Jack Hagel

speaker

43 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2019 last heard May 2019

Jack Hagel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · $3.75M Signing Bonus: The Red-Hot Competition for CFOs · 28 May 2019 podcast

They...

There's a lot of change, a lot of uncertainty.

There's a lot of risk, but also a lot of reward.

But once through the ringer is oftentimes enough for them.

So unicorns are these high-profile, high-value tech startups.

The benchmark to become a unicorn is often $1 billion or higher.

Some of the biggest tech companies in the Valley, Uber and Airbnb among them, had some difficulty either hiring or retaining CFOs.

The area where we're really seeing a lot of difficulty for the recruiting of CFOs is this group of companies that are sort of right on the cusp of reaching that billion-dollar threshold.

Many of these companies that have passed that threshold, many of them have a CFO in hand, but there seems to be a real battle, especially below them.

But you're right, even some bigger companies are struggling with this.

Well, so as the number of unicorns or high-valued tech startups grows, and as there's more competition for these CFOs, they're looking around and seeing who's got this experience, this tech experience, the finance experience, the ability to manage

all the things that a CFO is expected to manage.

And in many cases, that's coming from established public tech companies.

And so what we're hearing from recruiters is that CFOs who are already in these positions at these established companies are very sought after.

And it's causing some of these companies to really pony up a lot of cash, not only to attract CFOs, but also to keep their own CFOs or their own finance executives in-house.

That's right.

In fact, at Activision Blizzard, the video game maker, they lost their CFO to Netflix.

So to fill the vacancy, they went to a former CFO who was still at the company in another executive position, asked him to take his old job back.

And as part of that deal, they gave him $3.75 million.

And also, I think they don't want to send the wrong signal to the market about the timing of an IPO in some cases.

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