As the pace of technological change accelerates and uncertainty permeates the business environment, today’s CFO needs to have a much broader, much more strategic, forward-looking skill set than their predecessors, one that goes far beyond traditional career and skills development pathways. So unless you want to be a CFO stuck in the stone ages of fax machines and manual journal entries, it’s time to skill up.

“The skills that you need as an accountant are very different than they used to be,” said Blake Oliver, host of the Cloud Accounting Podcast and founder and CEO of Earmark, a continuing education platform for accountants. “What is a lot more important is being able to analyze, to make a decision, to do that higher-level thinking.”

That means that CFOs—and aspiring CFOs—need to be proactive and look for more creative ways to develop their skills, often on their own time.

And while the thought of being a CFO on social media might be slightly terrifying, the basic idea is a solid one: You have to branch out into areas you’re unfamiliar with, not just to connect with a younger generation, but to fully understand where your company and your job fit into the ever-changing finance ecosystem. If the chair of the SEC can have his own YouTube show, why can’t you?

“I encourage people who are nervous about presenting [to] start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, or maybe just start posting on TikTok or Instagram, and share your knowledge,” Oliver said. “There’s really no excuse now; if you have a smartphone, you can be putting your knowledge out there in the world.”

CFOs on TikTok? Of course it’s a thing, and they often impart wisdom, intentional or otherwise. Like this CFO who proved the wisdom of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: You have to go “where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Continue reading here.—DA

Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and others in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

Eliran Glazer is CFO of workplace organization software company Monday.com, which went public in 2021. (Disclosure: Morning Brew is a Monday.com client.) He’s served as CFO of public and private companies going back 20 years.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Monday.com went public roughly a year ago. What was that like getting ready for your first IPO?

I’ve been around in finance for about 20 years, the last 15 years as a CFO in mostly private companies, in the high-tech industry, and global industry in the US. [In] February of last year, Monday asked me to join to lead the IPO. The IPO was in June and [we had] only four months to get up to speed. I had to learn the people, get to know the business, and get up to speed with the analysts, the bankers. It’s like drinking from a firehose. I think the one important thing that I would emphasize is resilience. If you remember last year, there were multiple IPOs—not like this year—and everybody was super busy. So you have to kind of juggle around a lot of things.

Is there a part of your job that maybe you didn’t expect you would be doing when you first started out in finance?

Actually, I was lucky because when I started my career, I worked with a CFO who told me that when you focus on accounting, focus on the business side of the company and get to know your stakeholders, get to know the sales manager, get to know the marketing manager. And you know, these are [the] kinds of tips that helped me down the road. Continue reading here.—KL

Stat: $7.15 billion. That’s how much TikTok parent company ByteDance lost in 2021. Its revenue was up almost 80% to $61.7 billion. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “Today, we begin to right these wrongs.”—President Biden, in announcing he was pardoning prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession and ordering a review of how cannabis is categorized under federal law (@POTUS)

Read: In this profile of Jack Owoc, CEO of energy drink company Bang, one person describes him as “if Florida was a person.” (Bloomberg)

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