza, high growth B2B SaaS company, as were Joe and Brian. And very quickly, I think, realized that a lot of the problems that we were encountering at palantir, we found that they were actually more ubiquitous. Wasn't palantir specific. In fact, many high growth companies were facing the same challenges that we saw. And so after again, kind of automating our way out of a job by building internal tools to solve these problems that our respective companies wanted to take things a step further and start Mosaic. And so that's really our journey, having built and led finance teams over the last decade really pushed the boundaries of what these underlying systems are capable of.

**Ray Rike** (3:01)
Well, that's an incredible history. And most of our loyal listeners are huge historians of the cloud and the B2B SaaS industry. And I could spend an hour with you just talking about your experience at palantir because both the founder of palantir and the journey was so unique. But on the Metrics and Measure Up podcast, we want to talk about how companies are using Metrics and Benchmarks to really scale their business. So let's start with this Bijan, and that is you've been right in the middle of a hyper growth enterprise cloud company. What were their top two to three challenges that you faced in managing the financial function in such a high growth environment? And if you want to, you might say, hey, at this stage it was that, but at a later stage it was this. But what were those top two to three challenges?

**Bijan Moallemi** (3:44)
Yeah. So when we joined at palantir, the company was a hundred-ish folks. I think we just raised it $2 billion, and we're this multi-global company. I think had 10 or so subsidiaries still on QuickBooks at the time, which is crazy because as I'm sure your listeners know here, QuickBooks doesn't support multiple currencies. So off the bat, there was a lot of work that we had to do to build that strong foundation to be able to answer even the most simple questions about the business. And I'd say that the biggest challenge over the course of our journey at palantir, it was really keeping pace and even trying to get ahead of the needs of the business. I think what we quickly realized is you can't do the value add things like analysis, synthesis, really trying to make a big impact on the business if you don't have some of those fundamentals in place, the systems, the data, the ontology. And so for us, dealing with a company in hyper growth that was growing horizontally, vertically into different geographies, business lines, every few months, really trying to keep pace and ultimately get ahead of the business, I'd say was the biggest challenge that we faced.