Trending 40: Top Tech CFOs

Chief financial officers are often the unsung heroes, especially in tech, where things move quickly. Here are some of the top CFOs in the DC tech economy. We talked to them about how they got their start and some of the best lessons they've learned along the way.

When Ethical Electric CFO Jim Wiseman started planning for college, his father told him he would pay for his education as long as Jim studied accounting. As one of Ethical Electric’s first employees, Jim has helped grow the renewable energy provider from zero revenue and customers in 2012 to $60M and 75,000 customers. Jim spent the first year working on the company’s credit facility; he closed an $800k working capital line early on and a $30M line as the company grew. The company has also closed on two rounds of "significant" equity financing and two rounds of bridge equity.

Best lesson: Fail fast and cheaply, then quickly adapt and alter course.
Hometown: Lynchburg, VA
Current home: Vienna
Family: Married to Karen—the couple met while working at Arthur Andersen in DC. Two children and King Charles Cocker Spaniel puppy.
Fun summer trips: Disney World and Universal Studios and going to Costa Rica this winter.
Free time: Watching and following soccer, especially the English Premier League and son’s soccer games.
Bucket list: Write a science fiction novel.
Most people don’t know: His favorite movies involve singing and dancing—Pitch Perfect, Stomp the Yard and Step Up 2: The Streets.

1776 CFO Steve Graubart’s career started internationally, advising corporations and governments and putting together investment deals. After working with Calvert Ventures, he became CFO of several edtech and fintech companies and then headed up finance at a public university. As CFO at 1776, a global incubator and seed fund, he’s helping quickly grow 1776 organically and through acquisitions. Two recent acquisitions grew its footprint to San Fran and Crystal City. The organization’s Challenge Cup, a competition for startups in various categories, is also expanding to over 45 cities.

Best lesson: Say little, do much.
Hometown: NYC
Current home: Dupont
Family: Two kids (20 and 15).
Fun summer trips: St. Johns and Israel.
Free time: Tennis and art
Most people don’t know: He’s an artist and had a recent show in NYC’s Lower East Side.

Blue Pillar finance and business operations VP, Jeff Pontius, studied finance and economics in college and went on to get his MBA at Penn State. He began his career with Intel in operations finance and the rest is career history. At Intel, he spent six of his nine years there growing the company’s operations in China. His career also includes stints in operations, business development, and project finance at a solar energy startup and private independent power producer. He was hired at Blue Pillar, an industrial IoT and energy management solutions provider, 10 months ago and played an important role in the company’s $14M funding round in March.

Best lesson: A corporate culture is so utterly important to be successful, so set the right tone.
Hometown and current home: Frederick, Md.
Family: Married 17 years; two children (7 and 3).
Fun summer trips: Ocean City, Md., and headed to Disney this Fall.
Free time: Coaching and spending time with family.
Bucket list: Become fluent in Mandarin.
Most people don’t know: He played college football.

Bob Latchford (on the right, with Optoro co-founder Tobin Moore) didn’t exactly choose a finance career path, it was more something he fell into. But he did have a background in startup growth stage companies, so it makes sense that he joined DC-based Optoro three years ago as CFO. Since then the company, whose software helps retailers sell excessive and returned goods, has grown from 50 people to 250 and raised over $100M, while maintaining strong revenue growth.

Best lesson: Keep it simple.
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, grew up in DC.
Fun summer trip: Nantucket for July 4th—a family tradition.
Free time: Getting kids to and from their sporting events and watching their games.

Direct Connect CFO Kevin Gates knew being an astronaut or a professional basketball player weren’t in his future, so accounting seemed like a good Plan B. His career has included stints in auditing and taxation with national and public accounting firms and public and private companies. At Direct Connect, which sells customized electronic payment processing products and services, he’s known as the guy who closes the place down every night. He says the company is investing in technology and pursuing acquisitions in the payments space.

Best lesson: Perseverance and patience tend to pay off.
Grew up: Illinois
Fun summer trips: Sitting by the beach and pool in Florida.
Bucket list: Making more time for cooking and baking and take classes in American and Art History.
Most people don’t know: He collects bronze sculptures of animals, especially frogs.

Many people break out into a cold sweat when asked to crunch numbers. But 3Pillar Global CFO Maria Izurieta loves the concept of how numbers work and flow and are the core of every business. She also grew up with a dad who loved talking business at the dinner table, which inspired her to pursue a finance career. As CEO of Wireless Matrix, she helped turn the struggling public company into a profitable business that was then sold to CalAmp Corp for a 22% premium. Her role at 3Pillar, a software development company, for the last two years has been to establish a global, scaleable platform. The team has expanded to 650 people globally and is on track to grow 20%.

Best lesson: You can’t do anything by yourself. In many cases, people have better ideas than you.
Hometown: Fairfax
Current home: Vienna
Family: Married 11 years–she met her husband while working at Coopers & Lybrand; two daughters (6 and 9).
Fun summer trip: Took the family to Italy and Germany for over two weeks.
Free time: Spending time outdoors, running, reading and helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses.
Bucket list: More travel—too many countries on the list to name.
Most people don’t know: She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in ’97.

SoundExchange CFO Anjula Singh’s inspiration to pursue a finance career is pretty simple: she needed a paying job after college. During her career, she’s implemented accounting systems and operationalized the budget process at a global Fortune 200 company. Anjula joined SoundExchange, a digital collective management company, nine years ago and became CFO last year. As the company has grown to over 160 employees, she’s launched a budget system and a financial reporting system and is working on implementing the company’s new HR system.

Best lesson: Have an open mind and try to understand everyone’s perspective.
Hometown: Gaithersburg
Current home: DC
Family: 5-year-old beagle named Jasper.
Fun summer trips: Beach trips and long weekends visiting friends in Europe, London and North Ocean City, MD.
Free time: Hang out with friends and travel.
Bucket list: Trip to Greece.
Most people don’t know: She’s an avid tennis fan and has been to all four Grand Slam tournaments.

CustomInk CFO Kevin Cheetham’s first major in college was mechanical engineering, but his interests changed and he turned to accounting. (Dad was an accounting professor.) One of his first jobs was working for Arthur Andersen in New York. From there, his experience spans from being one of the first employees of a company that was acquired by Travelocity to orchestrating various domestic and international acquisitions and opening operations in Europe. During his over three years with CustomInk, Kevin says he’s worked on building a team that could one day support a billion-dollar company. CustomInk, an online provider of custom apparel and accessories, now has over 1,400 employees nationwide.

Best lesson: Be present, be focused.
Hometown: Bergen County, NJ
Current home: Centreville
Family: Married 27 years; three kids (24, 22, 17); three dachshunds and a cat.
Fun summer trip: New Hampshire, a vacation spot since childhood.
Free time: Road biking with friends and watching baseball.
Bucket list: To be healthy in retirement and continue to hike and bike and spend time with family.
Most people don’t know: He’s really good at picking up people’s accents and where they’re from.

Endgame CFO Mark Snell grew up in Dalton, GA, which has long been known as the “carpet capital of the world.” His grandfather owned a textile manufacturing plant and his father owned a carpet manufacturing plant and a few other businesses. So Mark’s career working for early-stage companies was inspired by their entrepreneurship. Some of his career highlights include: serving as finance director of Internet Security Systems when it sold to IBM for $1.5B in 2006; helping Suniva build a solar cell manufacturing plant in Georgia and grow revenue quickly; and now helping Endgame, a cybersecurity firm in Arlington, grow from an incubator tenant to a company with over 150 employees. Mark says the company is adding a person a week and will need bigger office space shortly.

Best lesson: Be the person you needed when you were younger.
Hometown: Dalton, GA
Current home: Roswell, GA
Family: Married 10 years; two kids (6 and 5); two dogs.
Fun summer trips: Florida Gulf Coast in July and Mexico with wife to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary earlier in the summer.
Free time: Hiking and kayaking with family and watching sports.
Bucket list: Hike the Appalachian Trail from start to finish.
Most people don’t know: He was an Eagle Scout.

Finance always came naturally to Resonate CFO David Wheatley. He learned early on it was one of those business functions that could impact most key business drivers like customer retention rate, operational efficiency and customer acquisition costs. Early in his career he learned the ins and outs of IPOs when he helped take Software AG public. He was also at Cybertrust, which sold to Verizon. It was there that he gained international and M&A experience. He was an early employee at Resonate, a data analytics company in Reston, and had a chance to put systems in place as the company was launching. (Resonate was his first CFO role.)

Best lesson: Hire the right employees, who are passionate about the business and have intellectual curiosity.
Hometown: Fredericksburg
Current home: Woodbridge
Family: Married 18 years; three kids (14, 12, 8); and Yorkshire Terrier named Duke.
Fun summer trip: Puerto Rico
Free time: Coach basketball.
Bucket list: Take mom to Italy.
Most people don’t know: He served in Air Force in first Gulf War.

Chris Hoyt grew up near Wall Street in northern New Jersey and always pictured himself as an investment banker. Then he realized he wouldn’t have a life. With a love for the deal side of finance, he spent his career focused on capital raising, M&As and financial analysis. Chris helped spin out APX Labs, a smart glasses software company, from BTS Software in 2011. Chris is also a salesperson at heart, which comes in handy when trying to convince someone to put money into the company or close a deal. He’s also in charge of the sales and customer solutions function at APX.

Best lesson: It’s not enough to be good at what you do. You have to be persistent.
Hometown: Ramsey, NJ
Current home: South Riding
Family: Married 23 years; four kids (22, 17, 15, 13); three dogs, a cat, a lizard and a few hermit crabs.
Fun summer trips: Caribbean cruise with the whole family.
Free time: Advise startups; co-founded a nonprofit in Baltimore that supports STEM education for middle and high school students; and read, play poker and watch movies.
Bucket list: Go on a safari and visit Machu Picchu in Peru.
Most people don't know: He married his prom date. Their first date 30th anniversary is coming up. 

When WeddingWire CFO Mike Beach was getting ready for college in ’88, the job market was a wreck. But an article about accounting majors being more marketable led him down the finance path. Since then, he was part of the financial team at Blackboard when the edtech company went public. He’s also groomed former colleagues to take on leadership positions in finance and operations. He recently rejoined several former Blackboard colleagues as CFO at WeddingWire. He’s been busy integrating the company’s recent merger with Bodas, which added 12 new countries.

Best lesson: Hire people smarter than you, help them when they need help and give them freedom to do their jobs.
Hometown: Bethesda
Current home: Potomac
Family: Married to Katie 20 years; two kids, three cats, a dog and one fish.
Fun summer trip: Spent most of the summer at home in Deep Creek Lake.
Free time: Boating, skiing, golf with family.
Bucket list: Take kids to Mongolia, learn to ice skate and visit several other countries with wife.
Most people don’t know: He’s ridiculously good at fantasy football and he doesn’t really follow or watch football.

Privia CFO David Valdez’s introduction to accounting was a professor opening up the jobs section of a newspaper and showing him how many openings there were in the field. He joined Privia, a bid and proposal management technology platform, a decade ago and was promoted to CFO in 2011. He’s raised two rounds of private equity for the Herndon company and posted an operating profit last year for the first time in the company’s history. David converted the business model from traditional enterprise software to software-as-a-service. It now has a steady, predictable and recurring revenue stream. He’s working on growing Privia’s sales and marketing initiatives through Hubspot. 

Best lesson: Know when to bring on an expert.
Hometown: DC
Current home: Leesburg
Family: Married, three sons, pet fish.
Fun summer trips: Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and swimming with sea turtles in Akumal. 
Free time: Watch sons play baseball and fishing.
Bucket list: Visit Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and Machu Picchu, Peru.
Most people don’t know: He majored in graphic design and won a Gold Key Award. His artwork was exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery.

Invincea CFO Dana Mariano fell into accounting when she helped reconcile financials for a friend’s business in college and was able to present the information in an understandable way. Some of her career highlights have included serving as CFO of NetWitness when it was acquired by RSA in 2011 and finance VP of CareFusion when it was bought by CardinalHealth in 2006. Since joining Invincea as CFO in 2012, she oversaw a Series C round in early 2013 that’s helped the Fairfax cybersecurity company with steady growth.

Best lesson: Do it right the first time; it’s too hard to go back.
Hometowns: McLean and Vienna
Current home: Herndon
Family: Married one year; two stepchildren (16 and 11) and three dogs.
Fun summer trips: Nags Head in June and Football Hall of Fame for induction ceremony in August. (Husband is a huge Steelers fan.)
Free time: Yoga, running (with the dogs) and recently qualified for a boating license. Now able to to water ski and spend days on the lake.
Bucket list: Tour Australia and New Zealand.
Most people don’t know: She was a ski lift operator in college.

Avizia CFO/COO Luke Leininger has always wanted to be part of building companies that were making an impact on social welfare. Being in finance was a way to do that. He’s been CFO and COO of Avizia since helping spin out the telemedicine solutions company from Cisco in 2013. The team started with 11 people and has since nearly doubled year over year to almost 60 employees and over 400 enterprise customers. Luke recently helped lead its merger with Emerge MD in October, a transaction that strengthened Avizia’s software offering.

Best lessons: Choose the people around you carefully, especially if you’re taking risks in a high-growth entrepreneurial environment. Also, be mission driven and passionate about what you’re doing.
Hometown: Concord, CA
Current home: Ashburn
Family: Married to Emily 13 years; four kids (ages 3-11).
Fun summer trip: Hawaii and California.
Free time: Spend time outdoors with wife and kids, hiking, biking, running, playing and watching sports (S.F. Giants and BYU football) and visiting cool new places in DC.
Bucket list: Visit every country in the world.
Most people don’t know: He speaks Romanian.

Dave Uehlinger picked government as his major in college and had every intention of working at the State Department. When he realized a government career was not for him, he went back to school and earned an MBA in finance from George Mason University. For the last four years, he’s served as CFO of Eagle Ray, which helps national security agencies with performance improvement. He implemented the company’s first government contracting compliance accounting system; helped grow the company from $10M in revenue to $45M; and led the acquisition of Kore Federal in 2013, a deal that doubled the size of the company.

Best lesson: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
Hometown: Alexandria
Current home: Leesburg
Family: Married 19 years; two kids (16 and 14), three dogs, one gecko, a hedgehog and a foster cat.
Fun summer trip: Two weeks in Europe: Iceland, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Hiked in the Alps and shopped in Milan.
Free time: Attend both kids’ travel soccer games, daughter’s cross country races and son’s golf matches; bike riding and hiking.
Bucket list: Trip to UK to do pub tours and hit a Premier League soccer game.
Most people don’t know: He finished a marathon and a Spartan race.

Some people tell stories through words; Aaron Levine tells them through numbers. The story of his finance career is a series of exits. He went through the sale of Visual Networks to Fluke Networks; took Blackboard private; and most recently led the sale of Vocus to Cision. As CFO of Fishbowl, a data analytics company in Alexandria focused on the restaurant industry, Aaron led its most recent acquisition, which was Czar Metrics, a predictive analytics company, in July. He’s busy integrating that company, building Fishbowl's infrastructure and looking for more M&A opportunities.

Best lesson: Be honest. If you don’t know the answer, say you don’t know it.
Hometown: Rockville
Current home: Bethesda
Family: Married 12 years, two kids (5 and 1)
Fun summer trips: Just had a baby, so spent the summer at home.
Free time: Play basketball, watch local sports, and a whole lot of kid stuff and family time.
Bucket list: Been to six continents, but missing Antartica.
Most people don’t know: He's been to nearly 40 countries.

Jeff Dauer’s career started in a high school accounting class, where the logic of business and numbers really clicked. His finance career has spanned public accounting, internal audit, controller and financial management. He’s restructured over $300M of debt as CFO of Comstock Homebuilding, went through a successful IPO at Eloqua, and led the accounting and financial aspects of Boxtone's sale to Good Technology. Jeff was brought on to ID.me, a company that lets people prove their identity and group statuses online, as director of finance soon after the company raised a round of financing. He was soon promoted to finance VP and worked with CEO Blake Hall to close a $7.5M convertible note investment round. He also completed the company’s first financial statement audit and launched its stock-based compensation process and controls.

Best lesson: Build and maintain good relationships.
Hometown: Cleveland
Current home: Vienna
Family: Single; six nieces and two nephews.
Summer vacation: Went to the beach and had family come to visit.
Free time: Exercise, reading and swing dancing once a week.
Most people don’t know: He's ranked second in ID.me's foosball league.

Lotame CFO Mike Sullivan is a self proclaimed “numbers geek.” So while college buds were headed for degrees in law and medicine, Mike headed for the business school. His comfort zone was finance over marketing or corporate strategy. His career has included helping grow TARGUSinfo to $150M in revenue, being part of several public stock offerings and participating in close to $1b worth of deals. He joined Lotame, which sells a cross-screen data management technology, two years ago as its first CFO, and since then he’s been involved with two equity financing rounds, two M&As, a debt restructuring and growing the finance team. His current focus is finalizing the company’s financial audits and helping it grow to over $30M in revenue.

Best lesson: It’s all about selling and making deals happen.
Hometown: Frederick, Md.
Current home: Chevy Chase
Fun summer trip: Took extended family (20 people) to Virginia Beach for a week.
Free time: Watching Orioles and Ravens games and staying active on the Capital Crescent Trail.
Bucket list: When younger, visited over 25 countries and saw a game at every major league baseball stadium. He wants to refresh and update both lists.
Most people don’t know: He’s been a radio announcer, baseball umpire and college statistics instructor.