As customer expectations continue to evolve, marketers must adapt by delivering more personalized, timely, and efficient communication. This is where the online marketing platform Customer.io truly shines.
Customer.io enables tech-savvy marketers to engage with their customers in a more meaningful way through emails, SMS, push notifications, and more. For the fast-growing SaaS companies that Customer.io serves, this capability could translate into stronger customer relations, higher conversion rates, and increased scalability.
In this episode of The Modern CFO, host Andrew Seski talks with Customer.io CFO Zhi Li about his nonlinear career path, the impact Customer.io can have within organizations, how marketers can use AI as a fractional assistant, and more.
Show Links
- Check out Customer.io
- Follow Customer.io on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram
- Connect with Zhi Li on LinkedIn
- Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn
Transcript
Please note that the transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. The content in the podcast is not intended as investment advice, and is meant for informational and entertainment purposes only.
[00:00:00] Andrew Seski: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Modern CFO Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Seski. Today, I'm joined by Zhi Li, CFO of Customer.io. Zhi, thank you so much for being here today.
[00:00:21] Zhi Li: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:23] Andrew Seski: So I'd love to talk about your career progression, the route to the CFO role, your first time as a CFO in earlier companies. But before we do so, I'd love to hear a little bit of background as to what you were interested even in undergrad and some of the first roles that you had, you know, right out of Penn.
[00:00:41] Zhi Li: Yeah, yeah. So maybe just a little bit of myself and then we can probably launch into different topics that would go in there. But so I was born in China and then grew up in the Bay Area and then went to Penn. You and I just chatted about like Philly, which is the city that I really love. But after Penn, I actually started my career in Canada. So I was in finance at a wireless division of a large telco called Bell Canada. And then after that, I moved back to the US. So I worked in investment banking in New York in the tech group of Credit Suisse. So if you follow banking, you know, Credit Suisse might be called UBS or First Boston later on or something like that. So that's the some of the new dynamic there. But I learned a lot during that time in banking. Worked a lot as well but, you know, on many tech M&A and IP financing deals there and also get to interact with a ton of smart, hard-working, talented people. And then after that, I actually moved to Seattle cold turkey. And the backstory to that was my wife and I were both actually in grad school in LA. When I took the job to move to New York, I made a deal with her and say, Hey, you know, we need to transfer your grad school. She's got two more years. You know, whenever you are ready to leave, I'll hold up by end of the bargain. So no questions asked. When you're ready to leave New York, then I'll go. So the time came. This is probably like seven years ago. She says she wants to move to Seattle closer to her family. And then, I picked up and go. I did not know anybody in Seattle going in. But Seattle, I — now, like it's home for me. So I love it. It reminds me of maybe the Bay Area when I was, you know, many, many years ago, you know, back in high school when I kind of grew up in the Bay Area. So but yeah. So now, I'm in Seattle. I focus on helping fast-growing SaaS companies, helping them scale. So, you know, the one of the company was Skytap, which is a Seattle-based enterprise SaaS company. And we did a number of transactions, including a Series E Round led by Goldman Sachs. And then after that, I was with MedBridge. So it was a growth P/E-backed company, and we sold the company from one growth P/E to another growth P/E. And now, I'm at Customer.io. So very happy at the momentum and everything that we have here at the company. So just really, I think, very fortunate to be part of this growing story with Customer.io. Yeah, so that's generally the work background.
[00:03:07] Outside of work, I also, you know, spend time doing the alumni interview fo
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