Nearly two months into his new role as CFO of Optro, Tim Daniels is at the stage where he is looking to build rapport with his fellow C-suite leaders, making sure the team is heading in the right direction and fostering trust — a stage he calls “go slow to go fast.”
If you jump in and start to make large moves before that foundation is laid, “it’s very hard to make those changes stick,” Daniels has learned over the course of his career, he told CFO Dive in an interview.
Ideation to execution
Daniels joined Optro — formerly AuditBoard — in mid-September in the governance, risk and compliance platform’s top finance seat as the business seeks to continue to scale, according to a Sept. 14 press release. Among other moves this year, the GRC provider opened a new regional center in Singapore and finalized its acquisition of Midship, an AI-native SOX compliance service, according to company releases.
As he settles in to its top finance seat, Daniels’ priority list includes both ensuring the company can effectively finalize its year-end closing processes as well as shaping up a solid strategy for the upcoming year, he said. That includes ensuring the company’s financial planning and analysis resources, for example, are put to best use so the business’ go-to-market teams are adequately supported.
“I'm a huge believer in the importance of planning,” Daniels said. “Probably not a big surprise given my role.”
Daniels joined the San Francisco-based SaaS provider from operational intelligence software provider Quickbase, where he served as CFO for just over a year, according to his LinkedIn profile. At Optro, he is succeeding Hugo Doetsch as its CFO, who departed the company at an unknown time after assuming the GRC platform’s CFO seat shortly before its rebrand as Optro, CFO Dive previously reported.
Daniels began his career in economic consulting, he then served as a management consultant with Bain & Company, before switching to the software industry, he said.
His first two operational roles were at “VC-backed, hyper-growth software companies,” Daniels said. For instance, Daniels served as VP of finance and strategy for Turbonomic, an IBM company, and as CFO for OpsGenie, which was acquired by Atlassian. Following the acquisition, he served as head of finance for Atlassian’s OpsGenie operations.
As a CFO, the trick to coming up with a solid strategy is motivating the move from the ideation stage all the way through the alignment and planning stages to the execution stage, he said.
“My experience has been people love to do steps one and two, and they don't love steps three and four quite as much,” he said. However, especially when it comes to private equity backed entities where the hold window isn’t a lengthy amount of time, that discipline is crucial.
For Daniels, “that means we build out a very thoughtful, long-range plan, that we stack hands-on with our internal executive team as well as our investors, and then that plan will help us convert into what I call a value creation plan” with very specific milestones the business remains laser-focused on, he said.
Getting the lay of the AI land
Having a clear and disciplined approach to growth is all the more crucial for companies in the SaaS space. Many firms in the sector are recovering from the so-called “SaaSpocalypse" — an early 2026 market sell-off in the sector driven by fear that AI would replace certain software, according to reports.
As someone who has spent much of his career in software, Daniels is not surprised to see the industry bouncing back, he said. In Daniels’ view, “the part that people have missed with this whole narrative around AI is building software is hard, just like building a house is hard,” he said.
“You can vibe code, and you can use coding tools like Claude to help you code much quicker,” he said. “But you still need to know what you're building and why and what customers are going to care about.”
However, the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI today can still make gauging its future impact difficult and as a result, “it's just caused a lot of funds, a lot of investors to just sort of press pause and see where this whole thing is going,” he said.
As such, though it’s still early innings, Daniels is also looking to understand the “lay of the land” when it comes to Optro’s AI strategy. Many boards are still pushing leadership to adopt and implement the technology, which, Daniels acknowledged, is preferable to the approach of simply sticking one’s head in the sand and denying AI’s effects.
However, he said what he’s really focused on is focusing the company’s time and effort to make it gets the “biggest bang” for its investments in AI.
“I want to focus on the areas that are going to have the most tangible impact, and what I mean by that is driving revenue, reducing costs [and] gaining efficiency across the employee base,” Daniels said.
