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David Wells

David Wells

Ex-Netflix CFO (2010–2019) and current board chair of Wise; finance and operations executive known for scaling Netflix from $2B to $20B in revenue

Jul 1, 2026

5:51
The Novo thing was resolved or you saw clearer skies ahead and it was it was
5:56
better.
5:57
Yeah.
5:58
So let me can I back up, Jonathan, at the risk of sort of boring your your listeners or So one thing I wanted to make sure that comes across is one of the reasons that I had conviction to buy is Andrew and team are building a mission driven company.
6:15
So, I mean, you hear this a lot.
6:16
You hear this in Adresin's, you know, some of the venture capital coming out of Silicon Valley, but.
6:22
you know the company is in business to make money don't get us wrong we are a for-profit entity but we are a mission driven company we andrew's mission when he founded this it was from humble roots right from ed and hair loss but he didn't found it to be an ed hair loss company he founded it to to build a health platform to deliver personalized medicine to better outcomes And so if you forgive me for a second, I want to fill in some background stuff for people to put some real meat on that bone.

30 MINS LATER

36:53
When you see an insider either filing to sell, what does that tell you and what does it not tell you?
11:45
You knew a bunch of finance stuff, but not from your front end.
11:49
Yeah, the corollary, again, you know, it's called tech or working in tech, but honestly, the entire economy is going to be this and, you know, overtopping.
11:59
So calling it tech is a little apocryphal at this stage.
12:05
It just might be companies that are in various stages of how technical each position needs to be.
12:12
Within it, you know, do you need to understand the deep sort of technological aspects of whatever company you're working in if you're in a line function like finance or like FP&A, financial planning and analysis? And so for me...
12:27
The corollary was in 2004, I do remember interviewing at Google and they cased me on 95th percentile bandwidth pricing, which at the time, I didn't know anything about the internet in terms of bandwidth pricing.
12:43
And I was pretty...

12 MINS LATER

25:00
And one of the tensions that I see, especially on the CFO front, is how do you essentially allocate money towards risky projects and innovation? without kind of wonder you know and have some kind of sensible financial approach to it because there's there's kind of like this creative tension of we need to invest money into projects not working out but also how long is a piece of string like when do we stop this

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