It was instant. It was the first time that I actually felt like my life and my business were kind of aligned with each other.” That’s what Jill Woodworth tells me about becoming a CFO and that I know it was calling her.
Woodworth’s first role was as Chief Financial Officer at exercise equipment company Peloton Interactive. But in April, she joined forces with data-driven startup Alation. In addition to finance, Woodworth is also responsible for IT and legal functions.
Courtesy of Alation
“I just want to meet everyone,” she says of her plans for the first few months. “I want to understand what we do well and where there are opportunities for improvement.” Woodworth was drawn to the company by its employees and “the unique opportunity to learn a new business model and enterprise software”.
Alation, founded in 2012, has completed $123 million E Series funding round in late 2022, which brought total funding to $340 million to date. It raised the company’s current valuation round to more than $1.7 billion. Woodworth says the company is focused on growing the business and not pursuing an initial public offering at the time. Basically, Alation can crawl enterprise databases in order to create searchable catalogs of data, automatically indexing data by source. Machine learning is used to continually improve human understanding.
Woodworth compares how the platform works to Yelp, where you can do a simple search on a specific restaurant’s location, read reviews, and see which restaurants are most popular. “Alation is a platform that allows you to see the data and queries that an organization is using from a crowd-sourcing perspective,” she explains. “You can choose from data that is trusted and widely used by the organization, and you can see that visualization in the tool. Just like Yelp. Kind of like the Google platform.
Companies using Alation include Pfizer, Salesforce, Robinhood, and Aon. “We already serve more than 450 clients worldwide – Latin America, Asia Pacific, EMEA – and serve 35% of the Fortune 100,” says Woodworth.
Three lessons
Prior to joining Peloton in 2018, Woodworth worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and as a Managing Director at JPMorgan. She built a global financial team at Peloton to support the company’s growth and led its IPO and several other capital raises.
At the height of the pandemic, Peloton’s business performance was boosted by the growing demand for at-home workouts, With its shares up 350% And Revenue jumps 172% in one quarter, luck mentioned. But when that momentum could not be sustained, the peloton took a spectacular fall. Problems with the company led to the resignation of co-founder and CEO John Foley in February 2022. Foley was replaced by Barry McCarthy, former CFO of Spotify and Netflix.
Woodworth resigned from her position in June 2022 and continued to serve as a consultant until September. Peloton said 8-K filing that her departure “is not the result of any disagreement with the company on any subject, including its operations, policies, or practices.” Woodworth told me she made the decision to move on and look for new opportunities. Her successor, Liz Coddington, a former Amazon web services executive, is starting in June 2022.
Any learning from both what went right and what went wrong in the peloton? “A few things,” she says. “One thing, having managed Peloton through extreme growth, and COVID obviously exacerbating that exponentially, (in terms of) really wanting to meet consumer demand at that time, I really learned in retrospect the importance of balancing that Growth as you build that back-office operational scale to be able to handle that growth. You really can’t have one without the other.”
She continued, “You need to balance investments in your technology stack and working with a team to develop scalable operating processes that will enable the company to grow in the future. And if you don’t grow those things together, it makes it a little difficult.”
Another lesson – “what I did in Peloton and what I’m doing (at Alation) with amazing talent” is to build a finance team that plays an important role in company-wide decision-making by drawing on data and financial analysis to understand where investments need to be made, says Woodworth. “What works well, and what doesn’t? How to fail quickly and get it right, of course.”
“I think it goes without saying that the important lesson is to keep a close eye on your cost structure, no matter where you are in your growth cycle, or what the investor’s mindset is at any given time,” says Woodworth. “In all customer economic climates, I think it’s a responsibility to really make sure we manage risks and costs.”
Although she is no longer with the company, Woodworth enjoys working out on the equipment in her spare time. “I love everything Peloton,” she says. “Rowing the peloton, the treadmill, it’s not so much the bike. That’s my husband’s thing.”
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Big deal
In the asset management sector around the world this year, through May 2, private equity and venture capital firms have announced $5 billion in investments across 43 deals, finds S&P Global Market Intelligence. “With private equity interest strong in this sector, it is likely that the full-year totals for 2023 will match private equity investment in asset management in 2021 and 2022.” According to the report. The research found that in the first quarter of 2023 alone, asset management firms raised $4.89 billion through 30 deals.
Courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence
Go deeper
A study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that American workers who experienced workplace discrimination were associated with a higher risk of developing high blood pressure. “The negative effects of discrimination on cardiovascular disease have significant implications for worker health and point to the need for government and employer policy interventions to address discrimination,” According to the study. The researchers tracked 1,246 workers for about eight years. During that period, they measured instances of workplace discrimination and hypertension.
leaderboard
Refinement of E. ita He was named EVP and CFO at the Omnicell, Inc. (Nasdaq: OMCL), a manufacturer of automation systems for hospitals and pharmacies, as of June 1. Etta is succeeded by Peter J. Kuipers, who, as previously announced, is stepping down. Kuipers will remain with the company through July 1 for the transition. Etta has more than 20 years of experience leading global financial organizations. He most recently served as Chief Financial Officer of Essilor of America, Inc. , a subsidiary of EssilorLuxottica SA. Prior to that, Etta was Vice President and Global Chief Financial Officer for Johnson & Johnson Vision. He has also worked in various financial roles of increasing responsibility at The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft Corporation, and Eli Lilly and Company.
Steve Weber He was promoted to the position of Chief Financial Officer Fico (NYSE: FICO), an analytics software company. Weber was appointed interim Chief Financial Officer in January 2023, succeeding Michael McLaughlin. FICO retained a global executive search firm and conducted research before selecting Weber, according to the company. Prior to taking over as interim CFO, Weber served as the company’s vice president, treasurer, tax and investor relations. At FICO, he served as President of FP&A, leading multiple public bond issuances, managing syndicated bank lending, M&A due diligence and guiding strategic financial planning.
he heard
“My base case is that we’re not really going to think about cutting[prices]until 2024. In my world, inflation isn’t going down that fast and in that regard, cutting prices doesn’t really fit into that scenario.”
– said the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Raphael Bostick CNBC squawk box in an interview Monday.