By: Eric Gundersen
As the Wall Street Journal just announced, Nitin Agrawal is now CFO at Mapbox. Now that Nitin has wrapped up his work at Amazon, we can finally be public about the news. Nitin has been CFO for Compute Services at AWS for the past 4.5 years, responsible for the entire division’s P&L, leading financial planning, pricing for new services, capital and free cash flow management, and controls and compliance for the division. When he started, he was one of the first two people on that Finance team and grew it to a 40-person team. Prior to AWS, he was at MSFT. We encourage everyone building with Mapbox reach out to Nitin and welcome him to our mapping community and share what they are building and designing. Nitin would love to hear directly from our customers.
As we grow Mapbox we need leaders across the company who can both support our teams and business today and be builders that expand our operations and drive our products and platform into the future. A few months ago, I shared what I was looking for in a CFO. I wanted to find someone who wouldn’t just sit and control budgets, but would get in the mix and be a true partner. I needed someone who not only intimately understood what we’re building, but also knew how to enable us to take risks and work directly for the benefit of our customers. We found that in Nitin, who has an intimate understanding of how to build and scale sustainably — without slowing down growth — mitigate risks, and how to fail fast and learn from it.
The WSJ nailed it:
Mr. Agrawal’s understanding of pricing models for technology platforms, as well as his focus on customer needs, made him an attractive candidate for the job, Mapbox executives said Wednesday. “The №1 thing I’m going to take along with me from Amazon is an obsession with the customer,” Mr. Agrawal said in an interview.
For Nitin, CFOs aren’t outside of the organization — they’re an indistinguishable part of the team and act as internal advocates for customers.
“The CFO’s job is to figure out a way to enable the team. My job is not to make the least risky decision, but to make the most calculated risk-taking decision, and put in adequate risk mitigating measures in place should the decisions go wrong. CFOs need to ask the hard questions, be convinced about the investment and the decisions we’re making, and be the person who’s enabling the business to serve our customers better. The function of finance has changed a lot over the years — it’s no longer a function that is limited to the core basics of control and accuracy of numbers. CFOs, and their team should work as advocates, working on behalf of the customer to optimize company resources to make faster innovations in the company and drive impact in the biggest opportunity areas.”
On that note, I think it’s best for everyone to get a feel for Nitin and how he thinks directly — in his voice. To introduce Nitin to the team, Brynne sat down and asked him a few questions. His answers show clearly why we’re excited about his leadership.
Understanding the product
Nitin began his career as an engineer consulting for Deutsche Bank to come up with a credit risk management system. He realized then that he wanted to go to school for finance, and got his MBA at Duke University. This dual understanding of both tech and finance means that he gets cloud and platform — and more importantly economics of cloud and platform services — like very few people.
“Being a cloud-native company allows us to scale the organization and the business in a way that is agile and economical for our customers. We’re one of the few companies in this space that started cloud-first, allowing Mapbox to meet customers with a consumption model they’re used to and expect. Equally, if not more important, Mapbox is obsessed with the customer experience. We want to give the power to the developer to actually have the dataset in their hands and leverage it in the way that is best for their applications, not dictate to them in terms and limitations of how they should use it.”
Love of the game
Nitin’s energy for passion and building is palpable from the first conversation. He is fearless when it comes to untangling interdependencies, much like we face in building a large platform. At AWS, he had the opportunity to essentially start-up many new businesses and high-risk bets. He describes it:
“Jokingly, I tell people my experience at AWS is kind of like flying the aircraft at the same time as you’re building it. This has been a unique experience where I’ve had an opportunity to start up several new businesses. Sometimes, starting those businesses and seeing them fly off the ground in terms of gravity-defying growth, or — on many occasions — kind of fall flat on our face, where we misread the customer needs and then stand up, dust ourselves, and resurrect ourselves from there.”
As he moves into a more traditional startup environment, he’s excited about the challenge.
“The thing that is unique about startups is agility and the focus on driving things end to end. It’s about having that complete ownership model of your destiny. There isn’t cushion or support that you have in terms of making mistakes. You do make mistakes, but you learn from those very, very quickly and move on, and that’s something that I’ve experienced here at AWS where you fail but you fail fast, learn from it, and resurrect yourself. That’s honestly what is kind of in my core DNA and something I’m looking forward to — building that business, taking it to scale, and learning from our mistakes very, very quickly.”
This role will require someone who is a true systems builder. Our growth is constantly forcing us to build new ways to manage size, needs, and complexities.
“As we go through the kind of high growth phase that Mapbox is in right now, what you recognize is it’s actually a new company every 12 to 18 months. The processes that you have, the controls, may not scale from one phase to the other. You have to have consistent iteration on those to be effective. Otherwise either the controls become insufficient, the accuracy gets lost, or they actually become too cumbersome, because what worked with a five-person team, ten-people organization, does not scale and bogs down the business.
The most important thing in this environment is to be scrappy and then put boundaries on failure, understand where the failure happens, and then quickly iterate.”
Customer obsessed
Being a partner doesn’t just mean for the internal functions. For Nitin, it’s also about taking risks and making investments on behalf of our customers, their teams and end-users.
“The thing about being a startup is that you’re close to the customers. You have the agility to deliver value directly to the customer. I see how Mapbox is closely integrated into understanding what the customer pain points are, what their unmet needs are, and I want to be a part of that.
Vision for the future
Even though he’s just getting started, it’s clear to Nitin what our obstacles and chances for success will be.
“I think the biggest challenge that Mapbox will have, is going to be our relentless prioritization. The opportunity that we have in front of us is enormous. We have to make sure that we relentlessly prioritize, with the limited and finite resources that we have, that we’re focused on the most important customer needs. We have to be focused in terms of understanding what the customer needs are. We need to get the data on what customers need to build their business on our platform. Then we need to tirelessly serve those customers, which is not going to be an easy task. But if there is a team in the world that can do it, I do believe Mapbox is the team that can deliver.
A few years ago, the types of business models that have been enabled by geospatial data would have been unthinkable. Like ride-hailing, on-demand delivery, and business intelligence. I think this is just the beginning. If we’re staying close to the customer and their needs, in five years time Mapbox will be at the core of the businesses that will be created and changed by connected sensors and geospatial data that we haven’t even dreamt of as yet.”
Welcome to the team, Nitin.
Nitin Agrawal, former AWS CFO for Compute Services, joins Mapbox as CFO was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.