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Figma’s CFO on going public, AI, and working alongside Dylan Field | Praveer Melwani

In this latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Praveer Melwani, CFO at Figma.

Brett BersonhostPraveer Melwaniguest

May 14, 202643mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

50 min read · 10,093 words

0:00 – 2:13
Introduction
1. BBBrett Berson
  [intro music] So what's your theory as to why you've been able to be successful starting basically at a small company, IC, first biz ops, finance hire, all the way through CFO of a publicly traded company, right? Normally, a lot of times somebody comes in, they do great work. At some point, a more experienced person comes in and you get layered, or you go into a special projects role, or you, you know, like whereas a company goes public, they want somebody that's taken a company public before. So, like, what other than good luck and natability, like, what is it that you did or evolved over the course of that time that allowed you to sort of end up in the top spot in the finance function?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  I mean, I think you gloss-glossed over it really quickly there on the good luck and good fortune piece. I think so much of it has to do with, like, timing, finding the right company, finding the right, like, set of leaders that are willing to, to invest and bet on you in some respect. So I feel like I was fortunate to have that at Figma. It was a team and it was a leader in Dylan that, you know, felt like they wanted to support me through that journey. I was very candid on the things that I knew, things that I didn't know, and was empowered to, to go and figure it out. And for me, that, that meant asking the right questions, understanding, like, where my shortcomings were, surrounding myself with people that could be my own ad-- be my, my personal advocate, um, where I needed them to be, and recognizing that I have to be this constant sponge, uh, of new learning. I think that a lot of this role can be learned, um, and a lot of, you know, just great leadership is first-principles thinking and not actually being burdened in the way in which that historical decisions have, have, um, you know, impacted your current framing. Yes, I do think that they're helpful in relevant context, um, but I do think, you know, a lot of the things that we have gone through at Figma, um, are very unique to our, our own circumstance. And so I, I think having this ability and framework not necessarily to feel like I know the answer all the time, but I was seeking it out, allowed me to continue to grow, uh, in the role.
3. BBBrett Berson
  What are some examples of, like, the biggest phase shifts in terms of h- what you had to learn and grow in kind of each chapter that you've been at Figma?
4. PMPraveer Melwani
  So I joined as an individual contributor.
5. BBBrett Berson
  What's the story of, of joining
2:13 – 4:14
From banking to Dropbox to Figma
1. BBBrett Berson
  the company?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  So I started my career in, in investment banking, lasted about a year and a half, and got to a place where all my friends were looking at private equity, venture, that sort of thing. And I was living out in San Francisco, and I had a recruiter reach out to me about an opportunity at Dropbox. And this was, like, you know, late 2013.
3. BBBrett Berson
  That's, like, one of the hottest companies in 2013, right?
4. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally. And they were, like, one of the only ones based in San Francisco where they were... They saw value in people, um, with my background. And, you know, I was 23, 24 at the time, and after going and meeting the team and, you know, experiencing the office, I was like: "Holy crap, this is really cool." The ability to experience San Francisco for me was just, like, a fun thing to, to see and do. After that experience at Dropbox, uh, you know, I g- I got to see the, the growth of the company from a, you know, 400-person organization to about 16, 1700 people, and I just had this desire to do it over. So I joined NerdWallet, got really excited, thought the business was a really interesting one, built on the back of organic search. And, you know, the financials were, like, pretty amazing to see that you could run a 35% EBITDA business without spending a whole bunch of money, and I was like: "This is wild." Lasted about six months there for, you know, good reason, bad reason, whatever it is. Like, I found what I was actually seeking was not to do it over like I did at, at Dropbox, but actually to be empowered to be the person to make a decision, and that was, like, the kick in the pants I needed. You know, it was the first time I really did a search of, like, what I was interested in and talked to a whole bunch of my friends that I had made at, uh, you know, over the course of my time at, at, at Dropbox and, you know, living in San Francisco. And they were like: "You should just go early and talk to about 30-odd different companies at the Series A type scale, 25, 30-ish people." And again, still pretty early in my career and, you know, luck and good fortune landed me to meet the folks at Figma. Just hired a COO. They were just trying to think about how they built out the rest of the, you know, the organization. They weren't even charging [chuckles] for it just yet. And I was like: "This is perfect. Absolutely no one knows what I would do. I can just go in and just be a sponge and put my hand up to do anything." And so that's kinda how I ended up there.
5. BBBrett Berson
  Sort of what are the
4:14 – 5:36
The phase shift when Figma's COO left
1. BBBrett Berson
  big, um, step functions in growth if sort of Dylan made many bets on you sort of continuing to level up? Like, if you reverse engineer where you are now, what are those sort of milestones?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  So I think the first one that I fa- I faced is when our COO left about a year into me being there. There was this, like, gap of who was gonna own a whole bunch of, like, the operations parts of the business.
3. BBBrett Berson
  And what were you doing before that? Like, what was day-to-day responsibility?
4. PMPraveer Melwani
  So it was a lot on the finance and accounting side, managing our outsourced bookkeeper, putting our arms around, like, the initial sets of paid cohorts that we, uh, that we'd started monetizing, and then spending a lot of time thinking about how, uh, we were gonna evolve the product from what was completely self-serve at the beginning to something that was gonna have to have more of a sales-led motion, uh, overlaid as well. So, you know, working with the product team to help think through pricing and packaging, build out the, the cadence of, like, how do we actually think about growing this organization, a lot of the planning elements as well. We had obviously also gone through, like, a fundraise, uh, ear-early days of me being there, so we were a Ser-Series B company at the time. The COO left. It creates this void and, you know, there was a whole bunch of things that no one really knew how to build, but we knew it was gonna be important, things like legal and security and compliance, sales operations function. And that for me was, like, really fun to throw up my hand and say, "Hey, I'd love to go and figure it out."
5. BBBrett Berson
  You viewed it as a positive?
6. PMPraveer Melwani
  Oh, I got so excited. [chuckles] 'Cause, like, you know, at that moment, Dylan was like: "Come report to me. Go and take on this stuff and, you know, we'll see how far you can go with it. Hire the people where necessary."
5:36 – 7:18
Hiring leaders in functions you don't understand
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  And so I needed to hire really good people at a lot of functions that I had no idea [chuckles] what great looked like. So that was, like, one of the first things that was really challenging for me is, like, how do you go and you build muscle and, you know, an understanding of what great looks like and, you know, when you hire a great legal leader? And I had to meet a whole bunch of people and ask the questions and really understand what are the problems that we're trying to solve. And it's actually kinda wild, the person we ended up hiring back in 2018, 2019 is our GC today, a guy named Brent- Brendan Mulligan. And I Um, yeah, I'm so fortunate to be, you know, be working with them even today. But, you know, I similarly felt that across, like, accounting, ac-across, like, you know, partnering on the, on the biz ops and sales op side. And so hiring those people, making them successful, really seeking to ask the right questions to help them get the most within the organization without, um, them feeling blocked, uh, at all, like that, I think was, like, something that I needed to develop and a motion I needed to get good at. I needed to learn how to manage a number of different, um, how do I create alignment within our executive room around, you know, a s-set of ideas that I had? I'm someone who loves to live in a spreadsheet, who will live in the data. My expectation was like, "Look, I should just show people this and they, they'll get it just as well." But I, you know, realized very quickly that, uh, building alignment is a lot more than just showing people your thought process. Like, I think you have to really understand their internal motivations, you know, think about a problem from their seat, uh, and use that to, to help influence. And, you know, learning how to influence is not easy.
2. BBBrett Berson
  Mm-hmm.
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  Uh, and so much of my role today, and I think, you know, those were two of the things, managing and learning to influence, that I think allowed me to continue to scale.
4. BBBrett Berson
  What's an example when you were sort of trying to drive to a specific direction or outcome and had to sort of influence or bring along the rest of the exec team? Like, what's a story behind it?
5. PMPraveer Melwani
  A lot of it we're, like, we're dealing with today on,
7:18 – 9:48
Selling the exec team on AI consumption pricing
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  you know, navigating a change, going from a completely s-seat-driven model to one that overlays consumption for our, for our AI products. And I think, you know, developing a shared understanding with, you know, our full leadership team, but then also the rest of the company on it's an entirely different financial model. We have to be thoughtful on the cost structure. We have to be thoughtful on, um, the amount of choice that we give users. We have to be thoughtful on, you know, effectively, like, creating a new currency and how that actually forms and functions, and there's so many different ways to do this, and I don't think anyone has got it, you know, down pat and is doing it, you know, in a perfect way. We needed to go through the stages of showing people both the external analysis of, like, how the market is moving, the financial analysis of how this impacts our business in a whole variety of different scenarios, but then also sitting to understand the end user behavior as we're running many of these rollouts in, in betas and then, uh, and we actually just GA'd our add-ons that, that we charged for a few weeks ago. And being open to feedback, being open to listening, uh, allows us to kinda move in lockstep, but then also feeling like we don't have to be restricted to the decisions that we made and understanding what are the two-way doors versus one-way doors. And I think if there's a, an appreciation from your peers on a willingness to change and a willingness to learn, I think you can make these decisions a lot, a lot more quickly.
2. BBBrett Berson
  If I were to watch you working on that problem versus a similar problem seven years ago, what do you think is the biggest difference between how you go after that today versus back then?
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah. I think I would have a lot more appreciation for, um, our end users and community than I did seven years ago. I think, um, Figma has taught me a lot about what it means to lean into community-led growth and marketing. It's been super important how deeply we care about our end users, and not just, like, our users that are top 1% type companies, but also, like, the, you know, the freelancer or a person who's learning. Like, we wanna build a product and platform that everyone can, um, continue to grow on, and I, I maybe would've been dismissive of that, you know, seven, eight years ago, saying that, "Hey, you know, how does this actually show up in our P&L? Is it, how is it actually good business sense?" Today, I understand how much more these decisions are intertwined with one another and how important it really is to listen to a-all sorts of stakeholders there. I think in addition to that, I think having a, you know, being very open and willing to hear the feedback from our product team on, you know, the complexity that we try to introduce with wanting to be very creative on the pricing side. So it's a balance, right? Like, you're trying to move very quickly and create the thing that you think is the best, creates the best business outcome, and those two can be at odds at times.
4. BBBrett Berson
  When you think about the sort
9:48 – 11:36
Using Claude Code to learn new things as CFO
1. BBBrett Berson
  of your own personal growth, and you think about learning all of these new things over the past nine years, is there a general way that you go about it? Like, you are doing a new thing, whether it be, "I've never hired a lawyer," uh, or, "I've never done pricing and packaging," or do you have a way that you go about sort of working on net new problems and learning?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah. It's an interesting question. I, I feel like even my way of learning today is, is changing, partly because of the tools that are available to us. Last week, I got my full leadership team together, and we were all kind of messing around with, uh, you know, one of the peop- person who leads our biz ops team, a woman named Danielle, she had created, like, you know, an external brain, uh, for herself in, in Claude Code and was ingesting a whole bunch of information and context from different parts of the organization, uh, to allow herself to, like, uh, get to a better, uh, first draft. And so I ended up spending [chuckles] you know, a lot of my weekend kinda messing around with this too, and I was like, "Oh my gosh," like, I feel like the level of context and place of, place I can start today is way different even than what I would've started six months ago. So that's been really fun and unlocking. But then if I, if I think more holistically, I wanna seek out experts and people who've done this before, 'cause I, you know, very often do the decisions and sets of things that we're working on are not unique. Doing the legwork to go and build your, your, your framework, if that, you know, means that you need to start in a, in a spreadsheet, or if that means that you need to start seeking out the, uh, the right set of questions internally to build the, build the, the set of problems you're trying to solve, whatever it may be. Then I think I learn a lot through experimentation. I, I, like, feel like there's a, a lot of things that we can make progress on that are not always gonna be one-way doors, and if you have this willingness to experiment, it'll allow you to move, uh, a lot quicker, and just understanding what are the things that are gonna be challenging to, to back out of and holding those as decisions that are extremely holy, and then the other ones, um, you
11:36 – 13:52
Building an internal board of peer CFOs
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  know, I think you should be a little bit more flexible on.
2. BBBrett Berson
  What's your general process when you're talking with experts or peer CFOs or sort of anything similar? How do you figure out how to translate that into what's correct for the sort of subtle context of the company you're building, right? If somebody says, "Oh, we s- came across this problem. We solved it in this way" In a lot of cases, you obviously you can't just say, "Oh, that's the correct thing. Let's just do it here." Like, do you have a process for figuring out, like how do you translate that into what's correct for your sort of given situation?
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  I think it comes down to the questions that you're answering or asking rather, and what problems you're trying to solution for, and I think you have to have a deep understanding of your business in order to, in order to make sense of that. What I do find really helpful, though, is, you know, a lot of these leaders are very smart people. You can use them as thought partners, uh, as well, saying, you know, if you're able to give a little bit more context, you might get a, a better back and forth, and you end up turning these relationships into these, you know, living and breathing organisms that you almost are creating this, like, uh, peer group or boar- internal board for yourself of people that you can go to and, and, and riff with. I find that, you know, to be super helpful and valuable. You know, I love to return the favor as well, and so I, I, uh, you know, I highly encourage that and the discipline that comes with, you know, how you actually ask the questions and how do you bring people in.
4. BBBrett Berson
  Do you think sort of the office of the CFO or role of CFO done well is a specific thing across all companies of a similar scale? Or do you think there are certain flavors of CFO or office of CFO that you can kind of cluster, take 15 great billion-dollar revenue companies, and there's actually subtleties in the way that the role of the office of the CFO?
5. PMPraveer Melwani
  I can only imagine that they're gonna be very different depending on industry and context. If you're a, a highly operational business with much thinner margins, I think that you want someone who's extremely in the weeds analytical and the, and, you know, the operational pieces of getting that right, I imagine are gonna be very, very important to how things are framed and move forward. I think if you're at, you know, a very large organization with a whole set of bets, like maybe your CFO role is like how do I then go and manage the bets that we've got and the risk on and risk off nature across v- various sets of things. If you're an early stage organization, I think you might end up, you know, leaning into a lot of the strategy pieces as well, 'cause a lot of the, the, the blurring of roles will, will start to emerge, so I don't think that there's like a, a, a one-size-fits-all CFO at all. [chuckles]
13:52 – 16:38
Inside Figma's CFO job description
1. BBBrett Berson
  In terms of Figma and your role, like if you had to take out a blank sheet of paper and write up the job description for the CFO, the role that you're in, what would be in it?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  I wanna be a good steward of our business first and foremost, and so, and it's obviously, you know, we're a public company, so it's very important to, to, to be able to look our investors in the face and share with them that, you know, we've made the right decisions that are impacting the business long term. I think it's very important that I, I keep that hat on in all the conversations that I'm in, so I can shed light on how this will, you know, allow us to build a more durable business over the long term. We need to be really thoughtful around creating the guardrails of like how we actually go and execute the business. I don't want our finance team, uh, or the way in which that we do planning to constrain how quickly we can move, and so it's setting enough guardrails to allow us to move quickly, but then also like not being overly burdensome. There's a big compliance, um, portion to that, especially now, you need to kinda hold that to, to very high regard. The team that we've built is extremely operational in nature and wants to win. I'm personally someone that, like wants to understand the makings of everything and wants to like, have our finance team feel like they also understand those guts, and so I think it's, um, the level of oper-operational depth is very important in this role, and generally the intellectual curiosity. And maybe the other area we didn't touch on is like the IR and storytelling elements. That is an area that I've had to learn h-how to do over time, but especially within the context of the later and later stage that we got, and I ended up spending more and more of my time there to make sure that I could protect different, diff- other parts of the business so that they didn't necessarily have to spend that time.
3. BBBrett Berson
  Well, what is... Sort of share more about what that journey has been like.
4. PMPraveer Melwani
  Uh, it's been, it's been interesting. I think, uh-
5. BBBrett Berson
  Particularly because I think you have a CEO who's, and founder who's particularly good at this-
6. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah
7. BBBrett Berson
  ... the sort of narrative and storytelling around the business.
8. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally. He's also an extremely, extremely good product thinker and builder, and I wanna make sure the vast, vast majority of his time is spent deep in the business and in product. So if there are times for us to, to cover for him to be the business evangelist on his behalf, like that is the thing I wanna make sure that we do time and time again. I think his time is the, the most valuable in the organization and how we use it and where we use it, we have to be really, really thoughtful on. You know, for me, that, especially as a first time CFO grow- like growing into the role and, and then also realizing that investors are different at different moments in the company's life cycle. Like, you know, dealing with a venture investor is very different than dealing with a large public, you know, mutual fund. The level of context, the level of compliance, the level of depth and detail that, that's, that you're gonna get into in each one of those conversations is different. And so determining what level of altitude you need to live at, being really thoughtful about what you're sharing and how you present and whatev- what information you're showcasing, especially on the public side, 'cause anything that you say is gonna come back to you. You know, if it's not the next quarter, [chuckles] it's, it's the year
16:38 – 18:42
What separates good CFOs from world-class CFOs
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  after.
2. BBBrett Berson
  What do you think is the difference between doing a good job, at least in the context of how you think about being a CFO, and doing a world-class job? Like, what is the gap? Not between bad and excellent, but like you're doing a good job or you're doing an extraordinary job.
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  It's having this, like intellectual curiosity and willingness to continue to ask that second or third order question. I think if you get stuck staring at a P&L or, you know, set of statements and you don't have the ability to really understand the unique drivers around it, like you're not doing your job. You're being a traffic cop. You're like, you're kinda just playing good guy, bad guy for, for certain decisions, and that's not helpful. I think if done well, your finance organization should be this strategic arm of the, of the company and help you understand when you should be making in, uh, investment decisions that impact the long term of the business. And that's only re-really gonna come if you have a hunger and excitement and passion for continuing to go deeper and deeper to really understand the root cause. Like, my favorite meetings, uh, during the week are, we do a self-serve deep dive where we look at all funnel indicators and, uh, all kind of live and living experiments, and it gives me an opportunity to slice and dice our business in all sorts of different directions and understand if anything is trending in a, in a direction that I don't think is favorable What are we doing about it? How are we actioning on it? And start to be another voice in the room to go and really go and push this change, uh, quickly within the organization. We do a similar thing on our sales business, and then even for some of our acquired businesses, you know, allowing us to really, uh, seek to understand what's going on, uh, within those businesses. And so it just brings me an immense amount of joy to, like, you know, feel like I, I can really understand how that's working. And then in addition to that, like I, you know, got a set of dashboards and set, set of things that I will refresh on my own to feel like I can, um, I can bring the level of depth to a conversation where I'm very well-informed and pushing people's perspectives if we're operating at the service level, um, kinda taking everyone at that second order, uh, of depth.
4. BBBrett Berson
  How is capital
18:42 – 21:45
Capital allocation and risk in a post-ChatGPT world
1. BBBrett Berson
  allocation and risk-taking different today at let's call it a post-ChatGPT moment, today versus before? Other than, like, we should be taking more risk. But, like, you as sort of one of the co-people that's making capital allocation decisions, what's different in this environment versus three or four years ago?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  A lot actually ends up changing just when you, when you play out, play out that idea. So, you know, we feel, we feel it from the perspective of, um, these coding agents have, have made it so easy for people to go and create software. And so, you know, even this vertical line that I thought we're near, you know, near vertical line that I thought we were on, uh, when I joined the business in terms of the amount of software that, that was gonna get created is now, like, you know, near asymptotic. For us that, uh, at Figma, that actually is like, if you actually sit and think, that's extremely tam expansive for us. Now more people are gonna be involved in the, in the software creation process, design, craft, point of view is how you actually will win, um, in this day and age. And, uh, how we actually then go and bring those tools to our, to our current users, but then also how do we think more expansively is gonna actually define how the next kinda five years look, five, 10 years look for, for the future of Figma. And if you are operating in that shared context, uh, you wanna make sure that you both create the constraints for the, you know, what are the bright lines that you don't wanna cross, but you also wanna be in a state of keeping your foot continuously on the gas because you believe that, you know, the opportunity is, has just multiplied ahead of you. So what I found ourselves doing is, you know, relaxing some of the constraints that we previously had. We were a business that was 90-plus percent gross margin a year ago today, and, you know, when we reported in Q4, we'd taken our gross margin down about five points to 86%. And that's because we were investing in servicing our AI products because we, we, we recognized that in doing so, we widened the overall aperture of who can participate. So you have to continue to think long term, um, but you wanna not constrain the business to make the decisions that allow you to get there. And so I think that, I think is one of the things that has changed. In addition to that, how we're thinking about organizational effectiveness and efficiency, um, is something that's continues to be top of mind for us. I mean, it's been pretty cool to see not just within the areas that, you know, everyone seems to be talking about, like your software engineering, your product building teams, your support and sales-like parts of the organization. But even some of the operational parts of the organization can, can get extremely efficient through adopting some of these tools to taking out a lot of the manual toil in their day-to-day, sharpening their pencils in, in the frameworks and opinions that they put forth. That then gets your mind turning on, okay, well, we can really augment the output of the people that we already have. We still have bottlenecks for sure. I very much think it's important to have domain experts within the organization, but I wanna take all the manual toil away. And so you should believe that long term we can be more effective as an organization just by virtue of adopting a whole set of these tools and being willing to experiment. Today, that means that we wanna make sure that we're empowering people with the right tools to go after that, and recognizing that at some future point we're gonna have to be a little bit more constrained. But, uh, it's, it's actually pretty cool both, like, how much bigger the opportunity gets and how much more effective, uh, the organization can become, and it allows you to be a little bit more aggressive
21:45 – 24:32
Why Praveer wants to take more bets
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  in your investment strategy.
2. BBBrett Berson
  If you think about the sort of number of bets that you're gonna take as a company, do you want them to go up dramatically in an environment like this? Are you willing to have more go to zero risk in each one of those bets to sort of get the one power law bet that's gonna define the next chapter? Like, how do you think about bets and bet sizing-
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yep
4. BBBrett Berson
  ... failure tolerance-
5. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yep
6. BBBrett Berson
  ... today versus pre-ChatGPT, if you will?
7. PMPraveer Melwani
  We're an organization that moves fairly quickly, um, with a high degree of craft. So I think our bottlenecks today are not necessarily like, do we have the right ideas? Are we, uh, but it's more so are we building them with the right leadership and thought behind it? So I wanna make sure that even if we end up in a world that's like, you know, we've got 100, I don't know, whatever it is, you make up a number, you got a whole bunch more bets, that we're driving those with more quality and more action and more, you know, you know, the right amount of resourcing to, to allow them to be successful. I don't necessarily just wanna throw spaghetti, but I wanna allow those to be well-reasoned ideas, 'cause I, that's where I believe the, the bottlenecks are. It's not actually the creation of the product, but, like, are you designing with, like, the end user's intent as an actual problem that we're trying to solve? Um, have we been refined in our thinking to, to, uh, of what we, of what we wanna build? To answer your question directly, I'd love to be taking more bets. Like I, you know, I think that, you know, the cost to build has gone down, and, like, that should allow us to do that. And we have this large active user base that we can experiment, um, new products with, and I think that they get really excited to, to try these things with us. I think you have to be thoughtful around the framing of it and how you actually take those to market. We very much, like, welcome a future where that continues to accelerate. It's, it's already kinda happening. Like last year, we doubled our product portfolio. It went from four to eight products in a year. And we went and we built our prompt-to-prototype tool called Figma Make in a matter of couple months, two, three months. And then we went from that, like, initial beta to full GA in about five, and it's used by like, you know, 50% of our 100K-plus customers are creating in Make on a weekly basis on, you know, at the end of Q4. And so it's actually been pretty cool to see how, how you can, through speed and velocity, build really quickly.
8. BBBrett Berson
  Do you think when you just sort of plot out the next few years that being a world-class CFO looks materially different in a post-AI world versus a pre-AI world?
9. PMPraveer Melwani
  I mean, I'm finding my workflow change. [chuckles] Uh, and so if you're not integrating and leveraging some of these tools, then yes, I, I, I do think you're probably gonna be left behind. Um, I think, uh, we're all gonna have, you know, a little bit of this come-to-Jesus moment on like, are we-- you know, are the things that got us here gonna be the things that get us to the next place? Tooling, I think, is important, but then also, like, I think your risk tolerance, your ability to refine and move quickly. Like, you still need to create the constraints, but I do think you need to allow yourself to, to fail and then learn from that. You know, some of the things that I've been building recently and kinda working with our team on, I, I think even some
24:32 – 25:36
How AI is materially changing the CFO role
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  of the forecasting methodologies that we've built, um, are breaking and can be done in much more thoughtful ways by leveraging some of these tools that are out there. Like, you know, if you're constraining yourself to operating in a spreadsheet and not leveraging the ability to go and build historical regressions or the ability to go and, like, test your models in different, in different ways, like, that I think feels very legacy. Like, it's actually really interesting. I was listening to the CFO at Cloudflare, um, speak at a conference, and he was talking about, like, having three different forecasting methodologies running at all times. You wanna understand how agents would build a forecast model using all publicly available information, so that's, like, an outside-in perspective. You know, it's something that you can sense check with. It's like you wanna then have an internal almost analyst model using the primitives that, that you've rolled out, but then also, like, a very detailed model that, you know, gives you all the sets of drivers that you would've exposed to. And then you use those sets of context and obviously, um, pulling in diff-different tools to allow you to do that to, to build a better outcome. So yeah, I think all roles are changing, um, and evolving, and it's actually really fun to, to be a part of it.
25:36 – 29:12
The nine-year working relationship with Dylan Field
1. BBBrett Berson
  What's unique or special about working with a founder and CEO for such a long sustained period of time? In Silicon Valley, it's very normal to be in a role for two, maybe three or four years. People are coming and going. But one of the unique things that you've had in this last nine years is you've had a very close relationship with Dylan-
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  Mm-hmm
3. BBBrett Berson
  ... over nine years working together. What's special about that? What's great? What's beneficial about having that type of longevity in a business relationship?
4. PMPraveer Melwani
  Well, I mean, you just build this level of trust with, with one another where, uh, you can understand the perspective that they're coming from pretty quickly. That level of trust in mine, you know, affords me the luxury to go and, you know, operate on my own and kinda have a sense for, like, when I need to pull him in for, for certain things and what are the decisions I should just go and run with. In addition to the trust, like, you assume good intent. You just, you know that they like you for the person that you are. You can put all of the, you know, do they like me, do they not like me aside, and you just get to this, this place of feeling like you're o- you're both operating from the same level of unique context and wanting to make this place the best, you know, the best it can be. I think you understand each other's tendencies at times. You have the ability to call each other out and give the candid feedback where necessary. Yeah, those things, I think, you know, come with time, and they come with, um, you know, shared context and understanding.
5. BBBrett Berson
  Having had this relationship for so long, which again, in a lot of cases is atypical, do you think it's this immensely valuable thing that most people don't get as they go two and four-year sprints or chapters with different people? Like, would you evangelize it to other people that, like, they should have that as a part of their career, or hard to say?
6. PMPraveer Melwani
  I mean, I've stayed at Figma for as long as I have because I, I feel empowered and motivated to make this company, you know, a generational company. I get excited about the problems that we work on. I get excited about, you know, being able to put my hand in and feel involved on anything. And so, you know, relationships is one aspect of what you can, what you can get with tenure. Um, the other is just, like, sheer business context and gut and judgment and an understanding of where the bodies are buried. And you almost have just created this, like, mental model of, like, how things are likely to fit in and where to look and what actually is necessary to be successful. So that part I would, you know, highly evangelize to that. You know, for me, it makes me an effective leader. If I were to go somewhere else, I imagine the trust building, the business context and, and understanding, like, that takes time. That learned experience, I think can, can be the, the thing that differentiates, um, leaders, you know, in, in how quickly that they can have impact in an organization.
7. BBBrett Berson
  When you use the term trust, do you mean it in the sense of, like, you both believe in each other's competence? You sort of mentioned positive intent. Like, what in, in this business relationship, what does trust actually mean?
8. PMPraveer Melwani
  Dylan's not sitting in my spreadsheets, like, following my math. You know? Like it... There, there's, like, an understanding of competence there. There's an understanding of level of depth that I'll go to and the paces I'll put my team through, and he still asks, like, very, very thoughtful and poignant questions. But he also understands that, you know, we're also doing a lot of the soul searching and context building, um, and want to be able to go and highlight, um, these things to him proactively. There's less of a told direction of, "Hey, Praveer, go and do this thing." Um, it's, uh, "Hey, Praveer, like, what's actually going on? Maybe, like, help me build some of that context too." So that, I think the longer that I've sat in the seat, the more I've actually found, um, the freedom to go and build some of my own process and way in which that I wanna run our organization and pull Dylan into that versus, like, him kinda guiding exactly how that's, that's structured.
9. BBBrett Berson
  What about in the context of your own
29:12 – 31:47
How deeply in the details should a CFO be?
1. BBBrett Berson
  org? How do you think about at which altitude are you flying? What details are you involved in? What details do you not wanna be involved in at any given point in time?
2. PMPraveer Melwani
  I live in a lot of the details, um, maybe because of how long I've been at the organization and my route coming up, uh, through the organization as an individual contributor and then through our leadership team. But it's also a shared context that our full leadership team has as well. Um, we hold ourselves all to the same level of standard to be able to, like, zoom in to, you know, the 3,000-foot view and then the 30,000-foot altitude. Many of our leaders also have grown up in the organization as well, and this is kind of the first time holding, you know, this seat at, at this level of importance. And so I think, um, it's unique to, to our organization. In my reviews with my team, when we're reviewing a forecast as an example, like, I wanna understand the methodologies. More often than not, I'll ask for a spreadsheet, um, just to form my own mental model. I won't click through every cell [chuckles] like I, like I used to, but I call out the things that, you know, feel a little bit off, or at least, like, poke, poke on some of the analysis there. I think you have to have a good sense of, like, where you're poking and, like, do they actually matter for the organization? And so if you have your team chasing perfection on the thing that doesn't matter, like, not a good use of time. But if you're living in the details of something that's very high impact, it's gonna impact, like, the overall framework of things that you're creating, like, extremely good time spent. So I think having good judgment on, like, how these decisions play out and knowing where to really poke and where to, where to say it's okay comes with time.
3. BBBrett Berson
  When you zoom all the way out, how do you measure success of the sort of part of the org that you're responsible for that's not just, like, the financial health of the business or the accuracy of the forecast or those type-
4. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah
5. BBBrett Berson
  ... of things?
6. PMPraveer Melwani
  I love for people to involve our f- our, like, our overall organization, not just the finance team, but, like, corp dev and BD and business operations and accounting, and view them as, like, s- business accelerants, uh, and business problem solvers. It's not like this traffic cop or, like, you know, this go and no-go police. It's, like, these people that you actually want to bring into the, the room because they are gonna be the people that help you solve the problem, uh, and bring the creativity. So that's, like, you know, m-my first order thing. If we're not getting involved in those conversations, if people don't view us as additive, something's broken. I think longer term, and I learned this a little bit through my experience at Dropbox, like, I, I'd love to create this place where you can grow your career, but then also you're growing your network. I think, like, creating these moments where people can learn from one another, creating these moments where you can share context and you can build, you can build community, um, for me is, like, extremely important in building a fantastic organization,
31:47 – 33:24
What Dropbox taught Praveer about building strong teams
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  so.
2. BBBrett Berson
  How are you going about trying to do that? What is informed by the Dropbox experience? Because I think particularly in the early 2010s, a lot of the business and partnership functions at Dropbox, to your point, attracted this incredible group of people who have done all these spectacular things. And other than, like, hiring great people, what is required to do that?
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  I actually think it, like, comes down to hiring good people. Um, you know, many of us, this was our first job, you know, technology. Like, you know, I was two years out of banking. They had this program that that's where they pulled from, a bunch of people from banking, venture, hedge funds, whatever it may be, and no one had really done [chuckles] the thing before. So I don't, I don't think, uh, it, it was all written that people would be able to go and find these, these natural places to, to move to, um, thereafter. But it was hyper important to find the people that were intellectually curious, that could ask the right questions, that were really, really thoughtful about building great organizations and great, a great business, and, like, that I think is the... That is something that I think is, you know, part of the hiring process and then part of the experience that you create within the organization. So like we were sharing, I want, you know, everyone within my, my organization to be viewed as business accelerants and people that can unblock the rest of the organization. And if I empower them to create those sets of experiences where they can learn about go-to-market and what it means to integrate, uh, an acquired business, or what it means to, like, strike a really thoughtful, um, partnership, like, I want them to, to learn that 'cause I think it will allow them to be, uh, extremely well-rounded leaders regardless of where they go within, within their careers. If they continue to grow it at Figma, if they grow it elsewhere, I'm actually indifferent. I want everyone to feel like they can build these really round- well-rounded experiences and then be advocates to,
33:24 – 38:47
Praveer’s first-principles test for hiring VPs
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  to one another thereafter.
2. BBBrett Berson
  In recruiting and building your team, if I were to look at y- the managers that sit underneath you, so let's call them VPs or whatever term-
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah
4. BBBrett Berson
  ... you have for them as VPs, what's the thread that ties them all together? Like, what are you looking for in a VP of this or a VP of that, that is not just functional knowledge, that is, like, a, a prerequisite that you care the most about?
5. PMPraveer Melwani
  I want someone who's, like, an extremely first-principled thinker. I don't care if you've done this thing, like, eight different times over, if it's not right for our circumstance and situation, it's not right, even if it worked before. I want someone who feels like they can live in the details, and you know, we had that discussion earlier, and I think it's important to feel like your leader understands the work and is not a manager of managers. That is not, like, the, the culture of our organization, nor the, um, you know, the type of people that I'm drawn to. Building community and organizations is, is very important to them. Willingness to think around, think team first versus individual is important to me. Yeah, those are a few that, you know, I think... And then I think, like, we test for that.
6. BBBrett Berson
  What have you noticed about developing people into executives as opposed to hiring executives? Is there a good condition for one or the other?
7. PMPraveer Melwani
  We've definitely done both across our organization. I have a bias to want to build from and promote from within if we can.
8. BBBrett Berson
  Because of the existence proof of-
9. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally
10. BBBrett Berson
  ... Brett Guniche.
11. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally. I mean, I've seen the benefit that that shared understanding and context can build to the way that I operate. And then I've also seen that now time and time again. A lot of folks even on my leadership team we've elevated over the course of time. But there are moments where, you know, if that individual isn't growing as fast as, as the overall organization or, you know, the rate of change there is- isn't keeping up, like, you have to go and make changes. I think being able to be clear-eyed about it and act quickly, um, once you're starting to get the signal on it, like, that I think is the challenging part. It's always gonna be easier to stay the course, but then if that, if staying the course is at odds with, like, you know, what the business needs, like, that's where, where you really need to look hard and make a hard call. And they're not easy conversations to have.
12. BBBrett Berson
  There's lots of examples all the time of when it works to hire external leaders and have them be super successful.
13. PMPraveer Melwani
  I have theories. Um, I think it's, like, hard to build context in, you know, the way in which companies are building today. Like, we're a very remote-friendly organization. We have, like, offices in San Francisco around the world, but, you know, it's not as easy to go and look over your shoulder and, you know, ask someone a question as it used to be. And so if you're not intentional about how you actually go and, you know, seek to understand within an organization... And then I think, like, it's also challenging for someone coming outside in to really understand, like, how an organization ticks. Everyone is putting up a little bit of a front, you know, through that interview process, but it's not beneficial to anyone. You know, the more transparent that you can be-
14. BBBrett Berson
  Which is counterintuitive for a lot of people.
15. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally. But, like, there's a good reason why people do that, right? They wanna show up well, share that things are kinda working. But at least how I've- Internalize it. The more open that I can be about the skeletons that are living in whatever closet, the more likely it is that someone is not gonna be like, "Hey, you pulled a fast one on me."
16. BBBrett Berson
  Right.
17. PMPraveer Melwani
  Like, "What the hell?"
18. BBBrett Berson
  Or be successful ultimately.
19. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally. And I-
20. BBBrett Berson
  Like, you may at times decrease your close rate, but you're gonna increase, is the person a long-term successful person in the company?
21. PMPraveer Melwani
  Totally agree. And I, um, you know, I think about some of the folks that we've added to our leadership team over time. I think we've been lucky that we've hired pretty well, but, like, many of those interviews, we've been getting to know those leaders for some time. Like Shaunt Darciero, I think, like, I think I remember going back and forth with him and for, like, nine months, maybe more. He'd come in, and we had give him, given him, like, full data dumps of, like, parts of our Salesforce instance, and so, like, he had been able to really internalize and understand, like, what the heck was going on so that, like, he could be in a place to, to say, "Okay, like I, I better understand the organization," um, versus saying like, "I, you know, I came in, I had to learn everything for that first three to six months," whatever it may be. This has happened with, um, you know, other leaders that we've brought on too. So I think if you're very quick to pull the trigger and not sharing, like, and you're hiding, it's not helpful to anyone. But then it's, you know, an organization also wants to fill those seats quickly, and you wanna-- sometimes it's better to have a leader than not, so it's always a balance.
22. BBBrett Berson
  What do you think is unique about your exec team relative to 10 other great exec teams at great publicly traded software businesses?
23. PMPraveer Melwani
  The majority of us have, like, four-plus year tenure working together. I don't think that happens in a lot of places. Your perspective is a lot of people end up churning out pretty quickly, or they end up with these shorter stints. And so just this, like, level of understanding of what, what each other is coming from. So many of us have gone through these life events together, uh, and created the scar tissue ar-around what it's been like to grow this organization. But then also on, like, the personal side, so many of us, like, got married, had kids, like, have, like, this, this set of connections with one another, that it's been really cool to see, um, it come together.
24. BBBrett Berson
  Like, that's pretty interesting. There's-- Everybody has been in the seat for the first time except for one person. What else is surprisingly beneficial about that?
25. PMPraveer Melwani
  Well, I mean, you come in with, like, no priors, right? Like there's, you know, you, you can learn a lot-
26. BBBrett Berson
  You can't copy and paste from.
27. PMPraveer Melwani
  No, and I, I don't think anyone's trying to do that, uh, at all. And I think there's also this, like, desire and understanding that we're all gonna be just as in the weeds as, as one another are because we understand that it's important to the organization. That ability and desire to, to go deep there is unique to the organization and the leaders that are around the table 'cause we've all kind of grown up in the organization
38:47 – 43:39
Why Figma acted like a public company in 2022
1. PMPraveer Melwani
  as well.
2. BBBrett Berson
  You've shared before sort of the importance of acting like a public company before you are one. It's something that you did at Figma. Maybe you could share a little bit more about that and, like, at what point should a company be trying to run like a public company, even if it isn't one?
3. PMPraveer Melwani
  I can say it now that we're a public company, but, like, uh, when I first started to get the questions from our board, I don't think anyone really understood, at least internally, like, the level of effort [chuckles] that would need to go into it. And so I, you know, I pulled the checklist when someone asked, and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, we're doing these things. We'll get there." It felt like more of this exercise that we would dip into at some point, but it didn't actually feel, like, as urgent. I think in, in Candid, the, the moment that I started to feel the urgency was when it felt like an inevitable outcome or, like, an inevitable place that we'd like to go. And I first felt that maybe in early part of '22. We went public in '25, but early part of '22 is when I felt it. It's actually when I first stepped into the CFO role. It was, like, the conversation I had, and I said, "Okay, like, here are the things that we're gonna start to, to get going on." And the, the first things I told Dylan, I was like, "Here are the people that I need to go and hire that are gonna be important people that are, are gonna drive this process forward." So it was, like, an IR leader, a, you know, uh, it was a controller, a tax leader, that kind of stuff. So people and process were the places I started. We then, like, go through that, that acquisition process with Adobe in the early part of... or rather, I guess it was in August of '22. And so then we're all kind of sitting there being like, "Okay, well, that was fun, but" ... and we hired a whole bunch of these people. Like, "But how do I actually continue to have them stay motivated and keep moving?" We came up with this, with this framework and way of operating where it's like, hey, you know, should this acquisition go forward or not? It's just a different framework for how we would go public, right? 'Cause you, if you believe that that acquisition was gonna go through, we'd have to fold into their close process. A lot of the deal thesis was to run Figma as a standalone business, and so the business was gonna sustain. So that allowed us to continue to kinda keep our foot on the gas and get going. And the deal terminates in December '23. '24 was, like, our, our first year of, like, really feeling like we needed to get a lot of things, like, in order and moving. So that's when we introduced things like mock earnings calls. That's when we really started to engage more public market investors. We went through a larger secondary, uh, at that moment in time, and we brought on folks like Fidelity and GIC, and that would end up becoming these, these folks that would anchor parts of our, our IPO. So that's, like, really in earnest when we got going.
4. BBBrett Berson
  And do you think that was the right time?
5. PMPraveer Melwani
  For us, we needed the time, um, 'cause there was, like, process that we had to build. There were, um-
6. BBBrett Berson
  But no, no, going through the whole thing, do you think you did it at the appropriate time? It should have been done early?
7. PMPraveer Melwani
  Like going public?
8. BBBrett Berson
  Becoming public-ready.
9. PMPraveer Melwani
  Uh, yes. Yeah. I think if we try to do it too soon, you're gonna introduce process, undue process. We hired a, um, an internal audit leader. She joined in, I wanna say it was, like, late 2024. It gave her enough time to, like, get going, but we knew also the inevitability of us actually building into, you know, the go public process. And so, you know, had we hired her sooner, what would she really have done? And do you actually wanna go and overlay a lot of the, the compliance frameworks and process, um, and slow the business down potentially ahead of the need? You know, the answer's probably not. Folks kinda look at it, and they're like, it can be this thing that happened quickly, but I, I actually feel like we needed that year to get going. But what then it allowed us to do is, like, when we said go and when we engaged bankers and advisors and, you know, lawyers and all that, we ran that part extremely efficiently. That I'm really proud of. We went from, like, org meeting to confidential filing in, like, four weeks, and we went from confidential filing to going public in, like, three and a half months. Uh, and so, like, that I think allowed us to really minimize distraction, but we only really got there because we had done some of the legwork ahead of time.
10. BBBrett Berson
  What are some of the subtle benefits that maybe people don't fully get about being a public company?
11. PMPraveer Melwani
  Like, it's in your moment of need if you're, if things aren't working well or you're, you know, you're-
12. BBBrett Berson
  You just have many more degrees of freedom.
13. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah. Let, let's say that you, you have pitched people on these annual tenders, right? For whatever reason, the company's not doing so well while you're private. You don't have the ability to do that. Total compensation, people are just sitting on a whole bunch of, of equity that, that's not valuable. I think that you're more likely to bleed talent in that model than you would be if you're a public company and have access to, you know, public equity. Even if your stock price is, is depressed, I think you have more degrees of freedom there. Um, so, you know, I'd bet on the company there to then have the ability to go attract, retain talent. And, you know, ultimately, I think, you know, a company is going to evolve and be better if they have good people. That potentially is the better outcome for, for that business. More often than not, what we hear today are from the companies that are doing extremely well, but I also wonder if, like, when you did a survey of the companies that aren't doing as hot-
14. BBBrett Berson
  Right
15. PMPraveer Melwani
  ... if they would've had the same answer.
16. BBBrett Berson
  So I just wanna wrap up with the question: what do you want people to say about you when you're not in the room in the context of leading the finance function? What do you want them to say about you behind your back?
17. PMPraveer Melwani
  I want them to say that, like, I show up extremely prepared. I ask good questions. I'm not slowing anyone down. I'm helping bridge perspectives, that they're proud of the team that we've assembled and get to work on together.
18. BBBrett Berson
  Thank you for joining.
19. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah.
20. BBBrett Berson
  Really appreciate it.
21. PMPraveer Melwani
  Thanks for having me. This was fun.
22. BBBrett Berson
  That was great.
23. PMPraveer Melwani
  Yeah.