Driving Better Business Outcomes Through Financial Management Platforms

Welcome back to CFO Weekly, where we're talking with financial leaders about how to build efficiency in their teams, create time for strategy, and ultimately get results with your host, Megan Meese. Let's jump right in.

Megan - 00:00:31: Today, my guest is Kurt Shintaffer. Kurt is the Co-Founder and CFO at Apptio, with more than 20 years of financial and operational management experience. Kurt has led Apptio through key milestones and achievements, which include raising 136,000,000 in venture capital, taking the Company public in 2016 with a $110,000,000 IPO, executing a $144,000,000 convertible note offering in 2018, and closing an acquisition deal with Vista Equity Partners to take the Company private in 2019. In addition, through his leadership, Apptio has continued to expand globally and has acquired a number of high-profile companies in the cloud space. As the CFO, Kurt oversees several key departments across the business, including Accounting, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, IT, and Facilities. Prior to Co-Founding Apptio, Kurt was the CFO at iConclude Co where he was instrumental in completing the successful sale of iConclude to Opsware in 2007. Before that, he was the VP of Finance at Pacific Edge Software, where he led fundraising efforts that secured more than $40 million in venture equity and debt financing. Kurt's tenure at Pacific Edge culminated in the sale of the company to Serena Software. Kurt began his career at Ernst & Young and holds a BA in business administration from the University of Washington. Kurt, thank you very much for joining me on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Kurt - 00:02:04: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Megan - 00:02:06: Yeah. Today we're going to be discussing the importance of connecting your technology investment decisions to drive better business outcomes and how this enables users across disciplines to report, analyze, plan, and govern their investments collaboratively, efficiently, and with confidence. I'm looking forward to learning about you and your current organization. So let's get started.

Kurt - 00:02:29: Great. Let's do it.

Megan - 00:02:30: First and as always, let's start with you and your story and how it is that you got to where you are today.

Kurt - 00:02:38: Sure. So maybe first starting with a bit of professional history, I was an accountant coming out of college, went to Ernst & Young for a few years, and left Ernst & Young in 1999 when the dot-com boom was at its peak. And so I wanted to be a part of that. It seemed really exciting. And since then, I've been in enterprise technology companies. I was with a project portfolio management company, then I was with a Data Center automation company, and then that led us to Apptio. Apptio I Co-founded with a couple of other folks back in 2017, and we started it on the heels of selling our previous business. And at the time we were selling that previous business, we knew we wanted to build another company together, but we really just didn't know what it was. We took what I think is a somewhat unique approach where rather than coming up with some great idea and bringing it to market. We asked the market for ideas. So Sunny Gupta, who's the CEO of Apptio, and I went to all the people that we knew in enterprise IT and said, what's a big problem that you're trying to solve? What's keeping you up at night? What's on your CIO's top ten list of things that they want to solve that aren't being solved by technology? And we started getting this hearing this consistent theme of IT Finance is a really big challenge. It is becoming more and more strategic to the business, but we still don't have the right tools to manage it. And this is back in 2007, people would say this cloud thing is making everything harder because what we thought we knew about the IT business model, the cost, and the business model is being upended with this pay-as-you-go cloud model. So the market basically told us, we don't know what the answer is, but we know that there's this big problem. And so that gave us the opportunity to start peeling the onion, and we start forming really simple hypotheses about what might be a good technology to help solve this problem that's being described to us. And then we just kept iterating and iterating with people until we figured out that we really thought there was both a market opportunity and an opportunity to build a product that gave us a real technology advantage in this area. And once we had enough conviction in that opportunity, we started the business. And that was 15 years ago, and here we are today. So what I like about that story, is it's sort of a customer-led founding story. There was no genius that we brought to the table. We just listened and didn't have any biases and really tried to find a path to how we could deliver customer value. And it hasn't been a straight line, but we've been pretty successful along the way, so it's fun to look back on that story.

Megan - 00:05:49: I'm curious to know, how did you make the leap from accountant to entrepreneur?

Kurt - 00:05:57: Well, probably not understanding either the risks or how hard it would be very well or maybe just being intentionally oblivious to that. I think I've always had a love of business, and if you love business, oftentimes you naturally love to build things. And so without any big master plan, it just sort of seemed like the logical next thing to do. Without any real strategy or master plan, we just sort of said we're finding ourselves at a point in our career where we sold a business and we were looking for the next thing to do. If option A was to go work for somebody else and option B was to build something on our own, it just seemed obvious that we were going to build something on our own. So it's funny to look back, I think, on the lack of forethought put into some big decisions we made. But that's probably I bet a lot of people can relate to that.

Megan - 00:06:57: Yeah, sometimes you just got to make the leap, I guess. And I love how you guys went to your customers to find out what their problems were. But how did you tap into that?

Kurt - 00:07:11: We were pretty lucky because we've been in enterprise software businesses, so businesses that are selling software to large enterprises and our buyers were typically within the IT organization. So we had contacts, but we didn't have that many. And oftentimes we have to use the contact that we could get in touch with to leverage them for the next contact. So if we knew someone that might not have been the perfect person to give us this early product validation, we just begged for an introduction to someone that they thought might be better and then we would never let any conversation dead end. Every conversation ended with, well, who else should we be talking to? Can you get us that introduction? And so it was really just a bootstrap networking approach with a little grinding through it. It worked out okay.

Megan - 00:08:12: And can you tell us about what your perfect customer looks like?

Kurt - 00:08:17: Well, a perfect customer is one that knows that their company is going to be differentiated by the value that technology can bring for them. And so that could mean within the IT organization or it could be outside of the IT organization bringing a consumer-facing technology to the market, for example. But customers that know that IT is the differentiator, know that they have to spend their money wisely on IT because wasted IT costs are essentially just a missed opportunity. And that gets to the theme of Apptio’s product, which is we help enterprises understand where they're spending their money and how that's delivering value, and how they can potentially course correct to drive more in business value. Because there's no such thing as IT for IT, you do IT or technology to drive things about the business, whether it's something as sort of basic as employee productivity or it's something as advanced as a new way of reaching your customers. So we want forward-thinking businesses that are going to invest in a set of tools that will help them be better at allocating IT capital in a way that's going to drive the business. But the great thing is you don't have to look far for those types of businesses. I think pretty much everyone understands the connection between spending on the right things in technology and the business outcomes you get. So I think that general alignment within technology broadly is what's helping to grow our business. Because there was a time when we really had to be the evangelicals for this category. We can talk about the category more specifically, but now the market just says, yeah, we know we have to have tools like this. Otherwise, there's just too much opportunity for us to be mismanaging our technology spending.

Megan - 00:10:24: And is The main issue that the technology spending happens in silos like each department spending money on tools and technology that they need, but that it's just not communicated throughout the organization.

Kurt - 00:10:38: Yeah, great question and that is definitely one of the things. So when tools are purchased both within IT and then outside of IT, there can be tons of duplicate technology that are purchased which duplicate technology is typically wasteful. That's a pretty simple problem to help companies with to make sure they're not spending in two places when they only need to be spending in one. What's a harder challenge is if you think about a technology service let's say the service is a point-of-sale application for a retail business the cost of that point-of-sale application is not whatever licensing fee they pay to the point-of-sale system vendor it's that, but it's also plus the hardware or the cloud services that are being consumed. There are security considerations that cost money, there are people and help desk costs, there are all these costs that contribute to that application and because there's no logical way to connect all these different types of spend to a single-end service, in this case, we're talking about point of sale, you can never really know. It's very hard to be able to determine how much does this service cost from a total cost perspective and therefore then give you the ability to say based on what we understand the total cost to be do we think it's delivering the right level of value? So what Apptio helps with is it helps you bring in all the different cost data and allocate it towards the various services that the technology teams are delivering in a way that gives you the ability to decide if is this the right place to put our money or not and why. So an example that I think all CFOs can understand, if you're just looking at the general ledger that's just in lines, there's an account for hardware and software and labor, things like that, that doesn't tell you how you're doing in terms of delivering value with IT, that just tells you how much you're spending. But until you can put your IT spend in the context of the business value that you're looking to deliver, until you do that you don't have the right decision-making framework to ensure you're putting your dollars in the right place.

Megan - 00:13:15: And talk to us about how Apptio’s platform helps customers to do this to see the value that's being driven by IT.

Kurt - 00:13:24: Yeah, so that is what we have been built for from day one. So the first challenge we help with is getting data from disparate sources into a single system. And the disparate data sources we always will use the general ledger, we'll use planning data from the planning system and we'll use any number of operational data sources because what we try to do is bring the cost and operational data into the system. And with all that data, we can then build cost models for all the different services that are being provided. And that's really the secret sauce some CFOs would recognize. It's a really hard cost accounting problem where you have a bunch of costs, a bunch of activity-related inputs, and then you're trying to come up with the end total cost. So think about a car manufacturer. They buy a bunch of parts and they have a bunch of labor that goes into the car. And if you looked at the general ledger, you'd see all those parts and labor in the cost pools. But that doesn't tell you what it costs to produce an F-150. And understand the cost of producing the F-150, you need to know just what parts went into that F-150, just how many people touched it and for how long, and how much time it spent on the manufacturing line. And so that's the analogy of what we're doing for IT is similar to knowing what is the cost to roll a new shiny truck off the Ford production line. And it's a super hard problem to solve and it had never been done for IT before we decided that we were going to create our product and our platform.

Megan - 00:15:18: And curious, does Apptio just sit on top of an ERP or technology? And what does the implementation look like?

Kurt - 00:15:28: Yeah, so you could say we sit on top of it, I'd probably use different terminology. I'd say we take data from an ERP system and that's one of the data sources. But we are standalone. We're a big powerful platform, a financial management and operational platform for technology and finance executives. We are like a management solution that sits at the intersection of IT and finance and then the line of business that are the customers of IT. And an implementation is relatively simple. One of the things we've been working towards over all the years we've been building Apptio is making the implementations easy by creating standardization of the cost models, really understanding the data sources, and having a huge library of connectors that allows us to pull data in super easy for our core technology costing product. The implementation could take two to three months, which is sort of a normal enterprise implementation type of time frame. But customers are gaining value really quickly and you can grow iteratively. There's not just a big bang go-live deployment. You can start with individual use cases and build from there.

Megan - 00:16:57: And how is Apptio differentiated from its competitors?

Kurt - 00:17:01: Well, the competitors are an interesting dynamic because we created this category, there isn't a ton of like-for-like competitors. Our biggest competitors tend to be people trying to do this on their own with either homegrown systems or cobbling together legacy systems to kind of emulate things that, things that we do. And so we can call it the DIY problem. It's reasonable for a company to think, well, gosh, I feel like I have a collection of tools that could probably do the thing that Apptio does, but it's really such a complex problem, and you benefit so much from the built-in knowledge that we have of what the outcome should be. Along with the AI, we bring to bear and the great reporting and collaboration tools within the system, it's pretty clear that we're a better choice than the DIY approach. But that would be the biggest competitor we have. And it's not unlike many category creators that have experienced that. It's not like Workday, their model is just to replace PeopleSoft. I shouldn't say just, but a strategy they have is to replace aging software that they've built a better mousetrap. That's not our dynamic at Aptio because we created this market, we're trying to convince people not to do things the old way.

Megan - 00:18:42: And I'm curious to know, how does It drive collaboration?

Kurt - 00:18:47: Well, that's such a good question. If you think about the consumers of IT, they're in the business and they ultimately get the bill for IT. So if IT is telling, let's use finance. If IT puts a charge onto the finance PnL, that says, here's your IT allocation and we allocate it based on the number of people in the organization. So you have 10% of the people, you're going to get 10% of the IT costs. That is not a collaborative process. What we offer is by IT understanding the costs of the various services that the businesses consume and they understand who is consuming them, in what quantities. In this case, the chargeback process, what we call the Bill of IT, can be very granular. So instead of me receiving a 10% allocation of the IT budget because I have 10% of the employees, the conversation with me now is, Kurt, these are the applications you're consuming. These are the number of users of these applications. Here's the cost per user. This is how we've arrived at your IT Bill. And so that gets super collaborative because now imagine I'm talking with the CIO and I say, wow, this is amazing. For the first time ever, I have transparency into the IT services I'm consuming and the cost of them, because I see them hitting my PnL in a really transparent way. Now I'm empowered to say, gosh, I want to use less of that application, or I see two different payroll systems that I'm paying for. This is going to motivate me to consolidate onto a single-payroll system because that's going to save me money. So it puts power in the hands of the consumers of IT. I think most people can relate to this. That's a dynamic that has not existed in the past. When you start having real business conversations with the lines of business about what they're spending on technology, they really lean in because they feel so great about getting what I'd say is control of their own IT spend, as opposed to just being a recipient of the charge that IT puts on your PnL at the end of the month.

Megan - 00:21:22: Yeah, that's an amazing upgrade because I know most companies just kind of arbitrarily spread it across the organization. So yeah, I can definitely see the benefits of that granularity.

Kurt - 00:21:35: Yeah, and you avoid people yelling about why should I pay proportionately for this application when I don't even use it. That conversation is over. It becomes a productive one about what can I do to lower costs. Maybe I could upgrade the app, which might cost a little bit of money, but it'll reduce support tickets. And so over a one-year period, a near-term investment might actually lower my costs. So you can start having really nuanced but important conversations that you never would without that level of transparency.

Megan - 00:22:14: And what do you see as the biggest trends and challenges facing IT Financial Management in the next few years?

Kurt - 00:22:23: Well, I think that the trends I see are ones that also create challenges. Like tends to so often be the case because new trends mean that the current business models aren't very well suited to manage them. So a couple of big trends I see is one is the continued growth of public cloud that's growing 20 plus percent. It's becoming a bigger and bigger part of every IT leader's estate, yet it's very different managing always on pay-as-you-go, unlimited capability, public cloud versus buying servers, putting them in a data center with sort of a fixed cost environment so they're a public cloud. And then there's this proliferation of technology spending that's outside the IT world. So maybe talking about the public cloud first in a little more detail. So if you think about public cloud growing, I'm not sure what it'd be five times as fast as the rest of IT spend, you all of a sudden have this issue of I have to budget for this very differently than I do the rest of my IT spend. So how do I do that? You're putting a lot of control on the users or the consumers of the public cloud. So people that are doing development work or hosting applications, can make changes to the public cloud consumption that is not governed in the same way by some central person in procurement or in IT or in Finance. So you're giving up a lot of control. And there are also a lot of security concerns or new security challenges. I would say if you think about technology leaders have gotten really good about securing their own applications, but if you're putting stuff up in public cloud, it's just a whole different consideration. So all these answers are not easily met and are creating big challenges. And then the other one I mentioned was this explosion of technology spending outside of IT. It's probably an overused term at this point, but you've heard the phrase every business is now a software business. And what I take that to mean is every part of the business is using software to get a competitive advantage. And technology is not just being deployed by the IT team. It's being deployed within the lines of business, oftentimes going around the IT organization because IT simply can't keep up with all these demands. What happens is you have this proliferation of IT spending out in lines of business, and then ultimately that's going to need to be managed by IT. So we need to have a partnership between IT and the lines of business in how this growth of technology outside of central IT is managed. Those are huge, huge challenges that I think we'll see. The big consulting firms make a lot of money helping solve that, but we think there's a big opportunity as a software provider to continue to focus on those dynamics. We want to give both internal IT and the business visibility and insights into technology spend. We want to create this collaborative process where the line of business always feels like IT is on their side and able to help them with their technology initiatives. And then once things are deployed, we want to give you the ability to manage and control your spending because you never want to just have set it and forget it investments. You want to always be measuring them to say, what is their ROI? Is it consistent with the business case that we made when we greenlit this investment? If costs are trending up more than we expected, what is the reason for that? So FDO is serving this dynamic by giving this management platform that enables both IT and the business to keep a handle on all this stuff. So it's just like from the day we started the business, we saw a trend which was kind of this disruption of cloud within IT at a very early stage. Now we're sort of 15 years later and we're still really chasing or leveraging as a business these trends of massive exponential cloud growth. And the new thing is this spending outside of IT. So we think we have lots of opportunity ahead. And the key for us is going to be really prioritizing, tightly, listening to our customers, and making sure the way we think they need our help is actually the way they need our help. That's a big thing ahead for us.

Megan - 00:27:54: I'm also curious, is the main buyer of Apptio, is it the CIO or the CFO? Because I can definitely see a case for both wanting something like this.

Kurt - 00:28:05: That's right. It's a partnership, but the leader is typically the CIO and the CFO is a stakeholder and an important influencer in terms of the buyer of Apptio within larger organizations. There's a dedicated IT Finance organization that is really in the middle of It. But ultimately our category, which we call Technology Business Management and FinOps, is at this intersection of technology and finance because that collaboration is so important.

Megan - 00:28:46: And you may have already answered this in part or in whole, but can you talk about plans or initiatives that Apptio has in the works or where it is you see the company going in the next few years to handle the world's new challenges?

Kurt - 00:29:00: Yeah, well, maybe building off the conversation we were just having there, our job is to continue to lead the market forward by bringing new technology that's going to provide value, that's kind of table stakes that's motherhood and apple pie within that. What I see a huge opportunity for is this Cloud Financial Planning. Probably any CFO that would be listening to this is thinking about their planning tool and they can probably name five other sort of FP&A type tools that they know of or perhaps have used in the past. What we are building right now will be released later in the year. Is a focused offering for Public Cloud Financial Planning. If you think about this, you realize if you try to think about legacy planning tools and say how would they work for the cloud, you quickly understand that they just don't work. What cloud is it's this consumption-based model where you have these unlimited on-demand resources? You've got buying power distributed into the business and nearly every company I've talked about has had some issue with runaway cloud spend. So I think this is a huge, huge market need. So what we're launching is a product that will allow you to do, I guess I'd say driver-based budgeting and cloud resources. And what I mean by that is that you can say these are the different units of things that I need and therefore what will my cloud service need be over what period of time? And so it's going to be a really granular way to allow companies to budget for their public cloud spend. But we'll also, and we already have some of this in the market, have AI that looks at historical cloud consumption and helps you forecast future spending. So whether it be a cyclical business that has very different cloud consumption based on the time of year or the time of the month or any other trend in the business, our AI will say, hey, here's what we think going forward would look like. But if you want to change some variables in terms of the units that might be consumed, well you can then also edit that. But we're going to give you a really smart way to start your planning process. So as a CFO, this gets even closer to me because this is really right in the cloud FP&A world. But I'm super excited about it and I think it's going to be a big driver for us over the next number of years.

Megan - 00:32:00: Yeah, definitely sounds very exciting.

Kurt - 00:32:03: Yeah, we are excited.

Megan - 00:32:05: So what advice do you have for other entrepreneurs and business leaders who might be listening on how to build successful companies in the tech industry, especially with technology changing so exponentially?

Kurt - 00:32:18: Yeah, I think the principle that I described when we were talking about the founding of the business is one that even at the risk of sort of restating it, I believe it's so firmly, it starts with a customer in mind. I think whenever you are thinking about what the strategy of your business should be, try to disassociate yourself from what your current assets are. So even today we'll go to customers for feedback and we'll be asking them questions about what are their needs, what are their pains, and what can we do better for them. And it's really hard not to ask questions that are sort of affirming the position that we already maintain. It's easy for there to be sort of biased in the way we gather feedback because we sure are hoping, fingers crossed, that they're going to say the thing that's going to be really easy for us to deliver is the thing they want. And so the trick, I believe, is really just saying let's talk to our customers with a blank sheet of paper. They could be talking about things that our competitors do really well. Well, that's an interesting thing to know. They might be talking about an adjacent market that we never even thought we would get in. But the key is just to never think you know more than the customer. Even if sometimes you may try to suspend reality and act like you don't because you're going to hear more if you can remove sort of the current course and speed biases that you have at an established company. And that's the beauty of a startup you don't have any of those. So you can be totally true to that principle. But as you grow and as you become more established with more products in the market, it just becomes more and more incumbent that you operate that way. That's the advice I would give except I would also say that you do need to give yourself some opportunity to lead the customers. Because sometimes as a technology leader like I am, like many other people that might be listening to this you are thinking about things in a pretty deep way about where the market is going to go. So give yourself some opportunity to make a bet on what you think the market needs even if you're not being asked by the customers. Keep your core business grounded in what the customers are asking for. But there have been cases where we have been slower to react on opportunities than we would have liked because we were so focused on the customer and we said if the customer didn't tell us this is what they want, then that must be what the market then the market must not need it. So it's just kind of like anything if you have a portfolio of investment dollars to make. Save a little bit for the lead-the-market type of investments, because I think that'll give you an opportunity to retain some sort of big market-leading vision that may not get from direct customer interaction.

Megan - 00:35:53: That is great advice. Thank you for sharing that. Lastly, as a Finance Leader and an Entrepreneur, what is it that keeps you motivated?

Kurt - 00:36:02: Oh, man, it's really building a company. The building process is what's so exciting. And then there's the team that I get to do it with. I think the really cool thing about being a CFO is that you sort of have a license to play a role in all parts of the business. The CFO never really has to stay in their lane, and that's what's super exciting to me, because I get to be with my peers, understanding what's working and what's not in their business, and really building all of that intelligence and that data to then make decisions about the business more broadly. And so this could be entering new geographies, or targeting new customer segments, or product categories, or doing M&A. The CFO always has a huge role to play in the building process. So that's, you know, that's what gets me out of bed every morning. But if you didn't have a great team to do that with, what's the point? So we have this amazing, smart, dedicated team of just awesome people that love to work hard but also succeed together. And I think a lot of people can relate. Winning is super fun, but it's most fun when it feels like a team win, and it's even more fun when it's a team win and you love the people that you're winning with. So that's just so addictive, and that's what keeps me motivated 15 years after starting Apptio and going on a pretty long marathon. But the ability to build and the ability to win with the team is what gives me the juice every day.

Megan - 00:37:58: That's awesome. Kurt, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Kurt - 00:38:02: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a great conversation. Appreciate the good questions.

Megan - 00:38:10: Yeah, I really enjoyed learning about you and Apptio, and I appreciate you taking the time to be here with us today.

Kurt – 00:38:17: All right, thank you.

Megan – 00:38:19: To all of our listeners. Please tune in next week, and until then, take care.

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