The finance pyramid — David Yan on insights, not raw data

David Yan was hired into a 90-person KPMG audit class in Mountain View in the mid-2000s — a Sarbanes-Oxley class that, in a less regulated year, would have been 60 or 65. He almost certainly wouldn't have made the cut without the regulatory wave that put the firm in hiring overdrive. Five years later, he had moved through Synopsys, ForeScout, Twitter, Wrike, and Womply on a deliberate arc deeper into SMB SaaS, ending at Treez — the vertical-SaaS backbone of the US cannabis-retail industry, where state-by-state regulatory variation makes every market expansion a separate compliance project. He has been Treez's CFO for almost five years.

The chair David describes is the modern-CFO chair the catalogue keeps circling, but his contribution is the structural one: the pyramid. The job isn’t insights as a vague aspiration. It’s a stack of capabilities — finance ops, accounting, data integrity, planning, analytics — where each layer is the prerequisite for the next, and the team gets built backwards from the questions the CEO will ask twelve months out. The pyramid is the spine of the conversation.

The pyramid, layer by layer#

The framing is the cleanest organising principle for a finance function in the catalogue.

I think of it as a pyramid. At the very bottom you have to have the finance operations. If you don't have that, you're not going to have the accounting. If you don't have the accounting, you're not going to have data integrity. And if you don't have data integrity, you're not going to be able to do financial planning. Above the financial planning is analytics and insights.

The discipline is sequencing. A finance org that nails analytics on top of weak data integrity ships fast, confident, wrong answers. A planning function built on imperfect actuals mis-forecasts in ways that compound across quarters. David’s heuristic for how mature the stack should be: match current state plus one year of forward-looking ambition, and aim to be one year advanced of where the median company at your stage would be. Far enough ahead to lead from the front; not so far ahead you’ve over-spent on infrastructure the business can’t yet use.

Insights, not raw data#

The pyramid only works if you build it in the right direction.

It's not about raw data. It's about insights. You have to start with what insights you need to run the business one year forward, and work backward into what systems, what processes, and what team structure would best help you get to that state.

The reflexive finance-leader move is to start with the systems — buy the ERP, integrate the warehouse, drop in a dashboard — and trust that insights will fall out. David’s argument is that they won’t, because the insights you need shape the system architecture, not the other way around. At Treez the insights run sideways across 24 recreational state markets, each with its own regulatory contour, each with its own data ingestion. The team structure, the ERP customisations, the analytics layer — all of it is downstream of the question what do I need to know about this market 12 months from now? The CFO who runs the question in the wrong direction ends up with a fast finance function that produces the wrong reports on time.

The rule of 10#

The first-week move is the most portable piece of operating advice in the conversation.

Go pick 10 sales contracts, pick 10 offer letters, go pick 10 T and E expense reports, go pick 10 performance reviews, go pick 10 of anything out there that might be important, and just read it.

Three hours of work in week one. The samples are small enough to fit in a morning and large enough to surface a pattern. Ten contracts tell you whether sales has discipline on terms or whether the company is signing whatever closes. Ten offer letters tell you whether comp ranges are tight or whether the company is over-paying to fill seats. Ten T&E reports tell you whether spending culture is loose or controlled. Ten performance reviews tell you whether the management layer is giving honest feedback. The rule is a calibration the org chart and the financials don’t give you — and it produces actions for the next ten weeks that the data room never could.

Think like an investor before you join#

David’s final move is to compress the first-100-days plan to 60, and to push the diligence forward.

When you interviewed for a role, if you're interviewing for a CFO role, you have to think in some ways like an investor.

A CFO joining a company is making a personal-capital bet on a multi-year horizon. The diligence available to them is comparable to what an investor gets — financials, OKR performance, execution patterns, legal matters — and the discipline should be the same. By day one, the broad picture is known. The first 60 days are about confirming, prioritising, and starting to ship visible motion. The 100-day plan that gets written too early usually gets thrown out by day 60 anyway; the CFO who treats the ramp as a slow learning exercise loses the window in which the org is most receptive to a new operating cadence. The diligence work upstream is what makes the compressed ramp possible.

What to listen for#

The full episode runs the KPMG Sarbanes-Oxley hiring class, the Synopsys-ForeScout-Twitter-Wrike-Womply arc deeper into SMB SaaS, the cannabis-industry regulatory mechanics (state-by-state legality, schedule-one drug classification at the federal level, the SPAC-vs-traditional-investor funding paths), a quickfire metrics comparison across Treez, Womply, and Wrike, and the pyramid-and-rule-of-10 first-100-days frame in detail. David’s three-word descriptor is Curious. Determined. Builder. Listen at /podcast/ep-016-david-yan; for the longer conversation across the catalogue, see /topics/modern-finance-function or /topics/fpa.