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In 20-plus years of papering venture and private equity deals in Silicon Valley, I’ve sat across the table from a lot of CFOs. The good ones tell you what’s actually moving the business in the first ninety seconds. The great ones tell you, in the same breath, what they’d change about the last cycle. On Thursday evening at the Wells Fargo Innovation Center in Menlo Park, I had the privilege of moderating a closed-door conversation with four of the great ones, and it was the most useful ninety minutes I’ve spent on the state of value creation in 2026.

The credit for getting that room in the room belongs to the organizers. Christina Bui at Robert Half built the panel, ran the logistics, and kept the program on rails. Armello Rodriguez and the Wells Fargo Innovation Center team hosted us and made the venue feel like a working room rather than a stage.  You can see it in the photo above, panelists on stools, no podium, the program board behind us setting the week’s tempo. And Murray Newlands, who knows everyone worth knowing on the early-stage capital side, helped pull the right people into the seats and then sharpened the questions in the lightning round.

The panel itself was deliberately tight. Celine Dinh of Brain-Life and Vietsol. Drew Hamer of Arcserve. Ted Marks of Applitools. Viraj Patel of Signeasy. Four PE-backed CFOs who had pulled real levers in the last twelve months. No theory, no slideware, no AI-washing tolerated. Here’s what came out of it.

The macro: AI is on fire, SaaS is in a squeeze

I opened the night with a framing the room didn’t push back on. AI is in a boom cycle:  budgets are flooding in, board attention is everywhere, infrastructure spend is accelerating.  Meanwhile, traditional SaaS is in a tougher cycle than it’s been in a decade. Growth multiples have compressed. Expansion is harder. Churn is scrutinized more than ever. The math of the Rule of 40 has become the Rule of 100.

For a PE-backed CFO, that creates a very specific mandate: create value now (in EBITDA and in cash), protect the downside, and keep optionality for an exit that may take longer than anyone wants. Or, the way I kept saying it through the night: value creation must be manufactured, not assumed.

The ground is moving on valuation

The most uncomfortable truth in the room (and the one every CFO nodded at) is that the ground has shifted beneath our feet on how growth gets valued. Thirty percent growth used to clear the bar without a second look. In 2026, the same number provokes a different question: at what margin, with what retention, and at what efficiency?

Murray pushed it in the lightning round: is 30% growth respectable, or irrelevant? The stance back was honest.  It depends entirely on whether the growth is efficient and durable. A growth number without a margin profile and a retention story is no longer a complete sentence. From where I sit on the deal side, that’s exactly the shift I’m seeing in term sheets and quality-of-earnings work. Buyers and sponsors aren’t paying for top-line theater. They’re paying for predictable, repeatable margin expansion at credible scale.

That reframes everything a CFO does. It pushes pricing discipline higher up the priority list. It makes churn analysis a weekly ritual, not a quarterly autopsy. And it puts an enormous premium on what Drew called margin that sticks, the structural improvement that doesn’t reverse the moment you stop cutting.

EBITDA from precision, not pain

Every CFO in the room had already cut what was easy to cut. The interesting question was what comes next. The answer, almost unanimously: pricing, mix and operating discipline.

Viraj walked through what tightening pricing discipline actually looked like:  fewer discounts, clearer packaging, and enforcement in the approval workflow, so the policy actually held. The result was contribution margin expansion without slowing top-line growth materially. That’s the move every sponsor wants to see, and frankly the one that survives a buyer’s diligence: margin you can defend, not margin you had to bleed for.

Ted raised the warning flag too. “EBITDA at all costs” backfires. CFOs misjudge the tradeoff when they cut into revenue retention or product quality.  The churn shows up two or three quarters later, and by then you’ve also lost the flywheel. I’ve seen this exact pattern surface in working-capital adjustments and earn-out disputes more times than I can count. Sponsors reward repeatable margin, not one-time austerity.

The cultural shift: finance has moved into the operating core

The cultural shift inside finance departments is real, and it’s bigger than tooling. Celine described moving from monthly finance reviews to weekly operating reviews tied to a handful of leading indicators.  Crucially, finance owned the scoreboard and the decision gates, not just the report-out. Pricing exceptions, hiring approvals, spend governance: those gates moved into finance. The operating teams own the actions; finance owns the discipline and the follow-through.

Drew delineated the boundary line cleanly: finance should lead where the decision is economic, and support where the decision is technical or customer-facing. The friction shows up when finance tries to own the how instead of the what and the economics. That’s a useful guardrail.  It’s how a CFO becomes a strategic operator rather than a senior accountant with a bigger title. Increasingly, it’s also how a CFO becomes a credible co-pilot to the sponsor on portfolio company decisions.

AI, AI-washing, and the pricing question

Then we got to the segment everyone came for: AI as a margin driver, and the AI-washing problem.

Here’s the honest summary. AI is real, but it’s real in narrow workflows. Drew described automating high-volume back-office processes, requiring a payback plan, and tracking it monthly like any other capex. That works. Generic AI bolt-ons that don’t change workflow behavior, on the other hand, don’t get adopted. Viraj was blunt about that. If it doesn’t reduce time-to-value or improve retention, it’s a feature, not a lever.

Ted offered the cleanest capital-discipline filter I’ve heard: clear owner, clear KPI, defined payback horizon, and non-negotiable governance on data policy and risk. If it’s not tied to margin, retention, or cash conversion, it gets deferred. Full stop.

Then came the part I think will define the next twelve months: pricing AI services is a whole new ball game. The old SaaS playbook (based on per-seat, predictable, expand-with-headcount metrics) doesn’t map cleanly onto AI products where cost-to-serve scales with usage and value scales with outcomes. CFOs are quietly rewriting their packaging from scratch. Hybrid models, outcome-linked pricing, consumption tiers with guardrails to prevent gross margin from collapsing under heavy users.  None of this is settled. From the deal-lawyer chair, I can tell you that revenue-recognition policies, commercial contract templates, and MSAs are going to need to be rewritten right alongside the pricing pages. The companies that figure it out first will set the curve for everyone else.

This is also where the AI-washing problem bites hardest. A logo on a slide doesn’t change a P&L, and it certainly doesn’t survive a buyer’s quality-of-earnings review. Adoption metrics, cycle-time deltas, retention impact — those do. The CFOs in the room were running their own internal AI pilots the same way a sponsor runs a portfolio company: stage gates, KPIs, kill criteria. Theater gets cut early. Workflows that actually move a number get more capital.

Exit readiness when the exit is further away

We closed on optionality. If exits take longer, the winners are the teams that stay decision-ready. Ted listed the non-negotiables:  forecast credibility, clean KPIs with one source of truth, close speed and controls, working capital and cash discipline. As anyone who’s worked an M&A process knows, you can’t sell a business that can’t report on itself, and buyers pay for predictability.

Drew pushed on what “investor-grade” actually means in practice: a tighter close with standard reconciliations, a KPI pack that ties to the financials and stays consistent month to month, controls that prevent surprises rather than just detect them. Celine framed the investment question well: fund what compounds, cut what flatters.

The takeaway

Three things I’m carrying with me from Thursday night. EBITDA expansion in 2026 is coming from precision — pricing, mix, operating discipline — not from cutting. The CFO role in PE-backed companies has moved into the operating core, owning the scoreboard and the gates. And in a slower exit market, optionality is something you build early, not something you summon when the window opens.

One message to take back, in lawyer’s terms and CFO’s terms alike: be decision-ready before the market is.

The networking that came after the program was, frankly, the other half of the value. The people in this photo — panelists, organizers, sponsors, and a few friends of the program — are the kind of working network that helps a PE-backed CFO get a real answer to a hard question on a Tuesday morning, not a LinkedIn opinion. That’s what closed-door rooms are for.

Thanks again to Christina, Armello, and Murray for putting it together — and to Celine, Drew, Ted, and Viraj for being generous with what’s actually working.