Artico Search Recruits CFO for GoFundMe

July 1, 2022 – Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor, co-founder of Artico Search, has recruited Greg Mrva as the new chief financial officer of GoFundMe, the leading provider of online fundraising services. Mr. Mrva has over 25 years of experience building finance, strategy, and operating teams at leading technology companies and leading investment banking teams advising global technology businesses. He will be responsible for leading GoFundMe’s finance, accounting, business operations, and corporate development functions which includes Classy, a software platform for non-profits. Mr. Mrva will join the company’s executive team and will report to CEO Tim Cadogan.

“The focus and experience Greg brings to our leadership team will be invaluable as we scale our business, expand into adjacent markets, and continue to build industry-leading tools to help people help each other,” said Tim Cadogan, CEO. “Greg’s mix of financial, strategic and operating expertise will be essential as we accelerate growth globally across both GoFundMe and Classy.”

Mr. Mrva most recently served as president of TPG Pace Tech Opportunities, where he led the organization’s successful business combination with Nerdy Inc. Prior to that, he was CFO of StubHub where he sat on both the StubHub and eBay finance leadership teams and was responsible for financial planning, accounting, analysis, operations, management, and strategy. Mr. Mrva has also held leadership positions at Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Yahoo.

“I’m thrilled to join a company that has become a household name for providing a trusted and efficient way for people to help each other and their communities as well as providing non-profit organizations with mission critical software to unlock giving,” said Mr. Mrva.

He joins GoFundMe during a period of sustained momentum. In May, the company announced that it completed its acquisition of Classy. The acquisition creates a global leader in modern giving across B2C and B2B, unlocking new opportunities to service the nearly $500 billion U.S. philanthropic market and reach more people and organizations across the world.

Since 2010, GoFundMe has become a trusted global leader in online fundraising, helping to raise and deliver more than $17 billion from over 200 million donations.

Fast Start

With offices in San Francisco, New York, and Austin, TX, Artico is off to one of the fastest starts among boutique search firms in recent memory. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor co-founded Artico with Matt Comyns, a cybersecurity leadership expert, to lead the firm’s rapidly expanding growth executive search team. Given the billions of dollars flowing into venture capital and private equity investments these days, as well as the ever-present threat of cybersecurity breaches, the founders expect big growth acceleration ahead. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor has completed over 75 CEO searches as well as partner, principal, and other CXO level assignments.

Artico Search Launches to Help Companies Build, Scale and Protect
No one could argue that Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor and Matt Comyns, both of whom recently departed from Caldwell to co-found their own executive search firm, Artico Search, are anything less than ground-breaking search leaders. They are both among the very best in their respective specialties, recruiting some of the most sought after, and costliest, hires in the search industry and building successful practices and teams in their areas of specialty. In joining forces, they are looking to create a powerhouse search brand that reflects their experience, passion, and core values focused on delivering the people to drive change and transformation in the tech industry.

Ms. Chatfield-Taylor’s team focuses on executive-level search for scaleup venture capital and private equity-backed technology companies. The team has deep expertise in global enterprise software, data and consumer internet businesses. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor is deeply passionate about the importance of diversifying the industry, with a full 53 percent of her placements tracked since 2019 being underrepresented executives.

Ms. Chatfield-Taylor recently placed Wendy Werve as chief marketing officer for Nashville, TN-based CM Group, a family of marketing technology companies. Ms. Werve was previously CMO with Virgin Pulse for over six years. She brings more than 20 years of experience developing, leading and executing growth-focused marketing strategies for a diverse range of technology, B2B and SaaS software companies, from start-up to IPO, mid-market to $1 billion-plus.

CFO Confidence Crisis 

Few roles are as important as the chief financial officer at most companies, but the CFOs today who are thinking about tomorrow are growing nervous about a key talent issue: They worry that no one else in the company can assume their role.

Indeed, according to one Korn Ferry study, 81 percent of CFOs surveyed say they want to groom the next CFO internally, but don’t believe that there’s a viable candidate in-house. Currently, about half of new roles are filled internally.

“The current CFO is the one charged with identifying and developing that talent, and since they know best the skills required to meet what’s coming, they are realizing the internal bench isn’t fully prepared,” said Bryan Proctor, senior client partner and global financial officers practice lead at Korn Ferry.

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The lack of confidence is owed in part to CFOs feeling that their firms’ leadership development programs have failed to keep up with the rapidly changing role of CFO, Korn Ferry said. Core functions such as finance and accounting are increasingly being combined under one role, with CFOs citing a lack of resources or skills and career development opportunities as reasons for the merging. Korn Ferry surveyed more than 700 CFOs worldwide, asking them about their own internal talent pipelines. The top two abilities CFOs feel their direct reports need to develop are “leadership skills and executive presence” and “strategic thinking.”

“The tapestry of skills and experiences CFOs of today and tomorrow need are vastly different than what was needed in the past,” said John Petzold, senior client partner and CXO optimization lead at Korn Ferry. “The reason subfunctions are merging is because the focus is less on a role or person and more about the capabilities that need to be covered by a set of individuals.”

In essence, the CFO function is being deconstructed for optimization, according to Korn Ferry. Leaders are breaking down necessary functions based on their organization’s strategy and identifying people with a combination of those skills and piecing them together to get the right set of talent to execute against that plan. Core financial functions such as taxes, capital allocation, and M&A still need to be done accurately and in compliance with regulations, of course. But experts say the CFO role is becoming more about adapting and deploying talent in the most efficient manner possible.

“The leadership profile of the future CFO is less about tactical, direct experience, and more about learning agility, adaptability, and big-picture global perspective,” said Mr. Proctor. “That kind of nimbleness and ability to pivot isn’t naturally engrained in the typical CPA.”

Related: Crisis Management: CFOs Confront New Layers of Risk in Pandemic Era

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media