The vice president of finance at Ada, Long Dinh, is a financial leader and generalist with a background as both an operator and an investor. He enjoys forming teams, finding new solutions to challenging issues, and developing business plans for uncharted territory. He has raised more than $250M in financing (equity/debt) and specializes in leading early-stage firms (Pre-Seed through Series C).
Below are highlights of the interview:
Describe your background and what did you do before you joined Ada?
I was born and raised in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. Prior to immigrating to Canada, I had the opportunity to study and spend time in different countries—including Russia and Australia—thanks to my dad, who was a diplomat agent. Living and working overseas gave me the perspective to deeply appreciate how different each individual is in conducting business and making decisions.
Before joining Ada, I was a member of the investment team at Mistral Venture Partners—a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on enterprise software, AI for Enterprise, and Marketplaces. I also provided mentorship to early-stage startups in Ottawa with respect to fundraising and discovering their product-market fit
Tell us more about Ada.
Ada is an Automated Brand Interaction company, bridging the gap between brands and the people they care about. The world’s most innovative brands use Ada’s platform to automate their most valuable interactions, bringing a true VIP experience to every customer and employee.
Who is your target audience? How do you create services that align with what they’re looking for?
Technical teams spend precious time integrating, implementing, and operating inferior solutions instead of building on a system-agnostic, enterprise-grade platform that is both developer and business user-friendly. The failure to invest in a core automation platform prevents true long-term in-house AI competency.
With Ada’s platform, customer support (CX) teams can extend automation across the enterprise with integrations and channels that take minutes to set up. Technical teams have a platform that can become the basis for long-term investment in automation as an in-house core competency, and users are empowered to handle the majority of program needs.
What are the major changes happening in client behavior and market operation since the pandemic?
The pandemic has made digital messaging the default communication method for brands. According to McKinsey, 90% of global consumers want to use digital messaging to interact with businesses the same way they interact with their friends and families. As a result, the number of daily digital customer interactions has more than tripled since the pandemic.
Ada’s clients experienced this trend first-hand. The number of conversations we automated for our clients has grown five times since the first lockdown, and the volume growth has sustained since then. The number of brands that chose Ada to automate their interactions has more than doubled each year over the last five years. The pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the digitalization of customer interactions by many years, and I strongly believe that it has forever changed how we work and interact with the brands we love.
What are your responsibilities as the VP of Finance of the company?
As the VP of Finance at Ada, there are five key areas that I am responsible for:
- Financial Operations: handles all of our stakeholders’ day-to-day financial needs, including our clients, employees, and vendors.
- Accounting, Legal & Compliances: build an IPO-ready Finance organization that allows Ada to operate as a public company with regards to reporting, taxes and compliance.
- Strategic Finance: be the executive team’s and each department’s strategic partner in financial planning and decision making.
- Fundraising: manage every step of Ada fundraising processes including both equity and debt financing.
- Board & Investor Relations: support the CEO in managing relationships withour board and external investors including prospective investors.
Kindly describe how you will specifically know what success looks like for you.
From my perspective, a successful finance leader should be able to achieve the following:
- “Smooth sailing”: from time to time, people tend to underappreciate how hard and complex it is to ensure zero disruptions to the company’s day-to-day financial operations. If hundreds of team members across the globe are getting paid on time, payments are collected with ease, and our vendors are happy, we know that the financial operations team is doing a good job.
- Long-term financial plan is well-developed and understood: our Board, the Executive team and especially our CEO should have strong understanding of our long-term financial plan and key assumptions fed into our operating model at any given time. It’s utmost important for a Finance leader to instill confidence to the board and Executive team that the capital is being deployed thoughtfully and will yield highest return to the business.
- Deeply trusted by the business: the Executive team and each business unit view Finance team as a strategic partner in decision making and reach out to Finance to help when they need unbiased data and insights to solve problem.
- Finance team is happy and engaged: as a Finance leader, my job is to hire all-stars in their respective fields (i.e. FP&A, Accounting), give them clear guidances and empower the team to do their best works while enjoying work-life balance.
- Inspire the business: I strongly believe a CFO should not be the most conservative person in a company. Indeed, a Finance leader should encourage the team to make tradeoff decisions with data and help the team see the opportunities arised during difficult times with pragmatic optimism.
What are your future plans to sustain your and the company’s success?
We need to always anticipate what Ada will need at the next stage of growth to make a long-term investment in our team and product today. We always remind ourselves that we are a very young company that has the opportunity to disrupt an emerging market and may forever change how brands interact with their customers. Therefore, we have to keep learning and innovating to ensure we continue to deliver the best experiences for our brands and their consumers.
Website: www.ada.cx
