The modern CFO: From cost controller to growth driver

What is the CFO’s role today, and how do they work with other teams to help a company succeed? In conversations with Sequoia Capital Partner Ravi Gupta and Datadog CFO David Obstler, one theme stood out: the CFO role is evolving from ‘financial gatekeeper’ to ‘strategic partner.’

Moderated by Ramp CFO Will Petrie, these panel discussions explored how CFOs can move beyond cost control to become enablers of growth who partner with CEOs on critical decisions.

Here are some key themes that emerged:

Expand beyond traditional score-keeping

Gupta noted that great CFOs don’t just accurately track the score of the game; they actively change the score. This distinction in the CFO’s role shows up in how they partner with the CEO. “When a decision needs to be made, the best CFOs hear, ‘Help me make it,’ not, ‘Give me the data so I can make it,’” Gupta explained.

Obstler described how CFOs can move beyond their traditional role by leveraging their unique vantage point across the business. Because CFOs see across every business function, they can connect strategy, execution, and communication in a way no one else can.

In his view, the modern CFO wears three hats that work together:

• Strategic partner: Understand the business and enable smarter investment and pricing decisions that maximize opportunity for the company.
• Communicator. Articulate the company’s mission and direction across teams, investors, and the board.
• Operator. Build the infrastructure across controls, accounting, and procurement that enables the company to scale.

Align teams on key metrics that matter

The most effective CFOs align their teams around the few measures that capture most value.

At Datadog, Obstler said that aligning around a metric can also help create a shared goal across teams. Obstler’s shared goal with the CRO is to maximize ARR over the short and long term. This helps him position finance as a partner, prioritizing a common objective across teams to achieve the best outcome, while still keeping a profitability metric in mind.

In his words, “We're here together, trying to create a bigger, long-term sustainable company.”

Know what you can’t measure

Finance teams often face challenges in budgeting when ROI can’t be clearly quantified. Brand marketing decisions illustrate this problem well — while a campaign could increase brand awareness in the long term, metrics to capture that impact in the short run may be hard to define.

Obstler noted that finance leaders should balance the need to measure with the willingness to experiment. He shared the story of Datadog’s now-famous slides at AWS re:Invent which allowed attendees to literally “slide” between levels and take photos. While he was initially skeptical of this idea, he admits today that this experiment was wildly successful from a branding perspective.

“There are things that aren’t as logical, or you might not be able to attach straight value to them,” he said. “You’ve got to be flexible in this seat to listen to others and try some things.”

Make information accessible to everyone

Panelists emphasized the importance of creating a culture of transparency, where information is shared across teams rather than centralized within finance.

"It's really important to have set up the information and knowledge systems so that everybody can see the data,” Obstler said. “It isn’t a good culture to have finance hold the spreadsheets and bring them out only at certain moments.”

This transparency takes many forms at Datadog: tools that show all deals and assess their probability, and regular meetings between Obstler’s team and sales leadership to understand opportunities and how finance can support deals in motion.

Use AI to your advantage

Panelists agreed that AI adoption in finance is a competitive imperative.

Gupta challenged CFOs to take the lead on AI transformation within the company. "If you think your company is falling behind on AI, go be an AI leader in finance,” he said. “Have a better finance AI stack than the product team. What credibility do you have if you don't use it yourself?"

He encouraged teams to better engage with AI through more precise prompting and greater context sharing. This starts with a shift in mindset: "Treat AI like a genius hire that you begged to come work at your company. When they mess up, think: 'What did I not do to prep them?'”

Obstler noted that Datadog has about 40 AI initiatives across finance, focused on employee productivity tools and leveraging AI in existing platforms like Ramp, NetSuite, and Salesforce.

"What we're trying to do is make people's lives more productive so they can spend more time thinking, rather than on repetitive tasks in procurement, accounting, and general ledger,” he said.

A race worth running

Gupta closed by arguing that there has never been a better time for CFOs to step into their power and steer the business forward.

"This is the most interesting time in technology I've ever seen. It's not even close,” he noted.

“Getting to play in this time, to be accountable, to make the hard decisions … you will look back and know it was a race worth running.”