Good morning. It's Fortune finance editor Jeff Roberts pinch-hitting for Sheryl, and I wanted to share some highlights of my recent interview with Jason Warnick. He is the CFO of the fast-growing finance app Robinhood, which he joined in 2018 after almost 20 years at Amazon—a company that has heavily influenced Warnick's approach to his job and whose lessons he still draws upon today.
One feature of Amazon's corporate culture that has really stuck with Warnick is how the company walked the walk when it came to leadership principles. While nearly every firm adopts a formal mission or set of principles at some point, it often happens that these become empty words with little effect on executives' day-to-day work. Warnick says this wasn't the case at Amazon.
"They recruit people based on these leadership principles. They evaluate people for promotion based on these leadership principles. And you'll often hear in meeting settings how leadership principles are part of the dialogue. It's like, 'I don't think we're holding ourselves to high enough standards'—having high standards was one of the principles," said Warnick.
Other Amazon principles, Warnick explained, included "customer obsession," a bias for action, and expecting executives to be curious and to be correct a lot—but not all—of the time.
Warnick learned a lot at Amazon, where he served as VP of Finance and Chief of Staff to the CFO. Nonetheless, the move to Robinhood represented a big jump. He not only took on the role of CFO for the first time but did so at a time when Robinhood's revenue and customer base were exploding ahead of its 2021 IPO. Warnick has also had to help Robinhood—a firm that has done more to change how Americans invest than any other in recent memory—navigate a host of regulatory challenges and scrutiny from the media and Congress. In one particularly memorable episode at the height of meme-stock mania, he oversaw a frantic stretch where Robinhood responded to a black swan capital demand by raising $3.4 billion in three days.
For Warnick, mentors have played a critical role in his career development. At both Amazon and Robinhood, he has found people who provide important perspectives and advice. In doing so, Warnick discovered an important lesson about the nature of mentoring—one that many young executives should heed.
"Mentoring and networking can be easily confused. Particularly when you're a more junior person in your career, you tend to treat mentors as networking opportunities. And so you come in and maybe you talk about a decision you made three months ago, but for a mentor to be really effective, it should be more real time. It's like, I'm in the middle of it right now. And who in my network should I be getting real-time feedback from?"
Throughout his career, Warnick has shown a knack for borrowing the best of what he has learned at previous roles and from other companies. Robinhood itself has shown a similar aptitude as, according to Warnick and CEO Vlad Tenev, the company strives to emulate not just Amazon but also what iconic firms like Apple, Tesla and Costco do best. This ability to learn from others is a quality that is likely to serve any company and executive well. If you'd like to read more about Warnick and how Robinhood has evolved from a stock-picking app for college students into a big league financial firm, our latest feature is here.
Jeff John Roberts
Jeff.Roberts@fortune.com
The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna.
