Venture Everywhere Podcast: Christina Ross with Jenny Fielding
Jenny Fielding, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Christina Ross, founder and CEO of Cube, on Episode 5: Think Outside the Cube.
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Christina Ross is the founder and CEO of Cube, the first spreadsheet-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that delivers a delightfully frictionless experience by letting you keep what you love about spreadsheets and automating what you don’t. Prior to Cube, Christina held head of finance roles at Rent the Runway, Criteo, and Eyeview.
This episode is hosted by Jenny Fielding, co-founder and general partner of Everywhere Ventures (previously The Fund). In this interview, Jenny and Christina dive into a range of headaches and headways in the finance department, including how a failed implementation project led to the creation of Cube. Learn how to get real feedback when you’re starting a company, and hear how the principles of simplicity and building connectors in the early days enabled solving complex problems in an elegant manner. Listen carefully for Christina’s tips on closing sales and her favorite toy as a kid!
If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to Venture Everywhere and give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Fielding
Hi, and welcome to the everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that: founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Jenny Fielding
Super excited today to welcome our guest, Christina from Cube, and I'm going to have her introduce herself. But Christina and I have now known each other for more than five years. So it's always a treat, to be able to interview people that are not only portfolio companies, but are you know, people that I consider friends. And so I'm really looking forward to this.
Jenny Fielding
So Christina, welcome.
Christina Ross
Thank you. This is exciting.
Jenny Fielding
Awesome. So I'd love to start a little bit at the beginning, because you have such a great background. And we always say like, if you can find a founder, who knows like where the bodies are buried, because they work in the space or have unique insight, you know, throw your money at them. So that was kind of my feeling when when I met you. But if you could just go through a little bit about your background, kind of where you started, and then we'll move on to Cube.
Christina Ross
So when I talk about my background, I go way, way back. And when I was a kid, I always like to tell the story. My favorite toy was a cash register. And I don't mean like a fisher price one. I saved my allowance money from doing chores and things and babysitting. No, I was probably younger, I was probably being babysat at the time, but saved my money from chores and went to BJs, or Costco or one of those places and bought a real life cash register. And that was my toy as a kid.
Jenny Fielding
You're very unique, Christina.
Christina Ross
So the obsession started early with counting my funds. But when I got a little bit older, and I was graduating university, and I thought about the career I wanted to have, I knew one day I wanted to run a company. And to understand how companies work, you have to speak the language. And to me, that meant that going into finance or some sort of finance would be the right type of role for me. I actually wasn't great at accounting. And I wasn't great at finance when I was at the when I was in university. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to jump headfirst into it is - it wasn't exciting, and I wanted to make it more exciting. And of course, now I built my entire career around it. I started at this point, when I graduated at GE, which was considered the world's most admired company, by Fortune, I think many years in a row that would be like going to work for one of the FAANG companies. Now, of course, now I say it was when it was a company back in the early 2000s, and then became a finance transformation consultant with Deloitte. So to get really nerdy, basically, what we did is we went into finance teams of fortune 50 companies, and anything we needed - we were like a SWAT team or like a MacGyver for them. So let's say they wanted to do a restatement or build out a Shared Services Center, we would figure out a way to do it. And most of the time, I was actually doing large scale systems implementations. So this was my first, actually my second exposure to the FP&A software space. First was at GE as a user, and then at Deloitte doing the implementations of these large scale platforms like Hyperion and SAP. And then cut to after I was on the road at that point for maybe six years, I decided it was time to get a life and a real job. And I discovered the wonderful world of startups and I never left. And so that brought me to this little 30 person company that no one had heard of called Rent the Runway, which of course, is now a publicly traded company. And I joined as their first head of finance.
Christina Ross
And I'll repeat this story multiple times about joining a company as the first head of finance or as the first CFO. So I did it two more times, and cut to, these are all incredible growth stories. So you know, in the span of two years, in each of these companies, we would grow 10x plus. So hyper growth, but also hyper challenges that come along with it, and the need for something better in finance. And so let me take a step back and just talk about what is FP&A and when I say I needed support and FP&A with software, what do I mean FP&A I always describe it as telling the story of the past, present and future. So you tell the story of the past because accounting or the accounting function puts all these numbers in a format that is compliant with generally accepted accounting principles, GAAP, or in Europe, IFRS. I probably just didn't speak English right now. And you're like, What is she saying? What what are the numbers mean?
Jenny Fielding
I have to interrupt you for one second to say that when I first met you, and you pitched me, I was like, Wow, this woman is fantastic. She knows, you know, the space but I literally had to leave and you know, Google FP&A. I knew it was in the, you know, in the finance world, but I actually had never heard that term before. So you know, for you It's so native, but for many of us, it's like, okay, what is this?
Christina Ross
And that's one of the opportunities too, we got ahead, for a second to where we are today. This is one of the great opportunities with FP&A I've been told in the early days of raising money, sounds niche-y. Every single company in the entire world over certain size has FP&A, it's all the financial planning. So going back to past, present, and future, you're taking the accounting world and translating it into something business can understand. So whether it's a financial statement or report or a summary, FP&A is taking the accounting world and translating it into a story.
Christina Ross
Let's go to the future for a second. What's our plan for this year? Do we have a plan A, a Plan B, a Plan C? Are there ones in between? I'm talking to companies now that have six month plans that are small, medium, and large. What if we hit the low? What if we hit the medium? What if we hit the high? That's FP&A at its finest. And then we have the present, which is performance management. How are we doing right now? We said we're going to do X, we did Y. How far off are we? What do we need to do to pivot our business? And there's that old saying of it's not the strongest that survive, it's the most adaptable to change. And so great planning and agile planning is what makes companies really, really strong. So it's such a mission critical function, especially for today. Okay, so I went I took us down a side road on what is-
Jenny Fielding
I love it-
Christina Ross
You see the importance of this function.
Jenny Fielding
- and your enthusiasm is what I love. So I'd love to just before we get into Cube, as you were working at some of these high growth companies, what were some of the pain points that you were seeing within kind of FP&A, as the finance had to finance.
Christina Ross
So number one: garbage in, garbage out, going back to telling the story of what the data means. Oftentimes, it was imperfect data, it came from many different systems. We live in the world: now there's an app for that. So there's data coming from all these different places. And to your point of, hey, I wasn't familiar with FP&A, most people are telling me that including when I have an FP&A job. So is this really important? Do you really need to spend money on software? And how great can FP&A be was also a struggle to sort of get the resources needed to really deliver what FP&A could deliver. So that's one of the things and then just what's happening in a hypergrowth world, it's hard to predict. And so being agile and moving really quickly, is extremely important. Because it's, you know, to be morbid for a second, if you have a business that counts, things that don't change, like, I don't know, coffins, if you have a coffin business, it may not change year over year, sorry, bad example, but it's actually one from a finance book. But if you go back to a hyper growth company, you're not necessarily going to be able to predict based on what happened the year before. So you need to predict in real time to changes, that's very difficult to do when you're spending all of your time trying to get the reporting to look right.
Jenny Fielding
Make sense. So as you're working at these companies, you're obviously seeing all of this kind of dysfunction, and you know, things that are not efficient. So I imagine in your mind, you start kind of, you know, creating what could be something better? What was that kind of aha moment, though, that gave you really the confidence to kind of go out on your own. I mean, that's a big moment. Even though you'd already been working in startups. I feel like that's kind of a pivotal moment in someone's career.
Christina Ross
Yes, the failed implementation story. So in my last role of CFO, and remember my backstory, I had worked with FP&A tools. I had been an implementation leader of FP&A tools. I thought, I'm gonna get one at this company, and how hard could it possibly be? We were maybe a little bit larger than Cube is today. So we weren't a huge company where maybe 150 people, and it was time to bring on our FP&A platform. So we use the leading platform that we compete against today, it was supposed to be the best in the market. Took us six months to launch, which by the way, I thought it was going to take four to six weeks. Of course, that's what they tell you. It took about six months. And after getting live, we couldn't figure out how to get our numbers out. And when my analysts left, we were sort of stuck with a system that no one knew how to use, no one wanted to use. And we ended up going back to spreadsheets to keep a model that we understood. And my favorite quote came from our Head of Product who I was like, Hey, we've got this tool, just put your numbers in here, submit it to me, and we don't have to send spreadsheets back and forth! And I remember him saying to me, , I won't log into that thing, but I'll send you a spreadsheet. So here's a simple invitation. We spent close to six figures on we weren't a very big company. It took us months and months of time, I had to hire another analyst - one left during the process. We couldn't figure out how to use it and no one in the company wanted to. And this led me to think to myself, Wow, I must have really messed this up huh. So I went and talked to some of my peers in the finance space. And I heard a very similar story for all of them. No, this is the same experience we had or they would say this is exactly why I can't use FP&A software. And I'm constantly looking for something better.
Christina Ross
So this leads us to what we call the tale of two bad options, you have one option, which is make do with spreadsheets, which is what 80 to 90% of companies are doing today, including some of the biggest names out there. The other one is to move to FP&A software and take a very big risk for your business. And the data actually shows that over 80% of companies end up going back to spreadsheets anyway. Which is wild.
Jenny Fielding
That is a wild number.
Christina Ross
So we have this tale of two bad options. And I thought to myself, well, Couldn't there be a new way? Why do we have to get rid of spreadsheets? Is the problem really that spreadsheets are terrible? Or the problem is actually people are blaming spreadsheets for not doing all that they need them to do? So we started looking really carefully into what is it that is missing about spreadsheets. Number one: spreadsheets crash. Why? They're not a database, people use them as databases. Spreadsheets, especially Excel, lack collaboration capabilities. Okay, so that's needed. Spreadsheets are not a data management platform. So you can't take all of your source system data and map it and tie it out. That has to be done. That's typically done within the spreadsheet, but it's not for the spreadsheet. And a number of other issues that go along with why spreadsheets are bad. But when you look at why spreadsheets work, it is one of the earliest no code platforms out there, it's been around for decades, has been highly refined over time. There have been articles that have come out about people saying you can pry my spreadsheet from my cold dead hands, you're not taking it away from me. And the data itself shows that again, this over 80% statistic of companies that go - end up going back destroyed spreadsheets, especially finance. And spreadsheets, as we say, are really the lingua franca of finance, they are the most basic container of logic. It's rows and columns, that any type of data from text to values can be input within. And to think that we're going to replace that with something else for everyone unanimously is sort of foolish on our end, if you have data from a system, what do you immediately do? You download it to a spreadsheet so that you can manage it? So why would we take that away from people? So the big aha moment is we need two things. And we need them to work together in harmony, not replace one for the other. And so I started testing this idea, and that's the beginning of the lightbulb moment with Cube.
Jenny Fielding
I love it. Yeah, well, I'd love to hear how you met met your co founder. I mean, I know the story, but I think it's uh, you know, just hearing the early days, I remember meeting you and Josh at a coworking space that was in a restaurant. That was I think the first time I met Josh. So I'd love to hear about kind of those early years of working with Josh and kind of coming up with the MVP for cube.
Christina Ross
The first six to nine months of Cube was me running around town asking questions of people. Because the early days of Cube, I had a hypothesis, and it was slightly different than what Cube ultimately turned out to be. But it got refined over and over, for example, I thought we would be a little spreadsheet, a lot of platform. It turns out, it's a lot of spreadsheet, a little platform. And that's because I spent six months just talking to users and continually refining what Cube would ultimately be. And one thing I learned when you're starting a company is the people who support you, or people who meet you will be so inspired by your journey. They'll tell you what you want to hear. Awesome idea! Congratulations, good for you! And I didn't get the real feedback. And I can tell I wasn't getting the real feedback. So what I started to do was for everyone I talked to, I would ask them if they wanted to be a customer. And not "Will you sign my LOI and become a beta user so I can go raise the money." I said, "Will you be a customer and pay?" And then I started to get different answers. And that helped me refine even further, because it was important that we were solving real problems. And it was also important that the customer had some commitment on their end, because remember, there had to be some sort of implementation, there had to be commitment to use on their side. And so committing to pay for it was part of it. So from the very early days, before meeting Josh, I started looking for customers and had some early commitments to not only use but pay for the product.
Christina Ross
I had been working with some outsourced providers at that time, really looking for the right co founder and hadn't quite met him or her yet, and it was completely serendipitous. I love the idea of serendipity because I'd worked so hard to try and find a co founder and this was happenstance that I belong to this co working space called Spacious - rest in peace. They ended up getting bought by wework and closed down. It was a really cool concept where you would go to restaurants that were only open for dinner, and during the day they would open up as coworking spaces and you could drink all the coffee you want and loiter as long as you want and no one was gonna kick you out. So it's a great way to get out of the house before the pandemic. And through Spacious, I ended up meeting Josh, who also knew - apparently knew my husband as well. So there were a couple connections there. My husband introduced us. And I thought to myself, there's probably a 5% chance that this is going to work out. But in those early days, you take every meeting and you go for it anyway. We had a quick meeting. I talked to him about Cube. He said, it sounded interesting. He follow up. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Okay. See you later. He followed up. And he said, Hey, there's something I want to show you. And I said, Okay, fine. So I met up with him. And the reason why I went up is because I didn't think anything would come of it. There were there were a lot of meetings I had with a lot of people that never netted to anything. And Josh and I had what I refer to as a Goodwill Hunting moment, where if you've seen the movie, and you know, where the professor writes on the board, the equation that has never been solved, and it comes back in the morning, and someone wrote it on the board, and he's like, who did this and of course, it was the janitor. And then it's really Matt Damon's character, and he's a genius.
Christina Ross
That's basically what happened with Josh. So he comes back to me, and he shows me, here's what I've been working on. And I had one of these moments where my jaw dropped. So again, after nine months of working with other people, trying to explain to them the basic concepts of Cube, and having them not have any idea what I was talking about, Josh built out the early dimensional structure that today is still the backbone of Cube. And from then on, we started working together slowly but surely. And we've been working together ever since. And that was a little over four years ago. So absolutely wild that sometimes these things come out nowhere. But we've been great co founders, he's an incredible partner. And I don't know where we'd be, you know, I don't know where I'd be if I hadn't met Josh. He's also a complete opposite end of the skill spectrum for me. So he's our technical leader, he ran product and engineering when I was like, what, how do you code? And then on my side, I ran the sales and marketing and success side of the business until we finally have raised some money and built a team.
Jenny Fielding
I mean, I think one of the things that, you know, I always admire about you, Christina, is that you know, you're so well versed in some things, but you're really open to putting yourself out there. So you say that, it's about serendipity. But you really put yourself out there, you were talking to so many people, you were out there meeting investors, like you really wanted to find someone to complement your skill set, as opposed to like, oh, I can do this with some outsource dev. And, you know, that's a really awesome mindset for an early stage founder. So I always appreciated that about you.
Christina Ross
Thank you.
Jenny Fielding
Tell us about the name, Cube. And then I'd love to get into kind of the evolution of the product, right? Because it's come a long way.
Christina Ross
Definitely, the name Cube came out of thinking about the visual of what I felt Cube was, but go deep for a second here. So the idea of Cube is, it's this blank space or a blank canvas where you can create whatever you need it to be. Cube is not a custom for every person built, it is extremely configurable, meaning you can create what you need out of it. And it's simple, and it's seamless. And I thought what is something that conveys this image to me and I thought of the concept of the White Cube Gallery in London, like oh, like a blank, empty cube. And then I thought to myself, wait a minute, basically - I'm gonna get nerdy for a second, like the the basic infrastructure of FP&A software is the OLAP Cube. And so it's the OLAP cube, it is a blank space, it's a blank canvas. And also wait a minute, when you build a model, you're basically creating building blocks of a model. So here's your sales plan and your headcount forecast. And if you think of these blocks being stacked on top of each other, it's like cubes that can connect and even today is part of the product. You can use Cube in a multi Cube fashion and connect these cubes together. So it really had so many meanings and for the OGs of finance, who hear about us, they go Oh Cube! Without us even telling them what we do, immediately understand Cube because of the name cube and its implications around OLAP and all of that. So it's a really cool thing. It's a it's a nod to the OGs and it's also a little bit of a nod to the new way of doing things and this block formation and of course, as a brand it's super fun we can do tons of things with cubes. I have - if you could see my desk right now - Rubik's Cubes and I got it - someone gifted me a custom ice cube tray with Cube logos in it so lots of fun!
Jenny Fielding
I love it. Yeah, I always think of - as you were describing it to me when I first met you - that helped me visualize what it was. right. That's for me, I always thought of this kind of spinning cube, right, that touched all parts of an organization. And so I kind of love this like, you know, central source of truth within the organization looking like having a you know, a physical manifestation.
Christina Ross
Yes correct.
Jenny Fielding
So I'd love to hear a little bit just about how you know the product has evolved and a little bit more about, you know, your go to market thinking.
Christina Ross
Yeah, so I'll start with the early product, which was, when you're building an MVP, obviously, there's a million things you can build, especially when it comes to something as broad as FP&A software. So again, I talked about telling the story of the past, the present, the future. It's custom for every single business, what do you what do you actually build? Well, fortunately, I had a lot of experience in FP&A. So I knew what the basic foundational elements were for FP&A software. So it's this multi dimensional structure. And a dimension is something as basic as time, department, account. So if you think of going back to your image of a cube, if you think of a Rubik's Cube, each sliding side is a different dimension. And the idea with with cubes is you can multiply dimension times a dimension and get an intersection of data. So that's at its most basic level what Cube is.
Christina Ross
But there's a lot of things you can do with it. And where do we even start? Well, going back to the user interviews, the one thing everyone had a common challenge with was actuals versus budget variance analysis. And why is that so complicated? Well, I mentioned there's three sides to finance. And this actually covers all three. So the past story, what did we do for our actuals? It's combining all this different source data into one place. For the future, it's your plan, and also being able to take the data from one plan and reconcile it to the actuals, which sometimes these have different account names. It's not one to one mapping. And getting those all together in one place in a timely manner is actually way, way harder than most leaders realize. And that's why there's always the question of why does finance take so long to get the data together? It's a really difficult task. So we said, let's tackle that. And that only first. So when we go to market, we're going to say we'll solve a variety of problems for you over time, but this is the first thing that we're going to do for you. And it's a big enough of a problem and a big enough of a value driver that people said yes to this specific use case. So that's what we built for.
Christina Ross
And one of the things that Josh was really good at in the early days was saying can't do it shouldn't do it. Let's stay to really, really narrow scope and do this one thing very well. So that's something at Cube we're really proud of, we always called it "faster, smarter, simpler." And one of our values, even to this day is the art of simplicity. How do we do a lot with a little? How do we do something in a very elegant and simple manner to solve complex problems? So if you now take that first use case that we had, and how did we evolve this over time? Well part of it was how we built the product, and the spreadsheets been built a million times by a million different people. And of course, our friends at Microsoft, Google probably do it best. So we said instead of building our own custom spreadsheet, and spending our time in dev resources there, we'll connect with the spreadsheets that users already know and love, and that they prefer to work there anyway. What about things like analytics and drilling into dashboards? Well, again, this goes back to my knowledge of finance, and talking to people over decades and managing finance teams myself, the dashboards are a great thing that managers always want, and we always sell as the end product. But that's the last step in the journey of building a report. It's actually all the data stuff that takes the longest and is the hardest. So we also said most of the companies we talked to, we found out are all already using tools like Tableau or Looker, or something else. So we said instead of rebuilding our own dashboard, tool, which by the way we have, we're releasing now, which is very exciting. And it's all that that we've waited for. But in the early days, we didn't build it, we said we can connect to it. And we built connectors instead. So we tried to build what would make Cube the most unique and the most flexible platform out there. So we really stuck to our design principles of simplicity. And if someone else has built that, if someone else has built it, let them be the experts. And we'll connect into it and play nice in the sandbox versus trying to replace it.
Jenny Fielding
Awesome. One thing that I've always admired about you is that you're fantastic at sales. And it's not just because you know your products so well. But you're actually a great salesperson. So you know, there are a lot of people listening that are just getting their businesses off the ground. So any tips on you know how you kind of implemented your go to market and were so successful at the early days being so convincing? Because you really are.
Christina Ross
Well, it started with me not knowing how to sell. And it started with me learning how to listen. So the first thing I learned - and this goes before I even started selling Cube - was I remember interviewing for a job and I remember I was talking to my dad about the interview. And I was like, he just kept talking the whole time. Like should I interrupt him? He goes, just let them talk. And so I started this when I talked to early customers. Instead of interrupting and saying what about this when I just met them. I just listened to all their problems and stuff, started digging deeper and deeper. What about this? Okay, it sounds like that's not a challenge. What about that? I sort of lead them into a pain, trust me, they have them. So I wasn't convincing anyone that they had a pain, there were lots of them. And just repeated back what they were saying until there was something that - if we solve this problem, would that work for you? Great. So that's step one is just being a good listener, and being able to understand and empathize with where someone's pain is coming from, and being able to sort of rephrase it back to them.
Christina Ross
The second and very important thing I did is I went to a sales bootcamp when I was in TechStars. And it was a two day intensive, I was that annoying person raising their hands constantly. But it was amazing, because I learned that the art of sales is not at all about convincing. It's about asking the right questions. It's more of being a detective. And part of it, if you like process, is a lot about following a very specific process. So in the beginning, it's discovery, as I just mentioned, question asking. But it's not just around uncovering pain, it's also about understanding how do they buy? Many of the times your buyers is a new founder or especially in finance, or FP&A, haven't bought 100 Different SaaS tools. So you actually have to help them learn how to buy. Okay, so let's say we're going to move forward, who would need to sign off on your ends? What is your timing? What does your budget look like? And being able to ask these questions upfront, so you don't get to the end of a sales cycle. They're like, Oh, you know, I need approval from so and so and they're out of the office for three months. And we actually don't have budget for this, you do all that upfront discovery, then of course, you get into the part that people are used to - the demo and the and the explanation piece of the product. But that comes much, much later. And I think one thing I learned the wrong way is showing the product like Hey, isn't this cool? People immediately say after the fact, well, I didn't see what I needed. So I'm a No. Instead, get all that information upfront, show them what they need to see to solve the problems that they're trying to solve. And then you move to close. And the closing process is actually again, going to helping them buy. Who needs to sign, what does it look like, I'll send you all the documentation. Be a step ahead of the buyer. And one thing I'm really proud of is we've built a really robust rev ops team here at Cube so that when you do buy from us, our team makes sure, make sure that we stay on top of it and walk you very carefully through the process. We have transparent pricing, we talked about the price up front. So it's not some sort of a mystery and you get all the way down the road and realize you don't have budget for it. So these are all things that we work internally, and have taken a very long time to get to where we are today. But always learning and always growing.
Jenny Fielding
That's awesome. You talk about being a step ahead. How are you guys thinking about kind of the future of finance software and staying ahead of you know, the trends? And then how is Cube kind of innovating, you know, going forward?
Christina Ross
So we've been very careful again, going back to simplicity and focused on FP&A as our core buyer. And that's at the expense of building out all this other cool flashy stuff that looks great for investors, like, you know, flying car dashboards and things like that. But we build for our user, which is a lot of the data stuff that doesn't look like much of anything, you know, you click a button and the right number shows up. But how powerful is that, if you're actually a finance person? I get exactly the data I need, how I need it when I need it, and where I need it. Now, as we move forward into this fiscal year, we were now starting to build and we're releasing some exciting new products and features for not just that FP&A buyer, but for the rest of the organization. So you could always use Cube across your work. But now we're building more custom functionality for those additional users. So that is what we're calling our Cube views product, which is amazing dashboards, web reports, emails, and things of that nature to sort of expand the usage of cube outside of just the FP&A team. There's also this movement from FP&A, to what the industry calls XP&A. So that's extended financial planning and analysis. And one use case that we discovered just in - I don't like the term dogfooding - so drinking our own coffee of our product, is how great Cube is for forecasting and planning. So my head of sales uses cube regularly in our rev ops teams. We're doing our own forecast planning. You could always do this with Cube, but now it's something that we're packaging up as its own rev ops, revenue Cube or rev ops Cube, to do better forecasting and prediction. So this is the next iteration of Cube, it's building more functional specific planning and analysis tools and platforms for other teams to sell into.
Jenny Fielding
And now I have a new acronym that I need to learn. So thanks. Love it. Okay, so shifting gears a little bit more to the company. So you know, I mentioned I met you and Josh at the coffee shop that you're working from. How many people are at the company now and tell us a little bit you know, how the growth has been. Obviously, it's tough to go from two to how many?
Jenny Fielding
We're at 125 now if you can believe it.
Jenny Fielding
Oh my goodness. I can't believe it!
Christina Ross
We are now our ideal customer profile, which is wild. We've always said Cube is usually a great - we're a great solution - usually when you hit about 100 to 150 FTEs, which is around the time when people hire their first FP&A hire. So that's very exciting. We're like, yay, we're in our own customer profile now.
Jenny Fielding
I mean, literally, like my heart speeds up. It's like, it's so exciting to see all this success. What have been some of the, you know, the challenges of the learnings as the team scales, right? Going from two people in an office to, you know, distributed teams, and now you've got remote teams and all of that. So, you know, I'd love to hear just any insights there.
Christina Ross
Yeah, there are several inflection points that happen as you scale your team size. So there's the co founder stage, which was just myself and Josh. And then there's the sub, let's call it 15-20 people, which is which is its own stage. So usually, you know, every one in the company. You have some basic small teams, you have a lot of we had a couple of what I refer to as slashys, so people who are like Customer Success slash also running the demos, slash also doing implementations. You have some people running wearing multiple hats doing multiple roles, myself included. I was also like the, the head slashy. And then you get into around 50 employees, and you start to specialize and you need to build out your leadership layer, if you haven't already. The challenge there is when you're sub 50, or sub 20 people, hiring senior enough, but also hiring someone who is not afraid to get their hands dirty. So to me, whether it's running Cube or before running Cube, I think this is the hardest stage - is the 20 to 50 - is hiring that first leadership team. Because you really, you're not exactly sure what the right level or scope is at the time, you could hire people too early, and you can hire them too late. Then the next iteration comes between 50 and 100. And 100 is when everything typically breaks. I tell customers this all the time, especially when they're calling us like help, we need your help. This is where there's more than one point of contact for each team, you start to have your challenges become communication between teams. And so one thing I'm really proud of is sort of knowing this going into it, we really invested in what I refer to as enablement headcount. So those are things like our finance leader, and our rev ops headcount, and people operations team. A lot of times companies wait until they get sued, or everything blows up, or they run out of - almost run out of money to hire these functions. You know, as the patron saint of FP&A, we also think it's really important for a variety of reasons to invest here. But again, we drink our own coffee, and we make sure we have enough of these enablement heads, because they really are accelerators for your business.
Jenny Fielding
Amazing. I had the pleasure of sitting kind of right across from you for about three months. And I kind of saw the way that you guys operated and how you personally worked. And one of the things that was very clear to me was that, you know, you came in early in the morning, and you were heads down. But a lot of other people were chit chatting in the you know, in the kitchen, like you'd come in get the piece of cake for the birthday. And you know, say hi to everyone, and then you'd go back to your desk. You were so focused, Christina, that it was like it was you know, it definitely stood out. And especially like you had young children, and you just needed to maximize your hours in the day. So how do you stay so focused, especially all of the different obligations that you have, personally, professionally, on that vision? Anything that you can share?
Christina Ross
I think focus is what allows me to get it all done, or get what I can get done. Because like you mentioned, I'm a parent, I have two children who are now turning seven soon. So they've come a long way since the TechStars days. I have, you know, I'm running a company that's now 125 people. I have to take care of my health and wellness. So there's all these things that are hard to, you know, keep all these things on your plate. And so for me staying really focused and putting the most of that into the hours I spend is the only way I can do it. I can't work - I don't know if I should say this out loud - but I can't work 14 - 16 hour days. It's just not healthy to do that long term. This is a marathon. I've been at this five years, I'll be at it indefinitely more. And so it has to be something where I work a normal number of hours. But what I'm going to do is pack as much in as possible to make that time as productive as possible. So one of the things I do to stay focused is really listen to my body and my energy levels. So we have - we're having this conversation in the morning. It's one of the things that I was hoping to have, because I'm more alert in the morning and I'm not exhausted from like 15 meetings and I can hopefully answer questions more clearly. But I'm really crazy about my schedule, or fanatical is probably the better word. So I try not to take meetings before 11 and I try not to take meetings after 4, and I go back to back in the meantime. I found that's the way I keep my energy up, I get as much done as possible when it comes to meetings. But I have time to do deep work in the morning. And I have time to answer emails and also have a request or an emergency request that comes in between those times. So if I scheduled myself back to back or had 20 minutes between meetings all day, I wouldn't get anything done. I'm pretty focused around that. And that gives me enough energy and time for my personal life, which provides energy for my professional life.
Jenny Fielding
I love it. Alright, so now we're gonna do just a quick speed round to wrap up. So just rapid fire kind of answers are good, a book or a podcast or some type of media that you're really enjoying right now?
Christina Ross
I just finished Amp It Up from Frank Slootman about his time at Snowflake and other companies that he led through hyper growth. And there's just some great -isms in the book. Like, we always say Cube is a platform, not a tool. And he used to tell his team tools are for fools. It's a platform. So one of my favorite takeaways from the book.
Jenny Fielding
I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, so you can take the family and go live somewhere and run Cube, where would that be?
Christina Ross
Oh, goodness, it would definitely be on an island. I live on an island, Manhattan. So I would go to another island, probably Puerto Rico. It's still US territory. But it's also a wonderful place where I got married.
Jenny Fielding
Amazing. Favorite productivity hack? I mean, you told us a little bit about staying focused, but anything that you do, specifically?
Christina Ross
That calendar hack about doing back to back hours. I'm also pretty obsessed with the tasks feature or the reminders feature on the iPhone. And I have a whole set of lists. And it's a great way to use a second brain. So something pops up into your head, and I used to think, oh, no, I don't want to forget this. Write it down immediately. And then I've time in my schedule to go through all those things that I think of and put them in a slot somewhere. So that's been a complete game changer for me.
Jenny Fielding
Perfect. And last question. Where do listeners find you? I know you're active on LinkedIn, right?
Christina Ross
Yeah, on LinkedIn - @ CFO Christina. I also tweet occasionally, it's usually the same content as my LinkedIn on @ CFO Christina.
Jenny Fielding
I love it. Well, thank you so much, Christina. This was awesome. And we're really excited that you're a part of The Fund family and just such doing such great work in the world. So thank you!
Christina Ross
Thank you for having me.
Scott Hartley
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