How Brendan White is Redefining the Role of Finance in Tech

00:00 Brendan: This is actually the most important thing — the thing that’s becoming more valuable in organizations, especially in startups, is not what you know, it’s how you execute.

00:20 Joe: Hello everyone. This is the Next Moves and it’s a series of interviews done with people who have built incredible companies and awesome careers. I’m doing it for the simple reason that there are so many moments where I’m sitting in meetings in my job as a recruiter talking with a CEO or a founder or a member of their team, and they’re talking about the choices that they’ve had in front of them and how they considered them, and then as they made them — the impact and what happened. And I’m just thinking to myself, this is so valuable for people because we all get stuck. And hearing how people plan their next move and the move after that, it can help us make better decisions. I’m going to be honest — sometimes it feels like people make very logical, calculated decisions. And all the other times it feels like they flip a coin. And I think we can learn from both those scenarios and the outcomes they got. So without any further delay, let’s talk to my next guest.

01:15 Joe: My guest today is Brendan White. You’re going to hear how a kid from a military family who moved around made some considered choices early in his life on where to go and what to do, and learned how to self-mentor by watching other people — which I think is an incredible skill — before picking some of the best known tech companies in Canada to be a part of, including one of them where he had to take a step back. We’re looking at companies like Ada, ecobee, and right now Float, which is one of Canada’s fastest growing tech companies. This is an individual who’s gone beyond finance and has had to manage other functions and has had to learn how to do that. And most importantly, this session is about someone who has seen a messy situation and had to think about — can I actually fix this, and do I want to? He ended up doing it more than once. Welcome Brendan.

02:10 Brendan: Thanks for having me Joe.

02:12 Joe: I tend to start with the intro to your early life and mapping it to where we are. Let’s just get an overview of where you’re from and how that early life formed you.

02:25 Brendan: Yeah, for sure. So I’m originally from the east coast of Canada — it’s where I consider home. My father was in the military and so that meant we moved around a lot as a kid. I spent some time in Nova Scotia and Ontario. As a result of that, I didn’t have a place of stability for super long periods of time. That created a culture of independence. It meant that I constantly had to be able to integrate into new communities and new environments and just figure out what to do and how to thrive in those places. Wasn’t easy, but the more times you do it, the easier it gets.

03:06 Brendan: I ended up finishing high school in PEI and made the decision to go to Dalhousie University. I was always interested in business growing up. I liked numbers, I’ve always felt comfortable with numbers, but more than that I liked solving problems. I wanted to be in an environment where I could solve problems and answers were knowable — and that meant measurement and data, but more importantly applied acumen and accountability. Those are things that have seen me grow into roles where I was able to embrace those concepts. From there it felt like a natural fit to go into the accounting route. I really liked the nature of the problems that were being solved. I really liked helping businesses grow and seeing what that could do for them. From there I joined a public accounting firm called Collins Barrow, which I think since has become Baker Tilly. They were focused on small and medium enterprise businesses in Canada.

04:06 Brendan: What I really enjoyed about this was seeing real businesses and seeing the whole business. I learned to love entrepreneurship. I’ve always had this dream. I think accountants can often struggle with the risk-reward and so they go into a more conservative path — but I always loved it. I loved seeing people take big bets, big risks, and ultimately being able to financially measure what happened. Ultimately, the thing I didn’t love about public accounting was the lack of ability to sustain impact on an organization. You saw them for periods of time and were able to help them get through specific reporting engagements, but you never really got to feel that you were helping them drive growth. So I made the decision pretty early on — and the CA program, by the way, is incredible at helping people understand how to solve ambiguous situations and apply frameworks against that to come to great solutions. But I figured I was going to do better in a one-on-one situation with an organization. So I followed my manager at that point, who had left about a year before me, into an organization called Emera Energy. Emera was this massive public energy company. I didn’t know anything about energy. It was huge — about 20 billion dollars in assets, spanning North America. But I had a unique opportunity to follow a manager and learn both how to run public company SOX-compliant month-end processes, and this is — you mentioned this early on — but this was my first opportunity to see how other people actually run businesses. I learned a lot from Emera. It was a company that had leadership development, incredibly strong business acumen at all levels of the organization, and more importantly it had a culture of winning.

06:08 Brendan: Life struck and at the time my wife was actually up in Toronto doing her CPA. So I had this unique opportunity with Emera but ultimately realized I was probably going to end up in Toronto. From there I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do next. Stumbled upon an opportunity with ecobee — and ecobee was just coming into their fight with Google at the time. Nest and the Internet of Things trend was the trend at that point — putting internet into everything, washers, dryers, obviously thermostats is a great use case. I loved it. I immediately fell in love with it. But there’s what hypergrowth environments look like and then there’s what they are on the inside. This is where I realized my ability to contribute value in a place of chaos — and growth breeds chaos, it just happens. So I learned how to take something that is messy and complicated and not working, turn it into something that is clean, efficient, and productive. That’s been probably the hallmark of my career. I consider myself a fixer. I can go into environments that are ambiguous, that don’t have clear paths forward, and help forge that. A lot of that comes down to first principles thinking. It comes down to expectations and relationships management. It comes down to the ability to prioritize organizational objectives and goals, and just understanding how you contribute impact at the end of the day. And most importantly — and where I think my upbringing has served me — it requires you to be independent. There’s no handholding in those environments. There’s nobody that’s coming to save the day. You have to be self-sufficient. You have to be resourceful. That includes understanding what tools do you need, how do you get scale in those types of environments, and how do you create clarity? If you’ve got a team that you’re working with, how do you help them be successful — including clarifying with them what the objectives are and how you get from here to there, and what needs to happen next and in what order. You start typically with learning — you have to just come into an environment and learn every single thing you can about it, but not dwell on what’s happened. Then it’s about rapid triage — how you go from here to there. So my time at ecobee was about how do we take an environment of accounting, financial reporting, financial operations that just happened — there didn’t seem to be any structure or rigor around it — and actually turn it into something that could support an organization that was growing as fast as it was at the time. You add in the complexity of inventory management and how to support an e-commerce brand and it was fun. It was hard. It was fun. The great thing was seeing progress. I was there for about two and a half years. Got to see them through a Series B. Got to see them through a really competitive fight where billions were being poured into Amazon Alexa and Nest was being spun up into Google Home, and we’re just this company in Canada trying to deliver incredible value to customers and shareholders. You really feel like you’re part of it. You see the company scale from maybe 150 people when I joined up to 300-400 people and all of a sudden you’re the veteran somehow and you’ve only been there a year and a half — that’s how fast things change.

10:07 Brendan: I enjoyed my time at ecobee, it was hard, I learned a lot. But ultimately I realized my passions actually lied in software. I spent a lot of time looking at tools and software and realized this is where all of the improvements are actually going to happen — the applied workflow management, the emergence of SaaS. I was fortunate from a timing perspective to be coming out of ecobee at a time where zero interest rates were taking hold and SaaS was exploding. So I realized I’d done what I needed to do at ecobee and started looking around. At the time there was an emergence of some really strong SaaS organizations in Canada. I also started to take a look at AI — this was before ChatGPT, before the emergence of generative AI, but it was clear AI was going to do something and it was going to be incredibly impactful. I don’t think anybody at the time realized how fast that was going to happen. I made a decision I was going to leave. The question next was where was I going to go? And this was sort of my first big career decision that was a bet. I’ve made a few of these along the way, but this is probably the biggest bet I made. The underlying fundamental criteria for me in making the decision was: am I going to get the opportunity to learn something I’ve never had the opportunity to do before? Am I going to get the opportunity to do something I’ve never had the opportunity to do before? Coming into the decision about where I went next, I knew that I had excellent financial accounting controllership capabilities. What I was missing was I hadn’t had the opportunity to build or scale an FP&A or strategic finance function. And it was very clear to me that is where value is provided from a financial perspective at the organizational and shareholder level. Strategic finance is where you need to be very fluent and very capable. The second was that I hadn’t had the opportunity to participate in more robust CFO activities — fundraising, more complicated debt raises. The things that when people go to CFOs, they’re actually looking for: I need you to manage our capital structures, I need you to enable me to bring in new capital, acquisitions of other organizations. These are skills you can’t really fumble your way through. You have to have some expertise in these areas and you have to be able to learn from other people. What I saw at Ada was that opportunity.

12:45 Joe: I’m going to pause you for a second because you said something earlier that I think matters — your time at Emera was special and one of the reasons was because it was an organization that knew how to win. I assume that within a winning environment you’re learning so much because new opportunities arise as you tackle and complete the old ones. I’m curious — what about the organization allowed it to win?

13:14 Brendan: It’s not special, which is the interesting thing, and this is one of the things I’ve taken away from my time at Emera and applied to every other organization. It just comes down to extreme competence across your domains of expertise, obsession with the customer, and drive. Emera had those. They knew what to do. They had very clear articulation of their objectives. It was the first time I had ever seen somebody run — I mean this was my first real corporate job — and they were running super robust planning cycles that were seeing them look long-term. This is a capital organization with a lot of capital and investment, and they had to think long term when making strategic decisions. But they were also fast. The emergence of Emera, if I recall correctly, was that Nova Scotia Power became a no longer Crown Corp. And so this organization emerged, but operating organizations in those environments requires strategic and long-term thinking to actually do it. I saw them bring on truly talented individuals from other areas of the world and then they didn’t just throw them into the organization — they actually moved them around the businesses so they could deeply understand it. To me it came down to one thing which was a sharpness of their drive. I still think back fondly to that time and compare myself and my own performance against what I was experiencing when I was there, and that’s my bar in some cases for how to run an organization extremely effectively. They’ve succeeded. The other piece of it was that they were hungry, they were driven, they took care of their people.

15:15 Joe: I want to hit you with a very simple question now about where you are, because you’ve moved into a role that has quite a bit of breadth to it. But you walked into Float. What was the problem to be solved? Box it into three sentences — here was the problem to be solved at Float and here’s why the role needed to be built.

15:31 Brendan: A couple of things. One — operational excellence. So bringing in strong foundational excellence in financial reporting, operations, controllership, FP&A, financial planning, and strategic finance was definitely needed. It was the right time — everybody comes to this journey on their own and that’s sort of most finance professionals that work in startups. That was the first thing. The second thing was clarity. This was my first time in a payments business — a different business model — and not one that was extremely well understood. Financial technology in Canada is certainly taking off but there hasn’t been a wealth of organizations that have spun out all of these really incredible people. In a lot of cases we’re building that from the ground up. The emergence of Ramp and Brex in the US — these are companies that are five, six years old, so there hasn’t been this massive pool of experience. All of those companies are learning.

16:27 Joe: What’s number three though? You gave me two.

16:31 Brendan: Accountability.

16:37 Joe: Are you saying these things were partially built or lacking? The accountability component — accountable to what, to who, for what? Is it across the organization?

16:49 Brendan: Yes. Across everywhere, across all parts of the organization. It’s not something that finance exclusively owns, but finance often does play a key part in that accountability. What this meant was holding ourselves accountable to the expectations and company priorities — specifically with relationship to the financial plan. Now in a financial business like Float, it’s very often hard to differentiate between operations and finance — they’re one and the same often. What it meant was all three of these things together mattered. But the outcome was that we had an operationally excellent finance team capable of both running and reporting on the organization and planning for the future. It meant having clarity and depth of understanding into our business and the key growth drivers and how things actually materialize. And the third is that we have accountability around our targets and goals and our financial plan and the ability to achieve them.

17:49 Joe: So then let me ask another simple question. You end up in a place where you effectively helped double go-to-market output and cut your customer acquisition cost payback by 75%. That is outside the domain of traditional finance and accounting — that’s CFO-COO, that’s RevOps. How do you end up in this position with Float and why were you asked to do it?

18:19 Brendan: It’s the three things I mentioned. It’s actually nothing outside of that — which was operational excellence, which is reporting straight up. What is considered acquisition cost and how do you define that? What do you actually contribute here? I took the role at Float because I wanted to be the guy. I wanted to be the person leading finance. And there’s often — in those roles when you step up into that role — you actually realize when you get there that nobody’s telling you what to do. You have rough goals that are aligned with the organization but your job is to manage the finances of the organization as a strong steward and ensure that your investments pay off.

19:06 Joe: And so you’ve had a chance now — you’re in your third Canadian tech play. Are you in love with the industry?

19:13 Brendan: I think that anything worth doing is likely going to be hard and I think I’ve embraced that and come to actually love it.

19:25 Joe: What about the fact the fundamentals have changed for so many tech companies now?

19:30 Brendan: It’s even harder than it’s been before. And I think in Canada it’s unique. We have a lack of government support, a lack of open banking, and in some cases one of the strongest challenges we have to overcome is our best and brightest leaving Canada and going to work for organizations in the States. Part of that I think comes down to just a lack of ambition. And we’ve seen this in a lot of places now — you look at organizations like Shopify who have exemplified what it means to be ambitious, to have a global vision, and we need more of those. I think we’re starting to get to a place where we’re seeing people in Canada become successful through the difficulty, and that is making truly resilient and truly strong environments for the cultivation of truly exceptional startup talent. Canada is unique and that’s again one of the reasons why I love Float. We actually serve Canadians and that’s really important to me because I am a Canadian finance person who’s sort of been not served well for a long time. I’ve had to try to do a lot of this stuff with my hand behind my back, and Float is helping solve that problem, which is personally important to me.

20:51 Joe: The product really appeals to you — I can tell when you talk about it. It’s targeted in the right segment, which is Canada. It’s serving a need that you have as a finance person. Do you think there’s a future role for you that’s different than what you’re doing now inside of Float? Do you see taking on different opportunities as a possibility?

21:09 Brendan: Yeah, 100%. What I believe we’re seeing now in the industry is a reduction in reliance on extreme domain and technical expertise across pretty much all functions. Some organizations feel this more acutely than others. But what I mean by this is in the past, finance people were extremely valued for our expertise in finance and our approach to financial strategy. With the introduction of tools like AI, it’s becoming increasingly accessible that other people can be as intelligent as somebody with years and years of experience. They may not have the technical expertise to execute, but they understand what to do. This is actually the most important thing — the thing that’s becoming more valuable in organizations, especially in startups, is not what you know, it’s how you execute. And this has created the emergence of an operator — somebody who’s multidisciplinary, that can execute cross-functionally across a lot of different domains. You don’t know everything, but you know enough to be dangerous across a couple of different disciplines.

22:29 Joe: Hold on though — do you think it just allows us to ask more intelligent questions in different domains, or do you think it allows us to leverage our other skills related to execution in a new domain?

22:46 Brendan: It’s a good question. I think what it allows us to do is actually answer questions that we have. A lot of people that are successful in operator capacities are just naturally curious — they want to know more. But in the past, you couldn’t. The thing that ChatGPT and the emergence of AI has done is actually say: if I want to know something about HR, if I want to know something about talent, if I want to know something about RevOps, I actually have access to some of the smartest people and the best information in the world to answer these questions. I didn’t have that before. So I can know what the answer is now. It doesn’t mean you know what to do with that answer, but it means you no longer have to rely on an individual to have that knowledge.

23:30 Joe: I got to be honest — what I’m finding is it does allow me to answer questions in areas where I don’t have domain expertise. So it answers the questions which, if I’m doing my job effectively, allows me to then ask the next right question — not necessarily of the model, but of my team. We’re using it like crazy. I don’t know if you’re finding the same thing, which is yes, it gives you answers, but then for us to bring everyone together and solve a problem, we actually have to have a new set of questions that can be informed by this because there’s new material to be gathered, new information to consolidate.

24:04 Brendan: What we’re seeing now, certainly in most organizations — and this is changing rapidly, we’re seeing this evolve in real time — is a couple things. One is the solution to most problems in an organization is not a single function. It’s a multi-function solution. So I want to go acquire more customers — well I need access to product, marketing, sales, and I need them all to be on the same page. The old version is you’d have to coordinate through five different people. What we’ve seen is the emergence of somebody — and most importantly, data. Somebody who’s fluent in data to understand what’s happening. So we’ve seen the emergence of this really strong generalist who has a clear ability to identify and synthesize data trends through the use of SQL and other data handling technologies, a deeper understanding across at least the common solutions to solving problems that are multivariant in nature — how to launch a product, product marketing, marketing, sales, all of these things. It’s understanding how to do those things or having access to information that will tell you what to do — aka ChatGPT. And then execution. Those are the three things. Data synthesis capabilities, resourcefulness and curiosity, and then straight-up drive and execution. We’re starting to see this and the archetype might be people that come from investment banking or management consulting backgrounds because this is typically how you do this. I think accountants are actually uniquely suited to this as well, but they have to evolve out of functional foundation thinking. The way I describe it is for the vast majority of people in an organization, it feels like you’re climbing up a tree — all you’re doing is looking up the tree. You might be able to see trees around you, but there are a lot of branches, a lot of coverage. When you actually get to the top of the tree, you have this massive canopy, you can see for miles around. You’re not looking down, you’re actually looking up and around. We’ve got to lower the height of the trees. We’ve got to get people to the top as fast as possible. Another example is competitive analysis — if somebody’s done something really well, why are you trying to create something from scratch? Use your brain power where it’s needed. Figure out the part you could tweak or use for your own identity, but just don’t create things from scratch if you don’t need to. The most successful people tend to be these cross-functional operators — they’re dangerous with data, they can do a lot of different things, and you can plug them into a bunch of different situations and have them be successful.

27:20 Joe: What you’re talking about there is the replacement of — I have a friend who’s from strategy, big strategy, and he’s like “look, this replaces the analyst, the associate in some domains” — because it’s the individual who brings the info together and synthesizes it. What I want to say though that’s missing in this analysis is the marshalling of the organization against the challenge — which is culture. And I’m not talking about soft culture. Understanding what does the organization believe in, what are the behaviors that arise, how do we then get ourselves organized and moving, and see if people believe in this and manage all of ourselves to this outcome with — like you said — accountability. There’s this other part that is getting left behind. I’m not saying you left it behind — I’m saying you’re taking it for granted because you do it. As opposed to seeing this leg here — how do we get ourselves really moving against these goals as a team. Unless you disagree that it’s not relevant.

28:20 Brendan: I 100% agree with you — that was more at the level of execution, front-lines execution. What I’ve seen from a leadership perspective, and something that I’ve accepted as a trend and why I’ve taken on some of the opportunities I’ve taken on, is I think what we’re going to see is a reduction in purely functional leaders. By that I mean people that have a single spike, because it’s very difficult to be a business leader. I create a strong difference between a business leader and a functional leader. If you only do one thing and can only manage one thing — the difference is that when you start to get more things, you start to realize they come together like gears turning each other. They’re completely intermingled. What I discovered about Float when I was here at the beginning was yes, there was a lot of functional work for me to do, but I was actually limited in my application. I didn’t control or have access or authority over running other parts of the business. I could support them, I could coach, I could lead cross-functionally, but I couldn’t set roadmaps. I couldn’t execute on initiatives that I wanted to drive. Earlier this year I found myself with a broader mandate — across more of the support functions, so RevOps, people and talent. Immediately the thing I felt happen was my ability to be much more effective, because solutions that required addressing two challenges the organizations were facing — or initiatives that would help us achieve our goals that required more than one thing — I now had access to and I could prioritize what the organization was working on. Rather than having somebody advance single functional initiatives, I could also enable those groups to work together, which reduces all of the silos that exist. Immediately that level of business context for people in an organization helps them see at the top of the tree what’s going on, how do I actually contribute here, what’s the priority, and self-align — rather than having somebody else who’s at their own top of the tree shout it down: “Hey, we’re going this way.”

30:49 Joe: The reason why I love this, Brendan, is because I’m looking across my own organization and looking at some people that are really having dramatic impact. The line “are you multi-threaded or single-threaded” — that’s another buzzword you hear from other leaders in tech. I’m seeing so much of my own organization become multi-threaded and it’s actually a goal that we have as one of our OKRs — the development of individuals across functions. Two things: efficiency and scalability, because you don’t always have demand in the same area. But the other thing is far more effective operating because you have the other lens of individuals on the other side. And it is really actually having an impact in our organization’s results. I think you’ve really nailed something here.

31:41 Brendan: The people that love this are people that have a growth mindset. It’s a natural evolution for the people that have been successful in organizations — they almost are never people that just did one thing. They were always people that were willing to go outside of their comfort zone, to take on something new that they didn’t know, willing to learn. The biggest difference in my opinion is just the access to information has never been stronger. You can go learn anything. You can get access to people or experiences that you can learn from, and that’s truly a powerful environment. But it does require you to seek them out and go after them.

32:24 Joe: The appetite for information and frameworks and tools allow you to better organize your thoughts. And we all know there are times when you’re looking at something and thinking “I should junk this, this has to get out of my brain because it’s not valuable.” But that’s part of any course correction as you’re analyzing the problem.

32:39 Joe: I’m curious about your view on selection of talent, because this drives me — I love this stuff. You’ve had to step into a role where you’ve really started to manage talent acquisition and HR functions. What was surprising to you? What did you learn that you didn’t know before?

33:01 Brendan: I’ve always appreciated how strategic and important both people ops and talent are as functions — deeply. I’ve always partnered with them. Finance people often partner with them and I’ve seen at organizations what happens when you don’t treat them like strategic components of the business. The thing I’ve loved about Float — and Float has been probably the most disciplined in this area — is around what it means for Float to have talent density, what it means for us to be a high performance culture. Very strong opinions here. What I brought to the table to enable the teams to be successful was just access to business context. I basically brought them to the top of the tree. “Here’s everything we’re working on. Here’s how you fit into this. Let’s go.” So valuable.

34:01 Brendan: Here’s the thing — I’m not an HR professional. I know enough about HR to help manage them, but I know enough about talent acquisition to help support them. They’re the experts. They are the ones that know what to do. But what I can help them do is contextualize our business problems and our priorities and prioritize how they will bring things to market. I can also help contextualize high-level strategic orientations — everything we just talked about are things that are important for Float. The access to talent that can be multidisciplinary, bringing in people into the organization that are data fluent, and more importantly more recently that have an attitude, an aptitude, and a desire to leverage AI to increase their own productivity.

34:42 Joe: Are you accurately — do you think you’re properly separating the signal from the noise when you’re looking for those signals? As you’re looking for the signs that people have these attributes, are you doing that in a methodical way that’s grounded in something real as opposed to heuristics or biases? How are you looking for the signal in the noise?

35:19 Brendan: Signal from the noise is hard. We’ve developed heuristics for it. Examples of things that we’ve evolved — companies that have gone through journeys and embody things that Float values. The people that we talk to that have worked at those organizations — it’s not necessarily about the fact that they worked at that organization, it’s during which time frame. Which period of intensity were you there? Were you there at Shopify in the early years when things were just getting going and you were building, and there was a lot of things going right and wrong and you were trying to figure out how to build something? Or were you there when they sort of made it — it’s still doing things now, it’s just a very different skill set.

36:05 Joe: There’s company context that you’re talking about based on the state of evolution in the organization. But the other part is — why would you be relevant for someone coming from Shopify? All these things that you have to map — what is it like to work at Shopify beyond the fact that it’s scaling? Is it a really great move to pull someone from there because the context fully matches your context, or has at least that nice Venn diagram overlap? These are all hard things. We struggle with them but we’re constantly pounding on our craft trying to get it right. Brendan, I want to say this has been awesome. I know that you’ve given us a ton of your time. What I want to ask you is to distill this stuff down for your prior self. If you look at Brendan when he was 20 and you want to distill what you’ve learned — this is the blinding insight I can give you as you plan your life, and that would mean also anyone else that’s at that stage. What would you say?

37:08 Brendan: Feedback I would have for myself back when I was 20 is — you’re not going to win alone. You’re going to win with people. Embrace that and learn to love it. And I have, but it wasn’t always the case. Individual impact versus team impact — important to embrace that. The concept of a team is maybe the thing I understood the least and now have come to truly embrace. Who is your team and what does it mean to be a part of a team? Second is embrace the opportunity — you can be learning what not to do, you can be learning what to do, but always be learning. Don’t get stuck in cycles of churn. You have to figure out the path forward. And sometimes that answer’s not easy. Sometimes it means you actually have to walk away. If you actually can’t be successful in your opinion, there’s no shame and nothing wrong with that. When you’re in that environment and you can’t fix it, you have to walk away. Or you’ll just continue to be in a bad environment and it’s no good for anyone. I look back at the moments of extreme intensity that I’ve been through — at the time it was hard and it’s still hard. It means late nights, hard moments. But those are also the moments I look back on most fondly. Like, wow, we did something that mattered.

38:36 Joe: I get it. If you’re unhappy, move. And if you can’t change things and it’s actually like that, get out. I also think that you don’t win alone — for me, that’s an amazing one. Because I think when you’re young, you actually think “I’m going to take charge of everything.” I just want to say, Brendan, thank you because this was an awesome, far broader discussion than I expected. I hope you enjoyed it.

39:03 Brendan: Awesome. Thank you so much, Joe. It was great to be on.