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Balancing cash flow and growth in an uncertain demand environment.

Aneal Vallurupalli, CFO at Airbase, joins Alex Clayton, General Partner at Meritech Capital, for a timely discussion on finding the balance between investing in growth and protecting cash flow.

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About this webinar.

The cross-currents of more restrictive access to new capital and a slowing of demand are raising new and complicated questions about how to best fund company growth.

Aneal will take on these questions with Alex Clayton, General Partner at Meritech Capital, in this What I Wish I Knew session. Alex will share data that his firm uses and what it reveals about investing in growth as the marginal cost for that investment increases. The discussion will also focus on models that identify the point of diminishing returns for funding different types of growth.

Staying ahead of the curve in this changing environment will define not only how your company fares in the economic slowdown, but how it will be positioned to emerge as the market regains strength.

Key takeaways.

  • What does public market data have to say to private companies? 
  • How can finance leaders assess demand in an uncertain environment?
  • What factors should be considered when modeling cashflow allocations to growth activities?

About the speakers.

Alex Clayton

Alex Clayton

General Partner at Meritech Capital

Alex joined Meritech in 2020 and helps lead the firm’s enterprise software, infrastructure, and fintech practices. He works with companies like Flock Safety, Personio, Braze, Outreach, FloQast, ClickUp, Pigment, and many others.

Prior to Meritech, Alex was a partner on Spark Capital’s Growth Fund where he primarily focused on enterprise software and infrastructure investments. He was responsible for the firm’s investments in Braze, JFrog, Justworks, Outreach, Pendo and Tray.io. Prior to Spark, Alex worked at Redpoint Ventures where he sourced or was actively involved in the firms investments in Duo Security (CSCO), Justworks, RelateIQ (CRM), Lifesize and Sourcegraph. Alex started his career in the Technology, Media, and Telecom (TMT) investment banking division of Goldman Sachs, where he focused on software, Internet and semiconductor companies. He advised clients on mergers and acquisitions, equity financings and LBO transactions and worked with companies like Intuit, Yelp, Marin Software, Gigamon, SanDisk and others.

Aneal Vallurupalli

Aneal Vallurupalli

CFO at Airbase

Aneal Vallurupalli is the Chief Financial Officer at Airbase. His background includes early- to late-stage corporate finance, corporate development, operations, and tech M&A. Most recently, Aneal was the Vice President of Finance & Operations at Mattermost, where he still serves as an advisor. At Mattermost, Aneal grew the company’s enterprise value, with a 4x increase in revenue growth and by leading the $50M Series B. He also managed the company’s fully distributed global growth by doubling the number of countries it operates in, and growing employee count by 5x. Prior to that, he was the Head of Strategic Finance at Mapbox, where he led the company’s $164M Series C round of funding from SoftBank, and was the founding member of the Corporate Development team at Guidewire (NYSE:GWRE), helping it to grow from a $800M private company to a $7B public company. His career began in technology investment banking at Union Square Advisors, completing a range of public and private M&A transactions, including buy-side, sell-side, corporate divestitures, and restructurings.

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