BROADCASTS.com

b'

Twenty-four hours after Brian Kinion\\u2019s first earnings call as a CFO of a publicly-traded frim, his aspirations as a finance chief quickly became deflated as Vista Equity Partners made clear its intent to buy the company, a developer of marketing automation software known as Marketo.

\\u201cMine became a very different role than what I had anticipated\\u2014almost all of the executives with whom I had worked left, but I stuck around for another 6 months to help the team take it from public to private,\\u201d remembers Kinion, who nevertheless views his Marketo career chapter as one of the most formative steps along his vocational path.

To Kinion, who had joined the company several years earlier as vice president of finance, his Marketo sojourn was important because it allowed him to check the \\u201cCFO\\u201d box, thus guaranteeing him a coveted edge when it came to future CFO appointments.

What\\u2019s more, Kinion says, Marketo was where the full breadth of his past experiences could finally be put to use and where he finally came to \\u201cown the financial model\\u201d\\u2014a leadership leap made possible by then-CFO Fred Ball, who Kinion says made no secret of his mission to develop others. \\xa0

Ball had led the company through Marketo\\u2019s successful IPO in\\xa0May 2013\\xa0and occupied its CFO office as annual revenue at the firm grew from\\xa0$14 million\\xa0in 2010 to\\xa0$210 million\\xa05 years later.\\xa0

\\u201cHe told me, \\u2018Come in and take my job, and even if you don\\u2019t end up taking it, I\\u2019m still I\\u2019m going to train you to be a CFO somewhere else,\\u2019\\u201d explains Kinion, who in 2017 would exit Marketo to accept a CFO position at Upwork, where once more he became the CFO of a publicly traded company after the private firm\\u2019s IPO in the following year.\\xa0\\u2013Jack Sweeney