Agenda

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2025 Agenda

7:30am – 8:15am
Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:15am – 8:30am
Opening Remarks
- Jeremy is a Managing Director at UBS Financial Services and joined in 2015 after spending more than 10 years at Credit Suisse in Boston. As a senior...
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8:30am – 9:00am
Welcome to MIT Sloan CFO Summit

MIT Professor Nelson Repenning shares insights on the discipline of dynamic work design from his latest book, There’s Got to Be a Better Way. Large-scale change initiatives, reorganizations, and productivity programs are expensive and can add a lot of busywork. Learn how to transform understanding of your organization’s workflow, allowing you to redesign your work to boost productivity, profit and genuine engagement.
- Nelson Repenning a Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he also serves as Director of MIT’s Leadership Center. He has been named by Poets & Quants as one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors.
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9:00am – 9:30am
Morning Fireside Chat

Arm architecture, based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC), today powers billions of devices – from sensors, smartphones and laptops to vehicles, datacenters and beyond.

Learn how this technology, discovered over four decades ago and born out of simplicity, elegance and parsimony, laid the groundwork for a new era of efficient, scalable technology.
- Nelson Repenning a Distinguished Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he also serves as Director of MIT’s Leadership Center. He has been named by Poets & Quants as one of the world’s top executive MBA instructors.
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- Jason’s career spans 30 years across all aspects of global finance and strategy, accounting, capital markets/treasury, IPO execution, and investor relations. He has extensive experience in scaling disruptive technologies within enterprise software/SaaS, e-commerce, local commerce, consumer hardware/IOT, and online residential real estate. He most recently served as senior vice-president and CFO at Splunk, a technology company specializing in application management, security, and compliance, as well as business and web analytics.
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9:30am – 10:00am
Morning Keynote

Robert Glazer, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Acceleration Partners shares the lessons of his fifth book, The Compass Within: Core Values. Learn the value for people and organizations in making important decisions in alignment with their core principles.
- Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of global partner marketing agency, Acceleration Partners. Under his leadership, Acceleration Partners has received numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards (2 years in a row), Ad Age’s Best Place to Work, Entrepreneur’s Top Company Culture (2 years in a row), Inc. Magazine’s Best Place to Work, Great Place to Work & Fortune’s Best Small & Medium Workplaces (3 years in a row), Digiday’s Most Committed to Work-Life Balance and Boston Globe’s Top Workplaces (3 years in a row).
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10:00am – 10:30am
Morning Coffee Break
10:30am – 11:30am
Track I - Opportunity

Managing change requires alignment of people, processes, and tools. Join our panel for insights into setting goals, unlocking potential, driving execution, and building change that delivers.
Track II - Impact

The path to the CFO role can begin in accounting or FP&A, in a smaller or mid-sized company, and continue to a public and/or larger company. Come hear the career journeys of our CFO panel including pivotal decisions, larger vs. smaller company experience, and when and how to make a go/no go decision.
- Jason Kropp advises emerging and growth-stage companies, venture and growth equity investors, and mature private businesses on a wide range of strategic transactions and corporate matters. His practice focuses on the life sciences, biotech, medical device, software, and e-commerce industries, where he counsels clients from formation through exit, including financings, M&A, and other mission-critical deals.
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11:30am – 12:00pm
Luncheon Buffet
12:15pm – 1:15pm
Luncheon Keynote Panel

CFOs are leading through change across many fronts. From day-to-day operations to long-term goals, company-led discoveries to external developments, and industry-centric news to international considerations. Join our luncheon keynote for a conversation on managing through known and unknown change.
- Walden Siew is the bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal’s CFO Journal.
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- John Dietrich is executive vice president and chief financial officer of FedEx Corporation, where he oversees the corporation’s global financial functions. His responsibilities encompass strategic financial planning, corporate development, investor relations, treasury, tax, internal audit, accounting, and controls. He is also a member of FedEx’s eight-person executive committee, which plans and executes the corporation’s strategic business objectives.
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- Shelagh Glaser serves as Synopsys’ Chief Financial Officer and is responsible for Finance and other business operations. She brings an outstanding track record of financial and operational experience in both the software and semiconductor industries, including scaling large businesses while continually driving profitability.
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1:30pm – 2:30pm
Track 1 - Impact

Sometimes a company’s best “new” opportunity is the optimization of current people, products and positioning. From smarter pricing strategies to enhanced financing decisions, strengthening customer relationships to expanding market opportunities, we’ll cover new strategies for business success that focus on basics and beyond.
- Chris Menard is Chief Financial & Operating Officer at Gordon Brothers. Chris is responsible for the overall management of the firm’s financial functions, including global financial reporting, planning and analysis, treasury, and tax strategy and compliance. Additionally, he oversees operations ensuring overall efficiency in support of the firm’s growth strategy.
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Track 2 - Opportunity

Risk is everywhere in business – from regulatory risk to credit exposure, operational uncertainty to cybersecurity threats. Understanding and planning for risk enables the resilience needed not only to overcome the risk, but also to grow and thrive. Learn strategies to plan and adapt for sustainable success.
2:30pm – 3:30pm
Track 1 - Opportunity

Technology upgrades are a fact of life in the CFO office. New software, new upgrades and new integrations to keep pace with internal business demands as well as external policy changes. Learn best practices for technology optimization in an ever-evolving software landscape.
- Vipul Shah is the Co-Founder and CFO of FinQore, the first AI-powered System of Record purpose-built for strategic CFOs and lean finance teams. FinQore automates financial operations, eliminates spreadsheet chaos, and provides real-time, auditable insights to help PE-backed CFOs maximize valuations and maintain exit-readiness. Leveraging two decades of experience as an operator and investor at Goldman Sachs, Brightwood Capital, and ArrowMark Partners, Vipul built FinQore to solve critical challenges driven by fragmented data and inefficient manual processes that frequently impede growth and strategic clarity.
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Track 2 - Impact

GenAI presents both an opportunity and a challenge for financial executives. What are the use cases that drive the most value and what are the areas where other technologies work better? This panel reviews lessons learned on how best to deploy and deliver on the promise of AI.
3:30pm – 4:00pm
Coffee Break
4:00pm – 4:30pm
Afternoon Fireside Chat

Founded in 2006, Shopify began as a store to sell snowboards online. Dissatisfied with the solutions available at the time, they built their own. Today Shopify is a $9 billion e-commerce platform that allows customers to sell online and in person; locally and globally; direct and wholesale; on desktop and mobile.

Come hear Jeff Hoffmeister, CFO, Shopify, in a conversation led by Eric So, MIT Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science. Professor So’s work studies the interactions between human nature, incentive systems, and technology.
- Eric So is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science at MIT. His work combines economics and behavioral science to study the interactions between human nature, incentive systems, and technology. A tenured full professor, he is a member of both the Global Economics and Management group and the Behavioral and Policy Sciences area at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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- Jeff Hoffmeister joined Shopify as Chief Financial Officer in October 2022. Previously, he served as Managing Director for Morgan Stanley in their Technology Investment Banking Group. Prior to that current role overseeing the team in New York and co-heading the Americas Tech Banking team, Jeff ran the firm’s EMEA Tech Banking practice. Before Morgan Stanley, Jeff held various finance, auditing and M&A roles at other companies, including PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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4:30pm – 6:15pm
Networking Reception

CPE Information

Program level: Intermediate
Approved CPE: 7.5
Field of Study: Finance
Program Prerequisites: None
Advanced Preparation: None
Delivery Method: Live/Group

Learning Objectives:

Understand how today’s CFOs make decisions, convey those decisions with confidence, and manage with certainty
Learn how to weigh options, make choices and allocate both human and financial resources
Review the ways the equity market has evolved, including the role of technology, the evolution of shareholders and decisions made along the way
How to manage internal cyber security procedures and external data threats
Learn strategies on how to manage with conviction and maintain calm through times of uncertainty
The impact of near-in decisions on long-term results and vice versa

The CFO Leadership Council is registered with the National Association of State Boards-of-Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. For CPE credits, one credit hour equals 50 minutes according to NASBA guidelines. Some state boards may differ on how many minutes constitute a credit hour. Contact your state board for more information. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be addressed to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, 150 Fourth Avenue North, Suite 700, Nashville, TN, 37219-2417. Website: www.nasba.org

Agenda

Learn and connect at keynotes, breakout panels,networking opportunities and more

2025 Agenda

CPE Information

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