Cyber resilience is no longer optional—it’s mission-critical for every modern organization. As CFO of Commvault, Jennifer DiRico is helping shape the future of how companies protect, rebuild and grow after cyber threats.
In this episode, DiRico opens up about her journey from working in her family’s car wash to leading finance at one of the world’s top data security and AI firms. She reflects on the decade-long ride at Toast that led to its IPO, the mentors who shaped her as a leader and how she’s driving durable growth at Commvault through innovation and trust. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
—
Listen to the podcast here
We’re going to have a fun and interesting episode. I have been looking forward to it for a little while. Please join me in welcoming Jen DiRico. Jen is the CFO of Commvault, which is a leading provider of cyber resilience, data security, and AI solutions. Since joining Commvault in 2024, Jen has been laser-focused on driving long-term, durable growth initiatives to scale. She joined Commvault after ten years at Toast, which we’re going to explore, where she played a key role in its expansion around the world and in its successful IPO. Jen, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
We’re glad to have you. Commvault is one of those companies that’s not yet a household name. The brand is certainly growing amongst CFOs, to say the least. A lot of our members know about it. For those who aren’t super familiar with it, what can you tell us about the company?
Commvault operates in the cyber resiliency space. It’s been around a long time. It started in a world of data protection. Ultimately, if you listen to our CEO, Sanjay, he says that we’ve always protected data in a difficult world. Those challenges have evolved over time. It used to be natural disasters. Now, it’s much more around cyber attacks.
What we do quite simply is make sure that when you’re attacked by a threat actor or a cyber attack, because these days, it’s a when, not an if, you can get back up and running. We protect your data, and we can rebuild your environments. We help you be truly cyber resilient, because cyber resiliency is the convergence between data protection and data security.
That makes a whole lot of sense. We’re going to explore that in depth later. Before that, I want to get our audience to know a little about your own background. I know the answer to this, and I’m excited by the answer to this. Can you share where you grew up?
Yeah. I grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts.
For those who aren’t from Massachusetts, Jen grew up about ten miles from me, probably. I grew up in Burlington, Massachusetts. We didn’t exactly have a rivalry, but maybe a little bit. Who’s your big high school rivalry?
I went to an all-girls school, Dana Hall, in Wellesley. I didn’t go to public school. My rivalry in high school was Windsor, which is another all-girls school.
For us, it was Lexington and Wilburn. We were often on the losing end of that rivalry. It wasn’t much of one. It’s always fun to have a fellow Bay Stater. When you look back as a kid, what was the first job you ever had? Maybe as a teenager, not after graduating from college.
My dad has been in business for himself for a long time. He runs a car wash. I worked at the car wash as soon as I could legally work. It was fourteen at the time. I worked on towel-drying cars.
That’s pretty cool. We’ve been doing probably around the 75th episode. It’s remarkable how many CFOs have shared with me that their parents started or owned their own businesses. There might be something in the entrepreneurial gene that translates to children who are going to become CFOs. Was your mother entrepreneurial, too?
My mom was largely stay-at-home while we were growing up. She’s a therapist now. She went back to school when she was 50 and got her degree. We are very much an entrepreneurial, small business, like-minded family, for sure.
You made a very wise decision. You went to college at the University of Miami. We don’t get a lot of people back when they moved to South Florida. I’m very happy that you did. You probably made unusual choices for fields of study at the time, but spectacular choices for a CFO. You got an undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship and Leading and Management, if I’m not mistaken. You got an MBA at Simmons, one of the best colleges in the game. Was there a vision that you would become, if not a CFO necessarily, maybe a C-Suite leader or something like that?
Yeah. I’d give myself too much credit if I said I envisioned myself as a CFO. I always saw myself as a leader of something in the business world. In entrepreneurship, back to your point about whether it runs in the family, I had always seen my dad make it happen, whether from a small business perspective. I knew I didn’t want to be an accountant. I have nothing against the accountants in the room, but I knew that wasn’t my passion. I wanted to make sure I had broad business experience. That was one of the reasons I chose entrepreneurship. Leading people, regardless of what you do, is important.
In financial analytics, there aren’t a lot of better things you could study for the modern CFO job. I got my first CFO job some time ago. Accounting was the best thing you could study back then. Now, it’s almost like you’re an accidental visionary with your educational choices.
I wish I could say it was all purposeful, but there was a little bit of luck here, honestly. It happened to work.
There you go. You finished up at Miami and got an MBA. What was your first job after school?
A little bit of background. Between college and graduate school, I went into hospitality for a couple of years. I worked at a local country club as the function director. I did that for a couple of years and then realized it was time for me to go back and get my MBA full-time. While I loved the job, I knew I wanted a little bit of a different path.
Coming out of my MBA, given that background, I did hospitality consulting work, which was a good blend of practical experience for a couple of years after school, plus the fact that I had this MBA, and I was trying to make that transition. It allowed me to work for a small consulting firm that brought me to Italy for over a year.
I lived in Italy for a year and a half, supporting a small business that was a family-owned coffee concept that had nine locations in Italy and a couple in London. I helped them think through operations and financial modeling. They were thinking about doing some franchising. It was a good opportunity for me to dip my toes in a lot of different experiences.
That’s interesting. Did you speak Italian prior to moving to Italy?
I did not. A little bit of a fun fact, I spent almost every night when I wasn’t working learning Italian in Rosetta Stone. I was living in a small town where there were only so many people who spoke English. There were very few. For me to make it work, I had to do a little bit of learning on the fly.
If you went to Rome or someplace like that, you’d probably find enough people. Some of them might not want to help the American who didn’t bother to try.
This was also many years ago. There’s been a lot of evolution since then, but English was not top of the list for a lot of people at the time.
That makes a lot of sense. You’ve had a great career, but I want to focus a little bit on your job at Toast. You may or may not know this, but Elena did a keynote at our conference in 2024.
That’s wonderful. She’s a good friend and a mentor of mine. That’s great.
I only know her mostly from that experience. I know her by reputation because everybody knows her by reputation. Clearly, it was a big coup to get her to come from Silicon Valley to be the CFO of Toast. You had a great run at Toast. You joined as the manager of FP&A. You grew to VP of Finance and SVP and General Manager of International at Toast. You were instrumental in an IPO. I’d love you to take us through that journey, what you learned, and some of the key lessons, because it was the ride of a lifetime. Hopefully, you’ll have another ride of a lifetime, but it was quite a ride.
Let me tell you that I’m incredibly grateful for the experience. When I joined Toast, I’d love to say I had this vision that it was going to be this amazing ride. Honestly, I didn’t think about it. What I did know was that I knew about the product. To go back to my days in hospitality, I knew there was a real market for software and technology. I also knew I wanted to work with people who could challenge me and who were fun to be around. Toast checked all those boxes. The job itself was great in terms of my experience.
What happened over the course of almost ten years at Toast was, first of all, I couldn’t have dreamed it to happen, honestly. It was a life-changing experience for me. I had the opportunity to build a finance team from the ground up and think through what true business partnering means. That’s one of the reasons I lean heavily into the FP&A and the strategic finance side. That’s where I cut my teeth, learning the business.
A key lesson for me was not about putting numbers in boxes per se, but it was understanding how a department works, how the business model works, and what the why is behind the numbers. For me, one of the biggest things I took from Toast was that you can tell a good story if you understand the business and the numbers. That is a powerful skill from a finance perspective.
Not only did I have the ability to build the finance team from the ground up, but I also had an opportunity to lead the company through the IPO. Elena joined towards the end of that process, so I had an opportunity to lean in there. Post-IPO, I led investor relations, strategic finance, treasury, and FP&A. It was understanding what good, strong public company operations look like from a finance perspective and how that is different from raising 4 or 5 fundraising rounds as a startup. Different muscles, but all incredibly important.
Lastly, I spent some time outside of finance, which I credit for being one of the reasons I’m a pretty good CFO. I took time outside the finance team and had to own the number. I led our international operations. I started that business from zero. We had no locations, only there. When I left, it was north of 2,000 or so in terms of the number of locations. It was a lot of progress.
Ultimately, I was responsible for the full P&L. What I liked most about that part of the job, though, was that it stretched me because I had to lead leaders who I couldn’t do their jobs. All throughout finance, it was much more that I could do the job of a lot of my teammates and my peers. As the general manager of international, that was different. I never cared about a quota. I’ve never built a product. I wasn’t a product person or a technologist. Ultimately, it allowed me to hone my skills on one of the questions in how I lead. For me, Toast was an amazing experience that realistically could happen over someone’s 30-year career that I got in less than 10 years. I continue to say Toast changed my life, and I’m incredibly humbled to have been part of their story.
I picked the right company to focus on your pre-Commvault days, it sounds like. It’s interesting. I remember when Elena was hired. Search firms, as they tend to do, reached out to me to ask if they knew anyone who was looking. Clearly, they were going for a big fish. What they were going for was looking for a person to take them public within 6 to 18 months. You had that whole thing of building it not from zero, but from a very early stage, to where it was IP already. Thinking along, who are some of the key people that you worked with in terms of mentors, formal or informal? Who are the people who have impacted the way you approach your job as a leader?
I’ve had a lot of people along the way, but I have to credit two people. Former CEO of Toast, Chris Comparato, took a chance on me time and time again. In fact, he allowed me to serve as the “interim CFO” during a period of a lot of change during COVID, almost up until the IPO. That was a life-changing opportunity. From a leadership perspective, he always led with positive intent. He always took a chance on people whom he believed in, even though, on paper, I did not have all the experience. That’s a big testament for me in terms of when I think about people and their potential. Those who are hungry, want to try hard, and mean well, that goes a long way.
The other person I would say is Elena Gomez. She is the reason I can sit here and talk to you as a CFO, not only from a technical perspective, but she pushed me to think differently. Finance shows up at the table on how you can be a strategic leader and how you can move business forward. I would say to you that I owe a big part of my career to her, in a matter of meeting her a couple of years ago.
That’s great. By reputation, she’s all of those things. You had a great run at Toast. It must have been a very difficult decision. You had the opportunity at Commvault, which, if I have my facts correct, is your first ever CFO job. Can you share with us how that opportunity came about and what that decision process looked like when you decided to move on from Toast to Commvault?
It’s an understatement to tell you that it was a hard decision for me. I like to tell people that when I was at Toast that I bled orange, because the Toast colors are orange. I believed completely in the mission and the product. I had grown so much at the company. I had learned so much. This is a conversation Elena and I had a lot. I want my chance to be a public company CFO. That’s a hard thing to get when you are not a sitting public company CFO.
I wasn’t actively looking, but I was passively considering what was out there. A recruiter who had the job for Commvault reached out. I will be honest with you. I did not know Commvault. I did know the brand. What I did know is that in the time that I had participated in the audit committee meetings at Toast, from the early days all the way through, one thing has changed.
It was the conversation around, “Are we prepared? If there’s a cyber attack? What will we do to make sure that our business continues to respond, God forbid something happens?” In the early days, that wasn’t a conversation at all. In the last few years, it was top of the list. Risk was top of the list in terms of cyber attacks and threats, like many boards and many audit committees. For me, that told me that this was a very interesting and relevant space.
I did a little bit more digging into the company. Commvault has had a long history, but over the last couple of years, they’ve done a lot of great work in terms of transitioning a business model and reinvigorating growth, all the while being incredibly profitable. For me, at the highest level, when I saw that they have a growing TAM, a very relevant product solving a big customer need, and also growing, I thought, “This is something I should consider.” I had a lot of conversations.
What I was most drawn to was the impact I could have. Commvault was looking to reinvigorate growth. That’s a very different DNA than your steady-type company. What I thought I could bring was how we can make sure that we can respect and balance all the great work that has happened at Commvault for so long, but then also invigorate and inspire additional growth-driving initiatives. That’s a different risk appetite. Sometimes, that requires different skillsets as well. I thought I could add some value. I officially crossed my one-year anniversary. It’s been an amazing year.
Happy anniversary.
Thank you.
That’s pretty good timing. From what you’re telling me, it sounds like it was a great choice. One of the things, by reputation, from my preparation for this, is that you are way up there in terms of CFOs who understand generative AI. There are not that many of us out there who do. How are you using generative AI within your work as a CFO, as opposed to how the customers might be using it? We’ll get to that separately.
On my end, as a CFO, I’m using it as an extension of how I think and work. What does that mean? I’m using AI to help pressure test my decisions, draft my communications, model trade-offs, and sharpen my narratives. Commvault is a high-growth company. I’m looking to do a lot, and I’m trying to move quickly, but at the same time, AI can be a great partner. It’s not a substitute for other partners, but for me, I feel like I’ve been able to progress decision-making and scenario planning options faster than I would’ve in the past if I hadn’t engaged with it.
From a team perspective, and Commvault is in the early innings on this, I am pushing my teams to say, “How are you leveraging AI from a model perspective? How do we find efficiencies, even things down to headcount reconciliations? How do we think about drafting decks quicker and ultimately getting people to do more thinking versus copy and pasting and creating formulas?”
With you as a visionary on generative AI, I know the question comes up a lot about whether AI can take the place of humans. It can take the place of processes, but you’re not on the side that it can take the place of humans, as I understand it. How do you see AI becoming a useful part of the corporate finance function in a way that works with humans as opposed to replacing humans?
I am of the mindset that AI is only going to make our jobs easier and faster. I don’t believe it’s going to replace humans, at least in the corporate finance side of things. However, I think the way we work will change. I like to give the example that much earlier on in my career as an analyst, I spent a heck of a lot of time doing headcount reconciliation and creating a model from a revenue perspective, or the waterfall revenue. In the future, the analyst is no longer going to have one model. They’re going to be training 3 or 4 different agents to help them do the modeling effectively. It will be how you interact with the AI agent as opposed to whether you created the model yourself.
Ultimately, I think we can all agree that we’re going to find a lot of efficiencies, but I believe the finance teams that embrace this will be better finance teams. They’ll be able to have higher output, stronger decision-making, and ultimately be embedded in the business more. There will not be time spent doing variance analysis and all the things that take up so much time at the beginning of the month or the beginning of the quarter. That will be a quick thing where you can get back to the business to understand, “What can I do to push decision-making and strategic intent?”
It’s interesting because in every technology wave, people say it’s going to eliminate jobs. I remember in high school when I said I was going to study accounting, smart people told me I should never do that because computers would replace accountants in five years. As smart as they were, they couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, if anything, computers have empowered accountants. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I have a feeling it’s going to change work, but it’s not going to replace work.
I think it’s going to make the work different. The most important thing is how we train our people and our teams to embrace and make sure that they can be successful in the workforce.
I want to move on. Commvault is in a great position. It’s one of the most visible companies out there, but still, the capital markets are tricky, even for a company as well-positioned as yours. I’m wondering. What advice do you have for CFOs who are maybe dealing with a constantly changing private capital market scenario for the first time in their careers?
It goes back to truly understanding the market you serve and being able to quantify that very clearly. In the public markets, I get a lot of questions around, “What is the TAM? How does that support your growth over the long-term?” That would be the first thing I would say. The second thing is that even if you aren’t public, you still should start to act like a public company regardless.
In terms of how you report, how you think about supporting your investor base, and anything around telling the story from a narrative perspective, there is good hygiene that is important regardless of the stage of the company. That’s hard to do if you’re early on, but it’s a good part to get your teams focused on strong operating cadences. Operating rhythms are incredibly important regardless of what stage you are as a company.
It makes a whole lot of sense. There is one thing I like about having CFOs who are not CPAs on the show. I am a CPA, or I was at one point. I always like to ask what some of your favorite KPIs or benchmarks are that you use to assess and report financial performance. You’re nodding your head, so I think you’ve got some good ones.
When you think about KPIs, they’re not the P&L metrics. Those are important. Revenue growth, gross margin, and EBIT are fine, but for me, it’s about leading indicators around growth. For us at Commvault, it’s the type of inflow. How much inflow are we seeing? What is the average revenue per account? How many net new accounts are we bringing in? What’s the lifetime value versus CAC dynamic? What’s the payback on that customer? Overall, I pay a lot of attention, and it’s a little lagging, to the net new ARR that we’re adding to the platform. I think that is a signal of long-term growth.
Those are some good ones. I mentioned I’m a CPA. I had a boss who would not let me report according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. He used to say, “GAAP is crap.” I won’t say who it is, but there’s a reasonably good chance that you know him because we’ve played in the same circles. He has retired. “GAAP is crap,” is what he used to tell me.
I can’t say I disagree.
He had a valid point, but a rules-based system for reporting inherently has value.
It’s important.
I picture this guy as probably writing poetry in his retirement. Speaking of CEOs, you are lucky you work for one of the better ones. You mentioned Sanjay earlier. A great brand, a great thinker, and a great visionary. The role between the CEO and the CFO has become a true partnership rather than just saying it’s a true partnership. I say that because more and more CEOs are the ones telling me. When CFOs used to tell me, I’d be like, “Sure,” but now, CEOs are saying it, so it’s probably true. How do you build that true strategic partnership with Sanjay?
It’s a process. First of all, I’m lucky to work with someone who’s so open to building a relationship. That was one of the reasons I thought I could be successful at Commvault. For Sanjay and me, it’s all about building trust and honesty, and then learning from one another. When I first got to Commvault, I wanted to learn about the product, his vision around innovation, and how AI plays into that. In the beginning, it was a lot about wanting him to teach me about Commvault because I was so new.
On the flip side, right, there’s an element of growth from a strategic finance and an FP&A perspective. There’s an element of what we can learn from each other, but also inherent trust that we each have our swim lanes. Understanding where those swim lanes are is incredibly important because then, I understand what subject matter expertise I can bring to the table versus what he can. We can balance these ideas off.
We think differently, which is incredibly important for a CEO and a CFO dynamic. You think about different risks. You think about growth a little bit differently as well, and where you’re willing to make trade-offs. For me, any good partnership starts with trust and a heck of a lot of regular communication. The more communication, the better. I feel very fortunate to have Sanjay as a CEO and a partner.
There’s a lot of talk about it. In Accenture, a couple of years ago, they thought that within the C-Suite, that was the most important partnership. Other partnerships and relationships could survive a little bit of dysfunction. It doesn’t mean they have to be hanging out together on the weekends, golfing, or whatever, but business-wise, if they’re not on the same page and their disagreements aren’t respectful, the whole company is going to suffer for that. It’s great you seem to have that type of relationship.
We have a great relationship.
In one of my early CFO jobs, I worked in the cybersecurity space. It’s a different game now, to say the very least. One thing that is probably true is that you are working with engineers, some of the smartest and some of most innovative ones. At the same point, your customers have rock-solid reliability. You’re sitting here as a CFO. How do you balance the financial risks that are associated with innovation, keeping your product ahead of the game, and having an innovative culture? At the same time, you’re responsible for mitigating risks with all of your stakeholders. Do you have an active role in that?
That’s a great question. It’s one we debate internally a lot. I credit Sanjay for setting the right tone here. Our primary goal is to keep customers’ data safe. When a customer comes to us, and they’ve been impacted by a threat actor, they’re in a bad place. They need us to help them drastically. We have one job to do in that instance.
We’re a company steeped in engineering and innovation. Also, we have been very clear that, ultimately, our first priority is to ensure we can bring customers’ data and companies back to life. That is priority number 1, 2, and 3. As we think about balancing risk, we go back to our first principles, and then outside of that, we need to engage with innovation.
I’ll give you a great example, which is AI. One of our tenets of AI is that we use AI to make customers’ lives easier and make their recoveries faster. We’re not looking to play in a space that is inherently more dangerous. It’s all about how we can go back to our number one principle of protecting customers’ data in a very difficult world. When I have those conversations with our engineering team, I’m very fortunate because our teams know that. They inherently know that’s the first principle. Ultimately, as the steward of risk here, I have to make sure that we are consistently making sure that that is top of mind.
Steward of risk. I’m stealing that phrase from you. There has been another change in the space since I was there. Data protection is still job one, but it was probably the only job we had in cyberspace. I remember our ads showed a soccer goalie blocking a ball. It said, “What happens when you get hacked with top-layer networks?” It was the soccer thing, and it said, “Absolutely nothing.”
That was a mistake because then, every hacker took it as a challenge. The stuff held up. Data is a little different from what it was then. People are extracting business value from data. They’re not just storing it. How are you evolving your business model to capture the value analysis, AI, and all of the data-driven services that might be available?
I would go back to our first principle that we protect customers’ data. We don’t leverage the customer’s data in any way. We don’t use it from an analytics perspective. There is no monetization or anything like that. At the end of the day, customers trust us with their data. We are the last line of defense. Having said that, from an overall perspective of how we think about leveraging AI, we think about it in a couple of ways.
How can we make sure that customers can come back to life very quickly using AI? How can we learn more from what makes customers stronger in terms of how they leverage certain partners from an AI perspective? Ultimately, while we protect a lot of data, there’s no monetization, and we don’t use customers’ data in any way, shape, or form.
That’s great. We’re a little bit in the home stretch, so we’ll resume the normal conversation. You have a lot going on. Growing a company as the CFO is a busy job. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, or Jen a dull girl, in this case. Do you have any interesting hobbies or things that you do outside of work to maintain a good work-life balance?
Yeah. I like to think of it as work-life integration versus work-life balance. I’m pretty active. In the winter, I ski a lot. We have a place in Vermont. I go there a lot. In the summer, I love to mountain bike. I’m also a runner. When I want to chill, I love to read a good book. You couple that with some good dinners with my husband, and life is pretty good. Even though it’s busy, I do try my best most weeks to find some balance. The week of burden is a little tough. How’s that? I try.
It’s the reality of being a CFO for a company like Commvault. It’s not 9:00 to 5:00. You may have made different career choices. For people who want a 9:00 to 5:00 living, those jobs still do exist, but not in your space.
It’s a lot of fun. I’m biased. I love the job. I have enough balance.
Good for you. Sports are the greatest balance. There’s so much research that people who are active are better in their jobs and whatnot. It helps your energy, helps your self-confidence, and gives you that critical psychological break. You’ve had a great run and have seen some different things with different sorts of companies. How do you see the CFO role and maybe even the nature of financial leadership itself evolving over the next few years?
You’re going to continue to see the same type of trajectory where the CFOs have become far more operational and far more strategic. It’s no longer a back-office function. You see the difference between certain CFOs who are more back office versus more involved in the business on a regular basis. That’s where the market is going. That’s where we need it.
Most of the CFOs I talk to are leaning into how they can be a voice in the room from a strategic perspective. Sometimes, I sit back and watch my team discuss. If I’m quiet, there’s a clear voice missing in the room. It’s not because it’s me, but there’s a definite view that a CFO brings from a strategic, business impact, and even a customer impact, oftentimes. Over time, you’re going to continue to see that take shape. It’s only going to accelerate, in my view, when we can continue to leverage AI.
It does make a lot of sense. We tend to have a young-ish audience, according to the analytics. A lot of our readers are in that pre-CFO category. It wasn’t so long ago that you were in that crowd.
Not long ago at all.
The VPs of finance, controllers, and chief accounting officers who might be short-term CFOs. I’m wondering. What advice would you give them to continue on, do their job great, get that CFO opportunity when it’s available, and then crush it when they have the opportunity?
I would say to continue to raise your hand. Continue to ask for more. Step outside of your comfort zone. Continue to understand the business. The best CFOs out there understand not just the numbers, but the why behind the numbers and the business and the operational impact. Make sure you build relationships outside of finance. My job outside of finance was probably one of the reasons I can be a good CFO. Don’t underestimate the power of understanding the business and not just the numbers. Raise your hand for every opportunity because I truly believe that’s what got me here.
That is fantastic advice. I look forward to following your career journey over the next few years. With that, I’d like to give you the final word.
When we think about AI, the value of finance isn’t just precision. It’s perspective. AI is going to supercharge the questions we ask. Our job is not to fear that disruption. It’s to operationalize it.
