The Strategic Future of FP&A - with Albert Gozzi, Founder and CEO Aleph

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, 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 at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Albert Gozzi, the co-founder and CEO of Aleph. We'll be covering four primary topics with Albert today. First, the vision behind founding Aleph. The evolution of AI in the Fp&A category. What is Fp&A's role in developing corporate strategy? Tactical versus strategic function. And fourth, the growth strategies for a company competing in a fairly crowded category. So, Albert, with that, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Albert Gozzi** (1:19)
Yeah. Thanks, Ray. Thanks for having me in your program. Pleasure to be here. And yeah, a bit of my background. I'm originally from Argentina. That's the accent that you can hear. I started my career in finance, worked at Procter & Gamble.
Then I worked in management consulting, working a lot with CFOs before becoming a COO and CFO myself. So, you know, like first 10 years of my work life, working different finance roles. And I think that's a bit of what got the idea, where I got the idea for Aleph and how the company got started. And I'm happy to share more and go deeper into all things finance and Fp&A.

**Ray Rike** (2:01)
Okay, Albert, you and Steve Ballmer had your career start at the same place at P&G. I don't know if you knew that.

**Albert Gozzi** (2:09)
I know. Like, let's see who ends up higher.

**Ray Rike** (2:12)
Yeah, let's see if the next 10 years unfold just as well for you. But hey, I have a question for you. So what was the motivation or that catalytic moment to found a company and a Fp&A platform? What was the catalyst?

**Albert Gozzi** (2:33)
Yeah, I think it goes back to a brief background that I gave you, Ray. I lived and breathed Fp&A for the first 10 years of my career. When I was a management consultant, I was always pretty good at spreadsheets. I always joked that even today I can challenge most of the team at spreadsheets and still win. As our team gets bigger, that gets a bit more challenging.
I think I combined that love and passion for spreadsheets with also a technical mindset. The way that I had solved problems with spreadsheets in the past was writing visual basic back in the days and later on Python scripts to make them better and more automated. And I think what I ended up with is something that worked pretty well, actually, and I was pretty proud of across many experiences and situations. It also felt very fragile and it felt that one typo in one of my scripts might collapse all of the tower of cards that I was building. So I think that was the seed for the idea for Aleph and the motivation is, can I take all of these that actually works pretty well? Can I productize it? And can other people benefit from all of these without worrying that it breaks every week or every month? So it's like, yeah, solving the problem that I had in the way that I wish someone had solved it for me.

**Ray Rike** (4:11)
I still remember during budget season having those Excel spreadsheets with 12 to 15 different worksheets, links that were pretty precarious everywhere. And then let's throw in that macro that someone designed is like, Oh my God, it's a scary thing.

**Albert Gozzi** (4:30)
And the funny thing, Ray, is you might be talking about 1995 or you might be talking about 2025 I think that statement, isolated, can apply to any time, again, 30 years ago or last week, as many finance teams go into budgeting season.

**Ray Rike** (4:49)
Yeah. Well, that's the perfect topic to pivot just a little bit. So 1995 versus 2025 What are some of the most common challenges you see the Office of Finance facing today, which are new or not new from 1995, and then specifically that Fp&A leader? What are we asking him or her to do today? Or what challenges are they focusing on today that they really didn't see as much 20 years ago?

**Albert Gozzi** (5:19)
Yeah, I can tell you what they do versus what they were hired to do and what they would like to be doing. I do think that there are still a lot of the old way, which again was true in 1995 and is true today, of disparate data sources, the information that you want in order to show insights or make decisions living across three, five, seven different systems, a lot of manual data wrangling, copy pasting from one place to another one into spreadsheets, into different systems. There's a lot of error checking, data is not clean and you need to do a lot of that manually and you feel that you're spending 95% of the time on that preparation, 5% on the analysis. So I think that's the reality for 80% plus of finance teams today. What they were hired to do, what they would like to do and some of what I think we can do as a company, but I think this is not to talk only about Aleph, is automating all of that, putting all of that in autopilot and make it so that you spend 1% of your time data wrangling, data collecting. You spend 1% of your time reviewing all of the errors and anomalies that someone flagged for you automatically and you spend 98% of the time doing the insight and the analysis, but also using that to drive decisions. I think it's not about insights and numbers as an abstract concept. Those are only useful if they drive actual decisions. I think that's what top finance teams do today. I think that's what everyone would like to be doing. No one gets enjoyment out of correcting data errors or copy pasting.