The world of finance and accounting is undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by technology and innovative business models. In this episode, Michael Burdick, founder and CFO of Paro, shares his insights on the evolving landscape of finance and accounting solutions. He discusses the vision behind Paro.ai, a two-sided marketplace empowering finance professionals to work on their own terms, why he looks to hire rising stars and in what circumstances people learn the most.
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We have a great guest in this episode. I’m pleased to welcome Michael Burdick, who is the founder and CFO of Paro.ai. Paro is an AI-powered marketplace that delivers finance and accounting solutions to businesses through a combination of expert financial talent, data-driven tools and guiding insights. Michael, welcome to the show.
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Jack.
Thanks. I know the description’s accurate because I took it right off the website. It’s perhaps not yet a household name, so maybe you can share a little bit about the company.
I’m happy to do that. We’re a two-sided marketplace for finance [and] accounting folks to basically work on their own terms. That’s our guiding principle and why I started the company. I came from a Deloitte background, and so it’s like a rigid, firm structure. I would say going into that, I was probably a typical millennial, someone who wanted to work on projects that I was excited about working on and express my talents, my career trajectory, in a way that I wanted to.
The reality of a firm is rigid. It’s structured. You can’t veer off course. That’s difficult in this day and age where people want to work on their own terms, have that flexibility, freedom and autonomy to express their talents in their own ways. That’s why I started Paro, so that you can do that and have your cake and eat it too, if you will.
When we spoke before, you referred to it as the Uber of financial expertise, a rather intriguing line. You probably can’t use it in your advertising, unfortunately, but can you share a little bit of what you meant by that?
I would say it is almost like Uber Black for finance and accounting professionals because what we focus on is quality. We want the folks who are the best and brightest to go out there and work on their own terms, work fractionally, on a project basis, and be part-time. You could build your own firm through us. That’s on the supply side, the experts.
You think of the highest quality folks out there, and that’s why I say Uber Black. Companies, SMBs and mid-market enterprise companies want to work with the best and brightest, the McKinsey’s of the world, if you will, but don’t want to have to pay an arm and a leg to work with that quality. That’s why we exist. It’s Uber Black for finance accounting professionals.
Early Years
That’s very intriguing. I want to return to it, but I always like to explore the early years of our guests and their career paths. Yours is particularly interesting because you started with Deloitte, and I started with the firm that’s now KPMG. Yet, you’re obviously a very entrepreneurial person. We’ll explore that a little bit. To begin with, where did you grow up?
That’s a good question. In the digital nomad world, I’m a physical nomad. My dad worked at Caterpillar for 30 years, so a career single-company journeyman. Whenever promotions occurred, we moved to the next location. I lived in 8 or 9 different states in the U.S. and then lived in Switzerland for four years. I’ve just been moved all over the place growing up. I’m, I’d say, a Midwesterner at heart with some Southern flair.
That’s interesting. If someone forced you to say, “Where’s my hometown?” referring to your childhood hometown, you wouldn’t be able to come up with one, would you?
I would probably say Houston.
How about that? I thought for sure you were going to say the Midwest, but mine’s pretty simple. I grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I’m a quirky New Englander, and that’s all there is to that. How do you think growing up and moving around, especially living in a foreign country at a relatively young age (which not a lot of Americans experience), how does that influence your philosophy on running a business now, if at all?
I think a lot. Also, one thing that I did growing up was play competitive sports quite a bit. That’s also shaped how I think about running a business and how I think about teamwork. Just playing sports, I think, has left a lasting imprint on how I view building companies. It’s like the mix of living overseas and moving around all the time. I didn’t like my parents so much for that. Every time I started to build close friends, they would rip me out and move me to the next place.
As an adolescent, I didn’t necessarily like my parents so much. In hindsight, I think that made me into who I am. I’m very grateful for that experience and how my parents helped shape my worldviews and my perspective on adversity. I do think if you’re in a cushy environment your entire life, are not challenged and pushed outside your comfort zone, you’re not going to realize the best possible outcome for yourself. I think sports and moving around left a lasting imprint on who I am.
Do you still do sports?
I wish. I was playing soccer quite a bit, like in a men’s league, every Tuesday night until COVID, and then I got out of the groove and just haven’t picked it back up. Soccer was definitely my sport all the way through college. I walked on the undergrad soccer team in college. That was a cool experience. Definitely spent a lot of time riding the bench, but that was a career highlight.
You still did it. There are very few people who play and make a team at the collegiate level. Good for you. I want to get back. What was your first job? I’m talking about maybe when you’re a teenager, a college student, not your first job after graduating.
My first job was corn detasseling. When I lived in the Midwest, making minimum wage, you walked up and down the corn aisles, pulled the tassels off, and dropped them on the ground. I think it’s so that the corn does not pollinate itself, or it’s to help it pollinate. I’m not sure which one it is, but that was my first job. There’s this trajectory that I had over my life, and definitely I’m fortunate for that, of doing atypical and nonconformist-type jobs. I think moving around all the time had a massive impact on that as well.
I had a bingo card of things you might say, and corn detassel didn’t make the list. We’ll have to put that in the subject of the podcast, From Corn Detassel to CFO. That’s great. You studied business as an undergrad.
I went to Duke as an undergrad. They don’t have a business program. It was economics and psychology that I studied. I also got my MBA from Kellogg. That’s where I studied some business, the business psychology component, but definitely got my early business acumen and experience from Deloitte, which was a cool experience.
‘Competitive Streak’
It’s interesting because you studied psychology. When I think back, the things that you need as a leader, probably studying psychology is more valuable than what I learned studying accounting when I was an undergraduate. Did you always have this entrepreneurial bent to you, even as a, not always, but late teen, early twenties, or did it come to you from the Deloitte experience?
No, it was always growing up. I had a massive competitive streak and liked to build my own things. Some of that was hands-on building. I built a bow of Petra when I was in the Midwest and just had an entrepreneurial itch. Whenever the middle school sales programs would come around, Christmas time, you go around knocking on everybody’s doors, and you sell Christmas wrapping paper or whatever trinkets you can. I set the highest sales record a couple of years in a row.
That’s the entrepreneurial spirit that I had, just wanting to build and try new things. It was a curious mindset. It was definitely, over my life, something that I had an itch and a yearning for. I think Deloitte was a wake-up call that this is not aligned with what I want to achieve and be in future years of my career.
That serves an invaluable purpose. Every experience is a good experience, even if you don’t like it in the moment, because it helps you learn, even if you’re eliminating things that you don’t want to do. Let’s face it, not many of us know exactly what we want to do when we’re 21 or 22 years old and finishing school.
I could add to that real quick. I think we, as humans, learn the most from our failures and things that we don’t succeed in versus the things we do succeed in. I believe in taking small risks and failing, and failing often because that’s how you learn. That’s how you grow at a much faster trajectory. I think trying new things and failing is the way to go.
Do you know who Bill Walton is? Basketball player. A little bit of a quirky personality, but a brilliant mind. He said he learned more from his failures and disgraces than he ever did from any awards he won. I think he’s probably being a little bit hard on himself to call whatever he went through disgraces, but you do learn a lot from failure. Every entrepreneur I know has shared that with me. You left Deloitte and learned a ton. You’re working with some of the smartest people in the game, but what inspired you to start Paro, which you took from Deloitte? Did you see a hole in the marketplace that wasn’t being filled?
I’m eternally grateful for Deloitte, and I think it shaped my business fundamentals and foundational layer. A firm model works if you go work on a project or you work on a client’s needs based on what pops up. As an entry-level analyst, you don’t have a say in what that project is. At Deloitte, a lot of it was just building my entry-level business professional skillset. That was the spark.
I was on multiple different projects, highs and lows, things that I was excited about, things that I wasn’t. I more often than not was working on projects that were not exactly aligned with what I wanted to do longer term. I ended up on one project in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania and I definitely don’t mean any offense to anyone who is from middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. It was Amish country at a regional hospital system.
I just didn’t want to be there. I was going to the project site, and one morning, I saw a horse-drawn buggy pull through a McDonald’s drive-through. I think it was such a surreal moment, like a wake-up call, like shaking me, “What are you doing?” This isn’t what you wanted going into Deloitte. I set out to create what I truly wanted to do: have the autonomy, freedom and access to work on my own terms and chart that trajectory for myself. That’s why I created Paro.
It sounds like a great natural thing. Getting back to a little about Deloitte, every successful person I met, be they an entrepreneur, an executive, or an investor, they had important mentors along the way. Sometimes, the mentors don’t even know that they serve that role in the person’s career development. Did you have any important mentors at Deloitte, or maybe just other aspects of life that formed your vision that now directs this company?
There is one person in particular that I looked up to quite a bit growing up, and I think it was primarily from living overseas and building a close relationship with him. Ed Rapp, he was the CFO of Caterpillar, an amazing guy. I looked up to how he balanced work and life and was on an incredible trajectory, embodying the morals and values I wanted to look up to and realize myself. He definitely mentored me, and he probably didn’t know it, but I gave him a call from time to time just to pick his brain and think about how he would pursue or think about this specific situation. Amazing guy.
The CFO Role
That sure sounds like it. I think he spoke at an event that I organized years ago. I know we’ve had the CFO of Caterpillar, and I’m not 100 percent sure if it was him or not. It might’ve been a different CFO, but the name’s familiar, so it probably was. That’s great. One thing that I want to talk to you about because, first of all, I’m legally required to ask you the following question as a podcast host, but also, you’re genuinely an expert on the topic, and it’s technology generally, but AI in particular.
CFOs have a different set of challenges than other C-suite executives because their instincts and, candidly, their responsibility are about data privacy, cybersecurity, just keeping things confidential. At the same time, this is probably the ultimate game-changing technology. Certainly, within my career, I suspect you’re a few years younger than me, or at least a few years younger than I am. Perhaps something else will come along, and for me, it’s this and the internet. How should CFOs be thinking about AI in a way that’s pragmatic and allays their concerns about cyber and data privacy?
That is a phenomenal question. If you don’t mind me taking a step back, I think one thing we should probably discuss is just my views on the office of the CFO and being a CFO, and how that transformation has occurred over the past 5 to 10 years. I think layering AI on top of that is an interesting combination, a force multiplier. There’s the traditional CFO mindset, and then there’s the modern CFO, if you will.
Traditional, I think everyone can conjure up that imagery of just being in charge of governance and financial statements, like the foundational components, having the right controls in place, and being very back-office oriented. I think the modern-day CFO is more commercial and growth-oriented, has much more become the right-hand man or woman to the CEO. That means commercial and growth means you need to have your hand across all components of the business and interact with all leaders and growth advocates.
It’s not just a siloed mentality, which was more the traditional mindset. I think modern, it’s the “yes, and.” The “yes, and” is you need to be able to do all the governance, the controls, the regulatory components, and privacy, and have a commercial and growth aspect to how you approach your day-to-day. I think using that as the aperture and lens, it’s layering AI on top of that where I think it becomes interesting and also probably a little bit overwhelming, too.
It is, because I think a lot of CFOs or folks within the CFO org probably are still making that transition from traditional CFO mindset to commercial or modern CFO. You layer the AI component on top of that, and it’s a lot. That’s a lot of change to navigate and manage all at once. It can be overwhelming, and I acknowledge that. I think because of what AI is going to do to transform the CFO org, it’s important that everyone within the finance office understand and deal with and use AI.
What that means is baby steps. As opposed to this just being overwhelming, “What is all this Gen AI or next-gen stuff that’s being adopted?” Just baby steps. You can download ChatGPT and just ask it questions. You have to watch out with feeding that company data or whatever, but just dabble. Just try, and you’ll learn. I think that’s part of the growth mindset and tying this back to the earlier days of my career, it failed. Try new things and fail. That’s how you learn. Don’t let this be overwhelming in a way that you’re not putting yourself out there and trying new things.
That makes a whole lot of sense. It is a time when modern technologies are just changing at an incredible pace. As somebody told me, Moore’s Law is outdated, and he was right for a long time, but the pace of change is faster than even he predicted. I’m old enough to remember that was like a radical idea that he came up with, that the technology would change that quickly. By and large, he’s been right. If anything, now he’s understating the rate of change. Is that fair to say?
To go down a nerdy rabbit hole a little bit, I think that there are questions about scaling laws for LLNs and Gen AI. Can you ChatGPT 1 to 2 to 3? The leap was extraordinary. The question is, is that going to continue to scale? I would say probably not. It is because there’s only a finite amount of information on the web, for example. You can increase that and GPUs can do only so much. You can buy thousands of H100 clusters, and the output is not going to be multiplied as much as the input because the input is finite.
I think this is a very important thing, which is the data quality. What you access and what you have at your fingertips are so important. Your company’s proprietary information is what’s going to be a differentiator for you. It’s not just using LLNs and Gen AI. It is turning your unique data into a strategic advantage using AI.
That’s what it’s all about. It’s the strategic advantage. The role has changed so much. You referenced what I sometimes call the old-school CFOs. That’s what I was. I haven’t been a CFO now for over a decade. I was probably pretty good at my job, but the job now is just so different. Maybe it’s even the people who were successful in CFO jobs from who got them in the year 2000. It might be a different group of people getting CFO jobs now than that. I think we would have learned and adapted, but maybe they just would have been different people rising to the top in the profession.
I think it’s an interesting observation because the finance leadership suite is a very atypical trajectory. I think it is still a world that values certificates, prior experience, and logos, and it remains conservative in that regard and in that nature. My view on the future is that’s going to change, but now it still is the case that I think a lot of the folks that occupy CFO roles are more from the typical background. They figure out how to adapt into the modern-day CFO growth mindset role.
That makes a lot of sense. I want to chat with you about your own role because I think your official title, and do correct me if I’m wrong, besides being the Founder, is chief strategy Officer and interim CFO. My sense from talking to you before and again now is that the long-term play is probably chief strategy officer for you. Let’s chat a little about the crossover between the two roles and how you interact with the other executive leaders within your company.
I think they’re just titles. I think what’s more important is what you do and the impact you make. I’ve always been somebody who values numbers, sees a spreadsheet or a trend line, and wants to figure out what that means. How do we double down on this? What are we saying no to? What are we leaning into? How do we turn this into a strategic advantage overall? Using numbers as the way to craft that narrative or the lens to view that through. I think there’s a lot of overlap between looking at the future through the lens of numbers.
If you think about a CFO role, maybe half of it is accounting-oriented, and half of it is finance-oriented. If I had to overly simplify, the accounting side is more historical and looking backwards, and the finance side is more looking forward. I like the looking forward and finance and growth aspect of that, which I think has a lot of overlap with the chief strategy officer type role. That’s where the Venn diagram overlaps, if you will. In terms of interacting and working across the org, I don’t know if there’s any pattern recognition there.
In this world, you have to be collaborative and work as a team. Even from my days playing on sports teams and being super competitive, I view building a company and running a company as a team sport. You’re only as good as your weakest link, which is one of the ways to look at it. You have to work together to be a force multiplier for each other to deliver the most optimal outcome. That’s probably cemented in me from my playing sports days.
Leadership Philosophy
That makes a lot of sense. One thing I want to chat with you about is your background in sports, which probably influences your leadership strategy. I know from our prior conversation that you take a lot of pride in the team that you’ve put together over Paro. What is your leadership philosophy and your talent development philosophy within the company? What can people maybe learn from you? It is because, I’ll tell you, when I talk to my members about their five biggest challenges, just about all of them will put talent management in some form, whether it be retention, retaining, developing, whatever. What’s your philosophy, and what can our readers take away from that?
It’s a good question. I think let’s put this into two buckets. One is hiring the best talent. What do I look for? The second is managing and developing the best talent. In terms of hiring, I’m probably going to beat a dead horse here, but I look for people who have played sports. I like prior athletes. I like folks that are competitive. If you look at their resume or their LinkedIn profile, I look for their rate of growth and their trajectory.
I don’t necessarily look at titles, logos or brands. I want somebody who is a rising star. I want to invest behind their trajectory, not necessarily hire somebody who is the SVP of blah, blah, blah at Amazon. I’m not looking for logos and brand splash. I’m looking for the substance behind the title. What have you done? What have you achieved? What do you want to accomplish in the future? I want to get to know you.
That’s how I look at hiring. In terms of developing and investing behind people, I think the CEO of NVIDIA, everybody’s probably heard this guy talk, he said to, I think, a group of Stanford graduate students, that he hopes everyone experiences great suffering in their life. I thought that was one of the most interesting and shocking things, especially to a group of Stanford graduate school students, to say to them.
It’s because you learn the most when your back is pinned up against the wall, or you’re in a corner, or you’re working 100-plus hours a week, and you fail. You learn the most from that. When you are overexerted, you’re pushed outside your comfort zone. You’re not probably enjoying it. That’s when you learn the most.
As a leader or as a mentor, I do that almost deliberately. It is because, even though the folks that work for me may not like me, I hope that they learn the most from working with me. That’s something that I optimize for and focus on. It is because being liked is not aligned with me helping them achieve, spread their wings, and be the most that they possibly can be and achieve the most in their career. It is because that’s what gives me the most joy.
Paro’s Direction
I’m sure that your employees like you. From what I can see, you’re a pretty likable fellow, so I want to ask a little about your company again. What do you see as some of the challenges and opportunities facing the company in the next few years? Obviously, an ever-changing marketplace, which, for a guy like you, is fun and exciting, but it does create some challenges to stay on top of that. Can you bring out the crystal ball and let us know what direction you’re taking Paro?
I think there are endogenous factors, things that you can influence and control, and exogenous factors, things that are external, which you can’t necessarily control. We’re a venture-backed startup, and so one of the exogenous factors that influenced us quite a bit was the venture markets in 2021 to 2022, or mostly 2021, where multiples were insane. People were just plowing money into venture hand over fist, and the mindset was just grow, which is at odds with how I think we build a company, which is to build a good company, grow, be efficient, and be thoughtful about how you deploy capital.
When you have exogenous factors just plowing money into startups, that can influence even the most disciplined people or operators. I’d say it influenced us for sure. That was an interesting factor over the past several years. How we think about building a company moving forward is aligned with everything we’ve been doing for the past 6 or 7 years, building our vision and realizing our truest and fullest potential.
We’re have integrated AI into everything we do. It’s about enabling finance and accounting professionals to work on their own terms and have all the tools and capabilities to feel comfortable doing that. It is because it’s honestly, frankly, terrifying and scary for a CPA to go from knowing their career trajectory, working at the Deloittes of the world, but wanting to work on their own terms, and then saying, “I’m going to do that and jump off the cliff.” It is because, by the way, in the freelance economy, you don’t have a consistent safety net or own trajectory. That’s why we exist, to make it so that people can freelance or work on their own terms and feel comfortable doing that.
That makes a lot of sense. Also, get back to your clients. What are some of the biggest challenges that your clients are facing, and how does Paro help them out with those things? I’m sure a lot of it is in the digital area, but I looked at your website. You do have a pretty impressive, wide range of services.
Our clients spend a lot of money on finance and accounting services. Think about it as external finance accounting spend with a CPA firm or using a finance accounting consultant, if you will. The issue with the accounting world, at least how I see it, is you’re paying for the brand as opposed to the quality behind the brand. We’re democratizing access to the highest quality folks on demand so that you get a McKinsey-quality person at the exact price you’re willing to pay and the quality you’re looking for.
If you’re a $250 million CPG company and you have a specific tech stack, you’re on a specific accounting software. You probably don’t want someone who’s right out of undergrad, who’s a generalist, and not going to add value. You want to work with somebody who’s done it before, knows your company, knows your space, and can solve your specific problem.
You also don’t want to pay an arm and a leg doing that. That’s where Paro comes in. Our matchmaking algorithms tee up the best-fit experts for a given specific problem or pain point for the clients. The value creation is pretty exorbitant and incredible in that way. We view that if we continue to build the flywheel with the supply side and have the best experts on our platform, the best thing we can do for our clients is to have those folks on our platform.
I want to change gears a little bit here again. One of the things I’m hoping to accomplish with this show, amongst many, is to change the perception that people have of CFOs. In that spirit, I want to ask, do you have a fun fact, maybe an unusual hobby, or even a favorite go-to joke that you use that you’d like to share with our readers? So far, nobody’s taken me up with the go-to joke.
That’s a tough one. I definitely have a dry sense of humor and probably am extraordinarily sarcastic, but I don’t have a joke that I’ll tell at a bar. In terms of fun fact, I don’t know if I can beat the first job as de-tasseling. I worked at a lemonade stand at a state fair. I worked for an oil rig servicing company at one point. I’ve been to Mongolia, an interesting location. I’ve also scuba-dived in Palau, which is in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific. A lot of this is just from living overseas, I just have the travel itch and bug. I like doing stuff like that.
That’s fantastic. I’d like to conclude with any advice you might have for the next generation of CFOs.
I think lean into AI because it is going to be extraordinarily disruptive and focus on baby steps. As I previously mentioned, in terms of the next generation of CFO leaders or next crop, I’d probably recommend something atypical, which is go get your CPA and study accounting in undergrad, and then focus on finance and your business career.
The reason I say that is because I think the foundational aspects and elements, the building blocks of finance accounting, are in the historicals and are in accounting. In order to apply AI to the finance accounting suite in a force multiplier way, you need to understand all the building blocks and understand how everything fits together so that then you can apply AI in ways that other people are not thinking about. I think do the against-the-grain thing and study accounting.
Michael, I think that’s great advice for the future leaders, and I know you’re busy. I want to take a moment to thank you for your time. I’d just like to give you the final word.
We’ve talked a lot about being outside your comfort zone, trying new things, and being comfortable failing. I think that’s increasingly important and true in this day and age with AI and how disruptive that is. Be true to yourself, be comfortable outside your comfort zone, and explore growth and learning as your overall professional story arc and I think you will all be incredibly successful as professionals overall. I’ll just leave you with that thought. Grow and learn and be comfortable failing.
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That wraps up this episode of the show. A huge thank you to our sponsors Planful and Travel Bank. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review at RockstarCFOs.com. Until next time, rock on.
