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It\u2019s perhaps no surprise that the late 1990s came to mind for Anup Singh when we recently asked him to share with us a finance career lesson or insight from his past.

It seems that our CFO guests have become ever more reflective on the period of years preceding the dotcom implosion as they seek to help their companies navigate the murky economics of the post-COVID age.

\u201cThis was a time when many firms ignored the core fundamentals of a successful business model,\u201d recalls Singh, who at the time headed up FP&A for Excite@Home, an new entity formed following the $6.7 billion acquisition of Internet portal Excite by @Home networks.

Not unlike its acquisitive parent company, Excite@Home had an appetite for growth.  

\u201cWe spent $1 billion to buy a company called Blue Mountain Arts, which had zero dollars in revenue, but the idea was to buy \u201ceyeballs\u201d\u2014and the fundamentals just got away from us,\u201d continues Singh, who in part was responsible for supplying analysts and investors external guidance as the environment for dotcom\u2019s grew ever more  turbulent.

\u201cWe were a casualty of the era,\u201d notes Singh, who would become tasked with helping Excite@Home\u2019s bankers, lawyers, and accountants to initiate a financial restructuring of company.

Apart from succumbing to the dotcom era\u2019s irrational business mind-set, Singh observes, Excite@Home also paid a price for a complex ownership structure that undermined its ability to achieve an alignment between its board and the company\u2019s strategy.

Having witnessed up close this strategic alignment failure, Singh made sure that going forward in his career, he was keenly focused on management directives that allowed executive teams to achieve strategic alignment.

Such agreement, Singh relates, needs to center on simple statements such as \u201cHere are the three bets that we\u2019re going to place,\u201d \u201cHere are the products that we\u2019re going to build,\u201d and \u201cHere are the markets that we\u2019re going after.\u201d

This is a prescription upon which Singh has perhaps recently come to rely on more than once, as in his role as Illumio CFO he has sought to keep the software company\u2019s ambitious international expansion plans in check and in step with the uncertainty of the current economic environment.  

According to Singh, Illumio is now opting for \u201cdepth over breadth\u201d and \u201cdoubling down\u201d inside its largest overseas markets, rather than focusing on growing the overall number of countries within which it resides.    

Says Singh: \u201cWe\u2019re really trying to sharpen our focus and say, \u2018Here are three markets on which we\u2019re going to bet in the coming year.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney