Praveer Melwani
Related people
Episodes
Notes
a16z · The New CFO: How AI Is Rewriting the Finance Function | Figma CFO…
-
Why Does Figma's CFO Still Use Excel?
Praveer Melwani says Excel is not under threat. It is his love language, the way he builds trust and understanding, and the models are not quite good enough to create a forecast or a model.
He grew up in Excel and still uses it to organize his thoughts and run an analysis because of the spatial organization. A lot of the output people are still creating is a model, and that model could be hosted somewhere else, but he wants a tool for refining his understanding and playing with the work by hand. He ties the habit to Figma. Prompting and natural language can take an initial stab at a first draft, and sometimes it is easier to riff and make changes directly. On a screen someone has designed,
-
How Do AI Agents Speed Up Finance Research?
Praveer Melwani says tools should hand over the first draft of what changed, the first set of expectations, and the first thread to pull. An accountant used to review GL accounts period over period. A tool can take that initial pass and leave a set of items to chase. His T&E review already worked that way. The team got threads to pull and enough gut feel to chase them. With the data in hand, there is time for the second-order questions behind the numbers. The faster first pass still sits next to the audit trail.
Seema Amble and Ivan Makarov are the a16z partners hosting the episode. On the CFO tools the firm has backed, the product is moving from tracking a workflow to returning a result, a
-
What Does Figma's CFO Pitch to New Recruits?
Praveer Melwani has started pitching access to technology when he recruits. People on his team told him they were having a ton of fun and wanted to stay, and he credits the policies and the freedom they were given to explore. The work is always going to be interesting, and it has gotten more fun because people can explore things more quickly.
He began raising it in recruiting conversations after he heard it from the team. The pitch is aimed especially at candidates who are not already in technology. They treat the chance to learn as a front entrance into an entirely new world. Other people may copy the approach, and for him it has been one of the really fun things to do.
He gravitates towa
-
Why Does Accounting Help Figma Data Scientists?
Praveer Melwani says a couple of the data scientists devoted to finance at Figma come from accounting backgrounds, and their grasp of the work is what enables them to be better builders.
They understand the work has to be really, really hard and always correct. They already know the nuances of checks and balances, what a refund is, and what an uncollectible is. The nomenclature is what lets them build well. Data science partners on the product team build as much product intuition as the product managers and engineers, if not more. They sit on the core team that can ideate and push change, and they do it by leveraging a different tool.
He could see the same background translate to a finance
-
Who Should Take a Finance AI Prototype Into Production?
Praveer Melwani wants finance specialists to invent the tools and leave production to a chief information officer group. Specialists know what good looks like, what they want, and the process they are trying to get right, so they are strong at the first prototypes. He does not want the same person checking every upstream dependency, hosting the tool so it still runs if they leave, or hunting for whether anyone else in the organization has the same need.
A world-class chief information officer organization takes the handoff. Kasper Sorensen joined yesterday from Coinbase as the new chief information officer. Interview conversations focused on centralized product manager type functions inside
-
How Does Figma Rehearse Investment Memos With AI?
Praveer Melwani says people with finance backgrounds created a unique personality for each leader and packaged each one as a set of skills. They run investment memos past those skills so the memo is stronger before the leadership team sits down together.
The writers work in a document-oriented culture and produce investment memos and merger-and-acquisition memos. Readers sit on the leadership team or lead product. Themes repeat, the questions repeat, and leaders share a way of looking at problems, which is why each leader got a personality. In the demo, the group goes back and forth on what each leader would say, matching the interaction of an investment committee. The writer then sees whic
-
Why Does Figma's CFO Check Data Every Day?
Praveer Melwani views data and having access to it as the key unlock for running his day, on a daily rhythm and sometimes more often than that.
Throughout his time at Figma, data was what he woke up to every day. In the first few days after he joined, about 30 people signed up for a paid plan, and he went through them line by line. He asked who they were, whether the addresses were personal or business, whether the team could reach out, and what he could learn to inform the organization product they eventually built. Early on, the line-by-line review was extremely important. Now he understands the repercussions of movement in any one direction. Catching a problem before it becomes a big dea