The IPO masterclass lives before the bell — Rakib Azad

Rakib Azad was pre-med at the University of Rochester before the sight of blood pushed him sideways into economics in his sophomore year. He graduated in 2001 into a closed banking market, took a financial-analyst seat at Footstar — the company that ran Kmart's shoe operation — and spent the next decade in retail and consumer-products finance at Footlocker, Avon, and the Havaianas US business. The wholesale shift into tech came in the mid-2010s, and the inflection point was MongoDB. He joined as a Director of FP&A in 2015 and helped scale the company through its 2017 IPO and into a multi-billion-dollar public company. He has been the CFO at Alkira — a Series C multi-cloud network-as-a-service company — for three months.

The spine of the conversation is what those years at MongoDB taught about running a public-company FP&A function — and how that knowledge translates to a Series C chair pricing infrastructure by the gigabyte. The IPO masterclass is in the years before the bell, not the day of it. The pricing question is harder than the comp question, which is harder than the team question. Rakib’s frame is mechanical, and it works because he has lived it three times.

Consumption pricing and the comp problem#

The pricing architecture at Alkira is the cleanest worked example of an infra-SaaS finance problem.

I pay a lot of attention to the go-to-market org and how that needs to evolve.

Alkira’s product is priced per gigabyte moved, with t-shirt sizing layered on. The customer mix runs three ways: pay-as-you-go, consumption-commit (a minimum spend booked upfront), and fixed-price annual deals. The CFO loves the predictability of commit and fixed-price ARR; the sales team loves the certainty of close-credit. The pay-as-you-go book is the friction point. Rakib’s working answer is a quarterly annualised-revenue reset: measure consumption every quarter through year one, accrue quota credit against the running annualised number, and let attainment drop if usage dips below the previous quarter. The mechanic ties the sales rep to the customer outcome instead of the logo land. The mix of pricing structures is what gives both sides a workable economic model — and the design conversation is one of Rakib’s first big calls in the seat.

The IPO masterclass lives in the FP&A seat#

The MongoDB IPO is the part of the conversation a generalist might mis-read as a war story.

The IPO masterclass is in the years before the bell, not on the day of it.

Rakib’s FP&A perch at MongoDB owned three threads in parallel. One: the internal forecast, rigorous enough to anchor the Wall Street model the company would beat-and-raise against for the next twenty quarters. Two: the red-yellow-green readiness sheet the CFO reviewed every two weeks, tracking governance, systems, and board composition against IPO standards. Three: the S1 drafting sessions and banking bake-offs Rakib sat in as a fly on the wall, absorbing what investors actually cared about. The work that compounded wasn’t the bell-ringing. It was the operational rewiring: GNA allocations stopped being a dumping ground and got pushed out by usage; the FP&A team learned to model GAAP-compliant P&L optimisations; the company built the beat-and-raise muscle three quarters before the cadence had to be muscle memory. The IPO was the start of the post-IPO clock.

Build the team backwards from the exit#

The hiring matrix Rakib runs is the inverse of the impulse most early-stage CFOs follow.

I love to have a well-rounded team. You get the best work from some of the parts who are really different.

The first hire at Alkira will be a strategic financial analyst — an ex-banker who has done one operational tour, models the three statements cold, and can turn scenarios around fast. The second is a strong head-of-accounting with revenue-recognition 606 depth and the appetite to think strategically about the P&L. The third is business-ops and analytics: an internal consultant with data-analytics chops and the temperament to translate insights to stakeholders. Two-to-three years before any IPO conversation, the technical-accounting depth comes in — someone who understands the new GAAP guidance and can pass a PCAOB audit. The internal-audit, SEC-reporting, and IR roles are the last six-to-twelve months. Rakib’s discipline: roles that sit idle for six months because the IPO timeline slipped are roles that didn’t need to be hired yet.

Diversity as a pipeline discipline, not a slogan#

If there's no females on the pipeline, I'm like, hey, what's going on here? Because I do want to make sure we have a healthy funnel that's bringing folks from all backgrounds.

The mechanic is upstream, not downstream. Hire the best person for the role — but if the incoming pipeline has no women, no different socioeconomic backgrounds, no candidates outside the traditional finance template, the funnel is what gets rebuilt. New York helps; the city’s natural mix produces diverse top-of-funnels organically. The downstream effect is that the team Rakib built at Chainalysis (thirty-plus people by the time he left) was diverse on the classic measures without ever optimising for it as a target. Most CFOs treat diversity as a hiring outcome instead of a pipeline design — and the outcome-only frame is the one that produces tokens instead of teams.

What to listen for#

The full episode runs the Bangladeshi-immigrant arc, the pre-med-to-finance pivot, the retail-finance years, the Chainalysis Series-B-to-Series-F scaling (the $470M raised in 18 months during the COVID crypto bull run), and the listening-tour first 90 days at Alkira. Rakib’s three-word descriptor is Curious. Kind. Intelligent. Listen at /podcast/ep-018-rakib-azad; for the other IPO-readiness essays in the catalogue, see Ananth Avva, Karan Bhople, and Arvind Agarwal, or /topics/ipo-readiness.