The Journey to a B2B SaaS CFO Role - with Michael DiFilippo, Invoca

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It 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 the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Michael DiFilippo, the Chief Financial Officer at Invoca. Today, we'll be covering four areas with Michael. First, how Michael has seen the B2B SaaS CFO role evolve over the last few years. Second, how Michael uses performance metrics to manage and report on his business. Third, how Michael uses performance metrics in the annual planning and budgeting process. And fourth, Michael's vision for how the B2B SaaS CFO role will evolve as we go forward. Michael, thank you so much for being here at Metrics that Measure Up and give a brief overview of your journey to becoming our guest. Sure.

**Michael DiFilippo** (1:22)
Thank you. Thanks, Ray, for the invite. I really appreciate it. In terms of my own background, I grew up in the business-facing kind of FP&A ranks. I didn't enter the workforce like as a CPA or an investment banking or consulting.
My profile is, I started working for companies in these business-facing finance roles, and I've done those types of jobs my entire career. I have done within those companies, I have done early on some accounting roles, some treasury roles, internal audit type roles, which I think helped to round me out professionally. But ultimately, it led to the FP&A VP Finance CFO type work. I landed my first tech CFO role over 20 years ago, it was actually just during the Internet boom of 1999-2000, and technology really captured my interest. And then, I guess more even specifically, I landed my first SaaS CFO role nearly 15 years ago now with a company called MuleSoft. And I immediately fell in love with the recurring revenue business model, just kind of the math behind it. And since then, I've worked exclusively, entirely in SaaS recurring revenue type businesses.

**Ray Rike** (2:46)
Well, MuleSoft was not a bad first recurring revenue business to be at, led to a very successful acquisition by Salesforce. So congratulations, Michael.

**Michael DiFilippo** (2:56)
Yeah, it was great. I was there in the very early days. There were 25 people and we were doing like a quarter million a month in recurring revenue. So it was early days. It was very, very interesting and just pleasing to see how, you know, see how well that company turned out. And Greg Schott, the CEO, you know, in my own opinion, kind of just single-handedly dragged that thing across the finish line. Really, really, really impressive CEO.

**Ray Rike** (3:21)
Well, I want to just go back a little bit. We're going to spend a lot of time on where a B2B SaaS CFO is evolving to. But I found it interesting that you started outside of the technology industry. In fact, you were in an industrial manufacturing business, DuPont. Then you were in the consumer food industry. And then your first kind of foray that I saw from your LinkedIn profile was at Symbol Technologies. So, tell me a little bit about that journey. And what made you pivot outside of traditional industries into a B2B tech industry?

**Michael DiFilippo** (3:54)
So, DuPont did a very nice job for me, early career, rotating me around into very different roles. I had, you know, four or five, six different roles in the time that I was there. My last job that they put me into in 2000 was a, it was a newly formed business unit that was commercializing flat panel display technology. It was actually OLEDs, which is funny because OLEDs are like, finally like today, kind of all the rage. We were literally 20 years ago trying to commercialize OLED technology. And that's really where I got kind of the tech bug.
We hired, the company hired an executive from, this will date me, you'll recognize Ray from Compact Computer to run that business. And then he subsequently later left DuPont and he joined a standalone public technology company called Symbol Technologies. And he then hired me to work for him. And since that time, I've been with technology businesses ever, ever since.

**Ray Rike** (4:58)
You know, I'm not going to go back into my history, but I did grow up at GE and I was in their technology division called Information Services. And boy, did they teach me a lot about how to run a business using financial metrics.