1106: Scaling Smarter: Inside the Finance Revenue Engine | Tim Ritters, CFO, Gong

During his decade at Google, Tim Ritters worked at the intersection of product and finance, helping to launch financial systems in collaboration with engineering, marketing, and product teams. The role gave him early exposure to cross-functional work and large-scale data environments. “Day one, you’re working cross-functionally,” Ritters tells us. He adds that this mindset became foundational to his approach going forward. When Ritters joined Gong in 2019, he says the company had already begun challenging traditional approaches to customer data. “We asked a really interesting question… what could we do if we gathered the 99% of information about your customer that was not in a traditional CRM?” Ritters explains. According to him, that original question continues to shape Gong’s mission today. Ritters tells us that Gong’s platform has since scaled to analyze more than 3.5 billion customer interactions. He says the company now serves approximately 4,700 businesses globally, including organizations such as Google, LinkedIn, Canva, and Anthropic. The platform, Ritters notes, helps customers extract insights from a broader set of data sources—including conversations, emails, and documents—that may not be captured in traditional CRM systems. Ritters believes that AI adoption has made Gong’s value proposition more tangible to prospective buyers. “When [they] peel back the onion… they start seeing some of the incredible sort of results,” he says. According to Ritters, some customers have reported “halving of deal cycle times” using the platform. All of Gong’s growth to date has been organic, Ritters tells us, and he views the company’s trajectory as part of a broader evolution in how organizations approach customer intelligence. “The sweet spot we’re in right now,” he says, “is helping companies make smart business decisions.”