Achieving positive free cash flow—where cash flow outpaces day-to-day expenses and capital expenditures—puts CFOs in a better position to execute on financial goals. But for a young organization in a burgeoning industry, it’s easier said than done.

Marc Suidan, CFO of Backblaze, said a change in how the neocloud provider measured operating margins and a switch to a budgeting process that justifies all spending from scratch each year were key to helping the business achieve positive free cash flow status within two years of his joining.

“EBITDA is not a good metric for a company like ours, because we’ve been reporting lots of healthy EBITDA, [but] we’re still burning cash,” Suidan told CFO Brew. “Unless you’re Anthropic and you’re growing 10x every year, nobody wants to see that burning cash.”

Backblaze added adjusted free cash flow, and adjusted free cash flow margin, to its non-GAAP financial measures soon after Suidan became CFO, he said, to reassure investors who were turned off by the cash burning.

Suidan also implemented zero-based budgeting when he arrived in August 2024, rethinking the entire budget with a focus on efficiency and redeploying capital or “driv[ing] it down to the bottom line.”

Keep reading.—DL

Share buybacks have a definite place in the public company CFO’s arsenal for deploying capital. Returning excess cash to equity holders (the owners) of the business is one of the moves that make the most sense when higher return investments aren’t available and earnings per share could use a boost.

Less discussed is how to do it most effectively—that is, create maximum value for management and shareholders by timing the execution better.

Share buybacks achieve many aims—giving a lift to earnings per share, signaling confidence in the company’s financial health, offsetting dilution from employee stock compensation programs. Some companies also state that they’re buying back stock because their shares are undervalued.

However, many also repurchase shares at unfavorable times—in other words, when their share price is relatively high rather than low. That’s according to Fortuna Advisors, a value creation consultancy that in late April released its 2026 Buyback ROI Report.

It’s in the timing. Fortuna has two proprietary measures for buybacks. Buyback ROI is one. The other, easier to comprehend and easier for a company to improve on, is buyback effectiveness, which “measures the value attributable to optimizing the timing of repurchases.”

Keep reading.—VR

For many companies, AI is more essential every day—but integrating the technology into an organization’s stack requires a level of budgetary ninjitsu that’s not always straightforward for IT teams.

Demands on AI can come from anywhere: leadership, staff, users, and company boards. What they all have in common is a desire to see more of the technology within the organization’s day-to-day, integrated as smoothly as possible.

IT teams and IT leaders tasked with this integration are in a sticky spot. On the one hand, they’re facing reasonable demands to deploy the technology; on the other, spend is constrained, and teams are asked to do more with less.

Determining factors. Basel Kayyali, who co-leads McKinsey’s technology practice, told IT Brew at this year’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Boston that it’s critical for IT teams to define what they want out of AI transformation.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—EH