How Global Treasury Teams Evolve: Lessons from Intel and Twilio
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What does it take to transition from an accounting internship to becoming a Senior Director of Treasury in a leading tech company?
In this episode, we explore the dynamic journey of Chris Blow the Senior Director of Treasury at Twilio across continents, treasury functions, and industry trends, packed with actionable insights for treasury professionals at every stage.
Featuring
About this episode
Chris Blow is the Senior Director of Treasury at Twilio, a global customer engagement platform powering intelligent customer interactions for businesses worldwide. With over a decade of experience at Intel and now leading treasury at Twilio, Chris has navigated regional and global treasury transformations, bringing a wealth of knowledge to this conversation.
In this episode, Chris Blow shares his journey from studying mathematics to thriving in treasury leadership roles at Intel and Twilio. Chris reflects on how his experiences have shaped his treasury philosophy, emphasizing the importance of staying strategic, leveraging data, and driving value beyond operations.
Whether you’re starting in treasury or aiming to elevate your career, this episode is packed with valuable insights.
Key topics discussed include:
- Chris Blow’s journey from an accounting internship to treasury leadership, driven by curiosity and taking opportunities.
- The evolution of treasury functions from regional operations to centralized global models, enabling efficiency and collaboration.
- Insights into how international career moves (UK, Netherlands, U.S.) broaden expertise and create new opportunities.
- Twilio’s approach to leveraging technology and automation for managing treasury with limited resources, contrasting with legacy practices.
- The importance of advocacy and building strong professional relationships to drive visibility and career growth.
- Lessons learned from mistakes, seeking advice early, and fostering a mindset of continuous growth and adaptability.
Key Takeaways:
- Begin your career with diverse experiences to ensure more opportunities down the line.
- Build relationships and ensure your work is visible to decision-makers.
- Embrace technology to improve efficiency and stay competitive.
- Learn from mistakes, and don’t hesitate to ask for guidance.
- Be proactive in seeking opportunities—sometimes you create your own luck.
You can connect with Chris Blow on LinkedIn.
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Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: Welcome to this week’s Treasury Career Corner podcast, where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week, I talk to treasurers about how they build their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let’s get on with the show.
Mike Richards: In this week’s show, I’m joined by Chris Blow, Senior Director of Treasury at Twilio. Twilio is a software company that strengthens businesses by unifying their data to build insightful paths to customers so they’re smarter with every interaction and able to outmanoeuvre their competition. Over, across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers.
Mike Richards: Chris will explain who Twilio are. We’re going to go right back to the beginning. Chris is a regular listener to the show when he’s out walking the dog. Chris, if you would take us back to the beginning, how you first started in finance, then treasury. Obviously I’ve known you for many years. So over to you, sir.
Chris Blow, Senior Director of Treasury at Twilio: Hey mate, great to be here. Thanks for having me. And as you say, an avid listener when walking the dog. It all goes back to, back to being a college or university. I was studying mathematics at the time at the University of Portsmouth, and I learned on the wind that in the business school, there was this year in industry opportunity, right?
Chris Blow: So you do your first two years, you disappear for a year and then you come back, but it wasn’t something that was being offered. You know, in the school of mathematics. So I started applying, ended up opportunity interview with Intel, got offered the chance to go there. The roles were on the side at the time.
Chris Blow: It was like a blanket how you’re applying for an internship in finance, right? I ended up getting put in accounting, which was, you know, it was a great experience. Good kind of exposure to the real world. The company was fantastic. In terms of the culture, the people, the community, like they had a number of graduates.
Chris Blow: The accounting team was also a really good team, very diverse. It was a mere focus, but there was guys on the team from Israel, Egypt, Russia. And so it was a really interesting place to be. But I didn’t like the accounting piece, essentially, for me.
Mike Richards: We touched on it, that you’re joining Intel, who are obviously computer chips and everything else, or what was Intel at the time?
Mike Richards: This is back in 2009. So what were the, what was the company like then? It was a
Chris Blow: market leader, right? It was, this was Just after the iPhone. So I think at the time, like Intel wasn’t taking abuse for missing the smartphone. It’s been a bit more of an interesting story since then. To me, I actually knew Intel very well as a kid.
Chris Blow: My dad was a physics teacher and we used to spend a lot of time kind of playing around making our own PCs. So I was actually pretty well, but I still was like, when I got that opportunity, I was like, Oh, this is cool. Like I actually understand this.
Mike Richards: I know the company.
Chris Blow: Yeah. It was in Swindon, which was a bit of a move for me at the time, but actually it turns out great city for grads.
Chris Blow: Nice old, you know, old town, cheap cost of living. The company itself at the time was I would say a market leader and not in the, where we are today with disruptors and things like NVIDIA and TSMC. Like it was a very different environment at the time in kind of the late 2000s at Intel.
Mike Richards: And that was your internship, if you like.
Mike Richards: So you’d, you would suddenly used to getting up proper time and then you were thrown back to university.
Chris Blow: So I’ve never been very academic. My general feeling is that I think exams are pretty poor judgment on people’s skill sets, but I was always worried about my final year. But then when I went back, you know, frankly, it was a walk in the park.
Chris Blow: It went from doing 40, 45 hour weeks to then being asked to do 50 percent of that, plus a couple of pieces of coursework. And so that was actually a fact, almost like a holiday in the end. I think when you look back and you talk to people, my final year at university was, that was the real year that I got work done.
Chris Blow: Whereas for me, it found like a bit of a year off, which is nice. And it’s always easy in hindsight, right? You probably see this yourself. Like you always think you have it hard at the time, and then you get into the working world. Then you go into working with young kids. And then all of a sudden you’re thinking, wow, I had so much time in the past compared to I have today.
Chris Blow: No, it was, I think it was a, for me in my career, although early on, I think it was a good level setter, right?
Mike Richards: So then talk about, so you rejoined Intel. How did you then get into treasury and things?
Chris Blow: Yeah, just potluck, as I said, I wasn’t sold in the accounting piece was sold on Intel. There was probably, I’m trying to think what the numbers are now.
Chris Blow: There was a hundred in the kind of internship program, and maybe 10, 15 percent of those came back in various roles, so finance or sales or accounting, whatever it was. And so there was a number of finance role, more on the revenue finance, channel finance, accounting, tax, and then this kind of treasury black box.
Chris Blow: And I knew a little bit because my housemate during my. Internship year, he did his internship in the treasury team, so I knew a little bit about it, but there was this opportunity there. At the time, they’d also decided they were going to take on an intern the following year in treasury, and they were basically creating a graduate role in treasury.
Chris Blow: I think just because the, because some of the knowledge was quite niche, that kind of 12 month turnover was disruptive in a way, because it was a relatively small team in the region. So anyway, so there was a, this was this role and I said, yeah, sure. Let’s give that one a try. It’s still at the company that I loved and I was lucky where a lot of the graduates that came back were my friends and people I spent a lot of time with.
Chris Blow: Yeah. And then it blooms from there. But I’d always been interested in markets and what’s going on in the world, that sort of thing. The kind of numbers background combined with the more kind of focus on what’s happening in the world and linking the two together in hindsight was interesting. And where we spent the last 13, years of my career.
Mike Richards: Yeah. And then talk us through what treasury was like at that stage, how it was structured to give everyone listening. You were then at Intel for 10 years or so from then, but you were all the way through the UK. Then the Netherlands, then the U S. So just walk us through those and what treasury was and everything else for the listeners, as if you’re a listener, if you like.
Chris Blow: Sure. So I think at the time when I joined treasury was still very much more regional. So we had kind of a U S team covering America as a team in the UK covering and the, uh, And then we had a team in Asia, primarily what was at the time Singapore, but then became China and India covering Asia. And what transitioned over time is rather than having regional sensors, we ended up having kind of global functions.
Chris Blow: Rather than in the region doing this cash management investments, you’d have a. global lead that would then run a matrix structure across the various regions. So I started out doing the kind of more treasury operations, cash management, I guess you’d call it middle office type function in the EMEA region, which eventually as I said, we got more functional broken.
Chris Blow: So you have someone who is leading like global FX or kind of interest rate hedging, someone leading cash and investments globally. Treasury operations got centralized in centers of excellence in India and Colombia. Debt capital markets was primarily run at the U. S. because it was headquarters. So that’s what really changed.
Chris Blow: But the scale also was, if I look at it today versus me at Twilio, the scale was just. In a different world, right? We also had credit and collections fell on the treasury, as well as insurance and a few other pieces, a few other pieces. So we were probably
Mike Richards: How many people were in the treasury in total? How many?
Chris Blow: Yeah, 150, 200. I would say probably that. 50 percent was credit inflection. So maybe if you carve that piece out.
Mike Richards: And then, so you started as a treasury analyst. What was that like for you? And you discovered treasury. What was it like, again, for the listeners, some learnings from that time? I made a lot
Chris Blow: of mistakes.
Chris Blow: That’s the good and bad part of treasury, right? Is when you do something, it’s visible on the good side and the bad side. I was very lucky at the time. My first boss was. From the U. S., but was on assignment in the U. K., and he was a very forgiving guy, very patient guy. And I think Intel was like a very safe space, I would say.
Chris Blow: You were given opportunities. If you made mistakes, you were allowed to learn from those mistakes. It’s different between making mistakes and making the same mistake. And so, at the same time, because of We’re a global treasury. We’ve moved people around. So we’ve had a guy come over from India. We’ve had a couple of people come in from the US.
Chris Blow: We pulled someone in from Russia. So actually that team was almost like a hot pot of kind of global experience within treasury. And actually one of the things that I really miss about Intel is. The ability to just the knowledge that you had around you. So for me at the time in my early twenties, you could just, there were no stupid questions and there was always some expert that would knew it in great detail, which was something which was fantastic at the time.
Mike Richards: And talk through then the, I said you were there for 10 years. So walk us through the progression and then also the international moves.
Chris Blow: Yeah. Progression, super high level went from middle office kind of cash operations, things like. Working on in house bank and kind of corporate restructurings, especially some of that was around Russia at the time of the first kind of annex of Crimea and a lot more on the system side.
Chris Blow: So we’ve had an in house built TMS. We went to Quantum or Sun Guard. So there was that piece. And then a lot of kind of connectivity around connect up to speed with. SAP and integrating some of the legacy stuff and then some work around compliance and use of bots. So that was the kind of middle office piece, but it’s still very operational.
Chris Blow: And then in between that and the next role, which is more in the FX kind of hedging risk management space. We had this, we’d had this initiative at Intel where we were trying to consolidate our global cash pools at the time there was three or four in the world. And it was also at the time when those cash pools tend to sit in regions that were becoming politically unfavorable, Cayman islands, this kind of thing.
Chris Blow: Right. And there was an initiative where we were going to consolidate our international cash into a region or into a country. And I was working on that with a colleague and it came down to either the Netherlands or Switzerland. And I didn’t know at the time I was going to end up. being shifted to where we ever ended up.
Chris Blow: So if I’d known that maybe being an avid skier, I might’ve said Switzerland, but yeah, so that kind of came along. We, when we put the cash pool in the Netherlands, we had those conversations at the time around substance. Do you have the people who are investing the cash in the country? Do you have auxiliary functions, accounting, tax, whatever there.
Chris Blow: So that’s essentially what happened. We added tax and accounting people. We needed treasury people to go. Everybody else said no. And they’re like, okay, we’ve been asked Chris, like scraping the barrel. But at the time for me it was easy because I, I didn’t have a mortgage, I didn’t have kids. And the guys who were being asked, they didn’t have young kids, they did have a mortgage.
Chris Blow: So there was more complexity and frankly it was a very short move. It was when I was trying to meet with banks and they were living kind of Swindon way, it’s actually quicker to me to get from Amsterdam into Kerry Waltham than it is to get from Swindon. It wasn’t a too big a shift. And so that was the Netherlands piece.
Chris Blow: And the other kind of nice change on the Netherlands piece is we were hiring people in. But we were hiring people in from Within the business, but from other parts of the business, from the credit team, from broader finance roles. So they knew Intel, but they didn’t necessarily know treasury.
Mike Richards: Yeah.
Chris Blow: So it’s like a great opportunity for me to help guide those guys and integrate those guys
Mike Richards: into
Chris Blow: treasury and understand a little bit more.
Chris Blow: What does it mean to form a team? And that dynamic, my type of a time, my boss is actually based in Israel. So we’ve had some legacy UK people who hadn’t shifted to the Netherlands. We had a group in the Netherlands and we had a group in Israel. And so it was an interesting dynamic and it came with its own set of challenges.
Chris Blow: And at the same time, I was in transitioning away from the kind of middle office to board, front office role on the FX side, which we’ve done was a relatively easy transition. Like on the cash management side, I did a lot in the spot FX space. I understood a lot of the kind of entity structures and the flows.
Chris Blow: And it was a similar story on FX as it was on the broader business about consolidating, bringing into a centralized program, not having differences in the region, doing kind of less, but doing it better. So rather than hedging. I think at one point we were like 15 currencies. I think we ended up close to five or six.
Chris Blow: I’m really looking at that and saying, okay, what’s driving the risk and how do we shrink that program down and, and make it more efficient without putting more risk to the business, which was a big chunk of kind of what we did in the Netherlands. Plus some compliance stuff like at the time.
Mike Richards: And you mentioned that sort of making moves.
Mike Richards: I know that when I had Chan from PayPal on the show earlier this year. And we talked about him moving from the west coast of the U. S. to Singapore, and then he came back again, and I’d asked him making international moves, because you followed it from Swindon to the Netherlands and then to the U. S. So how did that come about?
Chris Blow: Yeah, so the Netherlands was always going to be somewhat of a dead end. And I knew that going in the sense that if you could have probably could have stayed there forever, although now with what’s happening internally structuring, it would have been, it would have been challenging, but it was certainly like it was creating a ceiling.
Chris Blow: And my ambition has always been to get to the US because I wanted to be at the headquarters, because as much as we say people in the regions.
Mike Richards: Yeah,
Chris Blow: if you do drive strategic change and influence what’s happening, it’s a lot easier to do that at the headquarters, right? Whether that’s USA headquarters or otherwise, there’s always a plan going in.
Chris Blow: But the challenge was like, could I leverage the Netherlands to get enough advocates? And we talk about a lot of this with kind of people coming up through Twilio and saying how important it is to have advocates, right? There’s going to be situations when people go into the room and talk about you. And it can’t just be a boss, right?
Chris Blow: It needs to be, it needs to be their peers. It needs to be their, their managers that kind of understand and have a relationship with you. And I was very lucky at Intel because through kind of projects and through kind of the consolidation or the globalization of the functions, it’s been a lot of time with those people.
Chris Blow: And also I had bosses that were very good at. Giving me recognition and giving me visibility and giving me opportunity. And I’ve, that, that luck slash intention is somewhat carried through the 2007s. Because if I look at today, I happen to work for now CFO for 12, 18 months before she came CFO. Right. So sometimes you get lucky.
Chris Blow: I also until a couple of the bosses I had also transverse levels relatively quickly. So yeah,
Mike Richards: that’s helpful. You made that luck in some ways as well. So you then became senior treasury manager out in California and then headed back or what happened after that period of time?
Chris Blow: So California was fantastic at Intel just because I was still doing when I first transitioned across the hedging role, essentially the same role I was doing in the Netherlands, but now just from the U S right.
Chris Blow: And so we had a kind of a matrix structure. So the team had India, China, Europe, and then in the U S but it was. It became very much more a job about educating the business unit CFOs, why we were hedging, what we were trying to do, why it matters, what it meant for that part of the business. And originally I thought, you know, that’s a one time exercise, but the thing is we had Five or six business units, CFO heads would roll over every 18 months to 24 months.
Chris Blow: So basically every quarter you were re educating somebody, right? And at the same time, we were spending a little bit more time. We had a hedge committee that we presented to the CFO and I’d done that in the past. It was coverage over the phone, but now you’re doing it in person. So I think it was great in terms of getting exposure and learning how to talk to senior folks, right?
Chris Blow: What you should say, what you shouldn’t say. But I think that kind of comes back to what I said, like Intel being a very safe space, like you’re allowed to make mistakes. The feedback was very constructive and very timely. So that was the biggest part of being with Intel in California was frankly, was the exposure and the kind of one off projects.
Chris Blow: Because if we were doing some kind of M& A deal or some kind of strategic investment, like. That information wouldn’t typically flow out to the regions. So there was a lot more than a project type stuff going on and just the ability to essentially we had most of the kind of functional leads there, as well as credit collections, retirement investments, insurance.
Chris Blow: So. There was opportunities to talk to these guys, get involved in projects, like leverage the kind of knowledge you had on the more core treasury function and then work with those guys on other initiatives, which was super interesting. And then in terms of what happened there, it’s more of a personal dad advocate that said, yeah, my wife had been great all the way through this.
Chris Blow: Like when we moved to the Netherlands and when we moved to the U. S., like When we were first talking about going to the Netherlands, she joked, well not even a joke I guess, she was deadly serious, that we weren’t going abroad. And there was this classic inflection point where one of her friends said you’d never do it, and that was the end of it, like it was a done deal as far as I was concerned.
Chris Blow: Once we got that move to the Netherlands, the first thing that she said when we landed was, hey, we’re not going to the US. Which is how things ended up a lot more difficult to integrate in the U. S. than in the Netherlands. It sounds weird. Like we always think of like the U. K. maybe is a special relationship with the U.
Chris Blow: S. or like 51st state or whatever you want to call it. The culture is very different. Like even California, just in terms of the ease of getting around, the, just the general environment, like it’s actually, feels a lot more homely or familiar in the Netherlands than it does in the United States. I think we just have.
Chris Blow: Harder, more challenging degree in the United States. And then my oldest son, who’s four now, when he was born. So there was a bunch of surgeries and he’s doing great now, but there was a lot of stress at the time. And part of that dynamic was, I think we need more help. And that’s very hard. Like at the time it was COVID as well.
Chris Blow: So yeah, we were getting up to this point where it was not an automation, but like, Hey, I’d like to go home. And then for me, selfishly. I was trying to figure out, can I get the best of both worlds, right? Can I stay in the West coast tech bubble, so to speak, but can I get my family where they want to be in the UK?
Chris Blow: And I was lucky in the sense that the guy who was running treasury or he was actually running investor relations and treasury was a one man band at the time. I knew him, he was a guy, ex Intel, I worked for a number of years, and he actually lived close by, ended up being always a close friend, and so we would joke about it, right?
Chris Blow: Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if this kind of worked out? And then it did and, and what was interesting in that dynamic for me is when I joined TWI, it felt very familiar because a lot of the process or these initial processes were based on my previous colleagues’ experiences at Intel. Also, when he was talking about putting new policies in place, Twilio, like, we went to chat about it, explain for the, on Friday,
Mike Richards: explain for the audience if you would.
Mike Richards: So you made the move to join Twilio. Who are they? I gave a little bit of the header of the shirt.
Chris Blow: Yeah, yeah. So as you say, there’s a little spill here, but. We’re a customer engagement platform and the way to think about that really is we’re trying to help business bring together data communications and with some kind of layer of intelligence to help them interact and understand their customers.
Chris Blow: And so what does that mean? What’s an example of that? If you think of. Say Uber, for example, where like you may interact with Uber, like for an app, but there’s some facilitation that happens in the background in terms, if you try to call the driver for the app, it then connects to their cell phone, right?
Chris Blow: So some of the plumbing, there’s examples in terms of how we might manage with Domino’s in terms of how you interact with them through the app, how you might interact with them through the kind of help center, how you might also get. Coupons or kind of customer feedback from them. So it’s very much every aspect of communications and they’re now trying to.
Chris Blow: Add the data layer and an AI. And I think where Twilio is really well positioned is the misconception on AI is the bit that matters is the models. And although they’re very important, the bit that matters is the data. And frankly, like who owns the data or who has access to the data. And so if you look at companies like Google, Amazon are doing a great job of basically taking your data.
Chris Blow: And then using that data to provide you personalized experience. Twilio essentially wants to do that for everybody. And I think this kind of AI wave is just the kind of catalyst that Twilio needs to super in that to market and scale. I think we’ve been making some good progress there. Tough couple of years in the tech industry.
Chris Blow: Lots of restructuring, people getting a little bit ahead of their skis in the kind of COVID boom, but I think right size and more focused on the kind of near term future now.
Mike Richards: Tell us about treasury there sort of thing. So how is treasury structured? Again, obviously it’s to try and give some value for the audience about the do’s and don’ts of treasury, if you like.
Chris Blow: Yeah, much more simple in terms of structure. As I said, it used to be, so Twitter IPO in 16, basically from 16 through to beginning of when treasury was like 50 percent of one person.
Mike Richards: Yeah. And
Chris Blow: the other 50 percent was IR, and there was a lot going on. It was much more a case of let’s keep the business running.
Chris Blow: Yeah. We’d had various equity offerings. We’d had a debt offering. We had a convert. And so when I joined, they had just hired a manager. And so there was two of us. And then at the beginning of 22. We had a third person and then at the beginning of 24, we added a fourth person. But we’ve been very intentional, right?
Chris Blow: I think when we hired in 20, it was an internal hire. I was like the classic worst case scenario, right? You walk into a new organization, you’re like, okay, let’s get a lay of the land. And then within a week, I was like, I’d like some more headcount, but that’s what the answer was. No. But if you can find somebody internally, that’s interested in the role and go ahead.
Chris Blow: First, I just saw this great girl. Her name is Margaret Ulmeck. She sits in Ireland, background in accounting, accounts payable, just really process driven, really hardworking, but also knew everybody. She’d been at the company now for. Six, seven years, she’s worked with all the people internationally. So she instantly gave us that connection to those stakeholders that we didn’t have in the past.
Chris Blow: And she’s been great ever since she continues to drive basically treasury operations for the company. She’s working on things like dashboarding, reporting, some really cool stuff. And then Jen, who had been hired just before I joined, who’s based out on the East coast. She would have been the one man. And treasury shop in a previous role.
Chris Blow: She was accounting and identified that basically there was this whole treasury function that she’d care about. And so she was super in depth on payment. She also worked with a lot of currencies on the FX rich management side and generally really great in a crisis, right? And so they’re actually not even great in a crisis.
Chris Blow: She’s the kind of person that sees it coming a month, a couple of months before anybody else,
Mike Richards: right? And then you’ve heard the podcast that I asked people about where they see the challenges for treasury and things like that. You’re the treasury director there. What are you using as the key challenges for treasury at the moment?
Chris Blow: I think a broader challenge is resource, right? I think it’s the same for all functions, right? It’s not just a treasury problem. It’s a general kind of GNA, right? Do more with less. And so it’s really, I think, a technology play. Right. And also where do you want your expertise to be? So classic example would say like an Intel.
Chris Blow: We invested all our own cash, right? We had a team of five or six globally doing that. Whereas at Twilio we use certainly manager accounts or asset managers. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but it’s definitely different in terms of resourcing. Right. Similarly, like leveraging tools on your, on the FX side, like leveraging certain TMS partners, like.
Chris Blow: When I go and talk to peers, and especially what I drew from various benchmarking groups and things, there’s a stark difference, I think, between Especially maybe like the tech space or the younger, the newer tech space versus some of the more legacy tech. So let’s say this just Siemens, IBM, Intel, HP, Dell, whatever you want to call them in the use of technology and resourcing.
Chris Blow: So that was an eye opener for me because we essentially do almost everything we were doing at Intel, we do at Twilio, but the scale is slightly different. But it’s still a relatively. It’s a relatively heavy lift, but again, it’s pros and cons, right? Because you also got a lot more visibility in our company in the previous short Intel, maybe once a quarter, I’d be presenting to the CFO in the role of Twilio presenting regularly to the CFO and talking to the board relatively regularly, the C suite know who you are.
Chris Blow: So your ability to drive change is just amplified because of your access, essentially.
Mike Richards: Yeah. And where do you see treasury going next? What are the new things you, again, you’ve heard this, what other areas do you think the treasury needs to deal with?
Chris Blow: Yeah, the phrase that gets thrown around a lot is this strategic treasurer, right?
Chris Blow: Which I, I agree, but I do think there’s almost like a fundamental right to be earned. And I was talking about this just yesterday, actually. Yeah, it’s really, I think you obviously got to have your house in order and you’ve got to have job one, like just down, right? It’s. Nobody comes to the treasury and knows this, unless something goes wrong.
Chris Blow: I think we talked about this in the past, like the challenge in treasury is that you typically get a lot more visibility when things are going wrong. And there’s a lot more pressure on you to perform. And if you don’t perform, like there are repercussions, not only to the business, but also to you as a function.
Chris Blow: So I think you’ve got to have that, you’ve just got to have that down. And it’s always going to be forefront in your mind, but being this kind of catalyst across the business. Right. very much, sir. We, the treasury has the benefit of working with all kinds of stakeholders, whether that be corporate finance side, maybe it’s more accounting, tax, whatever it might be like you can, we can connect the dots essentially.
Chris Blow: And we also have access to data that people don’t think about in terms of there’s an accounting way of looking at things. There’s also a cash way of looking at things, right? What’s really happening in my business. We were looking at initiatives now in treasury at Twilio, like how can we be a. Strategic partner or, or a pipeline driver for sales and product.
Chris Blow: Like we have all these products that are utilized by financial services industry, like treasury, we have all the contacts in financial services. Like we talk to these guys all the time, how do we then leverage those relationships to drive ARR or revenues for business? So I think that’s the change rather than treasury being an operational function.
Chris Blow: I’ve heard some people describe it as shifting from a cough center to a profits. And I don’t think that’s quite the right way of saying it, but. Along those lines, essentially.
Mike Richards: Cool. And just, we wrap up each show, each week, sort of thing. Takeaways. If you look back over your career or, again, it’s great.
Mike Richards: You’ve heard the show before. You know how we finish it. We’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes, but what are the takeaways you would say for
Chris Blow: I always, I think, live my career by, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Right. And the worst case someone can say is no. And that’s worked out very well for me.
Chris Blow: I also think if you’re going to do that you have to have a mindset that you’re going to say yes. People want to, people aren’t going to bring problems to you if you aren’t going to help them. So I think that general mindset is helpful. I think for me looking back on kind of career so far, I wish I could have learned a bit earlier.
Chris Blow: I know obviously we learn through our careers, but I think I had this wealth of kind of knowledge and, and through peers and things at Intel that often gave me really great advice, but sometimes it took me a couple of years to really digest that and to implement it. And so when I look back now in certain situations, I made life hard for yourself there, Chris.
Chris Blow: Have you just done what X has said rather than saying, I know what I’m doing. I think it could have made life a little bit easier. The other one that I haven’t done, which obviously people talk about, and you get a lot on the podcast as well, is like BREP, right? In terms of finance BREP or business BREP.
Chris Blow: That’s one thing I haven’t really done. Like, I’ve had the opportunity where I’ve changed countries, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with different cultures and different parts of the business. I haven’t gone and done an FD& A role. I haven’t gone and done an OPT role. And I think if I look where I am in my career now, 15 years in.
Chris Blow: If I was to change something like somewhere in the middle there, should I have done that or could I have done that? And would that be easy to get or do 5, 10 years into your career versus 15, 20 years into your career? I think I’m down with it is, and you don’t realize early on in the career, like the decisions you make a bit like when you’re at school, right?
Chris Blow: Like you start to narrow your, narrow your funnel, which is fine. If you like your funnel, that’s fine. And I do like my funnel, but at the same time, like the world is, uh, yeah, it’s a never changing place. And so keeping those, your skill sets broad enough, you can slate yourself as you go forward. I think.
Chris Blow: That’s something that I think we generally we underappreciate, and I certainly underappreciate it going up. Not to say again, that people didn’t tell me that. I think people said a lot. The challenge I had for me going through the career is typically the people who were telling me that had never lived it themselves, which I always find hard.
Chris Blow: When I was talking about moving countries, like the guys who’d be telling me about it saying, Oh yeah, 100 percent you should definitely do that. Like these guys have worked for infield for 25 years in Swin. And I think at the time I was saying, that’s hard. It’s easy for you to say ’cause you never did it.
Chris Blow: But then when I look at it now, I think these guys were probably saying it because similar to me, they were like looking back saying, oh, I wish I’d done it. I wish I’d done it. So I think that’s experience has changed my perception on people’s advice. Right? Yeah. Like I think initially I found it harder to respect what people are saying.
Chris Blow: But now obviously understands they’re not saying what they’ve done, they’re saying what they wish they did.
Mike Richards: Yeah, they’re giving you future advice for you rather than what they wish they’d done.
Chris Blow: Yeah, yeah. And so I think that that makes all of a sudden it all starts to click into place. And I guess as you go through your career, there are points in time.
Chris Blow: Where you make a decision or you heed or don’t heed some advice, which then five, 10 years down the line, you’re like, Oh, I get it. And so I think there’s been a lot of that coming up in the last.
Mike Richards: No, great. I was going to wrap up there. Cause I just think it’s been great. We talked through your journey and give us some good takeaways and you can listen to yourself when you’re walking your dog next time as
Chris Blow: well.
Chris Blow: I cannot think of anything worse.
Mike Richards: Lovely. Thanks very much.
Chris Blow: Thanks
If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get: Taking initiative and asking for opportunities can lead to significant career growth—the worst someone can say is no.
Have a “Say Yes” Mindset: Be approachable and open to solving problems, as it encourages others to bring opportunities and challenges to you.
Learn from Others Early: Leverage advice and insights from peers and mentors earlier in your career—don’t wait years to implement valuable lessons.
Broaden Your Skill Set: Keep your career path open by diversifying your experience (e.g., taking finance or operations roles) to avoid narrowing future opportunities.
Appreciate Advice from Experience: Recognize that advice often comes from others’ reflections on what they wish they had done, even if they haven’t lived it themselves.
Career Decisions Have Long-Term Impact: Early choices shape your career trajectory, so consider how they align with your broader goals and potential future shifts.