When Susan Li joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2008, her first job was to build the company’s early revenue forecasts. Unlike her experience as a Morgan Stanley analyst, the models and infrastructure for forecasting didn’t exist. “There was a real Wild West feeling about it. To get the data I had to go find the engineer who built the data warehouse and get them to walk me through how the data was set up and how to query it,” Li said.
The social media company had 400 employees and was smaller than MySpace when Li joined the finance team. She saw the company through hypergrowth periods, the mobile advertising hiccup and its initially rocky IPO. Now, as CFO, she’s leading finance at a 70,000-employee company making massive bets on large language models and other AI applications. She’s precise, humble but driven and forward-looking—all traits that serve her well as one of Silicon Valley’s top CFOs.
Li is also a deep thinker about the finance function and its future within today’s largest companies. In a Q&A with her chief accounting officer at the FEI Corporate Financial Reporting Conference (held virtually), Li explained some of the core principles of finance at Meta, most of which are highly adaptable by organizations of any size. Here are seven of them.
Plan dynamically
What does the financial planning process at a massive, hyperscale tech company look like? Early on in her finance career, Li said she would have assumed it amounted to taking the prior year’s plan, “turning a large crank and rolling everything forward, and everything extrapolates out one year.” But Meta starts every planning cycle with a blank sheet of paper and an idea of the biggest challenges ahead. “And those are very often not the same challenges that faced us 12 or 24 months ago,” Li said. “The process is a little painful because you’re starting from scratch every year, … but it ensures the company is building dynamically, building for what’s facing us today, Li said, and that the company can adapt quickly.” Adds Li: “There’s a real intentionality around trying to keep what made us special.”
Partnership is important
Meta’s business is not delivering financial models. However, a financial model enables the company to make sure that across this year and next, and three years, five years, and 10 years out it builds toward the mission. Finance is an important narrative mechanism for the leadership team, said Li. It also has to help product and business partners “recognize that we are here to accomplish the company’s goals, which is to make sure that we launch new products to many areas of the world successfully,” said Li. “If we just sat in our offices pounding our spreadsheets, we would not get far alone.”
Be objective
Although finance is a partner, its perspective can’t be tied to any individual product or business. It must look at the long-term investment and automation plans as an independent, objective party, said Li. That requires making judgments: “These products are performing better than those, or this is an area running more efficiently than that other area. Or this is a project that we should invest more in and here’s a project that we need to wind down because there is no market for it.”
Budget for the future
Instead of thinking about finance’s resource needs for 2025 or trying to be 5% better next year and budget accordingly, Meta’s finance leadership collectively asks, “What should the finance organization look like at the end of the decade? What should the landscape of all our responsibilities look like?” Said Li: “When you expand the time horizon, it suddenly removes the limits on what you think is immediately possible…It challenges people to think outside of the immediate operating cadence.” Once the organization has a mission, the question becomes how to get there. “We’re trying to run a budgeting process that will put us on a long-run path to unlock that 2030 vision,” she said.
Tap others for AI knowledge
How to use AI to make finance operations more efficient? Improving finance’s efficiency is not a foremost priority for Meta’s AI engineers, said Li. “Every additional engineer we have is [focusing on] how do I make a better model? How do I make a better product?” Li is inspired by talking to companies where finance is the core business. In addition, Li said that any time she runs into other CFOs, they grill each other on how their respective finance teams have leaned into AI-driven process automation and what hacks they have each unlocked. “I would encourage CFOs to broaden their apertures—What are others in your industry doing with AI? What are finance professionals in industries adjacent to yours doing?” BPO partners can be another resource: “How are they using AI to make the operational work they do for you more efficient? Push them on it,” she said…”And the most interesting font of information is talking to people working in the trenches of an operational job.”
Give finance staff “deep purpose”
“One thing we care about a lot at Meta is making sure that there are interesting opportunities for growth development and a meaningful career path when you work in finance,” said Li, “even at a company where finance is not our bread and butter.” For example, at Meta, finance doesn’t build the apps, the data centers or the AI infrastructure, and it doesn’t sell ads. “So, how do CFOs ensure that people in finance jobs at nonfinancial companies feel plugged into the mission?”
Take transparency seriously
“The more that your financial reporting is clean, straightforward and easy to consume, the more it reflects a good judgment about, ‘Am I telling people things that they need to know?'” Li said. Investors appreciate a clear picture of what is going on, but also welcome the issuer’s judgment calls on disclosures if those judgments make sense, Li said. Investors prefer that over “boiling the ocean” and tripling the volume of the 10-K. “It makes the difference between a 10-K that is a valuable document versus one that feels like a compliance requirement,” said Li.
The more investors feel like you are not “trying to hide the ball with your disclosures, the more they trust you as a management team and a company,” Li said. Taking great seriousness in accurate and timely reporting of operations is critical. Added Li: “It’s an extraordinarily high-integrity function.”
