In the final episode of season two of the Recession-Proof podcast, Alex and Kimia discuss the most impactful insights from previous episodes with Sam Mallikarjunan of OneScreen.ai, Geoffrey Woo of Anti Fund Investment Fund, Dan Chen of Deltec, Anup Singh of Illumio, Keith Masuda of Modern Treasury, Liz Christo of Stage 2 Capital, Kelly Battles of DataStax, and Ken Suchoski of Autonomous Research.

Each of them share advice on how to overcome the challenges of the current state of the market, prioritize investments, and grow your business through the end of 2022 and the start of 2023.

Here are a few highlights, check out the full episode for the rest…

Why Sam Mallikarjunan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OneScreen.ai emphasizes the importance of connecting the finance and marketing functions

“I will say there is an adversarial relationship between finance and basically every other part of the company. But to treat the finance team and the finance leadership as if it's an adversarial relationship or to not actually proactively reach out to them, to me, that therefore has always been like, you're yelling at the person who's sitting in the top of the ship's sails being like, Hey, there's an iceberg up ahead, or, Hey, there's land over there that's just like filled with random gold. Why are we ignoring it? And we're not creating clear lines of communication in alignment with a partner whose objectives are fundamentally aligned with our own.”

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund explains why attention is more valuable than capital

“We all have 24 hours in a day times 8 billion people. That is the max limit of attention that exists in this world. You can print money, do weird financial engineering with money, but literally, the max attention cap of humanity is some 8 billion times 24 hours a day. Anything that can wield attention, I think, is going to be increasingly powerful over time.”

How Kelly Battles, a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, and Genesys thinks you can become a more well-rounded finance professional by…

“Get on a board if you can, even as a full-time executive, because it makes you a better executive. When you're a full-time exec, especially in an intense startup or private company scaling company, you can get tunnel vision. And I think having another company and seeing from a bird's eye view what they're going through gives you perspective, context, and learnings, and you start building your pattern recognition.”

Learn more about our season two guests:

• Sam Mallikarjunan on LinkedIn
• Geoffrey Woo on LinkedIn
• Dan Chen on LinkedIn
• Anup Singh on LinkedIn
• Keith Masuda on LinkedIn
• Liz Christo on LinkedIn
• Kelly Battles on LinkedIn
• Ken Suchoski on LinkedIn

Check out the full transcript here.

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player. Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Ken Suchoski joins Alex Song on Recession-Proof this week to discuss the impact of inflation, which types of businesses will thrive in this environment and what your management team should be doing now.

Ken is the Equity Research Analyst at Autonomous Research, where he collaborates with companies like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Global Payments, Bill.com, FleetCor, WEX, nCino, and Western Union. Before Autonomous Research, Ken served as a Research Analyst for First Eagle Investments and Janney Montgomery Scott.

Ken and Alex discuss:

• The role of an equity research analyst
• Short-term and long-term macro trends
• What makes an effective management team
• Which businesses are better positioned to survive and thrive in an inflationary environment

Key takeaways

• Regarding the macro environment, it's essential to separate what we're seeing in terms of current indicators versus what we might see in the future. In the near term, there are excess savings, wage growth remains robust, debt servicing for consumers remains in check, and credit volume growth continues to outpace debit volume growth. Overall, we are experiencing normalization of the shifts we saw during COVID-19. On the other hand, banks disagree over their economic outlooks, investors are concerned about the so-called “white-collar recession”, and that we may see a macro slow down over the long term.

  “In this time of uncertainty, businesses need to put more of their spending under scrutiny. If you're facing inflationary pressures and your costs are going up, you need to be able to manage that.”
  
  

• Overall, inflation is bad for every company in the long run. But in the near term, it might bring benefits and opportunities for specific industries and businesses. For example, if you're in the business of processing payments, inflation might help you because just the ticket sizes get larger. These companies usually generate revenue as a percentage of the transaction value. So as the average transaction size increases due to inflation, if you're charging two percent per transaction, your revenues will increase as that transaction size increases. As a rule, companies with greater pricing power are better positioned to survive and thrive in an inflationary environment.

  “Our view on inflation is that it's not good for any business. But payment companies are generally better positioned to face inflationary periods, at least when compared to companies that are outside of the financial services sector.”
  
  

• When looking at a business from the investor's perspective, you want a management team that will do the right thing in allocating the generated cash flow to high-return projects or maybe acquisitions if that makes sense. You also want a management team that you can trust and that foster an attractive culture. Regarding what a management team should be doing right now: cash preservation and expense management.

  “So you have a business that is producing cash flow. The management team is responsible for being stewards of allocating that cash flow and the earnings that the business generates.”
  
  

Learn more about Ken:

• Ken on LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• Ramp’s 2022 Q2 Benchmarks Spending Report
• The Outsiders by William Thorndike

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Kelly Battles joins Alex Song on Recession-Proof this week to discuss how exceptional finance leaders help their executive team make the best decisions to increase the likelihood of growth during a recession.

Kelly is currently a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, Genesys, Alpha Medical, Clari, and Plex. Kelly has a thirty-plus-year career in finance through various leadership roles at companies like Quora, Bracket Computing, Wikimedia Foundation, Host Analytics, IronPort Systems, and HP.

Kelly and Alex discuss:

• Quora's mission of sharing and growing the world's knowledge base
• What all economic downturns have in common
• Why all full time executives should seek board positions
• How great finance leaders help their executive teams make the best decision
• The role of a CFO in setting the right company culture during economic growth and downturn

Key takeaways

• When choosing a new company to join, Kelly focuses on culture, market opportunity, product-market fit, and her role in that company. Quora nailed all of these, so she decided to accept the role of a CFO. What sets Quora apart from social media apps is its noble mission to share and grow the world's knowledge base through quality content that aims to help people. Quora is also an example of what makes an online platform succeed through clear policies and processes that match its mission, a great product, community, and team.

  “I was watching what was happening in some social media companies and thinking there's so much power for good in these companies, and there are so many missteps. And I believe in a hundred years when people look back at the internet, they will see some bad actors. History is not gonna treat some of these companies well. And I think Quora and Wikipedia are two examples of where history will treat them very well as examples of the power of the internet for good.”
  
  

• Whether discussing the current recession, the great financial crisis of 2008, or the Dot-com bubble, Kelly recognizes a pattern that she calls the “overreaction to the fear-greed cycle”. Good time manifests the greed cycle, companies being encouraged to spend unreasonably because of growth, and in bad times, the fear cycle, where it's all about hyper-analysis of every spending decision. The best companies are disciplined during the greed cycles and then emerge with strength from the fear cycle.

  “Companies that have been raising so much money in the last couple of years because it was so plentiful and didn't spend it will be able to come out with strong balance sheets in an environment where it's gonna be easier to hire, cheaper to take share, and easier to buy assets than companies that didn't raise the money or raised it and spent it.”
  
  

• The best CFOs are true business partners to the executive team and bring a synthesized proliferation of data to help their business partners make better decisions. The finance function exists to help executives overcome obstacles and challenges during economic struggles. CFO’s must learn from these challenges, take those lessons, and apply them to the future. Finance also has a significant role in setting the right spending culture to ensure the company is disciplined during the good times and conservative during hard times.

  “As a CFO, joining the CEO in the future and understanding the past, understanding what you can learn from it, understanding current performance, what it means for the future, what you need to do differently in the future, or what you need to double down on or stop doing, to me, that is how you do this right.”
  
  

Learn more about Kelly:

• Kelly on LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• Quora
• Wikipedia
• Ramp

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.