322.5 The Afterpod | Mike Foley, CFO, Unity Technologies

When you entered the CFO office for the first time at Unity Technologies, what’s the one piece of advice you wish someone had given you?  

Foley: We started this conversation talking about the organization that I inherited and how I've had to change that. I would've put much more emphasis earlier on systems capabilities of the company. Being a first time CFO, I came in with an observation. We need a planning team. We need a controller. We need to build that team. A year and a half into doing that, the constraint wasn't the capabilities of the team. It doesn't matter how good they are. If you don't have the systems to support them, they can't do their job. And so, I would've parallel tracked that. I would have, maybe not hired a CIO straight off the bat, but I would've hired a great director of IT and systems that understands, you know, as I said before, a great modern architecture should be, and driven that really hard and early while building the finance capabilities, so that we'd be at a point today where all of that's on place, and it's not. So, you know, look hard at systems early, get advice, get expertise on where you really are. It took me too long to understand the hole we were digging ourselves at off in a systems perspective, and it does take a long time to get out of that hole. So, look at that early, look at that day one while you're looking at all the other functions, it's just as important.