In this episode, host Eric Zhou welcomes Sean Soper, the Head of Financial Operations and Accounting at Alchemy, to discuss the state of the union for blockchain and web3, the possible accounting use cases for the technology, and regulatory considerations. It’s a must listen for finance tech enthusiasts!
In this episode, host Eric Zhou welcomes Sean Soper, the Head of Financial Operations and Accounting at Alchemy, to shed light on the disruptive technologies shaping the trajectory of accounting and finance. Alchemy provides the leading blockchain development platform and as such, much of the conversation narrows in on the possible applications of blockchain in accounting.
Sean begins the discussion highlighting his experience working across companies that have revolutionized whole industries with new technology. He notes that a large part of his success at these companies has been from remaining curious and developing deep industry knowledge that guides how he approaches his accounting processes and procedures. Sean then outlines his priorities in his current role at Alchemy, which include optimizing the financial close process, fine tuning reporting and analytics, and managing cash.
The conversation quickly turns to the future of blockchain technology and its potential for revolutionizing accounting and finance. Sean and Erik discuss the state of the union for blockchain and web3, the possible accounting use cases for the technology, and regulatory considerations.
The episode wraps with Sean’s point of view on the future of hybrid work models and the importance of community and collaboration in that, plus the funniest expense report he’s had hit his desk (hint: it was related to a very creative sales spiff).
Key Quotes
Time Stamps
Links
CON006 - Sean Soper - v1
Sean: [00:00:00] Blockchain fundamentally is the reason why I got into this space is because it's an exciting technology to have something, a ledger that's distributed and immutable. Accountants absolutely love controls. They like to, you know, get supporting documentation, something that's substantive, that proves transactions that actually occurred and to be able to have date, time, Stamps, as well as the double sided ledgering that's all feasible and possible on the blockchain.
Announcer: Welcome to Controllers Classified, the podcast where we take a deep dive into the dynamic world of controllers, accountants, and finance leaders, and hear how their ever evolving roles are redefining accounting and the future of business. And now, here's your host, Eric Zhou.
Erik: Welcome to Controllers Classified.
I'm your host, Eric Zhou, Chief Accounting Officer at [00:01:00] Brex, and I am excited to welcome today's guest, Sean Soper, Head of Financial Operations and Accounting at Alchemy. Alchemy provides the leading blockchain development platform, and given that, it's no surprise that today's conversation will deep dive into technology and the role It could play in transforming accounting and finance in the future.
Thanks for joining us, Sean.
Sean: Thanks, Eric. Pleasure to be here.
Erik: So you've mentioned you thrive in disruptive technologies and emerging markets, how has that shaped your career and more specifically? You know, your views on the role of finance at companies in these spaces.
Sean: Thriving is a very strong word. I think I probably would put surviving if I could change it.
But it has been like a learning lesson just going through emerging tech, disruptive tech, and Sort of operating in an area where the playbook hasn't been created before. So from that perspective, there's, there's a lot of strategic insights [00:02:00] that I can either glean from past experiences that I can lend to new companies that I join, or there's something that either I'm taking from my public accounting experience that That also is like pretty industry specific that I can lend to the role that I'm walking into.
And I think one of the crucial aspects about being a controller in the startup space is to be strategic, as much of a strategic partner as possible to your organization to help them operationalize towards those goals. I like to say it's a little bit less CYA, and a little bit more like steward to an organization.
Erik: And then, you know, in terms of keeping up with the times and working in these disruptive technologies, I know you've been trying to keep up with this stuff by getting continuing education credits. I know you've gotten several certificates. You know, what did that entail and how do you think it advanced your career and professional goals?
Sean: Honestly, the, the certificates are more [00:03:00] along the lines of intellectual curiosity and just wanting to understand my industry a little bit more. Again, going back to the point of being a good steward for an organization, there's a lot of things that you can glean from. Industry specific knowledge that can help blend towards like some of the accounting guidance that that are already like pretty vanilla with prior experiences and cross industries like 842 at Sunrun, I was gonna as understood the technology more such that the decentralized grid infrastructure and how project finance Supported our monetization strategy would be crucial to like lending those incentive tax credits or SRECs towards operating and leasing models, which help define where they're going to be categorized on balance sheet.
And so that's an example. The other example would be along the lines of getting the blockchain and cryptocurrency certificates at, at Alchemy during the time I was here. [00:04:00] And, and that also just helped me understand crypto assets. What are the distinctions between stable coins or just regular crypto assets as we know is Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And actually that helps lend towards accounting guidance from 606 for non cash considerations, sort of how to treat revenue that's denominated in a crypto asset and why I would prefer to have it be a stable coin as opposed to a crypto asset.
Erik: I have one follow up question on what you just said. You know for our listeners out here, that's the leasing standard that was released some years ago. You have to now record like a right of use asset, a right of use liability, right? And you just mentioned thinking through the tax credits that would be involved with Solar at Sunrun. Did that play into the calculation of those?
Sean: No, it's absolutely part of, well, when you start thinking of Sunrun as a project finance company. [00:05:00] And the fact that the incentive tax credits are part of the portfolio tranche that then we're going to sell to the variable interest entity and then have the right of use asset and liability associated with the lease product, that incentive tax credit does play a part. So you're right there.
Erik: Oh, interesting. And that's kind of like, you know, I, I, I'm hopefully I'm not belaboring this point, but if I was renting out office space, But then I had a sublease. I know that sublease would be part of the general calculation of my master lease. In your case, it's just another cash flow that those incentive, tax credits then therefore have to be included for that as well.
That's interesting.
Sean: And it's, it's oftentimes people think of Sunrun as a, like a residential solar company probably puts up solar panels on people's roofs, which they do. But it's a lot of partnerships that, that they have with third parties to be able to do that. But for the most part, it's a project finance company.
Erik: [00:06:00] Well, in your current company, and for those of you who don't know fully, Alchemy is a Web3 development platforms bringing blockchain technology to billions of people around the world. Can you tell us a little bit more about your current role there and what are your priorities going into the new year?
Sean: Yeah, so at my current role, I'm basically the head of financial operations as well as accounting. And that's really the organic sort of growth of the fact that I came in as a controller. And then very quickly, I realized that there was a a pretty large tech stack that needed to be developed to help operationalize the business to allow for them to, you know, close timely, have complete accurate and, and cut off controls and great results, accurate results coming out of it.
So yeah, basically it's currently my areas of focus are threefold. First, it's going to be around the financial close [00:07:00] process, which is Pretty vanilla with most other companies or industries and it's just making sure that we're tightening up the close process and removing any manual processes that are there.
It helps us make, you know, faster decisions as we close sooner. Second is going to be around the, the reporting and analytics piece, which we're trying to understand areas to save costs for the company. And so part of the financial operations process is to help understand our direct costs associated with serving our customers and then be able to bifurcate that into product lines and potentially what's fixed and variable.
So that's another big push. And then the last one is going to be around cash management. Where we have both fiat and crypto as payment from customers. So it's really like building out the right treasury management and treasury operations to be able to support that as a business and take advantage of the great T bill yields and staking [00:08:00] yields that we can get right now.
Erik: One quick follow up on that in terms of treasury management. When I think about treasury management, I have Our U. S. cash, we have some foreign subsidiaries, and so we do have some cash, say in Canadian dollars or in shekels in Israel or a reality in Brazil. And there's some minor FX risks that we think about, especially when we kind of have to contribute funds into the local entity to make payroll, et cetera, spot rate trades, et cetera.
You know, you naturally are holding digital assets. But then when you report, you're reporting in USD, are you, are, is it the same kind of principle, like in terms of managing that price risk on the crypto and how, how do you guys manage that?
Sean: Yeah, we don't have like a an OCI and it, we we're, we're not doing any hedges relative to that.
But what we do to your point, is denominate in USD as a US gap company. And so, um. [00:09:00] We, we take price oracles that are basically best practices right now to take from coin market cap and coin gecko. So, sort of do a weighted average of those price oracles at any given point. Generally, we're looking at U, zero UTC, the closing price the last day for the reporting period.
And that's sort of what we're doing and during our each financial close process and reporting period thereafter.
Erik: So going into kind of the state. of the union for blockchain and Web3. You know, one of the use cases related to blockchain was conducting transactions safely and securely. But it kind of feels like the tech hasn't been able to achieve that efficiently.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on, on that statement
Sean:. Yeah, no, this is a great question because it's blockchain fundamentally is, it has The reason why I got into this space is because it's an exciting technology to have something, a ledger that's [00:10:00] distributed. and immutable. Accountants absolutely love controls.
They like to get supporting documentation, something that's substantive, that proves transactions that actually occurred, and to be able to have date, time, stamps, as well as the double sided ledgering that's all feasible and possible on the blockchain in a way that can be tested publicly and verified publicly.
So I'd say that is the exciting part about the technology and how it translates into accounting. But there are constraints, and they're going to be around, like regulatory is a big one. The lack of guidance around regulatory in digital assets. FASB is getting a lot better about classifying things appropriately.
And yeah, basically, I'd say regulatory frameworks are a little lacking, as well as the technological constraints of the blockchain, as well as the infrastructure immaturity. [00:11:00] That's sort of what's causing a lack of global or mass adoption, in my opinion. What about, like, the
Erik: development of blockchains and where they're going, like, in terms of scalability and, and, and things of that nature?
Sean: Yeah, no, I think, there's, the development of blockchain, if I were to focus in, in a particular area, it'd be around the technological constraint that I was talking about. Some, some of them are known. Some people call it synonymously the block blockchain trama. It's the struggle between the, the, the security scalability and, centralization aspect of the blockchain.
It's always fighting against those three different aspects of the blockchain, whereas in, you know, in, in some areas like Bitcoin is known for its strong security. Decentralization, but it faces tons of scalability issues, and we see that in latent transactions, high, high costs of those transactions. It's not really feasible to do [00:12:00] mass small transactions that you'd see at point of sale machine because it's a lack of scale.
But you may see something like a layer two. which is effectively a chain, a side chain to like an Ethereum chain that allows off chain computations to be done, and it makes it cheaper, faster, and more efficient. Then that would be something that would be more akin to a point of sale transaction. So I could see that in the future supporting retail and, and having more adoption globally.
Erik: Are these really kind of like trade offs that developers or designers have to make when creating a blockchain system?
Sean: That's the current constraint.
Erik: You make it sound like, you call it a trilemma, what that tells me is I can't actually have it all, potentially. Or like there needs to be further development or appendages to an existing blockchain to make it happen.
Sean: Precisely, that's, that's what [00:13:00] makes it pretty dubious and like If, in my opinion, is what's causing the lack of adoption. To the extent that Trelema gets solved, I imagine that's going to happen. it's probably going to happen pretty soon. And like I mentioned, the Layer 2 scaling solutions are already available today.
And, and they're, they're, they're hitting pretty, pretty massive scale at this point.
Erik: I gotta tell you a story just from our end. So I, I've been at Brex for five years. we've been a corporate card issuer since the beginning. That's our main line of business. And so when you talk about payment systems, right?
We're, we're on the MasterCard Network. We also have, we have some visas out there, but mainly on the MasterCard Network, and I remember in the early days You know, we were talking about the competitive advantage that blockchain may have over the long term versus card, and it all depends on adoption and there's many factors kind of beyond our control.
But the one thing that brought us that back to, no, cards is a [00:14:00] good bet. And plus we think we can underwrite some of these startups and other companies way better than traditional institutions. It was just a stat, like, you know, on, on a card network, you can process 30, 000 transactions. A minute, a second, like it was something very high and then on Bitcoin specifically, I heard it was something like seven transactions a minute.
So when you think about payments, going back to scalability and things like that, you know, that's obviously very important. Like you can't have Bitcoin promulgated throughout the masses for consumers if You're waiting on a coffee at Starbucks and it takes like 30 seconds for that charge to go through, right?
Like that doesn't have that. It just doesn't work for Starbucks. So where is that tech? You're saying that tech for payments is going to be better because of that layer two you just mentioned. Is that, and that's the, I'm guessing that's the goal, is to get more transactions per minute for for these coins.
Sean: Absolutely. To make it feasible, and [00:15:00] different, networks have technology that facilitate their scale, decentralization, security aspects. And some are going to be more hardware,heavy, than, than others. Like Solana is going to be a more hard, hardware heavy network protocol. But. When you, today, if one were to make a point of sale transaction in Solana, it would clear within seconds, and it's very, very different from, like, Bitcoin.
but it's, it's an entirely different L1 chain, but it's built for speed of transactions in mine, from the onset. So, Bitcoin, on the other hand, It was more designed for a store of value as opposed to like a payments, remittance chain. So, I think there's going to be different use cases for different chains in the future.
And there, there's going to be, you know, everything covering the gamut [00:16:00] from our, you know, Financial systems, financial services, payment rails, and, and potentially ERP, you know, being able to have a private or public blockchain that can have all the transactions in there and just be, a recording device as opposed to, payment remittance.
but, yeah, the stablecoins are also great because they are on, you know, different chains. They could exist on Solana and Ethereum, but they allow for us to be able to hedge to the USD. And, in, in, in basically hedging against any price volatility that you would see in Solana or Ethereum, say.
Erik: And then tell me about kind of like, you know, your, your Web3 company, what about within finance and accounting as you operate today?
What do you see as the use cases for blockchain or potential ones in the future?
Sean: Yeah, I, I think I mentioned this a little bit, the ERP aspect to me is [00:17:00] really quite exciting to be able to do a triple ledger in a, either a private or a public chain. I think that That is where I see it going to in the future.
There, there still hasn't been a system that I've seen that, that does this yet, but, I know some companies What do you mean by triple
Erik: ledger? Like Yep. Like as opposed to a, a double, a double entry system, like a triple entry system. Or like, how are you, how are you think, how should I think about. Is it not just debits and credits anymore or what is it?
Sean: That's exactly right. Not since the 1400s has it iterated past just the debit and credit. And Yeah, yes.
Erik: Luca Pacioli. The father, the grandfather of accounting.
Sean: That's the guy. Yeah, the grandfather. And, you know, it's still, it's, it's amazing that that hasn't evolved since the 1400s. And yeah, we've got different systems and different ERPs.
We've digitized a lot. That's certainly happened. We're no longer on, you know, actual ledgers or, [00:18:00] you know, now on computers and millions of times faster, but ultimately the foundation still hasn't changed. And the triple ledger is, is effectively that debit credit and date and time. that occurs at the very same time.
So, from that perspective, it's really quite exciting. Because if you can hearken back to your public accounting days, when you're looking for, as an attestation junior, your staff, you're going through supporting documentation for AR, AP, cash transactions, confirmations with the bank. Imagine being able to pull that information from a ledger to verify.
That it happened on one, on, on a date and time with respect to that debit and credit transaction. And so that's the value or the opportunity that I see in accounting.
Erik:So what is the third ledger? Like, what is, what is the concept of, is it just, is, is that just, does that, does that [00:19:00] just mean it's on the chain?
That's the third place that you can kind of verify the records of a company against versus potentially going through the rigmarole of the audit request list, etc. You have access to that, that blockchain to kind of verify on your own without necessarily bothering the client, quote, unquote.
Sean: Precisely. Instead of going, like, I remember it's always, you got to go with a third party agreement outside of the control of the, the, attestation client. And so, you know, you're basically going to third party documentation, which is a distributed and immutable ledger to be able to verify the transaction. How close do you think we are?
Very, very far. It is. I, I, I wish I could say that. So NetSuite is going to stay in business. Yes. Yeah. There's, there's still a lot of development work to be done and there's. Like, I'm sure not every company wants their cash balance available [00:20:00] for someone to verify. And so, you know, whether it's a private company or public company, I just don't think that's good practice.
So, you know, there's, there's other technologies like zero, zero knowledge proof, zero knowledge protocols that allow for, you know, private chain transactions for certain sensitive or confidential,transactions on the chain. So that that's an advent that could help with some of that. And then you can also have public chains, which which are available right now.
So putting it together in a way that kind of works really well and is built for scale and is also you. Really fast, efficient, and cheap to use. I think, that's, that's, hasn't been created yet.
Erik: One of the, one of the developments that I'm aware of in kind of the digital assets space, or the crypto assets space recently, is some new guidance that the FASB released, related to fair value [00:21:00] accounting of crypto.
And so, you know, where do you see regulation going from here? And what about other accounting considerations for digital assets and Web3 in general? Maybe you can even go over for our audience what the new standards are for fair value.
Sean: Yeah, sure. yeah, I think first it's, it's, it's a good call out to say that, you know, FASB regulators are getting more educated about blockchain and appropriately, trying to carve them out from, you know, the regular ASU of 350 of, like, goodwill, intangible, indefinite life, intangibles, to something in its own class.
And so, I think, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up, like, this is a great step in the right direction. but in general, the TLDR is that it's a symmetric shift from The lower cost of market impairment model, which they previously [00:22:00] had to more of the fair value measurement. And, I think from there, it's going to be quite interesting to see how other companies that are not in the crypto space actually want to hold digital assets because now it's It's got fair value treatment and fair value measurement.
And, I think greater adoption can be had in moving in this direction. Yeah, generally, it's giving the assets their own place on the balance sheet and giving a more precise, transparent way to show what's happening with those assets. It's also a good call out that, it's only for some crypto assets as it's mainly for those that meet the definition of And intangible assets, which are fungible, not issued by the reporting entity, and don't have contractual enforceable rights.
So that's not going to be an NFT or tokenized asset, or even stablecoin for that matter. It falls out of that scope, but rather something like Ethereum or Bitcoin is going to definitely fall in that scope. [00:23:00] Provided it's not issued by the reporting entity.
Erik:Let me, let me take a step back and try to reiterate what you just said, because I want to understand.
Ethereum, Bitcoin, there's other currencies, like cryptocurrencies that we talk about. Those are the kinds of assets that the standard applies to, but an NFT or some piece of digital art like those monkeys that I see everywhere, those chimps with the weird art and all that, you know, that, that's still, that's still 350, like you have to still hold it at lower of cost or market, so to speak, right?
Like that's not something you can measure at fair value period to period and get a mark to market. Is that, is that the right wayt o think about it?
Sean: That is the right way to think about it. And, and to your question earlier about where, where do I see the guidance going from here? It's the first step. And then I think creating, you know, sub assets, class, sub asset classes under.
You know, crypto assets, you know, and define, have the [00:24:00] definitions and the guidance and rulings around that, be even more distilled and, and, and, and, and better thought through is, is where we're going to go from here, but it's a good first step.
Erik: I mean, it kind of makes sense in terms of other financial assets, like, you know, you have.
Assets that are more liquid, that are more easily quoted and, you know, or you have similarly priced assets and, you know, we define them on the fair value hierarchy when you're going through your measurement exercises, level one, level two, but then you have your more opaque, you know, financial assets, whether it's an investment in a private company or something else.
Right. And, you know, you might do your best to hold it at fair value or come up with a fair value, but sometimes it is. Just lower of cost or market, given, and if lost, if no idea what the market is, sometimes it is just cost. So, I think that makes sense
Sean:. Exactly. Yeah, there's, there's no principal market being defined for these [00:25:00] NFTs.
So it's, it's really hard to say, in, in whether they say in art, you know, it's like in the eye of the beholder, some, some of these things. NFT monkeys might do millions of value, millions of dollars of value to some folks.
Erik: You know, one of the things that I know you're really involved in is community building.
you're, you're, you're a part of a number of them. Can you just walk our listeners through the communities that you're currently a part of? How often you meet with other members? You know, do you share notes? Like, what's the process today? Like, you know, given, like, we're fully remote almost in many companies and what are the day to day expectations of members if they choose to be a part of the group?
Sean:Yeah, now I'll call out two memberships that I'm a part of. It's F Suite as well as Operators Guild, and both are great communities and different in their respective, like, professionals that they attract towards those groups. I like to be a part of [00:26:00] them because I sort of straddle both worlds in financial operations and accounting.
And so, um, I, I do try to meet with them as often as possible, but to be honest, I'm very time constrained and, it ends up being once a quarter maybe for each of the respective memberships that I'm part of, but I do try to be engaging on the forums if there's something that has Thanks. either been brought up before that I can use in my current day to day, or reciprocally, if there's something that I've done before that I can share to the community, I'll go ahead and do so.
So that's a really easy Slack message to the community or in the forums itself, to be able to either inform or, or get an update from. So I would say about one to two hours each week on the community side. But, Being working remote, I'm able to, like, meet with my local chapter [00:27:00] when an in person event is going to occur.
Also, you know, just jump on the forums and talk to the national, national audience there.
Erik: Where do you think the communities are going from here? maybe we talk a little bit about RTO, return to office, essentially. Um, you know, what's your footprint right now at Alchemy? in terms of a physical footprint and, and, and how do you think we evolved from here?
Sean: Yeah, yeah, so from Alchemy's perspective, RTO is not. Really been a thing that's come up because for the most part, we have folks in the New York and San Francisco office. There's a few like myself that are remote, but there, there was a period of time where that was honored during the hiring process.
And so, you know, they still honor just the same. but similar to my membership [00:28:00] associations, I, I do want to try to have an in person visit to sort of. help round out a lot of the communications. I think there's a lot to be had for actual in person, person to person conversations that cannot be, cannot be had over Zoom calls.
And so, you know, I do try to be out to Alchemy at least once a month, whether it's New York or San Francisco. So I actually try to oscillate between East Coast, West Coast as much as possible. I end up tending to go more to San Francisco because that's where our founders are, our founding team, as well as the management team.
but, I see the formula for Memberships like OG and F Suite are, are going to be largely being a hybrid approach for in person and, and remote, just as they're doing right now. I think it's pretty successful.
Erik: I read an [00:29:00] article in the Wall Street Journal, it was a few months ago, and it was a, it was, it was about a very, old school company called Smuckers.
And they may have bought the jam. May have. And I think they recently bought Twink Hostess, potentially. I have to read up on it again and go back to the journal, but they have this interesting model where during the course of the pandemic, they didn't announce fully remote. There was not a company policy.
But people were working from home and it was almost like this indefinite thing because we were in the middle of the pandemic and you know hospitalizations were still happening and then their employees on their own volition, just started moving everywhere in the country, right? And they changed their permanent residences to Florida.
Texas, maybe for tax purposes. There was this one person, according to the article, that moved to San Francisco, even, for, you know, their own personal reasons, etc. And, and Smuckers is, headquartered in Ill in, Illinois, right? It's like, like a lot of the other, kind of like, consumer packaged goods companies, like Kraft, for [00:30:00] instance, is in the Midwest, right?
Very popular, region for that. But now that the pandemic's over They, they were making people come in, but they realized that it was, very difficult, I think, to just like, because the reality is people didn't move everywhere, they didn't want to lose everyone, but they made it so that, you know, you can live wherever you want, we'll change your permanent address, figure out the payroll, but then you have to be in office three days a week for, call it, I think it was like,
Sean: They call it core weeks.
Erik: tSo every two, every, here's two weeks or three weeks every month, where it's dedicated project time is planning time for the upcoming quarter. It's product development for new, you know, placements of their goods and supermarket shelves or whatever sales cycles. And people came, they came on their own dime.
Oh, wow. You know, apparently they got together and it was successful enough that they could coordinate an acquisition of hostess. You know, I, I, I don't know, like, [00:31:00] like, you know, you're traveling to New York and San Francisco. Do you think this is going to happen for the whole company? Now? I don't know where all your employees are around the country, but you think eventually it'll go back to this place where you guys just be in there three, three days a week.
Certainly if you're in the kind of senior management
Sean: ranks. Yeah, no, it's interesting because, my team is, my direct reports are split between New York and San Francisco. So it would behoove me to be at one location and to not manage the team in the other. And it's also interesting, just being central standard as I am now, that I can, you know, move up a couple of hours in my schedule to be able to accommodate, California, and then also be earlier for, for New York.
And that sort of three hour delta between East Coast and West Coast is a little bit harder. Just that one hour or two hour difference makes it a little bit tougher [00:32:00] for folks, especially if they've got families, kids after, you know, after school care and, you have to organize babysitters and, you know, I don't know, organize your, your workout schedule or, or whatever to make it work.
And so I don't know what the answer is, Eric, as far as like, what is the best approach, but what I, what I do know for, for myself is that I am most comfortable with MVNOs. Coming in for a week, a month. So that means three weeks I'm remote and for one week I come in and I'm in person. I'm attending all the, the cultural events, the in person meetings and the all hands like it's awesome.
It's awesome. It's, it's everything as if I were there the entire time. And, I find that to be a good, a good balance of, of the two.
Erik: Are those visits more curated for you than they would have been if, let's say, you were just going to
Sean: the office every day? Yeah, no, they're, they're not [00:33:00] more curated for me, if, if the, the questions around, like, have folks,done something to accommodate for my attendance there.
Erik: Maybe not curated for you from other folks accommodating, but do you try to get as many in person meetings, collaboration sessions as possible? Mm hmm. Yes. Like, you know, I, I come into the office. so we have an office in San Francisco. I live in Davis, by Sacramento. I go in every Wednesday. Sometimes it's a two hour drive, but I make it in.
And that day is that the day I do kind of all my important, like as many important meetings that I can have in person as possible. Yep. Right. So I try to maximize that day. And frankly, it's, it's been a little bit more organized for me versus like, I just have that day and I tell everyone it's that day and you know, I get a lot out of it versus like spreading it out across the week sometimes.
Sean:
Yeah, no, it's great. I do all my in person one on ones, during that week that I'm in there and, you know, in, in just whatever other [00:34:00] cross functional meetings that I can possibly get. It is To your point, like curated by me to, to make sure that I've got enough, face time during that week. So I cram it all in.
And then, you know, during that one week, and then those three weeks away, you just go back to, you know, the same, the same cycles that we used to or used to.
Erik: Yeah. I'm in the same boat. I think. I do think. There is a productivity aspect to remote that we all experienced in the beginning of pandemic that I think has held strong and definitely for for certain positions whether in our function in accounting and finance or or others there are just these these functions that It's mainly kind of COLA IC work that you need to head down, get something done, and so why waste two hours of your day commuting?
Sean: Agreed. so yeah, makes sense. Yeah, in all honesty, my, my, remote working has me more productive because it's less distracted [00:35:00] by, you know, in office, events and, and whatnot. you know, being within earshot can be a double edged sword, you know, the good, the bad. and, and I find that, you know, in accounting, it's a back office function.
And, and I think this, this hybrid approach works out really well for me, in my particular position, in, in my department. I don't think it's a one size fits all, but, but, you know, that's where I think folks have to find what works for them and where they can get the most value add.
Erik: We have a segment on the show, and I'm going to subject you to it.
It's this idea that controllers are fun too, or accounting personnel, or what have you. And it's because, you know what, I am fun, okay? And, and, you know, we ask our guests if they have just any kind of funny accounting debacle or an odd expense report to share to close out the show. And so if you have any of those, [00:36:00] I'd love to hear it.
Sean: Yeah, the donks. I, I didn't know what donks, donks. I had no idea what they were, until it came up in an expense report. And this was years ago, but, We, we had a pretty vibrant sales team, at my prior company. I won't tell the name, but they, they, they did submit a lot of unusual things in the expense reports, but the one that stuck out in my mind is Is these, these, 24 inch chrome, chrome wheels that they call them spinners or donks.
I had to find out from someone who's like, you know, who understood that, you know, if you're in the right company, you get it. And I wasn't obviously in the right company, so I had to be told. but, yeah, it was apparently a spiff for like a really great sales job. they closed a number of accounts and they're spiffing them these, these 24 inch chrome wheels.
So [00:37:00] when they came across here, it just did not allow it. And, and I think they sort of operated under this impression that, accounting just rubber stamps things that go through, but our, we had a staff. a staff person on, who is looking at the expense reports that said, I know what these are. These are dubs and we're not going to pass them through.
Erik: And it's also a SPF. So technically you have to include it in their payroll.
Sean: Exactly. Yeah. We'd have to find the, the, the tax, the cost basis and like, yeah.
Erik: I mean, I can only like, so, so I don't know how close you were to this, or if this is a secondhand story, like. I've been part of situations like this and sometimes there's a lengthy education process for everyone involved and then that, that education process is the kind of deterrent for future instances. Subjecting, you know, someone in sales to an hour long training on everything that's related [00:38:00] to the policy and. Yeah, the ramifications if you do this on taxes and everything else and you know, right?
Sean: Yeah. No, I think, if it and that's, that's if you're lucky, if you're unlucky, you're going to have to You know, basically, make an example of them, which is never good.
but yeah, no, being able to, to hold quorum, and, and to share and educate sort of why or why not people should be doing things, I think, is good stewardship, again, for the controllership desk. And, I'm sure the company, like, appreciates it and doesn't do it again in the future.
Erik: I mean, I mean, I think about.
You know, you have a lot of experiences at emerging tech companies, right? And they're all startups and they're all small companies. And part of the fun things about working at a startup, as hard as the work is and the amount of hours that it takes to get a company going when you're just a few people, is the [00:39:00] freedom, right?
You know, speed up your business or grow it. and the thing is. At a certain stage, there is a line. And I think the finance team does play a big role in fiscal responsibility and corporate governance. Absolutely. And so, I totally resonate with that. Sean, it was great to have you on the show.
I appreciate all the insights that you gave on blockchain, digital assets, and all the accounting considerations. Thank you for being
Sean: here with us today. Absolutely. It's a pleasure, Eric. Really great catching up with you and, yeah. Now you can come away with knowing what donks are. I know. Thanks. Cheers.
Thanks.
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