Podcasts classical CFO THOUGHT LEADER 664: Good Judgment: Every CFO's Star Attribute | Gary Swidler, CFO, Match Group

664: Good Judgment: Every CFO's Star Attribute | Gary Swidler, CFO, Match Group

Published: Jan. 10, 2021, 11 p.m.

Back in 2015, when Gary Swidler was a candidate for a CFO position at Match Group, the seasoned banking executive recalls being told by company management: \u201cOn paper, you are definitely not the most qualified person for the job.\u201d

The gap on Swidler\u2019s resume was due to the fact that he had never held a CFO position\u2014a void that frustrates many first-time CFO candidates who routinely find themselves second in line to candidates whose resumes list previous CFO appointments.

Perhaps frustrated CFO candidates might find some comfort in the notion that Match, a company whose online offerings excel at achieving \u201cmatches\u201d\u2014albeit romantic ones\u2014chose to discard industry\u2019s traditional CFO matching criteria.

According to Swidler, the CEO remarked: \u201c\u2018You\u2019ve never done this before, but I\u2019ve known you for a long time and you have very good judgment. You\u2019re a smart person with high integrity, so don\u2019t prove me wrong.\u201d

Swidler\u2019s comments expose the roles that intuition and instincts often play when it comes to CFO hiring. They also draw our attention to the type of partner that Match management was seeking: not a blind follower or \u201cyes man,\u201d but someone upon whose counsel the CEO and a board could rely.

Meanwhile, as a banker, Swidler\u2019s relationship with his future company had gone back not months but years, giving him an edge over veteran CFOs who were less familiar with Match as well as IAC, the holding company that at the time owned 100 percent of the online dating company.

However, within 2 months of Swidler\u2019s arrival in Match\u2019s CFO office, IAC sold 15 percent of its shares to the public, allowing Match to raise a little more than $400 million and giving the company a market cap of around $3 billion.

In the coming months and years, more IAC shares were expected to be sold to the public, which would allow Match Group to becoming increasingly unfettered from its largest investor.

Still, IAC was evidently not yet ready to part with its 85 percent and opted to hold on to its shares until this past June, when it completed a spinoff of Match Group by selling its shares to IAC\u2019s existing shareholders and thereby giving Match a market cap of $30 billion.

\u201cWe had such a good business, and we were doing so well\u2014IAC enjoyed owning us and didn\u2019t want to give us up,\u201d says Swidler, who would likely not hesitate to tell us that when it comes to large investors, breaking up is hard to do.\xa0\xa0\xa0\u2013 Jack Sweeney