Scaling SaaS and Digital Operations: Lessons from Mozilla

Megan - 00:00:35: Today, my guest is Eric Muhlheim. As Mozilla's Chief Financial Officer, Eric is responsible for leading financial operations for the company as they scale their mission impact with new and existing products, technology, and business models to better serve their users and advance their agenda for a healthier, more joyful internet. Most recently, Eric provided strategic financial and operating services as an independent consultant to a variety of early stage and privately funded startups. Prior to that, he served as chief financial and administrative officer at BuzzFeed, where he oversaw the restructuring of the company to drive impact, creating a more unified and integrated organization. Eric started his career at the Walt Disney Company, where he held various leadership roles over more than 15 years, including spending three years as an expat in China, managing the expansion of Disney English, the company's China-based learning center business. Following his tenure at Disney, Eric was CFO at Helix Education, a provider of technologies and services to power data-driven higher education growth, and at the programmatic advertising exchange OpenX Technologies. Eric currently serves on the boards of the Independent Shakespeare Company of Los Angeles and Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills. He graduated from Princeton University, cum laude in mathematics, and holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He's based in Los Angeles, California. Eric, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Eric - 00:02:38: It's great to be here, Megan.

Megan - 00:02:39: Yeah, today we're going to be talking about mastering financial leadership in tech and advanced strategies for scaling SaaS and digital media operations. And I'm excited to learn about you and your thoughts and experience with this topic. So let's jump right in.

Eric - 00:02:54: Great, let's do it.

Megan - 00:02:56: Before diving into specifics of financial leadership in tech, can you share just a bit about your journey and what it was that initially drew you into the world of finance and technology?

Eric - 00:03:07: Yeah, sure. So I started out not as a natural business person. When I was in college, I was a math major. But I realized pretty quickly after I entered the math department that I needed to have something that was, I guess I'll call it more of a team sport. The analytical part of my mind needed to be, I guess, exercised. But I wanted to do it in the context of something where I could really work with a lot of people. And so that naturally drew me into finance. And so where I started was I started investment banking. I was going to college near New York. And so that was in the air at the time. I hate to say how long ago that was. But I started out working at Morgan Stanley in mergers and acquisitions and was in the media and tech space there. I did that for about three years and built the toolkit that could make me successful there. But realized that rather than being part of a company that was simply connecting companies with the financing that they needed to move forward, either through M&A or through offerings to the public market, either debt or equity. I really wanted to be part of a company that was building something. And I set my sights on media. I had the media bug. And that took me after business school to Disney, where I had a pretty long career starting in strategic planning, where I got the chance to work with the studios and film entertainment division for about eight years. That took me after about eight years to the consumer products group at Disney, where I explored something very different, which really came about from doing a lot of work on franchise acquisition. And I spent about eight years there in various roles, one of which was a very seminal role for me, helping to build a business in China called Disney English, which was a location-based education business. That was my first experience as a operational CFO, if you will in function, not title. And I realized at that point, that diving into the operations and being the active thought, partner to the leader of that initiative, was the part that really gratified me and, and I really enjoyed that aspect of teamwork anf thought partnership. So after coming back to the US, I, you know, realized that the CFO path was really what I wanted to do, and that's what took me into the CFO job where I've been for about 10 years now at various companies. And technology in particular is a place where change is constant and there's always a lot of really interesting challenges and the opportunity to build new things. And that's kind of what I like to do is build new processes and address new challenges. So that's kind of what got me to where I am now.

Megan - 00:05:54: And you've had a diverse career across various high growth companies and sectors. So can you tell us about a particularly memorable project or challenge that you faced early in your career and how that influenced your development as a CFO?

Eric - 00:06:08: Yeah, I'll go back to the Disney English project that I just talked about, because I think that's a really great example of building from a strength and doing something very new. For those unfamiliar with this, Disney had a product line of licensing its characters and content to companies that were making kids-oriented English language learning products. What we did is we pivoted that from a licensed business into a vertical business, and we built our own curriculum as part of that. And now the business was anchored by a chain of learning centers that we launched in Shanghai to take that curriculum and build it. The business grew from just an idea to over 40 centers in large Chinese cities over the course of about five years. So it was an example of hyperscaling, not in a tech sense, but in more of a physical, actual physical lines of distribution sense. I learned a lot in this business. One, the first thing was that scaling, the challenges of scaling, taking the idea from one to 40 centers, it both illustrated the impact that very small operational decisions had on the overall financial model and oriented me to building robust communication lines across a fairly spread out operation. Second was the CFO job of telling the investor story. Disney English was a very unusual model, for a division of the company that was much more focused on signing licensing deals, it had different cost characteristics, different revenue characteristics. The investment required is very different. And this... Made me have to continually explain the vision and how the model worked to our management, which is essentially a toolkit that you use when you're going out to investors to talk about funding any new business. And third was the partnership between finance and operations. Building the visibility and resources to help the operators steer the business effectively in a direction that created value for everybody requires very close coordination, transparency, transparency, and trust between the individuals. And so these are the things that I took from that. And like I said, the things that I really loved about the job that pushed me in the CFO direction. And I think those are really hallmarks of the way that I've been, I guess, prosecuting the CFO job since I've been in the seat.

Megan - 00:08:33: And Mozilla has been investing quite a bit into experiments around AI and advertising. So can you speak more about how Mozilla balances investing in brand new initiatives that aren't generating a lot of revenue versus investing in Firefox, which is obviously your leading product?

Eric - 00:08:51: Yeah, I'd really love to talk about this. I think the first thing to do is we should really zoom out and talk about what Mozilla is, because I don't think a lot of people are really that familiar with what makes the company unique and special. Mozilla Corporation, which is the company that I represent, We only have one shareholder. This is the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit that has spent the last 25 years. Standing as an alternative to big tech. We advocate a truly open internet that prioritizes individual privacy, agency, and access over pure profit. And this is a... Perspective that's anchored in what we call the Mozilla Manifesto. This describes the world to which every entity that sits under the Mozilla umbrella aspires. And we have other sister companies that are under the umbrella as well. We have Mozilla Ventures, which is a venture fund that invests in seed companies that operate in ways that are consistent with Mozilla Manifesto. MZLA is the parent of the Thunderbird email client, which has been a very, very rabid following as a email front end. We have Mozilla AI, which is a company that invests in deep research around AI. And then we have the Mozilla Foundation, which invests in community building and impact-oriented projects. Mozilla Corporation, or MoCo for short, which I represent, we're a for-profit software company. But because we have this ownership structure, we have this unique set of incentives that a lot of other tech companies don't. So in my role as CFO, what I focus on is making sure that we're building a sustainable software business that delivers on the values that are embedded in the Mozilla Manifesto. And we don't focus on growing earnings every single quarter. We focus on creating software products that are going to be sustainable and build the world that we're focused on creating. So Firefox is a really great example of that. It's really important for the internet for a couple of reasons. One is that it runs on Gecko, which is the only alternative to the web engines that are owned by Google and Apple. And by being an important element of the overall ecosystem, this open source standard that we run ensures that we keep the web from full control by big tech. Firefox, also really pioneered a lot of privacy-focused innovations that helped to push the industry in a more privacy-focused direction as the other browsers. Adopt the same type of standards things like tab containerization total cookie protection. Other thing that really keep you safe on the web. So, when we think about the way we invest and what we invest in, it's not maximizing our profability for every single thing that we do. It's about setting up software business that deliver on the promise of Mozilla and our sustainable in the long run. So, Firefox clearly the most important thing in our portfolio. It drives most of the revenue and drives our ability to invest in other things. And so in part, we focus on investment in making sure that Firefox remains competitive, both in the short and long run, and is a robust generator of value for the company within that framework. When we think about investing in new areas, such as AI and advertising, the two things that we're looking at are, one, do we have an important role to play here based upon who we are? Can we provide the same types of value to the overall ecosystem in terms of increasing consumer privacy and increasing consumer access to the internet as we invest in things like advertising and AI. And then in the short or long run, will these be sustainable businesses returning the appropriate value to the bottom line so we can do more things? And it's a balance between figuring out what things are tangential to or can be supported by the audience that we have in the browser already and can yield revenue streams that are self-supporting in a very short run. I think about advertising when I think about it that way. And then AI is an area where the returns on that are likely to be in the much longer term. But then it's about building a portfolio and making sure that we're investing the right amount and the right products at the right time.

Megan - 00:13:08: And what role does transparency play in maintaining morale during times of rapid change or shifting priorities? I often hear the role of CFO described as a storyteller.

Eric - 00:13:20: Yeah, I've been in a number of situations as I've been a CFO and even in large companies as well when I was at Disney, where you're in a period of rapid change. And there are I always think of it as there being two sources of strain and uncertainty when you're in those environments. One of them is related to the outside environment, because there are a lot of uncertain things in the outside environment, which you really can't control at the end of the day. And then there are the things in the inside environment, because when you get into areas that are complex and there's a lot of change, there's a lot of stress on people. There's a lot of uncertainty. And you don't always know how different people inside the company are going to react. And when you're when I was always further down in the chain, as it were, you also don't know whether what you're being told by management is entirely, if you whale sort of forthright. And so that's where I think the CFO plays a really important role, because you want to eliminate those sources of internal strain, because if all of you can stand together, if the entire company can stand together against the outside challenges that you face, it reduces one element of uncertainty for everybody. And allows you to stand stronger together. So the financial transparency is a key aspect of that. People really want to know where they stand. And it is much less stressful in my experience to be told that you are missing your revenue numbers, that costs have gone up, how much money is in the bank. Not a problem with Mozilla, fortunately, but I've been there before. People are so much happier when they get the true story of what's going on, even if the news is bad, because that means that they have more certainty. That's something they can hold on to. And that aspect of running the business is something that is really important to me. And as we've executed against that at Mozilla, I've found employees to be just thrilled when they get that information.

Megan - 00:15:18: Yeah, I'm sure transparency is so important. I mean, I think as people, if left to our own devices, what we're going to make up in our heads is worse than the actual truth.

Eric - 00:15:29: Yeah, everyone tells stories. And the problem is if you're telling stories to yourself without any basis for them, those stories can get really gnarly.

Megan - 00:15:35: And what are some specific financial processes or systems that you've redesigned at Mozilla or maybe another tech company to support rapid scaling? And how did you ensure that these changes didn't disrupt ongoing operations?

Eric - 00:15:52: This is a great question because the thing about Mozilla is that we are, we're engaged in a time of real change here. The first 25 years, Firefox was really the key to our growth. But the challenges that we face as Mozilla now and the challenges that the entire internet faces in the, I guess, the mid 2000s, as we're talking about them now, the mid century are different. And, we, when I came in, we were starting our process of revenue diversification at Mozilla, but we didn't have a robust framework for reporting on multi-product companies. So, you know, what I'm calling profit by product. We simply didn't have that. And that really meant that we didn't have a lot of visibility into the choices that we're making about how we invested in new products along the way. And because of that, we couldn't get a good sense of what the ROI on those was and make mindful decisions about what we were going to invest in. So the main, the main task over the course of the past couple of years has been able, has been basically building out that profit by product framework, which is not simple because as you rightly pointed out, adding financial infrastructure can be something that's very distracting to a company, that's trying to move very quickly and do new things. And you don't want to spend a lot of money on your administration or a lot of time on your administration. You want to spend more time on actually doing the work. So we had the goal of being able to build this framework with essentially processes that were already natural to what we were doing. Required a lot of effort. First, we had to replace the systems of the company. We were operating on a much less detailed ERP. And we decided that we had to shift over to NetSuite, which would give us more capabilities in terms of adding new types of dimensions and functionality to our financial reporting. So that was a process that took us about a year to accomplish. Then came the process of working with the company to create an appropriate taxonomy for how the different products that we were operating under the company, which included Firefox, includes a number of privacy focused applications that we have Mozilla VPN, Relay, Monitor Plus, including a breakdown of our mobile and desktop operations. Create a taxonomy that was meaningful to the company and could identify the different initiatives that we were undertaking in a way that would allow people to make decisions. And because the majority of our cost structure is labor, as with any software company, we had to work with our teams to find a way to follow the natural headcount processes of the company and the natural, the backbone that we used for that, which was Workday, in order to classify and code people appropriately so that those costs could be put into the right buckets. There's also work we had to do on our purchase order system to be able to classify things appropriately. And so this took us really about two years total to make sure that we were doing it in a way that leveraged existing processes and systems to the extent possible to get this finer degree of information to be able to report by product, which was very distinct from reporting by cost center. And really, that then becomes the basis of how we make decisions going forward. It allows us to say, how much are we investing in the individual products of the company? How much are they returning? What kind of growth do we anticipate? And how do we stage gate our various investments in order to decide when the right time to turn on investment at a higher rate is?

Megan - 00:19:33: And what are some key strategies that you've used to lead and develop high performing finance teams in rapidly growing tech environments? And how is it that you maintain team morale and alignment when business goals are constantly shifting?

Eric - 00:19:48: It really comes down to a couple of things. It comes down to, first of all, communication and storytelling, like we talked about previously. We have undertaken a process over the past couple of years at Mozilla to really revamp our strategy process so that we have a robust framework for communicating, first of all, the priorities of the company, and then how those priorities really translate into the individual product priorities that we have. And then how those product priorities then sink down into the investment that we're making in the individual products, leveraging the infrastructure that we put in place. So that all gets into storytelling. What it is we're trying to accomplish, how the individual moves we're making support those decisions, and then how that translates into money. With regards to the finance and accounting teams that I lead, the goal is to make sure that everybody is aligned with those stories and they understand what it is that we're trying to accomplish. The accounting team, when you think about it, is one of the teams that has the risk of being most removed from the product decisions that we're making at the company. A lot of work that they're doing on a day-in and day-out basis is recording individual transactions. And I work really, really hard to make sure that team understands the business goals of the company and what we're trying to accomplish so that when they're making decisions at the very granular level from an accounting basis, those decisions are of where things are booked, how we think about what's happening on a month-to-month basis are linked to the business objectives of the company so that the information that's going into the system is to some extent already pre-vetted against the story that we're trying to tell at the end of the day. So that's really the goal here and the way we do that.

Megan - 00:21:46: And can you discuss some of the most cost effective or the most effective cost management and resource optimization strategies that you've employed in high growth environments and how these strategies have contributed to overall financial performance?

Eric - 00:22:01: Yeah. And when I think about this, I do go back to the transparency point. For the most part, we don't find people inside Mozilla that are interested in empire building and increasing the cost base that they have. We find people that are interested in delivering value to our customers. And so it's an education and partnership exercise where we really try to educate our operators on the return on investment of the activities to the extent that we can. So it's really about identifying the resources that they're putting against the individual things that they're doing, what impact they're getting out of that, and how those short-term goals are tied to the long-term goals of the company. So I go back to really clear financial communication and partnership from a business partner perspective.

Megan - 00:22:56: And how do you balance a data-driven mindset with intuitive decision-making and financial leadership? How do you make sure that you're using both to make the best decisions?

Eric - 00:23:06: That's a really good question. At a place like Mozilla, we're balancing an awful lot of things. Like we talked about at the top of the podcast, the most important thing to Mozilla as an overall entity is the impact that we have on the internet, ensuring that people on the internet have the ability to get access. They have their own agency. They're being treated with respect. So we have a very specific angle for the way that we operate on the internet. And that is the most important thing. Now, we have to balance that with the sustainability of the company. And that's really where the data comes in. As CFO and in partnership with the data operations of the company, we bring in an awful lot of data regarding our usership and regarding the financials that are generated that, that leadership. And my goal is to make sure that we can sustainably continue to deliver the experiences that we want on the internet. So we work in partnership with the product organization on the priorities that we have and the way we're treating our users. And you honestly, you kind of have to balance this is the experience we want to deliver. And this is the way that we want the manifesto to express itself in the world with. How do we make sure that we are keeping revenue on the right track? How do we make sure that our usership is at the right level? What investment do we make in marketing in order to drive additional usership of our products? And you have to balance those things at the end of the day. A lot of that comes from your past experience in other situations where, in some cases, I've been in companies that are more commercial. So you have the opportunity to say, what would I do in that situation? And then based on what we're trying to accomplish as Mozilla, how would I take that in a slightly different direction to meet our goals? So it's really an art at the end of the day. There's a lot of science you can provide to things. But then the question of what you do to optimize in this environment is very different in Mozilla.

Megan - 00:25:07: Great answer. And looking ahead, what emerging trends in technology do you foresee as having the most significant impact on the role of the CFO? And how can we be sure to prepare ourselves, to stay ahead of the curve?

Eric - 00:25:21: Yeah, at Mozilla, we're thinking pretty deeply about AI. And those are some of the big investments we're making across Mozilla as a whole, not only within the experiences that we're providing inside the browser at Mozilla Corporation, but also investments that we're making at Mozilla AI. And the work that we're, fundamental work that we're doing at Mozilla Foundation to lay out principles for AI in the future. We both think that AI is a great opportunity, and we also think that AI is something that needs to be treated very carefully. Using it for internal purposes, I think that there's a big opportunity for AI to transform the way that we engage in the finance and accounting operations inside the company. One aspect of that is taking away or transferring some of the repetitive, simpler work of the operations of finance and accounting. So that we can... Focus all of our personnel. More on the so what of the numbers, more on the story that is being told by the numbers and the decisions that we want to make than making sure that X transaction is coded in a cost center in Z time period. Those are the types of things that AI can be really good at in terms of pattern recognition. It's something that needs to be very carefully because AI, if not supervised and watched closely, will make a lot of decisions that might go in a very wrong direction. So there's an aspect of this, which is finding the appropriate tools, training your workforce to interface with those tools in a way that provides them the appropriate supervision, but leverages them. And then freeing up our people to really act as business partners to the rest of the company. And level up the work that they're doing so that we can sit at the table and help steer the company in the right direction.

Megan - 00:27:17: And reflecting on your experiences, what have been some of the most profound lessons that you've learned about mastering financial leadership in tech-centered businesses?

Eric - 00:27:27: Great question. I'll give you a couple of thoughts there, Megan. The first is that we have to be very careful not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I came from a math background. There's a lot of precision involved with that. And there's a lot of precision involved in accounting. I mean, you need to make sure we do all the accounting the right way. But in the financial storytelling piece of this, we need to make sure that we are timely and are providing information to our partners at the right level of granularity so that we can make decisions quickly. This means that sometimes we need to not spend tremendous amount of time trying to like nail every number down. And we need to, as we talked about previously, use imperfect data to get to a recommendation and say, well, it is good enough to point us in the right direction. We'll always need to course correct, but it's better to make a well-informed decision quickly and then be able to course correct from that than it is to make a perfect decision. That's way too late. So that's the first thing. The second thing is really a question about trust and representing your partners in ways that respect them as you share the information that you have. I'll give an example, and this is an example from earlier in my career. Not when I was in a CFO role, but when I was in a slightly different role in a strategy function. Where I was tasked with going to one of my business partners and getting information from them about what was going on in their business that I knew was going to be used by my boss to portray their business in a certain light that was unflattering. I was a lot more junior then, and I did what I was asked. And the result is sort of what you thought it would be, which is that the information was used, and it was used in a way that was really embarrassing to my business partner. And they came back to me after that happened, and they called me to task and said, look, I knew what you did there, and this is going to put me in a situation where I'm not going to be able to trust you again in the future. That was a really formative experience for me. And I thought deeply about that after that happened and really decided that was not the person that I wanted to be. And that really has echoed up and down throughout my entire career. So that the thing that's really most important to me as CFO is, first of all, portraying the numbers with objectivity and honesty. Not withholding information from people, but not using, as it sometimes is, using the finance group which has an enormous amount of information, not using my differential access to that information as a source of power. The other piece of that is understanding that I have a point of view, but not wanting to use the position that I have to preference that point of view over the point of view of somebody else unfairly. So if I have a different point of view about an individual business initiative that we're undertaking at Mozilla or any private company that I have, I'll both be very honest to my business partner that I, look, I don't agree with you on this direction and I understand that we have a difference of opinion. Part of my job then with the CEO and other folks on the executive team is to, one, make sure that I'm very clear about the view that I have about what's going on at the company and then what the numbers say. But also being clear that it's not the only point of view. And if there is another point of view that is out there, make sure that that's shared. Don't bury it. I can explain why I disagree with it, but I want to honor that as well. And that aspect of transparency I've found really builds the level of trust and confidence in the position that you have inside the company and inside the finance function as a whole. So to me, that's... One of the biggest lessons I've had in my entire career.

Megan - 00:31:32: And last question, and to piggyback on your answer to that question, but can you share any core philosophies that you implement in your day to day or maybe a key mentor who shaped your career mindset?

Eric - 00:31:45: Yeah, I've had the fortune of working for a lot of different folks and a lot of different businesses over the course of the years. And I can't say that any single one of them has been like the key mentor for me. What I can say is that like every one of them has had incredible strengths. And I've had the opportunity to look at those strengths and say, these are things that I want to adopt. And also look at weaknesses in places where their particular style didn't work for me and how I want to port a different path for myself. The key philosophies that I've walked away with as I've gone through all this, first of all, it's be clear about telling the story. There are so many times that you can hit people with a wall of numbers when you're in the finance role. And the most important thing is to elevate what those numbers mean to people. That's what they really want to know. They don't really want to know what percentage increase you've had from the prior year. They want to know, what does this mean? Where should I be going? Help them navigate using that story. The second is to be a truth teller in all situations. Don't withhold. Be willing to say the hard things that come out of this. Because as we talked about at the top of the podcast, people are a lot more confident, a lot more comfortable when they're hearing the bad news than they are if that bad news is being withheld from them and they simply think that it might be there. So always, always tell the truth as you see it. And then the third is to be a partner. I view the most important service that we provide to the company is being the trusted navigator for the company, to be able to identify where it is that we've been, what we see around us right now, and help them figure out where we're going and being the thought partner as we do that. So those three things are really what we bring to the table and hopefully what we're doing for Mozilla.

Megan - 00:33:33: Eric, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Eric - 00:33:35: I really enjoyed this, Megan. Thank you so much.

Megan - 00:33:38: Yeah, I really enjoyed speaking with you as well. And thanks for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge. And I wish you and Mozilla all the best. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.