Ensuring AI software delivery company Harness creates the “right financial profile” for an eventual public debut is top of mind for newly-minted CFO Bill Koefoed, he told CFO Dive in an interview.
An alum of Microsoft and HP, Koefoed took the top financial seat for the AI software delivery platform earlier this month. While the business has no set time frame for such a move, going public remains a goal for Harness and its CEO and founder, Jyoti Bansal.
As such, Koefoed has focused on preparing Harness’ financial team for an eventual initial public offering, working to ensure they are thinking about areas such as calculated billings, for example, that they might not have considered before. He’s also worked with the sales team as the business preps for upcoming product launches, targeting a balance of “effective growth” with the financial discipline needed to go public.
“You want to invest for that growth, but obviously, as you start thinking about being a public company, you want to make sure that you're showing a good financial profile of profitability as well,” he told CFO Dive of such a balance.
Skating to the AI puck
Just under a month into the CFO role, Koefoed is still “playing catch up” with the business and its products and operations, he said. Koefoed joined the San Francisco-based AI company, which enables engineering teams to test, build, and deliver software, from fellow software firm OneStream, where he served as CFO for six years beginning in 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile.
His past roles include serving as CFO for Blue Nile, an online fine jewelry retailer, CFO for software firm Puppet and as CFO, BCG Digital Ventures for the Boston Consulting Group. He also logged eight years at Microsoft in roles including CFO of its Skype division.
When he left OneStream, “I wanted to go do one more, another fun, exciting, fast-growing company,” he said of what attracted him to the opportunity at Harness. Another reason for taking the CFO role was “because I wanted to work with people who had that agility to know where this space is going,” he said.
The AI market has continued to capture the attention of both business executives and investors, and investors, Koefoed noted, “bet on CEOs.”
Koefoed first met Harness’ CEO when Bansal was serving as CEO of AppDynamics, a business the top executive founded in 2008 and which was sold to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion, according to a press release at the time. Bansal went on to found Traceable, an API security company, in 2017, before founding Harness in 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile.
A 20-year alum of the tech and software industries, Bansal’s expertise and his “agility in seeing where the puck is going” was an important factor behind joining Harness, Koefoed said. Additionally, their “philosophy around effective growth is very similar,” Koefoed said.
The AI ROI question
Since taking the CFO seat, his discussions with Bansal have concerned how to achieve that perfect balance of growth versus profitability, a key consideration for businesses especially in the very active AI industry. The company is mulling a public debut at a time when public markets have been “really hard on software companies,” Koefoed said.
That’s in part because the evolution of AI is continuing to capture both attention and funds, but the market has yet to determine AI “winners and losers” — something it will likely begin to rationalize over the next few years, Koefoed said.
While the company is positioned to be such a winner and is well-capitalized for its future endeavors — having completed a $250 million Series E in December, led by Goldman Sachs — the fast pace of the AI market makes creating that financial profile all the more critical. Koefoed has also spent time with the sales team, “helping them think through how they can show the best ROI and the best output,” he said.
Koefoed is also marshalling financial discipline at the company as the ROI question for AI continues to loom large in the minds of CFOs.
“CEOs and CFOs are looking at how much money they're spending on AI, and they're looking for ROI, and you can write lots of code, but unless that code gets deployed in your infrastructure, then it's worthless,” he said.
