After working with dozens of finance and procurement teams, we’ve seen that almost all procurement purchasing/spend requests go through finance as the first stop. When I was in finance, there were weeks I spent hours getting relevant data to decide if I should approve a spend request. What’s the #1 thing a strategic finance leader asks when reviewing a new procurement request?

This week we have the opportunity to chat with Fadi El Mouallem, a visionary procurement executive with 20+ years of experience enabling strategic sourcing and procurement teams. Fadi spent a decade at Salesforce and another decade in various roles prior, including at Apple and Lennar Corp. He’s built highly effective teams, empowered to deliver strategic value for the business.

As a senior in high school deciding which college to go to, Jasmin Moghbeli was one of the first people I met at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her roommate Alice C. was on the volleyball team, which is how we met, and they graciously hosted me at Baker House. Getting to know them that random weekend in February convinced me MIT was the place to be. Fast forward ~20 years, the NASA SpaceX Crew-7 blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Saturday, 2 days ago.

Procurement is one of the only DIRECT levers finance has on the business Finance teams don’t write code Finance teams don’t design product Finance teams don’t run ad campaigns Finance teams don’t sell to customers Finance teams don’t oversee customer success ✅ Finance teams DO make strategic investment and spend allocation decisions across the entire company to drive growth.

Do you ever wonder how many different suppliers and vendors were involved in building the Salesforce tower? 🏙️ 🌁 Or how about Apple’s new campuses? 🛸 How many emails and invoices were exchanged as part of the process? Unfortunately Fadi can’t share any proprietary metrics, but he’ll be able to share some cool stories about leading Strategic Sourcing and Procurement Operations for some of the largest projects in tech.

Some thoughts on Uber’s first-ever operating profit announced earlier this month 💰 1) It takes a village. There is no one thing that is going to make a business profitable at this scale. Every team has a part to play, and finance teams need to be embedded with every team to ensure the right metrics are shared in a timely way for the best decisions. 2) Diversification matters. Back in 2014, Travis pulled one of the only engineers I had working on toll and tax calculation to start working on Uber Eats. At the time it seemed crazy. We couldn’t get toll calculations right, causing a ton of support issues, but we’re going to spin up this food delivery business? Fast forward to today, Uber Eats is an obvious decision, and kudos to the team on the Advertising execution these past few quarters. And I’m pretty sure toll calculation is fixed now :)