For someone of my age, that's a long story. So today, career-wise, I'm the CFO for a SaaS-based venture capital-backed company called Automattic, which among other things owns wordpress.com, about 36% of all of the Web sites in the world run on some form of WordPress so it's an operating system for the web. I've just joined this company. One of the interesting things about Automattic is it's 100% remote managed organization. So we have about 1300 employees, and we really don't have a headquarters. So we have distributed those employees across 70 different countries, and we work remotely, I'm fairly used to working on these types of interfaces. Prior to Automattic, I was at a company in Utah called Vivint. Vivint just went public so I got the company ready to go public. I was there six years, built SaaS, I didn't, but the company built SaaS, a platform for Internet things that were deployed in homes and we sold it as a smart home. Prior to that, I was with much larger companies. Vivint had about 14,000 employees. This year they'll do just about 1B and a half dollars in revenue and we grew that 300% on a revenue basis and employee basis over the last six years. Before that, I was at much larger corporations. I was at Hewlett Packard, I was at Dell, I was the chief operating officer for a big manufacturing company called Alcoa, which operates around the world. So all large multinational public companies and six years ago, I decided that I wanted to go to private companies, to smaller companies, and I'd really like to build something from the ground instead of starting at something that was already massive. So that was the transition to Vivint and then to here to Automattic which has been a smaller but more exciting opportunity. And I've been in finance my whole career with stints in strategy. I reported to Michael Dell has had a strategic transformation when I was at Dell, and I've had a lot of IT experience, one of the groups that I had reporting to me at Alcoa was the CIO and the Chief Information Security Officer. So your groups that you're representing here as kind of IT professionals, I've had a good amount of time working with and helping to manage those types of groups.

It's a remote role, so it's a little nontraditional. We get to work wherever we want. We can work in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day. As Cheif Financial Officer, I'm focused on North America working hours, it's probably 50 or 60 hours a week. Most people, who helped run businesses there's a lot of communication in the sense of how do we run the business? How do we invest in the business? a lot of cross-functional work, and to do that and to grow the business. I also as CFO spent a lot of time with industry analysts, market analysts that write research reports on our company and on others. I spent a lot of time with bankers, investment banks in New York and San Francisco. I spent a good amount of time with venture capitalists, people who are invested in our company and thinking about investing. Partnerships, salesforce.com, large company has done great things, just bought 10% of Automattic. We've got partners like Salesforce and others that we kind of manage and then I have all the accounting, audit and financials and that type of work. So in terms of travel, I travel not a lot, maybe two or three times a month, relatively short durations even though we're an international company, we can run this company.

It was just this morning, I've had a teleconference with the head of our analytics department for the company. We just hired him from Google. He's a Ph.D. and data management analytics. I spend a lot of time with the chief marketing officer. I spent a lot of time with our general managers of each of the business units, we have five independent business units with different models, different customers. I spent a lot of time with our CEO on an internal basis. On an external basis, it's the bankers and the investors and the market analysts and partners. What works is that I just interviewed someone for a Senior Vice President earlier this morning and I asked him the same question that you just asked me, which is 'what works?'. I think to be effective in any environment, you need to know the business very well. You need to understand the dynamics, the details, you need to know the inputs and the outputs of whatever you're selling, you need to understand the customers, the market, the competition and when you clearly understand the business, then you can communicate with anybody effectively. Usually, you have to have a point of view, people don't communicate for the sake of just saying 'hi', but they communicate for a point or for a reason. So having a very clear understanding of what you're trying to accomplish in the role that you're doing is important. Then I think you need to be able to build a base by which they communicate on in and for a lot of what I do is financials, how will this make the business more profitable, grow faster, have a better chance of return on the investments, do a better job on strategy, so you have to apply your knowledge of the situation, your point of view to an outcome and if you can do that and put yourself in those other people's whoever you're working with their positions, then you can do well, and that's kind of how I try to focus.