Manage equity without headaches. Running a company is a complex skill. Managing your cap table shouldn’t make it harder. Growing companies use Pulley to simplify equity management from fundraise modeling to tender offers. Master running your business with help from Pulley.
Coworking is a recurring segment where we talk to CFOs and other leaders 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.
Matthew Ostrower is CFO of Link Logistics, the second-largest owner of warehouse real estate in the US. About 5% of US GDP goes through its warehouses each year, Ostrower said. He spoke with CFO Brew about how e-commerce has changed distribution, and about how someone with a liberal arts background wound up as a CFO.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I poked around a bit on the Link Logistics website, and you use the word “infill” a lot. Could you explain what infill is and why it matters?
Maybe the best lay definition of infill is real estate that’s near lots and lots of people, rather than near lots of vacant land…The industry has been changing enormously, and that’s largely a product of how distribution in the United States has changed. People increasingly want things delivered to their front door, and on top of that, they want it delivered as quickly as possible…Companies have realized that the faster they can deliver, the more they can sell, and the more money they can make. Proximity becomes enormously important…We went from a world 15 years ago when where the warehouse was didn’t matter all that much to now, location is everything.
You come from a liberal arts and real estate background. How did you become a CFO?
I worked for a not-for-profit that was getting involved in affordable housing…And no one in the nonprofit knew how to do a spreadsheet. And they kind of pointed at me, the new junior guy, and said, “Hey, would you give this a try?” And I never looked back. That was the tipping point for me, where I realized that you could take something so tangible, like affordable housing, and boil that down to the numbers, and that those numbers helped you understand whether a project would work or not.
I ended up going to MIT to get a city planning degree and also a real estate finance degree. At the time that I graduated, it was on the tail of the 1991–1992 S&L crisis. Public companies were being formed that owned lots of real estate. And I found that all incredibly dynamic and interesting and ended up going in that direction.
What advice would you give someone who aspires to become a CFO?
You need to understand finance. You need to understand accounting…But I would say there’s two important things that do get neglected a lot. One is strategy, and being able to be a strategic partner to the CEO, and a trusted advisor…Understand how finance fits into strategy, which means understanding how strategy actually works. Sometimes we view that as a soft skill. It turns out strategy is a real thing, and it can be learned.
And the second piece is tech. Tech, tech, and tech. What you need to understand is, what can tech help you do? What are your choices for how to use tech in your business? It’s moving into the world of predictive analytics, and…how you should operate differently as a result, delivering data in real time to people’s desktops in a way they can understand it and act upon it. That’s central to what a CFO should be focused on these days.
What’s something that you’re passionate about outside of work?
I am passionate about cities and the culture and people and food that go along with them…I live in a big city, and I’m out and about taking advantage of it constantly, whether that’s going to a Broadway show or a museum or wandering around neighborhoods in Queens.