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If Mark Seidel had told us that he had spent many of his high school evenings peering through a telescope at the stars, we would have likely believed him. However, Seidel\u2014CFO of space security start-up True Anomaly\u2014swiftly short circuits the familiar narrative of a space-loving youth.

Instead, he draws our attention to his early entrepreneurial endeavors on eBay (he achieved power selling status while in high school), and, as for his finance career, he tells us that he has long preferred not to narrow his lens but to widen it.

Indeed, such was the case at Goldman Sachs, where he spent 7 career years as an investment banker.

\u201cAt Goldman, I was a generalist, so I got to cover all different types of industries and transactions\u2014which means that the breadth and scope of the types of topics were incredibly wide,\u201d recalls Seidel, who notes that it was this same preference for a wide lens that drew him to the CFO role.

Observes Seidel: \u201cThe CFO role is a cross-functional one. While strategy can mean different things to different people, for me it really fits within my scope, my roles, and my responsibilities as a CFO.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney