About this episode
If you were to casually meet CyberArk CFO Josh Siegel for the first time at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), you might quickly assume that he has spent the balance of his career-building years in nearby Silicon Valley. Certainly, on paper his resume lists the requisite number of finance job titles and entrepreneurial milestones that you might expect the bio of an accomplished Silicon Valley CFO to itemize. Later, as you reflect on the mild-mannered “Cyber CFO” whom you briefly encountered, you make one last entry in your mental manifest: CFO Siegel was queuing up for a flight to Tel Aviv. In the end, it’s this entry that’s most telling. Or at least it’s the mental note that perhaps exposes the most about Siegel’s present as well as his past. The fact is that Siegel first began frequenting Tel Aviv departure and arrival gates back in the mid-1990s, when he felt compelled to divert his finance career-building into a more entrepreneurial lane. However, instead of zigging to Silicon Valley, Siegel purposely zagged to Israel—a move that he executed while brandishing a resume with modest accounting feats but deep treasury experience. “When I first got to Israel in the mid-1990s, they were really Old School, and the fact that I was not an accountant meant that I would never be hired as a controller,” comments Siegel, who prior to moving to Israel had held the position of director of capital markets at Sallie Mae, the erstwhile government-sponsored lending enterprise. As Siegel acquired different finance experiences and titles over time, he says, Israel-based businesses and the country’s widening entrepreneurial corridor recast their notions of finance leadership. “Today, the ideas around what makes a strategic finance executive in Israel have really changed,” reports Siegel, echoing a view widely shared among his Silicon Valley peers. Still, more than departure gates may today expose a difference in Siegel’s finance leadership upbringing. As he says, “A goal that I have shared with our CEO is answering the question of how to scale up this company with profitable growth—and that’s just not the standard modus operandi of a lot of Silicon Valley companies.” – Jack Sweeney