1110: When Leadership Mattered | Amanda Whalen, CFO, Kaviyo

Amanda Whalen’s first unit CFO role began with a question. “You’re not a finance technical person,” her company’s president told her, “but you’re the strongest leader on my team. Will you be willing to be the CFO and help me transform the finance function?” She accepted.

Over the following year, Whalen tells us, her team tackled three major initiatives: fixing broken cost accounting at a dairy plant, realigning sales incentives to drive margin, and overhauling the P&L reporting structure to match the new parent company’s expectations. The team was skeptical—“They said, ‘You’re crazy. There’s no way we can do that all in a year,’” she recalls. But they did. The business became 10% more profitable.

That experience, Whalen tells us, revealed finance as a powerful lever to drive business transformation—“You get to work with every function… It’s highly quantitative and analytical, and it involves working with a lot of really great people.”

Now CFO at Klaviyo, Whalen brings the same philosophy. In three years, the company more than doubled revenue and improved margins by 20 percentage points. She led Klaviyo’s IPO, expanding the company’s readiness across technical, strategic, and investor-facing dimensions. “It wasn’t just about getting ready to go public,” she says, “but about operating successfully as a public company for a long, long time.”

Whether transforming legacy operations or scaling a fast-growing SaaS firm, Whalen’s approach remains constant: think long-term, go deep into execution, and “be kind to your future self.”