Outside the Grind is our occasional feature that spotlights the unique passion projects, side hustles, and hobbies of finance professionals outside of the office. If you know (or are) a CFO with a unique, interesting, or weird side gig, pitch us here and we may feature you in a future installment.
Like many of us, Michael Bayer, CFO of hot storage cloud company Wasabi Technologies, got into baking bread during the pandemic. But unlike most of us, he stuck with it and dove deeply into the biochemistry, history, allegorical, and philosophical meaning of bread.
And although a recent dietary change has curtailed his bread consumption somewhat, he’s still thinking deeply about this ubiquitous staple. In addition to being a CFO, he’s also an adjunct lecturer of finance at Babson College and is in the early stages of developing a multidisciplinary course on the practice and meaning of making bread.
CFO Brew talked to Bayer recently about the stress-relieving properties of breadmaking, and how bread is like finance.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What place did baking bread have in relieving the stress of your CFO job during the pandemic?
I don’t feel a lot of stress because for the most part, I enjoy what I do. There’s certainly anxiety and complexity over the varying amount of stuff that’s got to get done. This [funding round] that I just closed—which was the fourth during the pandemic—was brutal, the most difficult one I’ve ever done. But it wasn’t so much stress and just a lot of work.
So the relief valve to me was multidimensional. I had to change the whole way that I connected with people. I was raising money from people who I literally had never met. I’ve never met the people who have invested $300 million with us since the pandemic started. So that’s my new way of connecting. I’m always looking for something interesting to talk about. It helps build the personal relationship. I don’t want to sound like it’s Machiavellian in any way, it’s not. It’s just instantly an interesting thing.
There were plenty of times where [I was] doing eight meetings and I had to map in 10 minutes to be offline so I could run upstairs and quickly do a stretch and fold.
So it’s not so much stress relief, as it’s just another dimension to add.
Among the CFOs we talk to, one of the things that they seem to have in common is focus. Is there something about your focus that drives you into this deeper than most?
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I mean, you can only do so many spreadsheets, right? The CFO is not the most intellectually rewarding pursuit. I’ve been doing this a while, so I find delight in the world around me.
I wouldn’t say that it’s any of my CFO attributes. In fact, I’m a pretty unfocused CFO; I’m not one of these detail, accountant kind of guys. I think that’s one of my strengths. It makes me a different type of CFO.
I see the beauty in the biochemistry of bread. If you’re off a couple of grams on the salt, you ain’t gonna rise. And so I think there’s a certain beauty in the chemistry all working. And that thread of it is a lot like the CFO journey, which is you have to get it all to kind of work.
Now you’re working on a proposal for a bread appreciation course at the college you teach at, correct?
I teach a finance class at Babson. I approached my division chair with this kind of crackpot idea. It goes back to a wine appreciation class that I took while I was at Cornell. Everybody takes those classes, and it’s 900 students in a massive auditorium and wine tastings week after week. How can you get any better than that?
I feel like this could be one of those same foundational, totally off the beaten path kind of classes. And so I’ve been trying to figure out a way that I could do it at Babson. It’s not a sanctioned thing yet. I’m trying to find where I can get enough oven capacity so that 25 students can bake bread twice during the term. I’ve dreamed up a recipe for dorm-room sourdough.
I’m figuring out how to bring students along this same journey of the history of bread, the biochemistry of bread, the morality of it. Bread was the first money. Every society has been built around it; the first trade in the first commerce was actually rent. So it all ties back into finance, in a pretty deep way, as well.
All the threads are there to make it a multidisciplinary course. It’s early conversation, but a lot of it is logistics. A school isn’t built to have oven capacity for 25 people.—DA