Coworking with Coupa CFO Tony Tiscornia

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

CFOs work closely with the leaders managing all the different functions in a business, with a focus on planning, forecasting, strategy, and many other areas. At Coupa, I oversee all financial responsibilities for the business, including capital position and financing, capital allocation and investments, financial operations, and reporting and investor relations.

But the job is more than just numbers and reporting. What I love most is using financial data to tell a story—whether it’s to help my teams make smarter, data-driven decisions for the business or to contextualize our financials for the investor community. I also interact with Coupa customers and prospects, many of which include CFOs, to help them understand the value they can glean from our business spend management platform.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

Community.ai is an initiative we launched earlier this year as our proof of concept that businesses are smarter together. It blends artificial intelligence with real-world experiences from our 2,500+ customers, 8 million suppliers, and nearly $4 trillion of cumulative business spend globally. It enables every one of our customers to benefit from the experiences of other customers using our platform. Community.ai works by aggregating customer activity data on our platform, normalizing and anonymizing it. We then feed those aggregated industry-level insights back to our customers by way of prescriptions to help them be more efficient, profitable, and sustainable with their business spend. No other company in our industry is doing this. It’s an incredibly powerful technology that helps teams make better decisions. I love seeing how it’s helping our customers find savings, detect and prevent fraud, and better allocate resources.

What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I’m most optimistic about the potential of digital currency and how it’s evolving. We live in an increasingly digital world, so it’s only natural that traditional paper tender will someday be entirely replaced by digital currency. Unfortunately, cryptocurrency hasn’t yet reached mainstream adoption. In turn, the waters have been quite choppy for crypto most recently. Paired with the ongoing talks of regulation, practical use of the technology as a true currency is in early stages. Cryptocurrency investments are also quite volatile and may continue to suffer in the near term as we navigate a prolonged period of macroeconomic turbulence, with quickly changing priorities and requirements for investors. That being said, I look forward to seeing blockchain technology evolve.

What’s the best tech-related media you read/watch/listen to?

One of my favorites is the Masters of Scale podcast with Reid Hoffman.

What’s something about you we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I love playing music, specifically the guitar and the piano, and golfing. Also, I recently had a newborn son, and I’m a father to a 5-year-old daughter. I love spending time with them.

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?

I find all aspects of the macro economy and financial markets (which are very intertwined) to be very interesting, and I keep close tabs on it. This includes IPOs and financings, the future of supply chains, geopolitical issues, inflation and interest rates, and equity and debt markets.