FP&A Today

From Big Four to Fiverr: How Esti Levy Dadon scaled Finance at the Gig Marketplace

Esti Levy Dadon, Executive VP Finance, Fiverr ,started in public accounting at Ernst and Young, before leading the finance function at Fiverrr. Since joining the global marketplace in 2016 she steered the company to a successful IPO in 2019. In her words: “In almost 10 years at Fiverr  I’m still waiting for things to be boring and repeatable, but it never happens because things change all the time”
In this episode:
Building finance from the ground up at Fiverr 
The path to IPO and the financial work required 
Challenge of building a robust forecasting model for a public company
Creating a finance team to last
Business partnering process at Fiverr
Traits for hiring in FP&A at Fiverr   
Mindset FP&A perspective shift to connect you to the business

From Data to Decisions - How Wasabi's FP&A and BI Teams Execute at Scale

What do FP&A professionals need to understand about data work and BI and the work that BI is doing? Marcos Bento, Director BI, at Wasabi Technologies: “They need to translate business requests in English in a way that the BI folks can translate that into codes.
That’s where the magic happens.”
In part two of our deep dive with Marcos Bento (BI) and David Suter (FP&A) from Wasabi Technologies, we explore the execution side of their successful data partnership. In this episode:
Our 130-Iteration Journey: Net retention metric evolution
Cost per dollar of new ARR (and how settled on it)
Storytelling across technical and executive audiences
Lean team compositions (4-person FP&A, 5-person BI)
Power of the problem solving skillset in our hiring 

Building a high functioning partnership between BI & FP&A

Wasabi Technologies (a Boston-based cloud storage company with over $530M in funding, a decade of hypergrowth, 450+ team members, and multiple exabytes of storage deployed) sets high standards for its finance and analytics teams.  Both teams are under pressure to deliver fast, accurate, and actionable insights. Marcos Bento, Director Business Intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and David Suter, Director, Financial Planning And Analysis at Wasabi Technologies join us for a special two-parter. They delve deep into how their teams work together, across functions to turn raw data into real-time financial intelligence.
In this episode: 
Building and gaining trust between BI and FP&A 
Getting from “10% out” to within a couple percentage points for forecasting 
KPIs such as dollars per terabyte 
BI and FP&A as investigative reporters 
Predictive analytics: forecast in the 6 or 12 months working with sales 
The manifesto for AI at Wasabi 

A "Systems Thinking" Mindset for FP&A Success - Daniel Gardner

Daniel Gardner is operational finance business partner at FirstGroup Plc, a leading UK-based provider of public transport. Daniel brings a unique perspective shaped by a diverse finance career across iconic consumer brands like L’Oreal, the Body Shop and Hunter Boots, where he led major forecasting overhauls and drove commercial transformation. Now at First Group, he is leading the development of a cloud-based forecasting system for a billion pound division, working with more than 50 stakeholders to deliver scalable real-time insights. 
In this episode he talks about the power of “systems thinking” in the CFO’s Office as a way of understanding how different parts of an organization (or any complex system) interconnect and influence each other.”If there’s an area, I’d say that FP&A could do with its systems thinking. Structure makes behavior and behavior makes structure. So it travels in a loop, which means that to make changes in an organization, you either have to hire people who do not exhibit the behaviors naturally or you’ve got to change the structure and alter the incentives that are producing the problems.”
In this episode:
Bringing my philosophy-training to finance 
Six week finance transformation at Hunter Boots 
Getting from lagging to leading indicators 
99% of People Problems Are Really System Problems
Python+ Excel (practical examples) 

“I am done pretending" - my honest take on finance and FP&A” – Sarah Schlott

Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment,  joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.
In this episode:
The power of aggressive curiosity in finance 
My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed 
My views on variance analysis 
Running a $100M forecast in Excel 
Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month 
From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader
Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/

From Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to Energy Transformation: Connagh Hopkins

Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. Connagh shares her fascinating and unconventional journey from working on the global licensing for  “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to navigating Australia’s energy transformation.
In this episode: 
Who Wants To be a Millionaire success (powered by Lotus123)
The Consolidated 10 year plan at Western Power 
Scenario planning and Inflation challenges in utilities 
How we are stacked: 65 person finance team at Western Power
The power and challenge of AI in finance
Connect with Connagh Hopkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connagh-hopkins-a9b3871/
Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, where she oversees the FP&A function for one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. With more than two decades of experience across utilities, property development, not-for-profit, retail, fuel, and media sectors in both the UK and Australia, she’s known for her focus on commercial strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and building high-performance finance teams.

CFO Grammarly – behind their $1 billion in non-dilutive financing and how we do FP&A

Matt Hudson became CFO of Grammarly – the popular writing assistant tool –  after the company acquired Coda (a productivity tool)- of which he was a founding member.  Now as CFO at Grammarly he is overseeing rapid change at the company which has over 40 million daily active users and $700m in revenue (and a 50 person finance team). Finance is helping pioneer a company vision of  AI redefining every business application and workflow, “reinventing productivity”. To this end, in May 2025, Grammarly raised $1 billion in non-dilutive financing from General Catalyst to fund sales and marketing costs and strategic acquisitions. Since then, Grammarly acquired email startup Superhuman (July 2025). You sense more is coming.
 In this episode
Grammarly $1billion non-diluted growth investment explained 
Being a founding member of Coda (acquired by Grammarly) 
How my product expertise plugs into finance 
Joining YouTube when it was around $140million in revenue to $3billion by the time I left ( $36 billion today)
Will CFOs see an explosion of costs because of AI 
FP&A set up at Grammarly and biggest KPIs
Bonding over a love of Chili’s

Why Financial models are essential even at early stages of a company – Lauren Pearl

Lauren Pearl is a Business Strategist and CFO Advisor who helps startup teams build data-driven businesses. The 3x founder with over 13 years of startup leadership experience now serves as CFO, advisor, and instructor for over 300 growing companies. She also runs the podcast “Growth Minded CFO” and offers a free course on financial modeling.
In this episode:
Financial models at startups
Sniffing out BS at startups
Storytelling as a pitchdeck 
Getting startups to engage with finance 
Free financial modeling course 
Being a punk band roadie 
Functionality of Excel 
Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenepearl/
Daily CFO newsletter: https://www.laurenpearlconsulting.com/newsletter

What Keeps Excel as the heart of business: Chandoo

Today’s guest barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government. 
The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to “make you awesome in Excel and Power BI” getting 250,000  visitors per month from all over the world and his YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers. His stated goal is “to make you awesome at Excel and Power BI”, and produces the go-to Excel resources  from blog posts and videos to full online courses.
My Excel Journey and Community building 
Skill gaps in FP&A Teams
Power BI vs Excel vs Python
Copilot – advantages and limits
My favorite Excel function
Check out https://chandoo.org
Chandoo’s Free Data analyst course: https://chandoo.org/wp/free-data-analyst-course/
Connect with Chandoo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purnaduggirala/

Top 10 Burning Questions in FP&A

In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership. 
The questions:
Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A?
Q2: What do you think of FP&A solutions?
Q3: How can you get to driver based decision making 
Q4: Fastest levers FP&A teams can pull with margin pressures rising?
Q5: How can an FP&A function trust the financial data it’s using when it doesn’t control the data?
Q6: Should the CTO or CFO own the data?
Q7. Skills to get from M&A Financial due diligence to FP&A?
Q8. FP&A Internship, what advice? 
Q9. Things I wish I had known earlier in FP&A?
Q10. What’s the future of Excel in FP&A?