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Join Apurva Desai, CFO, CEO, and venture investor, as he shares how finance leaders can turn disruption into opportunity.
In this candid conversation with Apurva, he talks about how the CFO role is evolving — from managing uncertainty and navigating digital change to meeting growing stakeholder demands. He shares lessons from his own journey, practical ways to bring AI and automation into finance, and how to build a team that’s ready for what's next.
You’ll learn how to
- Align finance to market shifts: Spot emerging trends early and adjust forecasts. Redirect resources to high-value customer segments and new opportunities rather than clinging to outdated plans.
- Unite a global team: Establish shared finance values and processes while respecting local styles. Encourage cross-border role rotations so leaders experience different cultures and bring best practices home.
- Automate & innovate with AI: Identify high-impact AI use cases for finance, such as automating complex tasks (e.g. contract and revenue recognition reviews) and using predictive analytics to explain performance variances.
- Lead with human skills: Even as AI handles more data, CFOs must translate insights into action, communicate clearly, and rally teams around change.
Who should watch
CFOs, VPs of Finance, and finance transformation champions building agile, tech-forward finance teams.
Meet your speaker
Apurva Desai is a CFO, an entrepreneur, and a venture investor. After spending over 20 years working in Silicon Valley at Intel, Yahoo! and Vuclip, he’s now leading Sarvian, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in CFO, M&A, and financial advisory services.
Webinar summary
1. How do you approach financial planning during disruptive industry shifts?
At Yahoo Mail, Gmail's entry with unlimited storage forced us to rewrite our entire cost model overnight. We needed tens of millions in unplanned CapEx. I learned early to scenario-plan against unconstrained market assumptions—even if they feel far-fetched. Now, before I greenlight budgets, I pressure-test them: What if the market flips the script? I don’t wait for the business to justify constraints—I make finance a strategic thought partner early in product planning.
2. What’s your framework for saying no as a finance leader?
I don’t default to no. I use what I call the Yes Framework. At Vuclip, when a country team asked for a local studio budget, we didn’t shoot it down—we asked what metrics would justify it. We set a CAC payback threshold and content consumption KPIs. When they hit them, we greenlit spend. The idea: finance sets the path to yes with data-backed milestones—not just roadblocks.
3. How do you drive alignment across global finance teams?
I use dependency handshakes. For example, when SF product teams needed Indian R&D to deliver a feature, both sides had to sign off on mutually understood dependencies—engineering headcount, finalized specs, timelines. No planning docs were accepted until both parties agreed. It sounds bureaucratic, but it saved months of cross-functional friction. These weren’t just soft meetings—these were codified inputs to our FP&A process.
4. How do you implement a consistent company culture across geographies?
Culture can’t be copy-pasted. At Vuclip, we valued decisive action—but in places like Singapore, consensus was the default. We incentivized calculated urgency by spotlighting local leaders who acted fast and gave them regional exposure. Some spent quarters embedded in more decisive offices like Dubai to absorb the tempo. Finance can be the bridge between global values and local expression—if we measure and reward the right behaviors.
5. What’s the inflection point where finance teams need automation?
When investment prioritization becomes non-linear—sales vs. product vs. new markets—you can’t run on spreadsheets. You need a unified finance system. At Vuclip, once we had to evaluate 5+ competing initiatives across 6 regions, we moved to our billing & RevRec software + scenario modeling tools. We needed real-time views across currencies, markets, and cost centers. That’s when automation pays off—when decisions compound, and lag kills speed.
6. What are the first high-impact AI use cases in finance?
Two areas: revenue recognition and root cause analysis in FP&A. At Sarvian, I saw 50+ contracts being manually reviewed. With an LLM trained on our RevRec methods, we could triage them: categorizing them into 30 green (auto-approve), 10 red (escalate), and 10 grey (further review). The controller focused only on what mattered. Second—variance analysis. AI found that one region’s poor hiring was due to five rounds of interviews vs. three elsewhere—insight we’d have never uncovered manually.
7. What soft skills will remain irreplaceable in an AI-first world?
Storytelling, prioritization, and influence. AI might surface 20 insights, but it can’t tell which three will drive the business. At Vuclip, I’d sit with regional heads and walk them through not just the data, but the why it matters. The CFO of the future won’t just explain variance—they’ll mobilize action. Knowing which VP to influence first, and how to build a coalition around that insight—that’s not going away.
8. What’s your approach to pricing strategy in emerging markets?
In Vuclip, we learned quickly that price sensitivity wasn’t uniform. In India, $0.25/month was too high, but in Malaysia, we could push $1. So we built a zonal pricing engine tied to mobile data usage and content type. Our finance team worked hand-in-hand with ops to experiment, test elasticity, and drive ARPU. Pricing wasn’t static—it was a finance-owned growth lever.
9. How did your role as a CFO prepare you for VC and advisory work?
Being a CFO taught me to speak every department’s language—engineering, sales, legal. That’s invaluable when assessing startups. At IFV, I look for pattern recognition in founders: who knows how to manage burn, who’s coachable, who builds systems not just MVPs. My years of boardroom firefighting give me an unfair advantage when advising founders—I’ve already lived their worst-case scenarios.
10. What’s one failure that reshaped your approach to finance leadership?
At Glu, we under-invested in consumer insight tools and over-indexed on telco distribution. That blind spot cost us critical early traction in the App Store era. Since then, I’ve made it a rule: finance must fund market sensing infrastructure. Now, if a team can’t tell me how they’re tracking consumer behavior weekly, I won’t sign off the budget. Don’t just fund product—fund feedback loops.
11. What advice would you give to finance professionals eyeing a portfolio career?
Go deep before you go wide. I spent 20+ years in focused roles—only then did I diversify. The CFO seat is underrated prep for operating roles—it teaches you pattern recognition, accountability, and cross-functional fluency. Build that muscle. Later, you can apply it in startups, VC, or consulting. But don’t rush to portfolio until you’ve mastered operator.
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