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Join Apurva Desai, CFO, CEO, and venture investor, as he shares how today’s finance leaders can turn disruption into opportunity.
In this candid conversation with Apurva, he talks through 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 fast, flexible, and ready for what’s next.
You’ll learn
- 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 Redirect resources to high-value customer segments and new opportunities rather than clinging to outdated plans.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: Develop data literacy, storytelling and influence. 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 fina
nce transformation champions building agile, tech-forward finance teams.
Meet your speakers
Seasoned CFO & CEO at Sarvian
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
Q. You’ve navigated major industry changes in Silicon Valley and beyond. Which shifts have had the biggest impact on how you lead finance?
Apurva describes how disruptive shifts taught him to think unconstrained. For example, when Gmail launched with unlimited storage, Yahoo (with its 2MB limit) suddenly had to scramble for huge new infrastructure funding. That taught him to first imagine what customers truly want, then work backward on the costs and trade-offs. Similarly, the iPhone upended mobile gaming – his team had to shift from managing telco relationships to building consumer-focused games. These experiences reinforced a finance mindset of anticipating trends and adapting strategy aggressively, rather than clipping costs too early.
Q: How should finance teams align their planning and analysis with fast-changing markets?
He advises being proactive. Finance should constantly monitor which customer segments value the product most and why. If one segment can pay more or is growing faster, allocate more budget and forecast more revenue to it. This means challenging initial sales forecasts rather than blindly accepting them. For example, if data shows a new feature is loved by a certain customer group, you might shift spend to support that group’s growth. Always ask: what’s the ideal margin mix, and how do we reallocate resources to meet it? By doing this, finance teams help the business pivot before competitors do.
Q: Which financial metrics matter most during times of growth or disruption?
In consumer tech environments, Apurva emphasizes unit economics. He focuses on contribution margin and the ratio of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Keeping LTV/CAC healthy indicates growth is sustainable. For instance, if LTV far exceeds CAC (say 3:1 or 4:1), there’s room to invest more in acquisition. If it’s closer to parity, you might need to improve retention or reduce costs. He also tracks industry benchmarks – comparing where you fall in percentiles – so the finance team can set clear targets (e.g. reaching 75th percentile LTV/CAC before ramping up spend).
Q: Your teams have worked across the US, Asia, and Europe. How do you build one cohesive finance culture while honoring different working styles?
He starts with shared principles: every finance team worldwide should embody the company’s core values (like decisiveness or integrity). But he also recognizes cultural differences. For example, in some countries decision-making is consensus-driven rather than fast-paced. To bridge that, he incentivizes desired behaviors and creates cross-cultural exposure. One tactic was giving high-performing leaders from a consensus culture a short-term assignment in a more decisive environment, so they experience a different work style firsthand. Upon return, they bring new ideas and encourage their peers. In short, set common goals for how finance should operate globally, and actively reinforce them through training, rewards, and international collaboration.
Q: When dealing with finance teams spread across regions, how do you ensure everyone stays aligned in planning and budgeting?
The key is a clear, coordinated process. Start with a unified planning calendar, deliverables and targets that all regions agree on. Crucially, build a “handshake” step between teams: each group formally signs off on how its plan supports others. For example, if R&D in India is developing features for the US sales team, both sides need to agree on objectives and dependencies before finalizing their budgets. By explicitly acknowledging these interdependencies, every office knows exactly how its goals tie into the company-wide priorities. This makes the planning process transparent and ensures no one is working at cross-purposes.
Q: At what point should a finance team invest in automation or AI tools? Who should be involved in that decision?
He notes that automation becomes critical once complexity exceeds what spreadsheets can handle. Early on, a small startup might manage with basic tools. But as you add more products, regions or concurrent projects, choices multiply. For example, if you’re juggling multiple R&D initiatives or sales channels and need to evaluate trade-offs simultaneously, manual analysis won’t cut it. That’s when CFOs should consider tech solutions. He also emphasizes affordability: finance leaders must balance the budget for tools against the gains. Typically, once you face a volatile market (as during COVID) and need real-time scenario planning, automation pays for itself. The decision usually involves the CFO and finance leadership (and sometimes IT or the CEO), ensuring stakeholders agree on the need and ROI.
Q: What are the first high-impact AI use cases CFOs should explore?
Apurva highlights two areas. First, productivity: automate routine workflows to free up the team. For instance, train an AI/LLM on your revenue recognition policies. Then feed it your customer contracts – it can instantly flag which contracts clearly meet criteria, which clearly don’t, and which need review. This could shrink a process that took weeks (with lawyers and manual review) down to hours. Second, insights: use AI to answer the “why” behind the numbers. He gave an example where the North US sales region lagged budget. An AI analysis correlated recruiting data and revealed the North had five interview rounds per hire (vs. three elsewhere), causing candidate dropouts and slower hiring. That root cause insight (which a salesperson hadn’t reported) helped leadership fix their process. In short, CFOs should start with AI for faster close processes, contract reviews, and for anomaly-detection that connects disparate data to explain results.
Q: With all the hype about AI taking over accounting tasks, what human skills will CFOs still need?
He stresses that data literacy and soft skills are more important than ever. Finance leaders must know what metrics matter and how to interpret them, but also have the ability to storytell and influence. AI can churn out numbers and correlations, but humans decide which insights to act on. CFOs will be most valuable if they can prioritize the key findings (“what’s the biggest bang for the buck?”), craft a narrative around them, and persuade operational teams to change course. In practice, this means honing communication and business partnership skills: identify who needs to hear the data, how to present it clearly, and who can champion the idea across departments. In short, while AI handles analysis, CFOs will drive change by telling the story behind the data.
Q: You’ve now transitioned from a tech CFO career into investing and entrepreneurship. How did your finance background prepare you for that?
He explains that the CFO role is inherently broad. By partnering with every business unit (sales, marketing, engineering, etc.), CFOs gain a 360° view of the company. Along the way, they develop transferable skills: strategic risk-taking, cross-functional leadership, and storytelling. For example, finance leaders learn to prioritize under uncertainty (a form of risk management) and to “firefight” issues across teams. These capabilities gave him confidence to branch out. Essentially, being a CFO taught him how to see patterns in business and how to influence outcomes – skills that apply equally well to evaluating startups or running a company beyond pure finance.
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