Director of Strategic Finance @ Subscription Tech Company AMA

Hey! I can share a few candid and actionable thoughts below:

1. With two years of banking you'll probably be shooting for Associate roles which pay about $100k-120k base and 20k-30k equity per year for a Tier 1 city at a Tier 1 tech company. That's basically ~$150K total comp per year. Assume a 20%-30% pay cut based on location and company.
   1. In general when we look at ex IB/PE we know you guys have strong work ethic and technical skills but you guys can be too deal-focused and rigid in your thinking. Honestly, we could care less about all the deals you've worked on but can you assess the operating levers of a company and think critically about how the business moves as you pull various levers.
2. As you interview for a company, you want to understand how that business works at the lowest level of detail. You will stand out a ton if you can explain how valuation works based on CLV (customer lifetime value) vs corporate valuation (this is for the strategic finance team, not corp fin FYI). A quick intro on CLV or LTV for a consumer subscription business would be:
   1. At the customer level what is their forecast of transactions over a prolonged period of time. People will say lifetime, but I feel that 3 years is a good starting point.
   2. You're forecasting customer value based on 1) their likelihood to retain on the platform each month (e.g. pay a monthly fee), 2) if it's a transactional business, what is their level of engagement / transaction each month on top of their subscription fee and 3) what is the monetization and margin profile of this customer / customer cohort.
   3. This will allow you to generate a long term forecasted view of a customer cohort and then map it back to its acquisition costs (CAC) and create ratios such as LTV/CAC and assess CAC payback to assess the efficiency of your marketing spend.

3. You'll most likely be given a technical take home with raw data to assess some business problem. This will require you to build a cleanly formatted, dynamic model and provide clear and actionable takeaways. Once you pass that, you'd be invited to chat with a host of interviewers that range from the team you're interviewing for as well as cross-functional partners. You'll likely get case study questions for certain interviews that test for your ability to think critically about the business and if you understand the trade-offs between the different operating levers. 

   1. For example if you spend a lot of money on acquisition of customers, over time that spend becomes more expensive as you capture more marginal behavior and more marginal customers have worse retention overall than first mover customers. That will have significant implications on customer LTV, LTV/CAC and CAC payback metrics.

   If you have more specific questions happy to answer. Hopefully this helps as a starting point!