The Pomp Podcast
#547 Mike Gonzalez on Building A New Category In Finance
- Mike Gonzalez founded Trace, a finance service desk that gives real-time visibility into business spending, hiring, and project management decisions.
- Traditional financial planning models are static and become obsolete immediately after completion; Trace connects finance teams with the rest of the business to enable continuous, dynamic forecasting.
- The enterprise cloud software category represents a $2 trillion market opportunity with high retention rates and expansion revenue, creating sticky, compounding business models.
- Trace is building a new category called "finance service management," analogous to IT service management platforms like ServiceNow and Atlassian, with similar scale potential.
- Operator investors (VPs, CFOs, COOs) provide more value than large institutional checks through hands-on involvement, introductions, and domain expertise.
- Mike's career trajectory—from Fortune 100 financial systems consultant to Facebook to VP of Finance at hypergrowth startup Zenefits to founder—demonstrates the importance of learning business fundamentals and unit economics.