910: Getting in Close | Alex Triplett, CFO, Appfire

When Alex Triplett is asked to explain where and how he began acquiring his operations knowledge, he tells us that his ops focus began to sharpen as more and more roles demanded greater “specificity” of him.

Back in 2006, Triplett had just completed a stint as an investment banker with Citigroup when he was hired by private equity firm TA Associates as an associate inside the firm’s enterprise software and fintech realms.

“Fintech forced me to get closer to the product itself because I couldn’t be credible otherwise,” recalls Triplett, who notes that very often the company founders across from whom he sat at meetings had other options when it came to sourcing investors, so the ability to demonstrate some depth when it came to product knowledge became essential.

“I got used to it being about product, product, product,” continues Triplett, who tells us that even today, his TA years bring to mind volumes of product literature and a steady stream of software demonstrations.

Still, Triplett reports that the specificity that he was able to nurture when it came to actual product knowledge was of little aid to him when discussions turned to the different operational challenges that certain founders were confronting. He attributes this void to what might be deemed the familiar investor–operator gap.

“They were great investors, but they didn’t always know how to give specific advice to a company that was trying to understand whether to pivot right or pivot left,” remarks Triplett, who says that it was his growing appetite for operations knowledge that ultimately led him to leave TA and join the corporate development team at financial services software company Ion.

In the years that followed, Triplett was at times tasked with being general manager of various newly acquired businesses—a succession of assignments that eventually would empower him with the specificity required to emerge as an operations troubleshooter.

“It’s great to be able to analyze the shape of things from 10,000 feet and glean insights using pattern recognition,” Triplett observes, “but do you actually know how a business works?” –Jack Sweeney