Rachita Sundar never expected to build a career in finance. After earning a degree in electrical engineering, she began her career as a software developer at Wipro Technologies in 2003. Tasked with interviewing clients to understand how they’d use the systems her team was building, Sundar soon found herself more interested in their business operations than her company’s software products – a realisation that led her back to college to pursue an MBA in finance.
“The skills I built as a software engineer, such as critical thinking, curiosity and problem-solving, served me very well in business. I was used to looking at everything as white space, as an opportunity.” Sundar says.
Sundar went on to join Microsoft as a finance manager intern, working her way up to senior finance director over the course of 12 years at the tech firm. In 2021, Sundar joined Hubspot, the marketing and sales platform, where she led financial planning and analysis (FP&A), before becoming senior vice-president of finance.
She believes her non-traditional background has been her biggest advantage. “I was able to see how seemingly unrelated pieces of information, such as data points, customer feedback or market trends, fit together to reveal a bigger picture,” Sundar explains. “I was able to think more like a business partner than simply a finance professional.”
Three lessons on growing a global company
In November 2024, Sundar was appointed CFO at experience management provider Qualtrics, where she has been tasked with leading the company through its next stage of growth.
Sundar has plenty of experience in this area, having spent the majority of her career helping to scale large products, including Office 365 at Microsoft as well as its cloud computing platform, Azure. During her time at Azure she helped grow the business from a $500m (£377m) revenue-generating business to one with a turnover of almost $10bn (£7.5bn). And, while senior vice-president of finance at Hubspot, revenues increased from $900m (£678m) to $2.5bn (£1.9bn).
Sundar says there are three key pillars to achieving growth. The first is staying close to the customer. “The world around us is changing rapidly and companies need to be able to keep up. What gets you to your first billion is not going to get you to your second,” Sundar says.
Companies that are market leaders are more than twice as likely to have made improving experiences a greater priority over the past three years compared with their peers, according to research from Qualtrics.
The finance function has a key role to play here, Sundar says. It is responsible for facilitating a smooth interaction between customers and the sales or procurement team, she explains, such as by identifying bottlenecks in the process or implementing the tech that directly affects how easy or painful it is for a customer to make a purchase.
Second is the ability to remain agile. “To innovate faster a business needs to be able to test, fail and pivot quickly,” Sundar says. For finance, this might mean shifting from static annual budgets to rolling forecasts that update with real-time data, or working shoulder-to-shoulder with sales, operations and marketing when thinking about new pricing models or go-to market strategies.
What gets you to your first billion is not going to get you to your second
In Sundar’s experience, leadership teams can learn a lot from smaller companies in this regard. There’s a cultural acceptance of failure as a learning tool and innovation is seen as a necessity, not a luxury, she explains. “Large companies like Microsoft invest in early talent with development programmes that build the necessary skillsets, but people without Fortune 500 experience are usually better able to work with scrappy tools and processes. I noticed this when I moved from Microsoft to Hubspot.”
Sundar’s third piece of advice is to keep growth plans as simple as possible. There are multiple ways a leadership team can choose to scale the business. They can acquire another company, expand into new geographies or launch a new product. Knowing which path to take is a challenge. According to Sundar, it all boils down to which lever is going to be the most efficient to pull.
“Always choose the path of least resistance to get to where you need to be,” she says. “Chasing the new, shiny object may feel like the right thing to do but it’s not always the most effective strategy. The best way to scale is to stick to the basics and do them extremely well.”
The realities of finance leadership
Sundar enjoys the work but is frank about the pressures finance leaders face when expanding product lines. “You are responsible for leading strategy for the company. It’s a tough gig – you often have to make decisions that make you unpopular but it’s in those really difficult moments that you build credibility. I think it’s more important to be respected than liked.”
Nonetheless, there are days where Sundar has felt overwhelmed and burnt out. As a mother of teenage twins, finding a healthy work/life balance has often felt out of grasp. In recent years, she has come to redefine what that balance looks like.
“It does not mean equal time, it means alignment with what matters most right now,” Sundar says. “Some seasons will be work-heavy, others life-heavy. The goal is awareness and choice, not perfection.”
Sundar encourages other finance leaders to stay curious and remain open to learning new skills. However, she admits that it can be challenging to consistently keep expanding your skills as a CFO as opportunities to learn become less frequent in more senior roles.
Rachita Sundar never expected to build a career in finance. After earning a degree in electrical engineering, she began her career as a software developer at Wipro Technologies in 2003. Tasked with interviewing clients to understand how they’d use the systems her team was building, Sundar soon found herself more interested in their business operations than her company's software products – a realisation that led her back to college to pursue an MBA in finance.
“The skills I built as a software engineer, such as critical thinking, curiosity and problem-solving, served me very well in business. I was used to looking at everything as white space, as an opportunity.” Sundar says.
Sundar went on to join Microsoft as a finance manager intern, working her way up to senior finance director over the course of 12 years at the tech firm. In 2021, Sundar joined Hubspot, the marketing and sales platform, where she led financial planning and analysis (FP&A), before becoming senior vice-president of finance.
