560: When Your Tactic Becomes Your Strategy | Raman Kapur, CFO, Moogsoft

Years from now, if Silicon Valley’s glitterati were ever to gather to celebrate the opening of a National Cloud Computing Museum, CFO Raman Kapur would make an excellent tour guide for the facility’s finance wing. In fact, he could just chart the trajectory of his career from the dot-com bubble forward to help the world at large to better grasp how the cloud opportunity has grown and reshaped the finance business function. Our tour could begin at Intuit, the accounting software developer that Kapur joined in 2001 while seeking shelter from the dot-com bubble burst, where he quickly found his footing as a controller inside the company’s fast-growing QuickBooks division. Looking back at his Intuit career chapter, Kapur recalls a loud internal debate that would ultimately determine the fate of a money-losing unit known at the time as “QuickBooks on the Web.” “I’m proud to say that I was among those who helped to make the decision not to close it. There was still a lot of talk around the question, ‘Should we just close it down?,’” explains Kapur, who says that while the answer may seem obvious now, there was still room for debate back then, in light of the unit’s losses. Kapur’s controllership savvy propelled him into the cloud-friendly Big Data era at Splunk, where for nearly a decade he helped the data-hungry company to chart new growth paths as he himself advanced into the role of vice president of finance—capping a tenure that exposed him to the likes of Godfrey Sullivan, a Silicon Valley stalwart who served as Splunk’s chairman and CEO. Today, Kapur recalls a quarterly meeting at which Sullivan surveyed Splunk’s senior executives about the future direction of the company. According to Kapur, the discussion focused mainly on two areas where the company’s offerings had been experiencing some extra traction. Still, not everyone viewed the new areas of traction as resources-worthy, at which point Sullivan remarked: “Your successful tactic becomes your strategy”—an insight that Sullivan used to open the minds of his management team and which led the company to double down on one of the two areas – a space Splunk has since grown exponentially. Meanwhile, Kapur is able to quickly validate the insight as he reflects back on his own experiences: “More often than not, you try a couple of things and one of them becomes the bigger part of your business,” says Kapur, who would exit Splunk in 2018 to step into the CFO office at Moogsoft. –Jack Sweeney