The CFO Journey from Private Equity Acquisition to Initial Public Offering (IPO) - with Bill Koefoed, CFO OneStream

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, 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. Today, I am joined by Bill Koefoed, the Chief Financial Officer at OneStream. We'll be covering five topics, eight topics in 30 minutes with Bill today, so we'll try to get them all in. Number one, the journey to an IPO and beyond a CFO's perspective. Lessons learned to the migration from a perpetual license model to a SaaS subscription model. Third, how does your role of the CFO change in a private equity environment? Bill's had that opportunity and experience. Fourth, to ask Bill to take out his crystal ball and talk a little bit about how technology, including AI, is going to help change and evolve the Office of Finance. And then lastly, I just want Bill to share his own personal journey from consulting organization to public company CFO. So with that as a backdrop, Bill, do you mind giving a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here in the Metrics That Measure Up podcast? You heard about Lifeflow. It's the easiest way to automate spreadsheet FP&A. Lifeflow updates QuickBooks Online and zero actuals in your models without breaking your formulas. Finance leaders are transforming everything from forecast to board reports into live 24 by 7 control centers. Some are even avoiding switches to expensive ERPs with no formula, real time consolidation. Thousands of companies are making life easier with Lifeflow. Join them at lifflow.com/metrics. That's liveflow.com/metrics.

**Bill Koefoed** (2:16)
I started my career in public accounting in California and took many different twists and turns. We'll obviously talk about in the consulting side, but we ended up moving to Microsoft in 2005 I started that role as the kind of FP&A person for IT finance. Our CIO ended up leaving Microsoft, and so I ended up doing a bunch of work with customers talking about how Microsoft does IT. And it was so weird. I was in the right place at the right time, and Chris Liddell, who was the CFO at the time, said, hey, you can talk to customers, you can talk to investors, so why don't you come run IR? And I didn't have a typical kind of banking background, but my experience doing investor relations at Microsoft was actually a pivotal moment for me, and I think helped prepare me to be a public company CFO. Obviously, I did 17 earnings calls while I was there. And then after that, I ended up taking the CFO job at Skype after we acquired them. And then I took a couple different CFO jobs and ended up here five and a half years ago. So it's been quite a fun journey. I don't know that there was any straight path. But I talked to a woman who I met her from time to time the other day, and she was asking about career advice. And part of it is work with people that you want to work with, do interesting work and learn. And if you do those, no matter what your job is, I think that's a good path forward for how to think about, at least as I think about my job and as I would give people advice in there.

**Ray Rike** (3:52)
Well, as I said, there's no one path to becoming a CFO or CEO. But yours definitely is not homogenous. It's very heterogeneous and the zinc and zags. Neither was OneStream's journey a straight line. So I guess I'm going to ask you just give a little bit of background, right? Because it was a perpetual software license initially. Then what I'd like for you to do is just share a little bit about that experience when KKR took a majority position as a Private Equity Investor.

**Bill Koefoed** (4:21)
Yeah, it's a great story. The founders of the company started with a small group of people and they grew the company as customer growth grew. They spent a year or two building the product and then the first customer that they had was a company that's now part of Tenneco, which is a multi-billion dollar company. There's nothing harder than starting your first software with a multi-billion dollar multinational company. And they started by doing that and then they grew from there. But as you mentioned, it was perpetual licenses because, of course, you got your cash upfront. And so they grew headcount as customer growth occurred. They realized that was going to impede their growth over time. And so in 2018, they started pursuing outside capital. And that, as you mentioned, that ended up, they ended up bringing in KKR.