What Worked Episode 34: The Art & Science of Scaling with Luigi Testa
In this episode of What Worked, Mike interviews Luigi Testa, CFO at LinkSquares, an AI-powered contract management platform. Luigi discusses the lessons he has learned for personal and business growth.
Luigi shares his insights about:
- Growing revenue 25X since joining LinkSquares in 2020
- How hiring for potential is key to achieving hyper-growth
- Career advice for college grads and first-time CFOs
We'd love for you to connect with us:
Transcript edited for clarity:
Mike Wu
Thanks for joining us for another episode of What Worked. We're very excited to have an awesome guest here today with us. It's Luigi Testa, the CFO of LinkSquares. We're going to talk about a bunch of stuff today, learn about his background, learn about what they're building LinkSquares and a few other things. But, we always like to start off with intros. Luigi, could you do us a huge favor of introducing yourself?
Luigi Testa
Sure, happy to do it Mike and thanks for having me on the podcast today. Really excited to be here. So yeah, quick background on me. I'm the CFO of LinkSquares, been with the company in a full-time capacity since 2020. Prior to that, I was an advisor to the business. My background is in strategic finance. So I started off in venture out of college and been working for private equity backed and VC backed companies ever since. In some cases FP&A, some cases strategic finance. My last business, we built and ran an M&A practice. So we bought a bunch of companies, and rolled them up and then sold it to a strategic. So we had a great long run and many different experiences all in B2B software.
Mike Wu
Awesome. No, fantastic. You've got kind of one of these finance careers that if I were to go back, what would be 15 years now and I was a rising senior at USC majoring in finance and wanting to work in investment banking and do M&A, this is like the career that I would want. So I'm curious to know, did you study finance in college? Was this something like you always knew you wanted to do or how did you, maybe stumble into this career?
Luigi Testa
Sure, interesting path. I did go to school for finance. I thought I wanted to be a stockbroker back in the day. I liked equities. I liked the idea of trading stocks. That was super cool to me. When I was in college, I interned at Merrill Lynch for summer. Also worked for a serial entrepreneur that was in the tech space. So I liked both of those things. And I said, well, I spent all this money on a college education. My parents put me through school and I want to do something with both. So I jumped into venture right after college, did that for three or so years and decided I really love tech. Tech's an awesome place to be. I was learning a lot, growing a lot and decided the stockbroker thing wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. And here I am now, many years later, sitting in a CFO seat somewhere in Boston.
Mike Wu
Yeah, awesome. You mentioned two different things. You mentioned strategic finance and then also like FP&A. Sounds like those are two kind of buckets, how you categorize things. Could you explain to us what the difference is?
Luigi Testa
Sure, I consider FP&A your traditional forecasting, planning in the business. Almost every company in the world that's mature enough has some kind of an FP&A function. So it's understanding the business, the drivers, and then building a plan around that. The strategic finance side, I see it much differently. It's more of being an internal consultancy. You worked for BCG, Mike, so you understand that world. You're an internal consultant to the business. You're looking at places where the business is going to have weak spots where it can't scale. And then you're identifying how can I fix those weak spots so we can scale and so you're not creating a bottleneck in the future. That's what I consider strategic finance, it can be everything from revamping pricing or, you know, looking at an accounting process and saying, you know what, if we had a thousand customers, this is going to break, let's fix that.
Mike Wu
Hmm. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, we just had, a guest on a couple episodes ago, Julian Rowlands. He's a former CFO for a venture backed company. Now he's building out FP&A software, and the vision is, a one person FP&A department for the future. He was breaking down FP&A, but strategic finance is something that's I think newer for the podcast at least of recent. So cool to get that breakdown. Thank you.
Side note, you mentioned you interned at Merrill Lynch. I also did that. I was a member of the final Merrill Lynch investment banking internship class. So summer of 2009, I was hired by Merrill Lynch. And then I think we went back to school for our senior year and then the markets crashed and Merrill Lynch merged with B of A, the investment banking division at least. So, uh, went back as B of A Merrill Lynch.
Luigi Testa
Yeah, that was a crazy time in the world, after the collapse and all these banks and everything emerging.
Mike Wu
Yeah. Crazy times. Yeah. Our office, we had a mishmash. It was kind of a funny cultural experience. It was a legacy Merrill office that we all worked in, but then we had the B of A side come over as well. And then they essentially recruited, they headhunted over a big MD from Bear Stearns. And that was a completely different culture than Merrill Lynch. And it was just like a mix of people in this office. Very interesting time for a few years.
But yeah, back to you Luigi. Tell us about LinkSquares. You mentioned you joined the company in 2020. That was a crazy time too. A lot was happening. We'd love to hear about the journey of past five years.
Luigi Testa
Sure, I had no idea we were in for COVID because I joined full-time early January. So we're about a $2 million revenue company when I came on full-time in the process of raising a Series A. We raised a Series A, Q1 of that year of 2020. And then the whole world changed. But I guess to back up a second, what does LinkSquares do? LinkSquares started in 2016, AI is obviously a huge part of the tech community and just about every business today. We were an AI company back in 2016. So we were pioneers in the AI space around contracts. So managing contracts, understanding what's inside them and also automating the workflows around contracts. So we initially came to market with the contract repository that was smart. You could understand what you've agreed to in your contracts and what kind of obligations you had with all your contracts. And that was powered by AI back in 2016. So we actually built our own AI models back in the day before AI was cool. So we started off with the analysis part of the contract management. Now we have the full contract workflow tool. So that's everything from assembling a contract to signing a contract, understanding what's inside it after you signed a contract. We're selling to corporates. We're not selling to law firms. So in-house, general counsels, CFOs, anybody that touches a contract is a great customer for LinkSquares.
Mike Wu
And you were talking about the journey, I want to hear about that. So that's what LinkSquares does. Very cool. I think, probably all too often, people sign contracts without knowing exactly what they're signing up for. And yeah, you mentioned 2020, you guys were trying to raise an A, you guys were about 2 million revenue. Where are you guys today? And then maybe can fill in some of the big milestones in between.
Luigi Testa
Sure, yeah, so we're about two million in revenue in 2020 when I started. We're well over 50 today.
Mike Wu
Whoa.
Luigi Testa
So it's been a great story of growth, learned a lot over the years, I'd say. And the sort of the biggest takeaway over the last five years is getting the right mix of art and science. And what I mean by that is, you think about starting a business and running a business and maturing a business, in the very early days, It's a lot about the art of it. Like, let me throw as much spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks and we'll do more of and iterate on that. When you get to a certain point, you have product market fit, you have customers, then you start introducing kind of more science. So the scientific component of it is building process, building structure, understanding where things are not going to scale. Some of the stuff that I talked about a little bit earlier with strategic finance. But you're always kind of managing that balance, you're never going to get it perfect. It's always being managed and manipulated as you kind of go through the life of a company. We've raised $162 million, the last round we did was a Series C for 100 million at the beginning of 2020. But there were all those successive rounds and all of our kind of growth spurts that we've had, we've continually been changing the mix of art and science.
And if you look at it, we were probably 90 plus percent when I started. And I'd say today, it's probably the reverse of that. We're much more scientific in our approach to how we go to market, how we build the product, how we look at how customers are using the product. And ultimately, our goal and why we exist is we want to delight customers and automate as much as we can out of their contract workflow.
Mike Wu
Yeah, I love that, that framework, the art, art, art and science. I'm curious for you as a CFO, what does that look like? Being the CFO of a $2 million company versus $50 million company. I would say that's not always the same person, right? It's been the same person for LinkSquares, but how has your job changed maybe in the frame of art and science or just, just generally speaking.
Luigi Testa
It's a great question. My prior company was PE-backed. I'd say on day one, if we're going back to the art and towns analogy, that started out much more as a science versus art, because it was an established company and we had specific goals, and we knew where we needed to mature and to scale. With LinkSquares, the growth path was much more centered around taking risks early on when there wasn't a lot at stake, meaning we were lower revenue. And then as we built up product market fit, as we got to a spot where we really had a real business, that's where we began introducing more of the science in everything from understanding, okay, if we bring on another thousand customers, what's going to break? Oh okay, now, you know, things are evolving, you know, we just need to change our pricing. A lot of different little things, and when I say little things, it's looking at all of the incremental changes that you can make in a business that will make the race car go faster. How do we find 1% improvements and do that over and over again so we'll get to the end of 2025 and say, OK, look at what we started. If we did 1% every week, now we're 50 % better at the end of the year.
When you look at how a business matured and how it has been successful, it's very rare that there's a silver bullet where you said, okay, there was just one thing that we did and we applied ourselves and that's why we're successful. When you're at scale, it's all these little minutiae changes that happen that when you cobble them all together are pretty impactful.
Mike Wu
Luigi, you just messed up my flow. I was gonna ask you about the silver bullet. But you're saying there's no silver bullet, just making the small improvements every day, just trying to delight customers, having that North Star. But I wanna know, we all wanna know, what's the one thing? But it sounds like there might not have been that one thing.
Luigi Testa
I have two things. How's this?
Mike Wu
Okay.
Luigi Testa
It's not a silver bullet. There's no silver bullet. If they're at the silver bullet, I want somebody to tell me.
Mike Wu
Bronze bullet. I'll take a bronze bullet.
Luigi Testa
One is being curious, right? So always asking why, trying to understand. I think if you're the kind of CFO that loves to live in a spreadsheet and you want to control the world from a spreadsheet, you're going to have a really hard time scaling and being successful. So always being curious, asking why, understanding the people part of the business, that is a huge, huge piece of it.
Once you have all those inputs, then you can go into your spreadsheet and you can do what you need to do to create the map forward. So that's the second part is you understand the human component, then you can create the map forward to understanding where the business needs to go and how it's going to get there. But without being curious and trying to live inside of a spreadsheet, you're going to have a really hard time scaling the business.
Mike Wu
Yeah, I think that resonates with me as someone who finds comfort in a spreadsheet. So I do like to hang out there quite a bit, but you're right. There's a ton of value in popping up and in operating outside of it as well.
Luigi Testa
Exactly, that's exactly right.
Mike Wu
I want to know, one thing from, like, from Hireframe’s perspective, we are a vendor for a lot of venture backed software companies. And I would say like the last five years have been wild. There's been like a couple ups and downs: 2020, pandemic. Next couple years, ZIRP. I perceived a tech recession around 2022, 2023, at least from a staffing standpoint, see a lot of like reduction in headcount and that sort of thing. Did LinkSquares experience this time period the same way or, has it really been, truly up into the right for you guys as it appears on paper.
Luigi Testa
So that's a great question. I'd say we're an AI company. We worked hard to build our brand, establish our presence in the market, pioneers in AI. So we're very fortunate to be in that position. I don't think there's any company in the world that everything is just up into the right and straight line all the way to the moon. It sort of zigs and zags and that's been our path. And if you look at 2021-22 or in the zero-interest rate environment, virtually every VC-backed company was getting rewarded to spend as much money as possible and grow as fast as they can. And now that's quite the opposite. You still want to have a good growth, but there's a huge focus on profitability, unit economics, just having good metrics, right? And that's sustainable. In my mind, that is what creates a real sustainable business. That period of time, it was very interesting, it's not something that we'll probably see again.
Mike Wu
Mm hmm. Totally. I'd be remiss not to ask you about, you guys were building AI from the jump like 2016 and what were we thinking about in 2016? It was not AI though. Tell us about that. Did it seem wild to be at a company that was focused on that at that time? Is that something that maybe drew you to LinkSquares? I also just think there's probably a ton of benefits to you guys and your team to have been focusing on that for a while where a lot of people, it's not too late, but a lot of people are just getting into AI right now.
Luigi Testa
Absolutely. AI in 2016, not a lot of companies were using it or really understood it. And I think from our perspective and what we deliver, AI is certainly a buzzword now and people are interested in how do I embed this into my business. I think about it also more broadly as automation. And this is exactly what we do. How do I look at all the processes that I have within the business and understand the really tactical ones especially, how can I automate those? How can I apply technology instead of hands on a keyboard to achieve the same results or better? And that's effectively what we came to the drawing board with for anybody that touches a contract in any company, how can we make their lives easier and better and more efficient and get them to focus on more strategic things versus tactical things? So we're automating their contracts. That's exactly what the business does.
Mike Wu
Yeah, I love what you guys do because I feel like there's such a direct line to value that you guys are creating for the companies. You're a CFO and, but I also know like some of your customers are CFOs, general counsel, that sort of thing. How do you implement automation and AI into your team at LinkSquares as a CFO?
Luigi Testa
That's a good question. So the way that I think about it is, what are all the things that are pain points in the business? What are all things that we hate doing that are just tedious work, right? And I'll take procurement, for example. So LinkSquares runs all the procurement that we do with our vendors through our software. Before we started doing that, it was almost a little bit of a free-for-all. There wasn't a good process around it.
As we scaled up, and we talk about the art and the science of things. This is an area where we applied some science, we built a process, and it just made things incredibly easier. And so, this is how these things are born. Do you want to spend a little bit of time investing in how you can make the future better versus just keeping up with the day to day and playing whack-a-mole? So from a procurement point of view, we took a step back and we looked at, how does procurement work right now? What are the issues? How much time are we wasting on just spinning our wheels and not getting a lot of value and how can we add more value to the process? So there's some folks on the finance team that work in a strategic finance capacity that analyze this problem. They do that in many other parts of the business. And then we developed a procurement solution within our technology, which our customers are using today too. And it's flawless. It's a chain of approvals, it's signature, everybody that's involved in the vendor selection can see what's going on, who has the pen, who's the decision maker. And it just gets done way more efficiently.
Mike Wu
It's cool that you guys are using your own product, but also very much like product testers in a sense, right? You're like, does this work for us? If it works for you guys, probably works for some other teams as well.
Luigi Testa
Exactly. It's find the unsexy parts of your business and, and, and automate them. That's a really simple way to think about it.
Mike Wu
Yeah. You guys raised a series C. I think you mentioned 50 million revenue, for a finance team, for your team at LinkSquares, how do you get to the next level? If that's a series D or maybe you guys are probably thinking about IPO, that sort of thing. From a staffing team standpoint, is there like a jump that you guys need to make or something like moves that you need to make to support an organization of this scale?
Luigi Testa
Absolutely. From a financing perspective, one, it’s do you have the right people in the right seats. And the second part of it is I talk about process a lot, but do we have the right technology? Do we have the right processes? I'd say early on in my LinkSquares journey, we invested, we might've even over invested in technology and process. So, as we are kind of moving along here, we're not gonna have to go back and redo things or have a fire drill around redoing a bunch of rev-rec or stuff like that. So, from a technology standpoint, we over-invested so that as we're thinking about growth, we can be in a good spot.
And as it relates to the team, I always think about where is the company going to be in three plus years from now? And I want to hire for that time, not for today. And I want, the folks that are in those seats, I want them to get ramped up, understand the business, have a high level of curiosity and continually asking why so that they can scale as the business scales. That's the exact spot you want to be in. And then as things get tight and as capacity increases and as there's needs, really hiring in any business should be about ROI. Where can I get ROI for adding an extra head? Not because I want to build a big team.
Mike Wu
Yeah, that's smart. So it sounds like this is somewhat unique. I think you're hiring someone and I guess a big part of your evaluation of the candidates you might be hiring is potential. You want to hire someone that you can invest in and grow with. Then in three years, they're in the role that the company is going to need, that the team's going to need, in three years.
Luigi Testa
Exactly.
Mike Wu
I'm super curious, as we do a lot of interviews and hiring at Hireframe, but during the interview process, how do you tease those types of things out and are there certain things you're looking for in candidates? And this is a good commercial for anyone who wants to work with Luigi at LinkSquares, take some notes here. But are there certain things you look for or maybe systems that you use when you're evaluating talent for that potential?
Luigi Testa
Absolutely. For me, it's not about getting the answer exactly right. It's about how did you get to the answer and what's the logic and the thought process that went into it? That's number one. Number two is the willingness and the ability to learn and grow. So I'd rather take somebody that's at a lower level that has that desire to learn and that thirst to grow and put them in the seat and help them grow. And the last thing, it's about, are you disciplined? Do you have rigor? And I think any business that doesn't have discipline or rigor, it's going to be really hard when things get tough. There's been some headwinds in the last couple of years. If you don't have discipline and rigor in your business, you're going to have a really hard time when things are hard. And that's when you learn the most. When things are hard, you learn the most in the business. And that's when you grow the most, too.
Mike Wu
Yeah. Are there, some accomplishments or some challenges you guys have overcome over the past five years that you're most proud of?
Luigi Testa
Yeah, there's a fun one that I like to talk about. When I first came onto LinkSquares, we were growing like crazy. The very early days, not a lot of processes established and, we had an issue where we didn't have a strong grasp on our gross margins and we needed to quickly understand what the drivers behind all the gross margins were. And part of our business is OCRing, understanding contracts. And sometimes, you you get a scanned PDF that the quality is so bad that you need to send it off for human intervention so they can interpret what's on the contract. We had a 20 page document, if there was one or two sentences that were off that our OCR technology gave a low rating, we would send the whole thing to be interpreted by a human.
And it was costing us a lot of money. So we applied technology to an automation where today, if there's uncertainty in OCRing a document, it's going to take the paragraphs or the sentences that it doesn't understand and ship those off, comes off the conveyor belt, a human looks at it, does the QA on it, corrects it if it needs correction, puts it back on the conveyor belt. But from an efficiency standpoint and from an economics perspective, that is a massive change in your gross margin. So that's something that I'd say it's a really simple kind of low hanging fruit that when you're growing a business fast, you want to onboard the customer and make their experience as great as possible. So you'll spend the extra money and then when it becomes a problem, you fix it. So that's exactly what we did.
Mike Wu
Love that. It sounds like you were able to really hone in and pinpoint the problem, isolate it, figure out a solution. And it's cool, I think what you're describing is like a common buzzword right now that I'm hearing a lot and I like is human in the loop, right? There's a lot of technology, there's a lot of AI, but there's certain points, maybe points of friction, where it's valuable to have a person there. And over time, hopefully those points will become even more acute and specific and less common. But yeah, that’s very cool. Thanks for sharing that.
Luigi Testa
Absolutely.
Mike Wu
Going back to hiring, you mentioned, you want someone who's eager to learn and grow and develop. You strike me as someone that's the same way. And I imagine that you're looking for people that have shared that value with you. And I also saw your LinkedIn profile that you're part of the F Suite, it sounds like it's a community of CFOs, maybe that's one thing. But my question is just how do you go about personal development? You continue to have a great career, a great run at LinkSquares. I imagine your job has changed multiple times at the company, at least what the company needs from you. How does someone in your shoes go about learning and development?
Luigi Testa
Two ways. I'd say the first one is I've been very, very fortunate to have a great network. And I think part of having a great network is you gotta water the plants in the network. And that means don't just go to the network when you need something, right? You're always interacting with folks and make it fun, almost make it like a game. You gotta meet people for coffee, meet people for lunch, meet them for drinks. Understand what they've went through in their experience, because anything that you're going to see, especially at a SaaS company, because there's thousands of them in the US, somebody has probably seen before. So the more of those experiences you can absorb and get from your network, the better off you're going to be. I think it's silly to go and if you have a problem to go sit in a corner and try to figure it out on your own without talking to anybody. So network for me is super important.
Then that sort of discipline of never really being comfortable and always being curious and putting yourself in an uncomfortable position, meaning I'm going to try something new because I want to grow, right? Feel a little bit of pain like you're exercising and you do that enough times, you will grow. You'll also fail a few times but like I said earlier, when times are hard and things aren't going well, you're going to learn the most. So those are, I guess those are my kind of two key pieces of advice for continuing to grow and evolve and building a career. But at the end of the day, make sure you're having a good time doing it. Make sure the people you're engaging with in your network are people that you enjoy hanging out with and you're learning from. And it's a pleasant experience. And don't just do it because you feel like you need to do it. That's probably the worst way to build a career.
Mike Wu
I want to pause on that. That's such good advice, make sure you enjoy what you're doing. It's huge. I think, especially with finance, I would say, like you clearly love it, it's a passion of yours and, I'm sure you bring your curiosity to it. But as someone who started my career in finance and worked with a lot of people at the entry level, a lot of people don't really, really enjoy it. And you can very quickly see, at least I'll share my experience, as an investor banking analyst, you can definitely see two groups diverge. It's the analysts who really love it and those who don't really love it. Those who really love it are so into it and that leads to great outcomes for them from a performance standpoint. Those who don't love it, it's very obvious. It's a good stepping stone, but they're going to be outperformed by those who love it. So that's always my take and advice to some younger folks thinking about what they want to do with their lives. W
Luigi Testa
Absolutely.
Mike Wu
Wrapping up here, I appreciate the time. I got a couple more questions for you. But just generally speaking, I want to ask you the same question for two different groups of people. One is the college students that are studying maybe accounting and finance or just business, interested in some of the things that you and I share interest in. What advice would you give to them about career? And then also my follow up question to that would be, for those who are rising CFOs, those who are mid career and they're trying to make that CFO leap if you have any advice for them. So let's start with the undergrads. What college did you go to, Luigi?
Luigi Testa
I went to Bentley for undergrad in Boston and I went to Babson for my MBA.
Mike Wu
Okay, so anyone in Bentley or Babson, or any other university out there, they're calling you up for a coffee chat. You’re like, hey, check out this episode of What Worked first and listen to my advice and then let's talk. What advice would you want to give them?
Luigi Testa
I've had a lot of chats with folks that are looking for a job or trying to figure out what to do after college. And that's like a totally normal thing. I graduated college now, I don't know what am I going to do next, I just want to get a job. When you're looking for a job, I think the wrong way to approach it is to just talk to as many people as you possibly can and say, I'm looking for a job. Can you find me a job? Think through what makes you happy? What are you good at? And how can you be creative and kind of make those two worlds collide. That's a really important thing. And then find people that have done that before and talk to them. And you can say, well, I just graduated college, I don't have a network, where should I start? You can reach out to people that are in your alumni network. I went to Boston College High School, there's a great network there. You get started somewhere and then, like I said earlier, just almost make it a game. Like, okay, now you know what I like. Find people, find me two other contacts you have that have had some kind of a similar experience. And generally people, one, like to talk about themselves, and two, it makes them feel good to help somebody out. But I think folks that are just coming out of college, they kind of hesitate to ask and bother people that maybe are busy.
But people generally like to help and like we've all been in that position. Everyone needs to start somewhere. So leverage the network, but be thoughtful about how you do it. And what I mean by thoughtful is, sit down and get a piece of paper and try to figure out where you want to end in the next five years. And then that should give you a good sense of what are the questions that I want to go and ask folks when I'm networking with them. And again, make it fun, make it light, make it a game. Don't make it like a job. If it becomes a job, it's going to just feel like, I'm graduating from college, my parents are going to force me to go find a job. And that passion and excitement will shine through to people for interviewing and people that are going to connect you. They'll know that. So I think the way you show up also is really important. And you can't fake it. That's like the other thing. If you're not convincing yourself, you're going to have a hard time convincing other people.
Mike Wu
I just want to piggyback on what you're saying. I really like your advice of reach out to people, do outreach. I think that can't be emphasized enough. A question people always ask how do you build a network? Well, you just got to reach out to people. I think, especially when you're in college, you have an opportunity to reach out to a ton of alumni. And, like you said, they will reply back oftentimes.
The second piece that I really liked what you said, Luigi, was think about where you want to be in five years. Because when I was in college, I was stressed out because I was trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. And that was an impossible feat to figure that out, I'm still figuring it out. So I like how you said, think about five years from now, where do you want to go? Because that scopes it out a little bit better for someone that could be trying to figure out what to do with their first chapter of their career. I always tell people too, I got asked this question recently and maybe it's more about the current state of things, but I'm like get to work. I would say don't hold out for a year or two a year looking for the perfect job. If you're around that threshold, I think you can learn a lot by just getting to work and taking a job that feels like it could be interesting or something there and then you'll learn from that. That'll help inform what you're interested in.
My second question was just about, what advice do you have for folks that have maybe 5, 10 years into their career in finance and they wanna make that leap to CFO, the one that you've made. Any advice for those folks?
Luigi Testa
Absolutely. And not too different from what I just said, but I guess more targeted. You've been around in the working world for a number of years, so you have a better sense of how things are, where you want to go. That five-year plan should probably change every year. You should probably look at that every year and say, how am I going to recalibrate this? How do I think differently? But for folks that are a few years into their career and have their sights set on, I want to be a CFO or a CEO, whatever it is, you should surround yourself with people that have been there and done that. And create almost like a small network or board of mentors for yourself and meet with them on a regular basis. For me, that's been tremendously helpful because they got there by doing that same exact thing.
And the second one is find folks that are in the professional services industry, like the stuff that you do, Mike. They're going to hear about all the deals, all the job opportunities that would be interesting to you. That's a great place for folks to network and to find new roles. How do you get into a first-time CFO gig? You're not going to get hired at a $500 million ARR company. You're going to have to start out at an earlier stage company and you're going to have to figure it out. And you might want to stick with earlier stage companies. You might decide you want to work for a half a billion dollar company as a CFO or a CEO or whatever it's going to be. But take on the challenge, right? And like you said, sometimes you just want to take the job to get the experience. Like the same thing with being a CFO, you should take the job and try it out. You might decide you hate it, but at least you tried it and you learned about it and you can recalibrate that five-year plan.
Mike Wu
Appreciate that, very specific, I love it. Yeah, Luigi, thank you so much. Wrapping up here, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on and mention?
Luigi Testa
I'll say something that might offend you, Mike, or you might like it. So I talked about networking a whole bunch. I'd say the network is super important, but I didn't go to an Ivy League school. But for me personally, it's been about the network, not necessarily the pedigree, right? I think there's a ton of value in the Ivy League education, but at the end of the day, you want to be the person that is disciplined, that has rigor and you want to surround yourself with those people. And those could be Ivy League folks they couldn't be but I would say don't just try to attach yourself to a great company name or a great school, attach yourself to a place you're gonna learn. My last company wasn't a P&G, it wasn't a big tech company. That's where I actually learned the most and I think you know the learnings that I took from that experience put me in a great spot to jump into a CFO seat and and I was at a position where I had a great group of folks mentor me that I actually work for that were investors in the company and even outside the company. So don't worry about all the pedigree stuff, have discipline and rigor and really just be focused. And the last thing that I will say is, and this is probably the most important thing that I learned over the years, just be able to listen. Be able to listen to people. And you'll be very surprised at what you learn.
Mike Wu
Very wise advice here. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Luigi, thank you so much for coming on What Worked. We appreciate this. I think this is going to help a ton of people. And very excited for what you guys are building at LinkSquares. As we wrap up here, do you want to leave with any kind of like place people can reach out to you as LinkedIn, a good spot? I don't know if you want to put your email out there, but we're happy to share that in the show notes if that's something you want to do or even some reasons you would like people to reach out to you.
Luigi Testa
Sure, yeah, I'm happy to chat with folks, informally networking. I'm always happy to take a phone call and chat with folks. LinkedIn is great way to reach me. Feel free to put my email in the show notes. Luigi at LinkSquares is pretty easy to remember. I'm the only one that's a Luigi at the company, so it'll definitely get to me. But I really appreciate you having me on the show, Mike. I've had a lot of fun chatting with you. And if you find yourself in the Boston area, I would be happy to grab a coffee or lunch sometime too.
Mike Wu
Let's do that. That sounds great. Thanks, Luigi.
Luigi Testa
Thanks for your time. It's been fun.
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