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A Fresh Perspective on Owning the Number and Driving Growth with Sinohe Terrero, CFO at Envoy

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This episode features an interview with Sinohe Terrero, CFO at Envoy. Envoy is a workplace platform that solves the complexity of hybrid work. 

Sinohe has over 15 years of leadership experience. He stepped into his current role as Envoy’s CFO in 2020. Prior to Envoy, Sinohe served as CFO and COO of Quid Inc., a big data and analytics company. He has also worked at Indiegogo and Etsy. Sinohe holds an MBA in Finance from Baruch College in New York City.

On this episode, Sinohe discusses his #1 indispensable tech tool, how he identified and filled gaps in his resume to land him his current role as CFO, and how just because you have money doesn’t mean you have liquidity.

Quotes

*“I consider myself blessed to have been put in situations that I think are unique for people that come from where I come from. I sit at these board meetings with all these very well known VCs and a lot of times you think, ‘Do I even belong here?’ And that goes back to the first time you're made a director or the first time that you're in a reputable company or the first time you wear a tie, honestly. I mean, you kind of feel like, ‘Hey, when is the other shoe gonna drop?’ Because it's not supposed to happen for me. So you have to mentally get over that hurdle to be like, ‘No, I do belong.”…”You wanna feel like, ‘I belong in this class. I prepared. Everything that I get here I deserve.’ So you have to have that mentality to constantly give a hundred percent.”

*“I always raised my hand when I saw a problem. I was like, ‘Hey, you know what? We have a problem there I think I can help solve, or I think I can help improve it at that scale.’ And I was just never afraid to take the leap of faith. And quite frankly, faith in myself that if another human can solve this problem, I can probably solve it myself too. But it's like, you know, I'm not the smartest guy in the room. But one thing that I tell my son is no one can outwork me. And I know that, so I am gonna raise my hand.”

*”I was at a startup before that ran out of money. And one of the things that I noticed when I was there was there were some gaps in my resume. Like,I felt like I could do things, but my resume didn't say that. And so at that moment, I had to say, ‘Okay, well, what am I gonna do? Because I don't wanna be overlooked again.’ And what I ended up doing was taking a pay cut and taking a lower ranking job to gain the skills that I needed so that I can say in my resume, I have seen and done that. And so that was sort of a pause moment to be like, my charm is not gonna get me where I need to go. I need to make sure that I make the right career decisions even if it means short term sacrifice… Quite frankly, I needed to be honest with myself, right? I think sometimes you need to be able to look and be humble. And be real. Like, ‘What are the things that are missing? What are my growth areas?’ And, ‘Am I just being overlooked and am I being the victim here or are there things that I need to work on?’ And clearly I identified that, I made the move and it paid off for me.”

*“I think the CFO has evolved from closing the books and making sure taxes are paid, to really being a thought leader and strategic leader, particularly because you own data”...“You are at the Vanguard, you are in the front because you are part of that intimate sausage making process, even in the product development.”

*”Back when I was at Etsy, if you raised a 10 million round at 200 million, you were crushing it. And so the rounds were smaller, the valuations were lower. And quite frankly, I think that led to a bit more efficiency. You had to grind it out a bit more. And now over the last couple of years that's really changed. Like the dollars that people are raising are just exponential and the valuations are astronomic. So that creates a different kind of pressure on the team, particularly on FP and A and how you think about it because you're dealing with less mature organizations that you have to continue to educate on the fact that just because you have a hundred million dollars in the bank does not mean we can have bouncy houses and unlimited Kombucha. You still have to be thoughtful about long-term planning.”

*“Everyone has a little bit of PTSD, no matter how much money you have in the bank. Because you don't know when the next thing is gonna happen. And clearly the economy is showing the third COVID cousin when it comes to financial impact. And so I think it's changed. I think the space has changed. I think the amount of money people are raising has changed. And that has really changed how you gotta think about your organization on the finance side, and have really strict - not strict, but clear - guardrails, so that you're not just completely running off the map.”

*“As a CFO, you're flying a plane. You have a bunch of different gauges and you're just looking to make sure none of them are going into the red. But not any one of those gauges is the only gauge you look at.”

*”I was talking to a company last week that was basically saying - it was a CFO - and he was saying that one of the things that he needs to continue to educate the CEO on is the fact that because they have money does not mean they have liquidity.  Like because of where the money is stored and how they're being able to finance. So they are asset rich, but liquidity poor. And so literally that conversation happened last week. And I think as we get into more complex vehicles in the future, I think there's definitely gonna be more and more need for this to be a focus area because it's not gonna be that straightforward. We're not just gonna be dealing in USD sitting in something that you can liquidate right away. Like there's gonna be complexity to how you're gonna be deploying that capital. And there's gonna be complexity to how you retrieve said capital.”

Time Stamps

*[5:19] How to get over imposter syndrome

*[9:15] Sinohe’s path to CFO

*[15:15] Segment: The Playbook

*[16:01] Segment: Cash Crossroads

*[37:01] Segment: Report From the Future

*[41:51] Predictions for the future CFO

Sponsor

The Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, the global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.com

Links

Connect with Sinohe on LinkedIn

Follow Sinohe on Twitter

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