Themes from Campground 2023

Key takeaways from Campground 2023

Last week we hosted Campground 2023 in San Francisco - our inaugural conference! We hand-selected ten finance and accounting leaders in tech from across the US that are pushing the industry forward through modern ways of performing their role. People that are re-thinking people, processes and systems to move accounting/finance from the back-office to being the backbone of their respective companies.  

Automation is positive for the role

The biggest takeaway is that despite all of the negative sentiment about the accounting profession in the news, the future is actually bright - very bright. There’s a new generation that operates like engineers. Instead of manually performing a task over and over again like previous generations, they’re finding ways to automate repetitive tasks, often through software such as Campfire. This has led to higher pay and lower burnout for those that are able to successfully shift to higher-value work. 

Learnings from the current market volatility

The 10+ year bull market in startup funding came to a halt last year with the increase in interest rates. The current crop of accounting/finance leaders are now hardened from the past year and a half and so are their employers and co-workers. We even had a session on Financial Planning & Analysis for a Volatile Market - a fantastic discussion on the three recent waves we’ve experienced: pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic. 

The CFO role is about seeing the forest not the trees

Our keynote session was a fireside chat that I hosted with Ian Charles, CFO at Filevine. He spoke about the path to becoming a CFO is about your ability to eloquently articulate the “what” not the “how”. Being able to digest the numbers and have accurate data is great, but the CFO role is really about telling the story in a business way that lands with the executives and/or Board of Directors. This resonated with many attendees that are currently leading accounting or finance teams and have CFO aspirations. 

We’ve already started planning Campground 2024 to be bigger and better, and we’re going to share a few of this year’s sessions with our email subscribers. Interested in learning more about Campfire? Let’s chat.