She starts with tape from the field, not the spreadsheet. Listening to enterprise sales calls, Amy Foo heard customers whose usage rose and fell with seasons. Fixed per-seat pricing “wasn’t quite hitting the mark,” she tells us, so she piloted a pooled-seat model that flexed monthly within an annual commitment—turning smaller clips into “one to five million” deals and lifting revenue “six to seven times per customer,” she tells us.

That instinct—to meet the customer where they are—threads through her journey. Early at Zendesk, she was “employee number one in the region,” handling FP&A, accounting, taxes, and team-building as the business scaled, she tells us. Trust won her a dual path: SVP of Global Finance Operations (deal desk, billings, shared services) and APAC managing director, aligning teams across seven countries, she tells us. Mentors’ unvarnished feedback helped her shed imposter syndrome and lead without geographic ceilings.

Today at Ignition, she reduces complexity to a few levers—ARR, payments volume, cash flow—and aligns accordingly, she tells us. She monitors top-of-funnel quality and pipeline coverage daily to steer marketing spend and sales motions, she tells us. On pricing, she watches what customers pay and repackages value by segment, she tells us. She leads with customer insight, she tells us.

As for AI, she calls it “not a magic pill,” advocating first for AI built into existing vendors, then new tools where capabilities are missing, she tells us. Finance, after all, is “about narrative and conviction”—numbers that move people to act, she tells us.

When Joe Custer describes Intrado’s purpose, he begins with a story that traces back almost half a century. The company, he tells us, was born inside the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department when someone asked whether there might be a better way to connect a caller in distress with a first responder. “Turns out they were on to something,” he adds. Today that idea has scaled into a mission-critical network touching roughly 90 percent of all 911 requests for assistance.

Custer explains that Intrado “has to operate like a utility … we cannot fail.” Reliability is not a metric to be met but a promise to the public, one he refers to as “public safety grade.” Behind that standard lies a web of acquisitions—eight to ten over time—that were never fully integrated. That challenge, he says, became opportunity when Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners carved Intrado out of West Corporation and began investing to harden its network and modernize its operations.

As both CFO and SVP of Operations, Custer leads a transformation aimed at restoring Intrado’s position as the thought leader in emergency communications. The work goes beyond financial engineering; it’s about aligning systems, culture, and purpose around a single mission: saving lives. “We want to be the most trusted authority in public safety,” Custer tells us, describing a workforce “deeply committed to the cause.” In his view, reliability, investment, and mission are inseparable—the essential framework for Intrado’s next 50 years.

On his first day in investment banking, Clayton Kossl was “thrown right into the cauldron.” With few senior professionals in the small aerospace and defense group, junior bankers like him were expected to face company owners directly. “You had to understand the businesses inside and out,” he tells us. The experience forced him to blend analytical depth with the interpersonal agility needed to earn trust in every room.

That mix of skills—numbers and nuance—became a through line in Kossl’s career. At ZocDoc, he joined a Strategic Finance team that partnered closely with the CEO and CFO, taking ownership of decisions that rippled across the fast-growing health-tech firm. The role taught him that financial modeling and relationship-building could coexist—and that influence often came from understanding how leaders think, not just how spreadsheets add up.

Later, when Kossl joined Paintzen as one of roughly a dozen employees, those lessons proved vital. He rebuilt systems from scratch, partnered daily with the CEO and COO, and touched nearly every function of the business. “Someone had to do it,” he recalls. His ability to translate operational chaos into financial clarity helped guide Paintzen through its expansion and eventual sale to PPG Industries.

Across these chapters, Kossl’s story reveals a consistent pattern: using strategy to tell better stories. Whether advising founders or steering finance in ad-tech today, he views storytelling not as spin, but as structure—the way finance can make complexity understandable and transformation achievable.