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Joining Intel Corp. in 1999 as a recent college graduate, David Freeman began his finance career as part of the tech giant\u2019s plus-size finance team that supported various business groups. Looking back, Freeman finds that few aspects of the tech giant\u2019s business were more influential in shaping his early career years than the company\u2019s direct and \u201cconfrontational\u201d culture.

\u201cThey expected excellence,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThey expected details, and they expected you to know your business.\u201d

Along the way, despite the many opportunities that Intel regularly offered him, Freeman came to realize that he wanted to open his next career door somewhere else.

\u201cI didn\u2019t really love being at a large company, so\u2014after 7 years there\u2014I decided that it was time to move on,\u201d continues Freeman, who opted to join a pioneering cloud company known as NetSuite.

At fewer than 500 employees, NetSuite was aiming to be among the first SaaS companies to go public, and Freeman tells us that he ultimately had a hand in drafting the company\u2019s S-1\u2014a hands-on role that ultimately led him to spending 16- to 20-hour days at the printer.

However, Freeman believes that the greatest takeaways from his time at NetSuite may have come from the exposure that he had to the decision-making done by NetSuite\u2019s CFO during the IPO process.    

\u201cFor the first time, I could see day-in and day-out what the CFO did, and this really gave me kind of a better sense of the role,\u201d he remembers.

We can see that as his career moved forward, Freeman\u2019s pursuit of experience and opportunities left little doubt that he had the CFO office in mind as a destination. Still, when the head of sales at Nutanix invited him to step into a VP of Sales operations position, he didn\u2019t hesitate to stray from what might have been a more traditional finance path.

Says Freeman: \u201cTo be honest, I really hadn\u2019t thought about this type of role that much, but I kind of felt like, \u2018Hey, if there\u2019s ever a time to do it, why not now?'\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney