Warren Wang

Background

About Warren Wang

Before starting Doublefin, I spent over 12 years at Google, observing how the company grew from a startup like culture to a mature enterprise and how finance transformed its role in enabling that magic to happen. The journey is never smooth but one key experience is seeing how many opportunities there are for finance to help business teams make the best decisions. As business teams evolve to be more data driven and operate at more granular levels, Finance and HR must keep up with the new mandates in order to continuously drive value as a strategic partner. But, traditional headcount and budget management tools are unable to deliver the level of detail, agility and usability desired by business teams. Businesses’ limited investment in finance usually prioritizes basic accounting needs. Business teams are left alone to manage financial operations and complete those tasks independently. Since traditional headcount and budgeting management tools were designed with Finance and HR teams in mind, they fall short of meeting business teams’ needs and providing the level of granularity and agility required by business teams nowadays. Business teams end up struggling with a tool that only speaks the language of finance or HR professionals, or relying on multiple spreadsheets, email exchanges, documents and manual processes to just make things work. The outcome is confusion, frustration, and a huge waste of time and resources. I used to manage a team of smart college or MBA graduates from great schools. But they are spending most of their time doing repetitive tasks month over month, reconciling different versions of numbers, doing accruals, and responding to the same questions over and over again. At the same time, businesses don’t get what they want. I still recall a time that a C-level executive asked simple questions: How much budget is left for the quarter and how many open positions are there? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers, as there are many versions and different understandings across the broader team. A dilemma: we are asking business partners to be accountable for the resources given to them, but we are not equipping them with the right tools and information. They are relying on dozens of disconnected, clunky spreadsheets to make decisions on headcount and budget. Such experiences trigger me to start Doublefin. In my free time, I enjoy squash training with my daughter and taking her nationwide or even internationally for tournaments. I’d love to meet finance, HR and business leaders who share our vision.