The Future Of CFOs: On Leadership, AI And High-Performance Teams With Navneet Govil, CFO Of SoftBank Investment Advisers

Navneet Govil of SoftBank shares wisdom from overseeing billions in tech investments—discussing leadership, venture capital and the future of CFO roles.

True leadership is about more than just managing numbers; it’s about empowering teams and embracing change. This is what Navneet Govil has learned as executive managing partner and CFO of Softbank Investment Advisers. Managing huge investments in tech startups that have gone on to change the business world—like DoorDash and Uber—requires an innovative and adaptable team. “The idea is that they should feel empowered to be innovators in their jobs and roles,” says Govil. “They can bring about innovation and have the autonomy and freedom. They feel like you don’t have to start a company to be an entrepreneur. The idea is you can be an intrapreneur in any job you have.”

In this episode, Jack McCullough sits down with Govil to dive deep into his leadership strategy, the modern role of CFOs and Govil’s career journey—from Zambia to leading SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Funds. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.

Listen to the podcast here

Welcome back for another episode. This is going to be a great one. I can promise you that. I’m delighted to welcome Navneet Govil. He is the executive managing partner and CFO of SoftBank Investment Advisers. SoftBank Investment Advisers is a global investment management firm that oversees SoftBank Vision Funds. They focus on large-scale investments in innovative and disruptive technology companies worldwide. Navneet, I’ve been looking forward to this. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jack. It’s good to be on your show.

I gave 10 words to describe your fund, but there’s a whole lot more to that. Do you want to give a little bit of an overview of what you’re doing? There might be two or three people who don’t know.

Sure. I didn’t know much about SoftBank when I joined at the beginning of 2016. SoftBank was founded by Masayoshi Son, we refer to him as Masa here, in 1981 as a distributor of software. It has been leading a number of technology trends over the decades, starting with the PC revolution, followed by the internet revolution, the mobile revolution and then the AI revolution when I joined in 2016. Fast forward, we’re managing three funds. We do growth equity investing, late-stage investing in tech companies. We have three funds with 470 portfolio companies and over $100 billion in assets under management.

Absolutely fascinating story, and I’m looking forward to exploring that. Before we do that, I want to guess a little about your own background. You grew up in rural Zambia. I understand the town that you grew up in didn’t have an elementary school. I’m curious what that was like, and I’m sure that still affects your view of the world.

From Zambia To The US

As you can tell, Jack, I don’t look Zambian. I’m of Indian descent. I was born and raised in Zambia, in Africa. My dad was running a college for refugees from neighboring countries at the time because some of those countries were not independent. A lot of expat kids in Zambia, their parents used to send them to the private schools or the international schools. My parents sent me to the local public school, and that was just a great experience for me.

Some of the things that I think I benefited from were, one, really getting an appreciation for the fellow students who were there, most of whom were not privileged. They were very underprivileged. Getting a sense of and appreciating how humility is important. The other thing is we had to take care of our own school and classroom. For instance, we had to sweep our classrooms. I used to slash the grass in the yard. That was a really great experience for me growing up.

That’s an absolutely fascinating story. Amazing. You came to the United States to go to college, and you studied mechanical engineering, not finance or accounting, like a lot of my guests have done so far. You studied mechanical engineering at Columbia. I’m curious. Did you just have a scientific bent from an early age?

Yeah, it wasn’t mechanical or Columbia. It was actually electrical engineering, but I was always interested in math and science and had an analytical bent. The other interesting thing is in Zambia, there was only one university, the University of Zambia, at the time. There was one political party in power, and so the students were effectively the opposition to the government.

From time to time, when they would protest government policies, they would go on strike, and the university would be shut down, sometimes for six months, a year or two years. I figured a four-year degree could end up taking five, six, seven years, so I applied abroad. I actually got into your neck of the woods in Boston, and that’s where I did my electrical engineering degree.

I got the degree and the school wrong. I hope that’s not an indicator of the rest of my research for this. My bad, I do apologize for that one, but you know, it is interesting because more and more, I’ve met former engineers who are CFOs, and they’re very successful in the role. I think part of it is because the modern CFO role is largely a problem-solver rather than a reporter. Do you think being an engineer is going to be more and more common as a pathway to becoming a chief financial officer?

I’m not sure. I think I’ve seen a lot of great CFOs with all kinds of backgrounds. For me, it was a little accidental. When I was in engineering, I did two internships at Motorola, first in R&D and then the next one in manufacturing, and I loved them both, but I was always curious to know the big picture. How does a company make money? How does a company decide to allocate resources? How do they know how much to put in R&D? How much to put in marketing? How do they make money?

After my internships there, I took my first job in investment banking in project finance. In those days, project finance used to be paper recycling facilities, power generation plants, and it was all about how do you take the cash flows from the project or the company revenues, service the debt that you have and provide a return to the equity holders. For me, at the start of my career, it was super helpful to understand how to run a business, how to make money, how to do resource allocation. That’s what led to my pivot from engineering to finance, and I’ve stayed in finance since then.

Working With Mentors

Looking at your background, and geez, hopefully, I got this right too, you’ve worked with some just world-class companies like Pfizer, HP, Sun Microsystems. I’m curious, working with some very talented people, what that experience was like, and who some of the key mentors you had along the way were.

I was very lucky. The companies you mentioned were at the forefront of growth in those days. Pfizer had come out with drugs like Lipitor, Zoloft, etc. Sun Microsystems, during the dot-com days, they used to call it the Dotin.com, but for me, it wasn’t me choosing those companies. It just happened that when I was at Pfizer, I had an amazing manager and mentor. There was this lady, Lisa Everett. She actually was in treasury. I had done a bunch of rotations in finance when I was at Pfizer in FP&A, M&A. They sent me overseas to France for a year. I was in treasury, and I started working for this lady, just an amazing manager. She had a lot of empathy. I obviously had some strong analytical skills, but early on in my career, I think I prefer to say I could have had more EQ skills. I really learned that from her.

When I was at Sun Microsystems, in those days, the CEO, Scott McNealy, used to serve on the board of General Electric when Jack Welch was the CEO there, he brought a number of practices to Sun, like Six Sigma, leadership development, etc. There, I had a manager, Mick Murray, really an amazing mentor. I learned from him how to think strategically and frame a problem, and he was really good at teaching me how to challenge the status quo. How to constructively challenge people, especially early on in their careers, when they have a tendency to acquiesce and just go with the flow. He was all about, if you disagree, you have to speak up, and this is how you do it in a constructive manner so it’s received well. I really benefited from those mentors.

That’s a fantastic story, and that’s one thing I’ve learned whenever I talk to an elite CFO, or a rockstar CFO, as I should be saying on this show, all of them had so many influential mentors along the way, and it’s great.

For me, it is so important because I benefited from that. Here at SoftBank, I’m in my ninth year here. I try to make sure that our employees, not just in finance but the rest of the organization, have those opportunities because I benefited so much. This is my small way of paying it forward.

Transitioning To Venture Capital

That’s great, and we’ll definitely get into that because I’ve seen firsthand how you mentor some great CFOs. I’m curious. The transition from a more traditional corporate environment to venture capital, how did that come about? What were the challenges you had learning? It’s more than just an entirely new industry. It’s really an entirely different approach to business.

You’re absolutely right, Jack. If you look at most asset management firms, whether you’re talking about PE firms or venture capital firms, CFOs traditionally come from the Big Four accounting firms, and that’s because there is a lot of emphasis on LP reporting, limited partner reporting. A lot of these funds tend to be regulated just like we are. We’re regulated by the SEC and the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, so they have that background. I was hired without that background at all. As you know, I started out in engineering and in finance. I didn’t have the accounting side, the reporting side at all.

When I joined here, we were actually like a startup. We are funding other startups, but at SoftBank, it was just a handful of us in 2016. We were like a startup, and so I had to basically start from scratch. What I focused on was, okay, what are the deliverables? What do we have to do? What’s the reporting that we need to do? Who are our constituencies? That, to me, was super important.

One was our limited partners. All the reporting we’re doing to them, how are we going to return money to them? What kind of returns? Do we need to have thresholds, targets? How do we show progress against those? The other was our investing teams. How can we support our investing teams in making better investment decisions? As our portfolio grew, we started supporting the portfolio companies.

What do we need to do to support our portfolio companies so they can leverage the ecosystem? It was really starting from scratch. I hired people, and in a lot of cases, I asked people for advice, such as who I should hire as I build the team, the finance team and the broader team. Some people said, hire super senior people. Others said, “You need to get the work done. Just hire a bunch of individual contributors.” I realized if you hire just people, individual contributors, they need a lot of hand-holding.

Super senior people, they’re not doers, and we were scaling so fast, and we had to move at such speed. I ended up hiring people, kind of mid-level people who could roll up their sleeves, were hands-on, but at the same time, as we scaled and grew, they could take on more leadership positions. In fact, most of my direct reports are the same people I hired eight years ago who have grown into those leadership roles.

CFO At SoftBank

I’ve met a few of them, and you’ve built a fantastic team. That’s great. I definitely want to explore your philosophy on building a team in a moment, but I understand you recently joined the investment committee at SoftBank. That has to be an exciting development for you, but challenging and very rewarding, I would think. Can you tell us a little about that, what your role is and how you make the best decisions?

My role here is CFO, leading the finance function. In addition, I lead our other functional teams. We call it the functional leadership team and then the investment committee. On the investment committee, we started our first fund in May of 2017. We’ve deployed over $100 billion over the last seven years or so. There are a lot of learnings that we have incorporated as we make investment decisions. We are uniquely focused on looking at companies that are leveraging AI, AI-led companies, artificial intelligence. Our founder felt in 2016 that we’re entering the AI revolution. That’s super important.

The second thing is the companies need to have positive unit economics. The third thing is, they really have to have a product-market fit. You’ll remember this, Jack. In the dot-com days, there used to be a company called Webvan, which basically did grocery deliveries and all, and you have the same concept with Instacart. The thing is, Webvan was a good concept, but it was too early for the time, so product-market fit is super important. Lastly, a track record of execution by the founders and the management team. Those are the four things that we focus on when making our investment decisions.

That’s very sound. I remember the dot-com era. It was a very crazy time with Heinz. We thought that would be once in a lifetime, but we’ve had a few bubbles like that. No, maybe not bubbles, but two areas like that. You’re right. There are a number of businesses that got well-funded, but they were just a little too early. We weren’t quite ready to embrace the technology or the solution. That’s great.

Building Relationships

One thing I want to chat with you about is how you engage with the CFOs at your portfolio companies. A couple of years ago, you were actually gracious enough to invite me to one of your retreats. When I was there, I was a CFO, but it became very clear these are some of the best CFOs in the game, your portfolio companies. I’m curious how you build relationships with them and what that relationship is like.

We have built and invested in about 470 companies, and some of them have turned out to be great investments, like Uber, DoorDash and Garden Health. Of course, not all investments have worked out. Some haven’t, it’s the nature of investing. One of the things I try to focus on is supporting our portfolio companies and working with portfolio company founders and CFOs, especially as they get close to going public. There are a couple of things there that I think are really important. One is having the right processes and controls in place, the Sarbanes-Oxley controls, to ensure that you don’t end up going public and, a quarter or two later, you’re doing a material deficiency and a restatement or anything like that. That’s like the basics, the foundation.

The other is trying to help them build the ability to forecast. When a company goes public, you start having to give forward guidance. What will next quarter’s revenue and profitability look like? The mantra that we like to use is that you always want to beat and raise. I did that in one of my earlier roles, helping a company beat and raise for six quarters in a row. We want all of our companies to be able to do that, but in order to do that, you have to have visibility into your pipeline, visibility into demand, supply, cost management, all of those types of things.

Of course, there’s also the selection of the bankers. Given the nature of our business, we at SoftBank do a lot of business with the banks and have deep relationships. To the extent that our portfolio companies can leverage those relationships and make sure they have the best book runners that are going to take them public, we help them. Those are some of the things we do. Jack, you referenced the event in 2021, and I think we did a similar event in 2019. We call it FinConnect, where we invite the CFOs of all of our portfolio companies for a gathering to share best practices with them.

That was an amazing event. I organize financial conferences for a living, and I go to other people’s financial conferences all the time. That was as good as anything I’ve ever been to, and it’s not even a full-time job.

You’re being modest. I’ve come to your conferences too, Jack. Those are really good.

We have our moments. One thing you did that struck me, it was like fox hunting or falconry as the activity. I’m like, “I’m in a different world than I’m used to if there’s falconry.” It’s one of those things, I had to look it up, like, “What is falconry exactly?” but cool. One thing I want to chat with you about, you mentioned, Masa, and I think words like icon and legend are maybe tossed around too often, but not in his case. Very few people within our lifetime have had the impact that Masa has, and forgive me for referring to him by his first name as if I know him, but I’m curious what that relationship is like. You must learn from him with every single conversation, I have to think.

Absolutely. He’s an inspiration. I think there are a couple of qualities about him, that was one of the reasons that attracted me to SoftBank. I still remember in the early days in 2017, when we were investing in ride-share companies like Uber, Didi, Grab, Ola, etc. He has this remarkable ability as a visionary to think out of the box. The founders would come and talk to us about what the addressable market is for ride-sharing, and he would start brainstorming with them. Suddenly, he would talk about not just ride-sharing but food delivery as well.

Fast forward, Uber does both ride-sharing and Uber Eats. His ability to think out of the box and be creative is always inspiring. The other thing I admire about him is that he doesn’t cry over spilled milk. We make mistakes, learn from them and move on. You’ll recall that, before the dot-com days, he was one of the richest men in the world, and he lost quite a bit with the dot-com collapse. He’s bounced back since then. That’s a quality that I think is just amazing, to be able to take the learnings and move on. The other thing, and this is where he and I are very different, he’s a risk-taker. By definition, a lot of founders, entrepreneurs, and investors are risk-takers.

I’m probably like you, Jack, in the CFO profession. I’m all about mitigating risk. Masa teases me quite a bit, he says you’re too conservative, but I think you were asking me about the investment committee earlier. I think part of the reason he’s put me on the investment committee is that he wants that balance and financial discipline. While he teases me, he appreciates that level of financial discipline.

Building A Team

Sure. If you were exactly like him, why would he need you? You could just say yes and make him feel better about the decisions he’s already made. You need to be challenged, even a man as brilliant as him, I suppose. I wanted to ask a little about your team, and you’ll probably remember this, but maybe not. You did me a huge solid in 2021 when I was selling what was the CFO Leadership Council at the time. I was the owner. I got some queries about it, and there wasn’t exactly a lot of publicly available information for selling professional associations.

I asked you, I just said, is there somewhere I can look? Is this information available? I’m just not having luck finding it. My request wasn’t any more than that. Really, I thought you’d just point me to two or three sources that I wasn’t finding. Next thing I know, I’ve got your team helping me out with valuation metrics and analyzing my business for me.

I realized, first of all, the reverence that they’ve developed for you over the years, but also just how good they are and what great problem solvers they are. I’m just curious, Navneet, what’s your secret? Are there principles you adhere to in developing a team? How’d you get them that way? They’re so talented, and they’ve been with you for a while. They must have a lot of options to go to other places, I would assume.

First, you’re being too kind, so thank you. I’ll pass on your remarks to the team, they’ll appreciate it. It’s a couple of things. We’re in the business of valuing companies and valuing investment opportunities. It was almost natural to help you. For our team, it’s an opportunity to work with you and do something different. It’s different than a tech business that sells widgets to be valuing this. It’s a new challenge for them. To your other question about teams and building teams, I like to use this tagline. It’s not my tagline, I’ve borrowed it, “Empower, engage and excel.” The concept is to really empower the teams so they feel valued, challenged and supported. I think these types of things help them feel empowered.

The second concept is engagement. This is like working with my peers and others. We have mutually beneficial relationships, whether it’s my peers, my manager, the board, etc. It’s really about trying to understand what their needs are, how I can support them in being successful at what they’re doing, and at the same time, having transparent communication that builds trust. The last one is excel, which I think is pretty obvious, we should all excel at whatever we’re doing. In my case, I want to make sure my finance function is best-in-class. I think following those principles of Empower, Engage and Excel helps in building teams and retaining talent as well.

I hadn’t heard that, but I’m going to start stealing that from you without any attribution whatsoever. That’s a great way to look at it. People talk about the high-performing culture, and it seems like you’ve created that, for sure.

I don’t know how much of that is. Part of it, we’ve been lucky. We’ve been lucky to hire some tremendous talent. The other thing I think helps in building a high-performance culture is the concept of intrapreneurship. We work at SoftBank with entrepreneurs, but the idea is to let employees be intrapreneurs.

The idea is that they should feel empowered to be innovators in their jobs and roles. They can bring about innovation and have the autonomy and freedom. They feel like you don’t have to start a company to be an entrepreneur. The idea is you can be an intrapreneur in any job you have, and I think that contributes to building a high-performance culture.

Generative AI

That makes sense, and I’m legally required, as a host, to ask you a question about generative AI. It’s really convenient since you work at SoftBank, and you probably know as much about it as anyone I’ll ever meet, but how is your team using generative AI, both in finance and accounting and maybe in the broader business as well?

Yes. In fact, we’re big users of ChatGPT. The parent company is OpenAI, and we have a close partnership with Sam Altman and OpenAI. All of our functions, legal, finance, HR, leverage ChatGPT. It’s a phenomenal tool. It has truly increased our efficiency. More broadly, in your question about technology, they say that necessity is the mother of innovation. In our case, with 470 portfolio companies, and these companies sending us quarterly data, actual performance for the quarter and future projections, it became imperative for our teams to take all of that data.

Some of this data is in spreadsheets, some of it is in PowerPoint, and some of it is in PDF documents. We built a number of tools. Some of it was leveraging existing tools, some of it was in-house tools that we built, and the data science around it, so we could take all of that data and come up with a number of heuristics. Our investing teams could use that. Companies that have been successful, like DoorDash and others, what is it that they’re doing right? What is their customer acquisition cost? What’s their return? What’s their retention rate? Things like that.

What went wrong for companies that didn’t do so well? Where did they make mistakes? What are some of the red flags when you look at a company? We used a lot of that. It was really necessary for us in terms of making better investment decisions, but then also to help our portfolio companies. To say “This is what you need to do to be successful and to be well-received by the institutional market and institutional investors in the capital markets.” So, for us, it was really necessary to leverage these tools.

Challenges For CFOs

I want to ask you a little bit more. Again, you’re being a CFO and just observing some of the best in the game, how do you see the very nature of being a CFO or financial leadership changing?

If I look back, and probably, you’ll agree with me, Jack, over the last several decades, the role of the CFO has changed. There was a period of time when we had the Enron scandal and all of those issues, and the CFO role pivoted to being more accounting-heavy, more Sarbanes-Oxley driven. There are different periods when there’s more growth, and it pivots to people with forecasting, investment banking or M&A-type experience. It’s hard to tell what will happen over the next 10 or 20 years, and with not just generative AI, but AI in general, we’re going to be leveraging tools. A lot of these C-Suite roles become a little blurry, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a CFO to be head of some other functional area and vice versa. I think there are three common things.

My advice would be that people should focus on 1) Whatever their functional area is, to be the expert at that and make sure they’re building a best-in-class function. 2) Understanding who the key stakeholders are, understanding their needs, helping them be successful, partnering with them, collaborating with them and building trusting relationships with them. That’s super important. 3) Having a strong team because the CFO is only as good as her team is. If the team is strong, then they do well and project well, both inside and outside the organization. The ability to hire and retain top talent is super important.

That makes sense, and as an outspoken feminist, I love the fact that you referred to the CFO as a she.

I have two daughters, two wonderful, beautiful daughters, and so I hope they will have opportunities. They’re both in college. I hope that when they’re in the working environment, they will do well and have equal opportunities. I have tried very hard. In fact, here at SoftBank, on my leadership team, there are a lot more women than men. I’m very proud of that.

Work-Life Balance

Good for you, and I have publicly predicted that within 10 years, there will be more female CFOs than male CFOs. It’s largely demographic and the way the world is changing a little bit. That’s great, and I’m sure your daughters will have very exciting and rewarding careers.

You have a lot going on with your CFO role at one of the biggest funds in history. You’re on the investing committee, and I believe you’re on at least one board of directors outside of that. Plus, you’ve got two daughters and you work with all of the portfolio company CFOs, so how do you do it? That’s got to be a lot of hours, and I know you’re family-oriented. How do you sort of achieve that work-life balance?

It has changed over the years. I think in the early days of my career, when I was single and just out of college, trying to prove myself and gain credibility, it was all work, work, work. Life events happen. You get married, have children, and for me, it was super important to go to my daughters’ school events—their performances, tournaments and things like that. I didn’t want to miss them and am glad I went. I have memories of those. That was wonderful.

Over time, we all went through COVID. Prior to COVID, people used to come to work five days a week, and then post-COVID, it became really hard to get people to even show up one day a week. Here at SoftBank, we encourage our employees to come to the office three days a week. What we’ve done is say, “Work and life, they’re so intermingled and interrelated, it’s totally fine to do your doctor’s appointments or haircuts during the week.” A lot of us naturally, it’s not just that.

For us as a global company, Masa is in Tokyo, our investing team, some are in London, some are in India and some are in Latin America. We’re having calls at all times of the day. You’ll have people go to doctor’s appointments during the day, and then in the evening, after dinner, they’re checking emails. I think a lot of it is just trying to integrate work and life and find the right balance.

That’s great, what you’ve been able to achieve, and I’m always trying to change the perception of CFOs. I ask them their favorite joke, interesting hobbies or a fun fact, and I wonder if you have a fun fact that you’d be willing to share with our readers.

I think, Jack, I’m really good at mimicking accents. I grew up in Zambia, come from an Indian heritage, and work for a Japanese company. As I travel around the world and spend time there, I think I can pick up the accent and mimic it. Before you put me on the spot, I’m not going to mimic an accent, but the next time you and I have dinner together, I’ll give it a shot, and then you tell me how good I am at it.

That sounds good. I was hoping you’d mimic a Boston accent because I always get teased for mine, but next time we get together, I’m going to hold you to that. This was a great conversation, and readers know I typically ask the guests for their advice for the next generation of CFOs, but I actually think they could read the entire episode and get that. You’ve already given some great advice for them along the way. I just want to thank you for your time. I know you’ve got a lot going on. You’ve always been very generous with your time towards me, and I want to give you the final word.

Thank you, Jack. I really enjoyed being on your show. Thanks for having me. I’ve known you for quite some time, and I want to take this opportunity to let your readers know how much we all appreciate you. You have done so much for the finance community, aspiring CFOs and CFOs themselves. The conferences you organize, the various events and forums you have and now you’ve started this show, which I think is just amazing. What you have done for the finance community and professionals in general is incredible. You’re a great human being. I’ve known you. I know your personal background, your family situation and all. You’re an inspiring leader. I’m proud to call you my friend, Jack. Thank you so much for having me on your show.


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