The CFO of Freshworks had two IPOs under his belt even before he joined the IT services company which debuted on the Nasdaq in 2021, and he believes he's the custodian of the company's raison d'être
CFOs have visibility into every other function in the company, so I always think to myself, move away from the numbers and see what’s driving the results: Tyler Sloat, CFO, Freshworks
Tyler Sloat recalls being business-oriented as far back as fifth grade, growing up in Hawaii, when he struck up a deal to sell some fancy marbles that his brother’s friend would bring back from trips to Mexico, a couple of times a year.
But what really put him on a career track that would eventually see him become a CFO was a job, almost fresh out of college, at a firm called Coopers & Lybrand—which later merged with Price Waterhouse to give birth to PwC—in what was called their computer assurance services group, which had to do with internal controls audit.
A year or so later, he transferred to the company’s San Jose office where he’d be part of an audit team and “I’d never had an accounting class,” he recalls. “I remember sitting in my car before I walked into the office, reading a ‘fundamentals of accounting’ book, because I did not know what a debit and credit was.”
But he did well enough to convince his employer to send him to their own Coopers Academy, where over an eight to 10-week period of intensive learning—recognised by the University of Southern California—he earned enough academic credits to qualify to take the test and eventually get a Certified Professional Accountant’s license.
In the long run, accountancy per se was less important to Sloat’s career, other than the need to really understand it, than what he could do in terms of helping an organisation grow and manage its business with his knowledge. That journey included two IPOs even before landing at Freshworks—the first one at POET Software, where he was the controller when the company went public, and the second at Zuora, a subscription management software provider, where he was CFO.
(This story appears in the 25 February, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)