On evaluating job opportunities and interviewing...

It is possible that we find an opportunity appealing - it is a great fit from the outside, we like the people, and we feel we can add tremendous value quickly.  However, it is important to listen to the interviewers as they outline their expectations of the person once they get the role.  While some stretch is reasonable (and somewhat good to have), if an area unknown to us is meant to be the focus of the candidate, then the role may not be right for us.  This emphasis can be understood while speaking with the interviewers about their expectations, and getting a 360 view of the role.  

The other thing to consider is the alignment between management and board/investors.  For a CFO, while it is great to hear diverse perspectives of diverse investors, broadly the expectations of the management and CEO should be aligned.  If the CEO and investors have differing expectations from the CFO, that is a red flag to be evaluated with caution.

Interviewing is another skill/art to sharpen.  It is hard for any one leader to have deep understanding and experience in all areas of finance.  Butofcourse, familiarity with all of them is required.  After that, the CFO should hire people who are experts.  During interviews, it becomes important to land this point.  It is **important to understand what the company is looking for, and then connect those requirements to your experience**.  For eg. you haven't been a public company CFO.  But taking the company public doesn't bother me as much as getting a company ready for public listing.  There is a lot of help available in the market today to take a company public - bankers, consultants, talent.  The difficulty is navigating the internal environment to get ready.  Besides, making a pitch and delivering it something I have done during my fundraising.  And taking a company public is, in a way, raising capital from the public.  

Sidebar:  you might not be great at selling yourself.  That's ok.  Eventually you also have to be yourself.

On age to become CFO, importance of luck, and progression in a career...

During a conversation with Jim, I was complaining that I have time till 45-46 to become CFO.  After which, my window of opportunity will close.  He smiled and said, "you sound like Chris Andersen.  His magical number was 50".  Then he commented - there is no real number to become CFO.  People can become CFOs at 50 or 52.  What's important is that there is natural progression in everything that a person does over his/her career.  If there is a sense of plateauing - the person does similar things across multiple roles - then it indicates limited upside.

Sure, you would find several folks who are CFOs at an earlier age.  This isn't surprising, even if it is somewhat disappointing.  Careers are a combination of experiences, decisions and luck.  Ofcourse, you have to be good at what you do, but luck is important.  While assessing our failures and others succcesses, we often attribute more weight to skills/abilities and less weight to luck.  Folks attaining higher levels at earlier stages of their career could've joined a company at an early stage (and grown with the company), they could've known someone there, they could've networked their way in - there can be a multitude of reasons.

On leadership (CFO) recruiting...

Once Jim and I were speaking about my interviews, and how I had recently received a rejection from Amagi - a company I really wanted to work with, and could make a difference in.  After hearing me out, Jim commented that usually a company, when it starts looking for leaders, has a laundry list of criteria.  It is worse than typical recruiting - because they know leadership hiring is critical.  This laundry list of criteria, when looked together, seems to indicate that they are looking for a unicorn.  As the company goes through candidates, it realizes that this unicorn doesn't exist.  That's when they are forced to make choices on which criteria are most important to them.  This process of searching for a unicorn, interviewing, realization that unicorns don't exist, prioritizing/making tradeoffs of requirements, and then re-interviewing - takes time.  One would expect leadership recruiting firms such as Spencer Stuart or Korn Ferry to help shape such requirements.  But often it doesn't happen.

This makes it important to have the right timing of entering the process.  Enter too early, and you are likely to get rejected because you aren't the unicorn everyone wants - management team, board, investors, team members, etc.  Enter too late, and you are one of the many they have already seen.  

Unfortunately, one cannot time the entry into a process, but that's where networking and referral can help. As the company goes through it's interviewing motions, staying in touch with the founders/CEO, can some time result in the company coming back and reconsidering you.