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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 \\u201cCyber CFO\\u201d 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\\u2019s this entry that\\u2019s most telling. Or at least it\\u2019s the mental note that perhaps exposes the most about Siegel\\u2019s 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\\u2014a move that he executed while brandishing a resume with modest accounting feats but deep treasury experience.

\\u201cWhen 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,\\u201d 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\\u2019s widening entrepreneurial corridor recast their notions of finance leadership.

\\u201cToday, the ideas around what makes a strategic finance executive in Israel have really changed,\\u201d reports Siegel, echoing a view widely shared among his Silicon Valley peers.

Still, more than departure gates may today expose a difference in Siegel\\u2019s finance leadership upbringing.

As he says, \\u201cA goal that I have shared with our CEO is answering the question of how to scale up this company with profitable growth\\u2014and that\\u2019s just not the standard modus operandi of a lot of Silicon Valley companies.\\u201d \\u2013Jack Sweeney