Big news on the hiring front continues for Ushur this week, with the announcement that Tony Smolek has joined our leadership team as CFO. This fills me with excitement on so many levels, and I wanted to take some time to augment today’s press release with a more personal take on Tony’s appointment.
For the past year, I’ve served as Ushur’s interim CFO. It’s a role I’ve enjoyed, and one that has helped me dive deeper into our cost and operating model to become a more efficient company. But, understandably, it also takes a great deal of time and strategic effort — time that is inevitably borrowed from other areas that require care and attention. One of my top priorities heading into this year was to fill that role with what it needs and deserves — a world-class, full-time leader. Our search was exhaustive, and illuminating. I came to learn quickly that the best candidates on paper did not necessarily make for the best fits at a scrappy but rapidly growing scaleup like ours. We needed someone who really embodied the entrepreneurial spirit we possess here at Ushur, someone who was not only an operational ace but someone who understood what the business requires in order to accomplish its goals in the longer term.
When we met Tony, it was obvious that he possessed both the requisite operational expertise and founder’s mindset in spades. Unlike many CFOs, Tony’s path to finance leadership has been diverse and nonlinear. He began his career in M&A, before eventually co-founding his own startup where he focused on financial systems and FP&A. That founding experience allows him to look at our business not just through the lens of a classical corporate CFO, but as a strategic partner who enables healthy growth, nimble decision making and continued innovation.
It’s that strategic ownership of a key function like finance that makes Tony such a valuable addition to the Ushur family. Critical business functions, like HR or finance or any operationally-focused charter, serve as a shared service and strategic partner to literally every piece of the business. Nothing happens in a company without partnership from finance, and when your finance leaders already possess a strategic disposition it helps solve problems across each department in ways that are in complete alignment with the goals of the business.
This is what I see in Tony. Not only is he an expert in his domain, he is also a strategy-first thinker who will advocate for financial decisions that support those goals. He understands how to rationalize the higher level of investment required for expanding our market, selling into the enterprise or building a new solution. Good financial systems for a startup aren’t just about burn and runway, or black and red numbers on a balance sheet. In attitude and approach, Tony is as much a founder and builder as he is a CFO.
Just as a product has a dedicated product architect, I see strategic CFOs as playing a similar role for the financial wellbeing of an organization. They are the financial architects that a CEO must partner with to define the arc of the company’s narrative and evolution. There are future rounds of financing and more institutional investment that will need to be raised. Being able to tell the financial story, to articulate the trajectory, is so essential to bringing in marquee new investors.
We are incredibly lucky to welcome Tony to Ushur. He empathizes with founders in such a unique way, and inherently understands how to do right by a business both in the short and long term. I have every confidence that there is no better captain to steer the financial ship through our next phase of growth! Welcome Tony!
