664: Good Judgment: Every CFO's Star Attribute | Gary Swidler, CFO, Match Group

Back in 2015, when Gary Swidler was a candidate for a CFO position at Match Group, the seasoned banking executive recalls being told by company management: “On paper, you are definitely not the most qualified person for the job.”

The gap on Swidler’s resume was due to the fact that he had never held a CFO position—a void that frustrates many first-time CFO candidates who routinely find themselves second in line to candidates whose resumes list previous CFO appointments.

Perhaps frustrated CFO candidates might find some comfort in the notion that Match, a company whose online offerings excel at achieving “matches”—albeit romantic ones—chose to discard industry’s traditional CFO matching criteria.

According to Swidler, the CEO remarked: “‘You’ve never done this before, but I’ve known you for a long time and you have very good judgment. You’re a smart person with high integrity, so don’t prove me wrong.”

Swidler’s comments expose the roles that intuition and instincts often play when it comes to CFO hiring. They also draw our attention to the type of partner that Match management was seeking: not a blind follower or “yes man,” but someone upon whose counsel the CEO and a board could rely.

Meanwhile, as a banker, Swidler’s relationship with his future company had gone back not months but years, giving him an edge over veteran CFOs who were less familiar with Match as well as IAC, the holding company that at the time owned 100 percent of the online dating company.

However, within 2 months of Swidler’s arrival in Match’s CFO office, IAC sold 15 percent of its shares to the public, allowing Match to raise a little more than $400 million and giving the company a market cap of around $3 billion.

In the coming months and years, more IAC shares were expected to be sold to the public, which would allow Match Group to becoming increasingly unfettered from its largest investor.

Still, IAC was evidently not yet ready to part with its 85 percent and opted to hold on to its shares until this past June, when it completed a spinoff of Match Group by selling its shares to IAC’s existing shareholders and thereby giving Match a market cap of $30 billion.

“We had such a good business, and we were doing so well—IAC enjoyed owning us and didn’t want to give us up,” says Swidler, who would likely not hesitate to tell us that when it comes to large investors, breaking up is hard to do. – Jack Sweeney

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