1109: Building Finance Teams for Scale, Speed, and Smarts | Larry Roseman, CFO, Thumbtack

When the Silicon Valley Bank crisis erupted in early 2023, Larry Roseman was already well-acquainted with market upheaval. A member of the CFO class appointed around 2020—just as the pandemic began—Roseman had weathered previous storms. He began his career amid the dot-com collapse, then advanced through the 2008 financial crisis. “Scar tissue helps,” he tells us.

So when he landed in Palm Springs for a tennis tournament and learned SVB was in freefall—taking all of Thumbtack’s cash with it—his weekend plans were immediately sidelined. “Literally getting on the plane and landing, and the whole thing sort of blowing up,” Roseman recalls. “I was holed up in the hotel room for days,” working through how to ensure payroll and access to capital.

That crisis became a defining moment. “That was the catalyst for us,” he tells us. Roseman used it to pivot the business away from growth-at-all-costs and toward sustainable, profitable growth. In just a few years, Thumbtack went from -$60 million in EBITDA to +$60 million.

His ability to adapt comes from a varied career path—public accounting at Ernst & Young, investment banking at Bear Stearns and JPMorgan, and operational finance at eBay, where he helped spin off PayPal. At Thumbtack, a national home services marketplace, he’s scaled the finance team tenfold and implemented a discipline around contribution margin, hire rate, and CAC.

“The P&L doesn’t lie,” Roseman tells us—especially in times of crisis, when it’s clarity, not comfort, that defines the leader.