How CFOs Build Resilient Careers: Lessons from Banking, M&A and GoFundMe

Melissa Howitzson: Foreign. Welcome to the CFO Show. I'm your host, Melissa Howitzson, CFO of Vena. The path to becoming a CFO is rarely linear. Some leaders come up entirely through operating roles. Others start in banking or capital markets or advisory. But when someone moves back and forth between these environments, they often develop something different. The ability to see across industries, business models, and moments of change. Greg Merva has built a career that spans investment banking, public company leadership, and now the role of Chief Financial officer at, uh, GoFundMe, a platform operating at the intersection of money, trust and technology. Today we're going to explore how Greg's varied career shaped the way he approaches integration, growth and leadership. And what enterprise CFOs can learn about building resilience, recognizing patterns, and preparing for what comes next. Greg, welcome to the CFO Show.

Greg Merva: Thanks Melissa. It's great to be here. Uh, really great to spend some time with you and with your audience. Uh, really looking forward to the conversation.

Melissa Howitzson: So am I. So you've had an interesting career. Let's start there. I'd love if you could help us understand a bit about some of the moves you've made. You've had operational roles, you've also been in banking and you've moved back and forth between them.

Greg Merva: Um, yeah, well, you know, I guess it helps to be, you know, in your 50s. So I've had like 30 years in my career, so, uh, I've had time, if you will, to, uh, try a couple of different things. Um, but I guess most of my career has been sort of earmarked by either being in investment banking roles or operating roles. And I started my career in investment banking. It's a great place to start if you want to learn finance. It's also a great place to start because you're exposed to just a variety of different businesses. Um, I was fortunate to start on Wall street at Goldman Sachs in the early 90s. I did say 90s. Um, was exposed to a ton of businesses and I moved out to the west coast in know, really around the dawn of the Internet because I was intrigued by technology. I was really intrigued by consumer Internet. And the same thing applies. There is just, you know, there were thousands of companies getting started and you know, in banking you get exposed to many of them and you get the opportunity to work with them on a lot of really interesting projects. I was, um, really enamored with a couple of them. And I joined one of my clients, uh, and that was my first operating role. Um, when I was sort of in my early 30s. I did the operating role for a few years. And it was, you know, during the dot com boom and then subsequent bust, it didn't work out. And I learned a lot from that experience, which is a theme that I think really matters as you think about your career. And then, you know, I made my way to Yahoo, where it was my second operating role. And I was there for um, almost half a decade. It was a great place to be there. It was in the sort of the early aughts, the you know, the sort of early 2000 time frame. And I ran the strategy and M M and A team there. It was a great place. But then made my way back into investment banking again, uh, in sort of the 2010s. And interestingly enough it's like very complimentary. Like to take what you've learned as an operator and then be able to apply it as a banker. It just adds a different dimension to the advice that you can give clients. Um, because you've actually seen some of the problems that your clients are dealing with on a day to day basis. And when you're giving them advice on transactions, you can come at it from the perspective of not just corporate finance, but also having been an operator. And then, so I did that for a while and then, um, well for a while, almost a decade, and then decided that again it was time to go back and be an operator. And at that point I really felt like the CFO role was the place where I belonged. And the nice part about investment banking is you're exposed to tons of CFOs and CEOs. I mean those tend to be the people that you are talking to, learning about their businesses and helping them think through capital markets, transactions, M and A transactions. And in that process, you know, I got to see the CFO role and I felt like, well, that was some, that'd be something I'd really like to do one day. Uh, and so I made the decision, you know, after that sort of winding journey that uh, I wanted to try it.

Melissa Howitzson: It's interesting because you talk about those early days as an investment banker and you know, that's it can be a tough world, tough job, uh, very demanding, but you get to learn a lot. I started out at KPMG and some similar attributes in that at the time I didn't quite appreciate the fact that I got a bird's eye view into so many companies and could have been absorbing so much more than I realized at the time I should have been paying attention to.

Greg Merva: It was around 2010 when I went back to banking. It was also the time when we were calling every software company that service businesses a B2B business. So I said, I'm going B2B. I'm going back to banking. Uh, so, uh, that was my own spin on it. It does actually really help you, I think, if you have the opportunity to work in a client service business, whether it's consulting or banking or accounting or really any client service business. A gives you exposure. It also gives you an appreciation for, uh, just how hard the work is and how conscientious, um, you need to be about, um, the deliverables, uh, because your clients really rely on it, um, for things. I mean, they're hiring you for this specific thing. Uh, uh, it's also just a great apprenticeship business. I mean, we'll talk about sort of, I guess, career advice later on in this discussion. But I, I'm a big fan of in person, not, not necessarily, you know, five days a week, whatever, you know. But I think it's really important, the human interaction that you get from, from those types of jobs. You get to sort of see and learn, uh, up the value chain. And, you know, it creates a great environment for you to learn, a great environment for me to see, and then a great environment for you to sort of figure out what do I want to go do next.

Melissa Howitzson: You ended up joining StubHub, and you were ending up in a role now where you were reporting into a parent company, which is ebay. How did being a CFO of a company that's part of a public company shape the way you view the role of cfo?

Greg Merva: It's amazing how hard it is to get the first job in the. Yeah. So it's like, uh, people like, there's no linear path to becoming a cfo. And, uh, you know, there, there really isn't a, hey, I'm going to go to school and then I'm going to come out and be a cfo. It's. It very much is a. It's not even like a direct line like investment banking, where, you know, you can be an analyst, then an associate, then a vp, and then a director, and then you become a managing director. It's like, that's pretty linear. So, uh, you know, I decided I wanted to be a cfo, but I really didn't know how to be a cfo. But I was really fortunate in that, um, I had a lot of exposure to CFOs at Morgan Stan. One of those CFOs happened to be Scott Shenkel, who was the CFO of eBay at the time. He's now the CFO of Expedia Group. And, uh, he's such a great guy, if he's listening. Hi, Scott. You know, Scott said, hey, look, if you want to be a cfo, come work for me at ebay. You can be a divisional CFO of StubHub. Um, eBay had acquired StubHub like, 10 years earlier. And he said, I'll teach you how to be a cfo, and you'll get to do all the fun parts of being a CFO at StubHub and the stuff that you're not going to be naturally. Naturally good at early on. You'll kind of learn. He's like, you know, you're not going to be good at tax. You're not going to really be good at technical accounting. I'm still not, uh, you're not going to be really good at treasury and a lot of the sort of business system stuff. He's like, but I think you'll be good at strategy, and I think you'll be good at finance, and I think you'll be good at operational finance in particular, which is, how do you apply all of the tools of the finance team to help drive the business and to help think about, you know, what the strategy should be, where should we be investing, how do we grow the business, how do we enter new markets? He's like, that's the really fun part. He's like, and you get to do that, and then I'll teach you the rest. Um, so it was obviously good fortune. I mean, I think you need good fortune in your career to find mentors like Scott. It was nice because there's a mothership, you know, eBay, that really, you know, is still a very healthy business. And StubHub, which is also a healthy business, and we got to sort of operate under that umbrella, but we also got to operate with a healthy amount of autonomy. Um, so much autonomy that we ultimately ended up selling the business before I ended up leaving. So it's, uh. It was a great, um, apprenticeship, if you will, for. For Scott. And it was a great way to learn.

Melissa Howitzson: Well, it's interesting you mentioned the mentorship, because similarly, I have, along the way, had certain mentors that ended up saying, hey, you know, you can do this. Or have you thought about that? Here's where I think you'd be strong. Here's areas I think you need to work on. And when I think about. You talk about a career not being exactly linear, but a lot of my career has been influenced based on my network and people I've worked with in the past that they keep popping up and sort of influence where you go next. And, uh, it's just sort of worked out well that I've really been fortunate to have similarly some really strong mentors along the way in the network.

Greg Merva: You know, your network really is your net worth, if you will. It's, you know, I can't remember who coined that phrase, but it's. I think it's really true. Like, the more, the more people you know, um, you know, the deeper your, your career and the richer your career becomes.

Melissa Howitzson: I think after that experience where you were part of a division reporting into a parent, you had a different experience when you were at gofundme and you made an acquisition there, where now you had to integrate that company into your company. How did your experience that you had from the past influence the way you looked at that integration when you did that M and A and making it successful?

Greg Merva: Yeah, well, it's. I mean, again, it was a little bit of good fortune, if you will. Maybe, maybe a little bit of like, you know, just your career path sometimes take you. Takes you to where you belong. Um, When I joined GoFundMe, GoFundMe had just combined with, um, a business called Classy, which we now call GoFundMe Pro. And that got GoFundMe, the consumer business, into a business that actually, um, supplies enterprise software for nonprofits. So some of the leading nonprofits in the world use our software to do fundraising. So, uh, the Salvation army, the Michael J. Fox foundation, um, Stand up to Cancer. These are all examples of organizations that use our tools to do really effective fundraising for themselves. We felt like it was a really strategic move, uh, to combine the GoFundMe business and particularly our audience of over 100 million users a month, um, with this enterprise platform. When I joined, it was two weeks after the combination had happened. And my experience at Yahoo, as well as my experience as an investment banker, I think was somewhat beneficial to kind of my first days on the job because we're like, okay. At Yahoo, I ran the strategy and M and A team. We acquired over 30 companies when I was there. And you don't just acquire a company and be like, okay, we're good. Let's go do the next one. You actually have to spend time integrating them. And what integration means is, uh, in most cases, it's, how do you take the best of both, um, put them together and really create the one plus one equals three opportunity. It doesn't happen overnight. I mean, you have to combine teams, you have to combine cultures. You have to figure out are you going to combine technology stacks or are you going to sort of figure out a way to, um, standardize onto one. We're now three and a half years in, and we are really completely now one team, one dream with one platform and one leadership team and one brand and a unified go to market. But it takes time. And of course, it started the first day I got there. But, uh, it's really been an area of focus for us in the entire company over the course of the last several years.

Melissa Howitzson: What would be your top piece of advice for companies doing an integration? And what would you say, based off the scars on your back and lessons learned, would be something you would suggest that people, uh, try to avoid doing?

Greg Merva: The first thing is you want to preserve value. So you've just made this decision to combine forces with another company, whether it's a similar company or a company that sort of extends you into a new strategic area. So first thing is like, okay, we want to preserve value. But the second thing is you really want to figure out, uh, how do you get to a point where you're operating as one team and not separately, and where can you look for the force multipliers between the two businesses? Everybody talks about synergies, which is one plus one H3. But if you're really being serious, that's where the value comes from. It comes from, where can we get benefit from? The customer base is overlapping. Where can we take a value of our product, um, and actually infuse that into the value of the product of the company that we just acquired? Uh, where can we culturally align around the things that matter most? Um, for us, it was our values. It sounds funny, but we spent a lot of time thinking about because both companies had different sets of values. And so we needed a line around, well, what are the values that we cared most about? Clearly, both companies, we service nonprofits, and our mission is to help people help each other. So our first value was fueled by purpose. Everybody who works at GoFundMe cares about the mission and is there to help people. And the second was, again, somewhat apropos of when you bring two companies together, but it's really true for any business where you're servicing millions of users. It's to earn trust. And trust is the backbone of our platform. And then the other two were, find a way, find a way to make it happen. You're going to be presented with significant numbers of problems, whether it's in your career or whether it's in trying to build a business, the right attitude, the right growth mindset is to have find a way. And then the last one for us was impatient to be great, which is, yeah, like this stuff matters. It matters a lot. Like, it matters to actually have a sense of urgency to what you're doing. But a sense of urgency isn't sufficient if it doesn't, uh, come with a sense of quality as well. So, uh, that was sort of the place where we started and we could get the entire company excited around if we, we all agree in these values, like, we have common ground and we can do a lot of good things together. The biggest advice I could give anybody doing M M and A, do it for the right reasons. But once you do it, it's not move fast and break things. You gotta be careful about it. But you, but you also have to be really intentional and really, you know, motivated to get it done.

Melissa Howitzson: Great advice. So let's talk a bit more about GoFundMe. You've mentioned in the past that the business wants to help activate more help in the world. That sounds like more than just a fundraising platform. So can you help me understand what's behind that broader mission?

Greg Merva: Uh, yeah. Well, I mean, the broader mission is to help people help each other. I, um, think that the thing to understand is just sort of a little bit of market context. Just sort of, you know, what we're talking about in terms of, uh, what does help mean? Um, first for GoFundMe. Um, GoFundMe is a platform that has delivered over $40 billion of help to individuals and nonprofits in its 15 year lifetime. Uh, and so we're really proud of that. And that's a lot. It sounds like a lot. I mean, it came from over 80 million donations on the platform. Um, so it's a very high volume, ah, of donations. And they tend to be donations of reasonably modest size ranging from $20 to $100. This is just, um, everyday neighbors supporting the organizations they care about or the people they care about relative to the overall market. In the United States, the market is roughly a $550 billion market. That's the amount of help that is giving each year to institutions. Globally, it's over a trillion and a half, which is great. The problem is the market isn't growing. Uh, it's actually, in many cases, it might be shrinking because it grows at about 2%. It's about 2% of GDP and it grows barely 2% a year. So there are challenges with the overall market. We think that we have an opportunity to help the market grow and help make the entire process of helping people easier. Easier to ask for help and easier to give help. Easier and more inspiring to give help. And we can think we could do that by further activating our audience. Um, and we've been investing pretty substantially into that over the course of the last several years, uh, to really create more opportunities for people to, um, come to our platform, uh, engage with the individuals in the communities they want to engage with, and then actually provide more help and support to those folks you

Melissa Howitzson: are trying to activate more, you know, make giving more, have more engagement, more robust capabilities.

Greg Merva: Yeah.

Melissa Howitzson: What is GoFundMe doing to actually get there? Yeah.

Greg Merva: Um, well, almost at the same time that we completed the acquisition of Classy, we started radically investing in our business, uh, in, like, to the point where we have doubled our spend on product and technology investment over the course of the last three years. Um, the reason to do that is to, uh, a bunch of things, build the platforms underneath the surface areas that are robust and secure and also flexible and enable you to actually offer new sorts of services to users. So we've invested substantially in that. We've invested substantially into all of the trust and safety and risk and compliance platforms underneath. Because trust, we're nothing without trust. People trust us with the most important things going on in their lives. And the same thing is true with the organizations who use our software. You're trusting us to help you be more effective fundraisers. So we've been investing substantially into product and technology to really evolve the platforms, but then to also evolve the product. And really the way to think about, really, both sides of our business, and then they come together in the middle, but both sides of our business, if you're an individual, the hardest thing, really the hardest thing to do in fundraising is to ask somebody for help, to tell somebody that you need help. Most of us are usually pretty comfortable giving help. Um, but we usually don't give help unless we're asked for help. Uh, if you think about your own sort of personal response to organizational fundraising, it's usually somebody has to say, hey, can you spare 100 bucks for the PTA? Can you donate to this cause? This worthy cause? And there's thousands of worthy causes. It all starts with the ask. And the same is true for nonprofits. Like nonprofits actually also have to make the ask. And nonprofit fundraising is increasingly hard. Um, yes, there's the ask, but there's also the where do I find supporters? How do I acquire them? How do I then convert them into one time or recurring donors when they come to my site, how do I keep them coming back? Um, so much of our product investment over the last three years has been on the underlying platforms to make these systems robust and then on the applications and products on top of those platforms to make the process of asking for help easier. And then the other side of the coin is when supporters show up. Uh, and I like to use the word supporters because not all supporters are donors. And that's okay. You could be a supporter and you can give help in non monetary ways. You could leave words of support, you could actually share campaigns with your friends and family. You can amplify it on social media. We have millions of people who do that and we're trying to make that experience, that supporter experience more engaging, more inspiring. Uh, because the byproduct of that is that people will get more help. Um, so we've been investing significantly into not just sort of making the experience of when you get to a campaign page more compelling, more social, more engaging, more rewarding in terms of the information and feedback you get back. But we've been creating a whole bunch of new surface areas to actually give you a place where you can actually express your, the identity that really represents what it is you care about in the world. The organizations you support, the causes you support, the individuals you support. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say we're living in the world of AI and we have been early adopters and it's really infused throughout our product. In fact, we recently launched a new product called Smart Fundraising Coach, which is an AI powered coach, um, that actually addresses almost everything I just talked about. So it shows up in things like how do we help you think about how you tell your story? How do we help you think about, um, how to write your story, what the title should be, how do we help it be? How do we help you clarify the story so that way people can see the need that you have? How can we help you, um, share the right videos and media? How can we help create those for you? How can we help you share them with the right people? Um, how can we help automate the process? Because fundraising is a process. It starts with the create and then it moves to the share and it moves to thank yous. And then we also use AI throughout the product to help you think about goal setting and when, when supporters show up, we try to personalize the experience, to actually personalize the ask to help you think about like, you know, what's the Right way to frame, um, the request to particular users. Do I want a one time donation or a recurring donation? So AI shows, um, up throughout the product and then of course, you know, AI is being deployed throughout the business internally. Like my team uses AI to forecast, uh, and my team uses AI to close our books faster. We use AI to write our code faster. And it really is true. You can go from what used to take you three months to write code to being able to do it in a week. Um, and the great news about that is, uh, it's going to enable us to continue to accelerate the pace of innovation for our customers and deliver more value. The AI thread that runs through it is absolutely critical because every company that, that is being created today is going to deploy AI at an increasingly accelerated rate. And every company that exists has to basically re engineer all of their processes to be AI forward as well as their products. So we're doing all of the above.

Melissa Howitzson: One of the interesting things that we have going on in the world right now is, you know, we have a younger generation, they're starting to have some wealth. How does GoFundMe think about engaging this younger generation and how, how does that generation look at giving?

Greg Merva: Yeah, it's, um, I mean, thanks for raising the question. It's actually one of the areas that I think we would consider to be one of our superpowers. You know, I mentioned a little bit the market for philanthropy. In the United States alone, um, it's roughly $590 billion. It's given away each year. Uh, but if you look at the demographics underneath the surface, um, the number of donors, uh, the percentage of the American population that, that is giving money to these organizations has declined, um, in each of the last 10 years. And it's also aged. So the average donor to a, uh, nonprofit is over the age of 60. Nonprofits often rely on major gifts, which typically come in from checks or come in offline through analog channels. And we think there's such a much bigger opportunity nonprofits to engage online with their current community as well as new communities of younger donors. And we think that GoFundMe is uniquely positioned to help them do that. Our superpower is our brand strength. We, you know, we have over 90% aided awareness, over 70% unaided awareness. And with millennials and Gen Zs, we punch really high, uh, in both of those categories. And Most millennials and Z's will say that GoFundMe is one of, if not the first place they've learned how to give. So we're very Much an on ramp for giving for these younger generations. And, um, these younger generations have grown up online. They're digitally native. They're very, very comfortable sharing, um, what they care about, the causes they care about, the organizations they care about, the people they're supporting. So we're working actively with influencers. Influencers are becoming an increasing, a big part of our go to market strategy. Um, influencers like Jimmy Darts, they're amplifying, uh, campaigns on our behalf out there, doing good in the world and, you know, sharing GoFundMes with their networks. Um, and then we have like, young folks who come to GoFundMe and, you know, I mentioned that you can support and help in ways that don't include donating. So we had a young lady on our platform, you know, she goes by the handle littlemissflint. But, uh, she, uh, cares about environmental causes and she started a campaign and I think she herself might have given five or ten dollars to the campaign, but then she shared it with her network and her network generated over $100,000 of help for this organization. So that's really the power of the younger generations who have grown up online. And, you know, at the same time that this is happening, philanthropy is still a largely analog experience. Uh, it's largely, it looks a lot like E commerce did, you know, 15 years ago in the United States? So maybe 10% of help in giving has moved online. Uh, a lot of it still happens. I mentioned the aging demographic. It still happens offline through direct mail, through radio, print, TV campaigns. I know, but it's going to move online. And that acceleration online, uh, is happening right now largely because the population is aging. And there's going to be a massive wealth transfer in our country and globally over the course of the next two decades, from boomers and silent generations to millennials and Z's. I'm an ex. It's probably going to hop right over the top of my head, uh, and go to my kids and hopefully my grandkids one day. Um, and the size of that wealth transfer is anywhere from 120 to $150 trillion. Um, and it's going to go to a younger audience who wants to see the impact, who wants to actually see the direct impact of their giving online. So GoFundMe is a great place for them to start. It's a great place for them to build a hab of giving, um, which we think will be super beneficial to the nonprofit organizations that are working with us and where we're helping those organizations build communities, um, on GoFundMe.

Melissa Howitzson: So let's shift over to how you operate as a CFO and what you're seeing coming up, uh, coming in the future. What would you say are some of the top skills that people in the Office of Finance need to be working on today?

Greg Merva: Increasingly, I think that finance teams are becoming more strategic and there's a business operations function in finance, um, that I think m many companies are developing and should develop, because that's all about, like, how do we go make it happen, um, how do we take what we've learned, the insights that we're seeing from our product, from our marketing channels, um, and then how do we go deploy resources to drive growth? My former boss, Sukhinder, uh, Singh, uh, Cassidy, who is now the CEO of Zero. Um, she was the president at StubHub. Uh, and she had a good phrase for it. She used to call it just range of motion. Um, you need to have, I have terrible range of motion in my shoulder. But she used to call it range of motion, which is you need the ability to basically get deep into the weeds and tell me what happened and why. And then you need the ability to pull up and see strategically where it's going and tell me what we should go do and why. And then you also need to tie it together in the middle and actually model it and put together some numbers and help me think about, like, if we do that, what will it end up looking like? So those are some pretty significant skill sets. Obviously, AI helps you do that. Uh, you know, you could be more effective using tools to ask some of those questions. You could be more effective building agents to actually go take some of those actions on your behalf. So I do think the modern day tools for financial practitioners are going to be okay, how do I do my job and then how do I use AI to actually go do it more efficiently? And then how do I use it to just get smarter and quicker and more productive at what I do day to day?

Melissa Howitzson: And so if you think about Those next generation CFOs that are going to be coming through, what would be the top two or three capabilities that you think they must have?

Greg Merva: I feel like we're two things can be true. Like we're, we're sort of entering a world where, um, there's just going to be a tremendous amount of ambiguity. And dealing with ambiguity, uh, and change and the stress and the anxiety that it will produce is, it's probably one of the most important skills to have. It's not a finance skill. Like, how do I Use Excel. It's really a human skill which is, you know, how do I deal with the unknown, the known unknown. Like we know that we don't know where we're going to be two years from now with the next versions of these LLMs. We know that if we don't evolve that we will be at a competitive disadvantage that creates a lot of stress and anxiety. And I think, you know, as a leader you need to both be able to manage that and uh, accept it and then you know, to practically say okay, well what can we do today that'll help us, you know, get along the path there. So that's one. And then, and then you know, kind of the Venn diagrams sort of overlap here in a couple different ways. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, you're going to fail along the way. Um, you know I mentioned my startup in the like early 2000 time frame. Uh, I was there for three years and it was a really fantastic learning experience but it ended up being a failure if you will financially. But I learned a lot from that experience. I learned a lot from Yahoo. Like the pace of failure is going to increase in the environment that we're in. So you got to have pretty thick skinned, you have to like, you have to learn to deal with the mistakes and you have to learn how to learn from them. Which would basically be the last piece which is just again all of these Venn diagrams overlap, ambiguity, Learn from failure growth mindset, really take the feedback, ask for the feedback and um, be willing to change on a more regular basis than you're typically used to changing, adapt and evolve and are willing to develop new skills, willing to experiment and fail and just really literally pick up the pieces and get going again. Uh, I do think that those, whether you're a CFO or really anybody in a company, like that's, that's the skill set you need. And then all the other stuff is technical, which, it's table stakes. You have to learn it, you have to learn how to do, be the subject matter expert and you know, finance and Tax and Treasury, like I'm not the subject matter expert in any of those but I have a great team uh, who are subject matter experts in all of those and collectively we operate as a pretty good unit. So I'd say like uh, maybe if there's like a fourth, you're usually only supposed to give three pieces of advice, but the fourth is just you know, recognize your weaknesses and make sure that you compensate for them by having people around you who are better at what they're doing than you could ever be and try to build a team that will really sort of surround you with the things that you yourself can't bring to the table.

Melissa Howitzson: Greg, great advice. Thank you so much for sharing. Now, before I let you go, we do have two rapid fire questions that we like to ask our guests. So are you ready?

Greg Merva: Maybe go for it, Melissa. I'm ready.

Melissa Howitzson: The first one's easy for you. What is the hallmark of a mature finance organization in terms of how they operate?

Greg Merva: I like to make analogies to sports. When you put a team together, it takes a while for a team to grow and to mature and to become really highly functioning together. Um, but after a while you get to know each other really well and you get to know each other's tendencies and you can, you know where that person is going to be on the, if you will, the playing field and you can make the no look pass without being there and it becomes seamless. And so I think great finance teams, yes, they operate as a unit inside of finance, but they're also actually operating as a unit to help the rest of the company and the rest of the system function. So how can we help product and technology engage seamlessly with marketing and sales? How can we actually help our customer service pass information back to product and technology and do it in a way where it's not like you're just, it's not a dumb pipe, you're actually adding value and insight to it and you're helping people make decisions and think about the trade offs over here and the impact over there. So to me it's really system level thinking, not individual, um, level thinking which comes with the transparency and the ownership and the accountability. But it's accountability for the system, not just for your own role. I think about really any mature team, any mature company, you graduate from your own personal responsibility to your team's responsibility to how do I have responsibility to really help take the company, even if that means like, and this is where it really shows up. It's like, you know what, it makes less sense for us to invest here. Let's spend more time and effort over here. Um, when you start to see that happen, you know it's happening. And you know you've got a team that's focused on winning, not just, you know, um, doing a good job.

Melissa Howitzson: I love it. Uh, the no look pass, I'm going to remember that one. And the next question is, what is a book? And it can be personal or professional that has lasting impact on you.

Greg Merva: Yeah, I'll, I've, gosh, I've, I've read a couple recently. I mean, um, I was a history major undergrad, so like, which is sort of an interesting path to uh, pursue to Wall Street. I was also an economics major, but history is still my passion. So I read a lot of history books. I just read 1929, which is Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book about the crash of 1929 and how we got there and the sort of mistakes that were made. Um, but I'm now reading, um, this book Nexus, uh, by Yuval, uh, Harari. And it's also a really interesting book for our time because it's about a history of information networks and how information networks can be used for good and for bad. Um, and this is particularly relevant in a world of AI, uh, how information can be used to control, but it can also be democratized and used to help people, um, seek and gain freedom. Uh, it's sort of like, you know, the world that we're experiencing right now is a world of entropy and extropy. It's, you know, things can feel like they're falling apart at the same time that they can feel like they're coming together. And I think that's just our new reality, uh, for the foreseeable future. It's a great book to read, to put it into perspective. Uh, Yuval is a historian, so um, he takes you through like the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church, to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to where we are today, uh, and examines information networks and how they were used, um, for good and for bad, uh, throughout the process. So to me it's a must read in the world of AI because how we train our AIs, um, will actually have a lot to do with sort of the world that we're creating. Puts a lot of responsibility on, on, on, you know, how we think about it. Uh, and so it's really good, I think, to, to, to be aware of it, um, and not to pretend that this isn't happening to us right now.

Melissa Howitzson: I'll have to check that one out. It looks like a nice big book. And I love the fact that you're reading about something leading up to AI, but you're actually doing it with an actual physical book. So that.

Greg Merva: Big words though, big words. Because I can actually like, I, you know, I can read it without my glasses on. So it's only, it's only 400 pages but you know, lots of footnotes because he's a historian, so you've got, you know, he's nailed every source and every context, uh, throughout it. Definitely trying to read more these days. Um, uh, spend plenty of time on devices, uh, but there's always time for a good book.

Melissa Howitzson: I hear you Greg. Thanks again for joining me. I've really enjoyed this conversation with you today.

Greg Merva: Melissa, thanks for having me. Thank, uh, you cfo, uh, show listeners, uh, for tuning in and watching. Um, hope it was interesting and helpful along the way.

Melissa Howitzson: If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd love your support. Follow the show and leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's one of the best ways to help more finance professionals discover the show. For the CFO Show, I'm Melissa Howitzon. Until next time.

Greg Merva: Mhm.