How do you know when a company is ready to go public? And what do you do to prepare for this? Chirag Shah, CFO of Motive and former CFO of Kong and Cornerstone OnDemand, joins CJ to share insights from his experience of scaling businesses from $30 million to nearly $1 billion and tripling ARR. He talks about taking companies public and how he helped take one private again in a $5.2 billion deal. In this episode, he explains what signals indicate that a company is ready to accelerate its growth, the art and science of building sales capacity, and how to balance efficiency and growth in hypergrowth mode. He also covers how to achieve a great valuation without a strong performance, the biggest headache on the road to IPO, and whether you should IPO in the first place or remain private.
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SPONSORS:
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Chirag Shah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chirag-shah-787b1b20/
Motive: https://gomotive.com/
CJ on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/
Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com
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RELATED EPISODES:
From $30M to Almost $1B: A Guide to Hypergrowth, IPO Prep, and Navigating the Public Market
https://youtu.be/_pJfdN5p-ik
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Preview and Intro
00:02:57 Sponsors – Mercury | RightRev | Tipalti
00:06:49 Motiv CFO Intro & Company Background
00:07:01 Product Market Fit as a CFO
00:09:26 Lessons From Taking Companies Public
00:11:04 Preparing for Life as a Public Company
00:11:26 Moving From Finance Into a GM Role
00:12:50 Learning the Business Beyond Finance
00:14:23 Empathy for Sales & Carrying a Quota
00:15:51 Sponsors – Aleph | Fidelity Private Shares | Metronome
00:19:03 Asking Better Questions After Operating Experience
00:21:23 Knowing When to Accelerate Growth
00:23:16 High-ROI Capacity Signals
00:24:51 Scaling Requires Supporting Functions
00:26:19 The Art + Science of Adding Reps
00:27:53 Sales Team Buy-In Before Scaling
00:29:15 Reading Product-Market Fit Through Sales
00:30:08 Where Scaling Breaks First (Enablement)
00:31:36 Importance of SE / SC Ratios
00:33:13 Timing Supporting Hires
00:34:32 Maintaining Momentum While Scaling
00:36:33 Longest Pole in IPO Prep: Predictability
00:38:47 Building Confidence Through Consistency
00:40:45 Large Deals Swing Small Companies
00:42:41 Growth Still Drives Quarterly Volatility
00:44:43 Investor Education as a Core IPO Task
00:46:00 Harder to Make Big Changes Publicly
00:47:39 Managing Morale in Volatile Markets
00:48:33 Taking Cornerstone Private
00:52:32 Advice: Know Why You Want to Go Public
00:56:18 Efficiency Without Sacrificing Growth
01:00:58 Operating Roles Prepared Him for CFO
01:06:23 Finance Software Stack Overview
#RunTheNumbersPodcast #Hypergrowth #IPOreadiness #CFOInsights #MostlyClassics
