Jon Cochrane, Chief Financial Officer of Maxio, joins hosts John Furrier and Gabe Olave on theCUBE to examine billing, subscription and usage-based pricing and how artificial intelligence reshapes finance operations. Cochrane analyzes quote-to-cash workflows, tokenization and wallets, product-centric finance and the evolving operational role of the chief financial officer in business-to-business software companies, and they emphasize the need to connect contracted annual recurring revenue CARR to generally accepted accounting principles GAAP revenue while prioritizing cash monetization and operational agility.
Cochrane highlights the importance of supporting mixed pricing models such as subscriptions, usage and tokenization and of implementing agentic automation to deliver real-time insights for pricing optimization billing reconciliation and revenue recognition. theCUBE analysts underscore finance's transition from a back office function to a front-office operational partner that drives revenue and profitability, and they identify key factors to consider for finance operations transformation in SaaS and FinOps environments.
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Jon Cochrane, Maxio
Jon Cochrane, Chief Financial Officer of Maxio, joins hosts John Furrier and Gabe Olave on theCUBE to examine billing, subscription and usage-based pricing and how artificial intelligence reshapes finance operations. Cochrane analyzes quote-to-cash workflows, tokenization and wallets, product-centric finance and the evolving operational role of the chief financial officer in business-to-business software companies, and they emphasize the need to connect contracted annual recurring revenue CARR to generally accepted accounting principles GAAP revenue while prioritizing cash monetization and operational agility.
Cochrane highlights the importance of supporting mixed pricing models such as subscriptions, usage and tokenization and of implementing agentic automation to deliver real-time insights for pricing optimization billing reconciliation and revenue recognition. theCUBE analysts underscore finance's transition from a back office function to a front-office operational partner that drives revenue and profitability, and they identify key factors to consider for finance operations transformation in SaaS and FinOps environments.
>> Palo Alto studio connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, hosting theCUBE here with Gabe Olave, my co-host. So I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at theCUBE's NYSE studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is a part of our NYSE Wired program and community where capital markets and technology are intersecting. This is the Business Transformation Edge. The next competitive edge will be in who can inject AI into their system and how do you manage it, how do you build it, operate it, and invest in it? That's a CFO conversation. That's the C-suite activated across the entire dimension. Of course, the CIO and CISO doing their job. But this is a role of operations now in business. That's the focus. Jon Cochrane here, the CFO, Maxio. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you.
Jon Cochrane
>> No, thanks for having me on, John. It's a pleasure to be here.
John Furrier
>> The Jefferies conference is happening. Your CEO is giving a talk right now. Billing is going to be the topic. But talk about what you guys do. I want to get and then get into some of the dynamics. What does Maxio do?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah, no, Maxio has been around since about 2009, our roots. So, almost 20 years now. We help— we focus on the B2B software vertical. We help companies with everything from quote to cash. So lots of nuances there, twists, turns, stuff like that. But we've been doing it for a long time now.
John Furrier
>> So essentially when a salesperson goes in and tries to sell something, in a company. They have a product, they have pricing, they have to put a proposal, get a quote, get a PO, do all that work, bring it into the system. Is that kind of the workflow?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah. No, everything from how do you actually handle that back and forth between the sales team and then ultimately processing it through the quoting process, getting the signature. We help with that to making sure that the invoice gets out on time. You collect cash on time, reconciling deposits. All of that stuff.
John Furrier
>> Cash flow is king. You got to get that order, get the sale, deliver it and collect the cash.
Jon Cochrane
>> Look, cash, it always comes back to cash. So I've had a variety of different roles, but it's like inevitably, regardless of your role on the finance team, it always comes back to where did the cash go? How does everything reconcile?
John Furrier
>> And you and I were talking before we came on camera that you were a customer before coming in as the CFO, and you guys are very product-centric from a CFO finance perspective.
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh yeah
John Furrier
>> , about the DNA of the company.
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah. No, we've really supported CFOs since the founding of the company. I was a former customer, I'm a CPA by trade. I was controller at another software company. Again, I was a customer before I pivoted my career about 7 years ago and came in as a product manager, led the product team for a period of time. And that's when I joined the team, the thing that was most exciting was I could finally build solutions to all the old problems I was having with the systems I was using. And yeah, we take product development and serving the CFOs and accounting teams really seriously because we also take it personally because I personally use the product. And we want to do a great job for that.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the agility requirement. AI is bringing a lot of intelligence in. One of the top conversations we're having on theCUBE is obviously it's finance, it's tech involved, they still got domain expertise, but switching pricing from subscriptions to usage. I remember when cloud came out, a new business model subscription. They would go to ARR and now people are switching to usage. These are real-time decisions that companies are making. It used to be the switch from license to subscription was a long process.
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh yeah.
John Furrier
>> And now people are trying to make this on the fly. You got usage with APIs. Talk about the pricing dilemma.
Jon Cochrane
>> Well, yeah, there's so much change happening so quickly and the last thing you want to be caught in is your CEO or your board or the strategy of the company shifts, which it seems to happen every single month. And you don't want to be caught in a situation where you can't actually roll that out in a scalable fashion to your customers. So, rewind kind of pre-AI tokenization and wallets, kind of the debate and tradeoff was do we go with a platform that can handle usage-based pricing? And there's a lot of folks who specialize in that. Or do we go with a vendor who can support, call it more of the enterprise sale? Now you have a whole new third leg of the stool where you have companies that have specialized in like AI tokens, wallets. But it's very hard whenever you want to mix and match those models, combine them together, you know, and have depth within each one of these. But that's exactly where Maxio, that's where we focus is across all three, mixing and matching, helping folks be able to actually have the agility that you need to keep up.
John Furrier
>> What's the CFO's problem right now? What's on their mind that you guys are seeing and targeting for the solution? What's their big pain point?
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh my goodness, John Furrier where do I get started on that?
John Furrier
>> Order it, number it, stack rank it, go from 1 to top 3, on the long tail. There's a lot. Sure, there's many things, but what keeps them up at night? What are the top things, Warren, that you guys help solve?
Jon Cochrane
>> You know, I just think that CFOs are increasingly playing an important role in shaping, making sure that the direction, you know, we're keeping up with the direction of the company, we can actually monetize. There's a lot of conversation right now around, okay, what's the token spend? How do we control costs? And I think that conversation is shifting now. To how do we make sure that we don't miss out on monetization opportunities. And if you don't have the right foundation— so when I think about what keeps me up and where am I focused, it's, OK, how do we make sure that our organization can keep up from an agility standpoint, we can support our customers so that they can actually bring these ideas to life from a go-to-market revenue generation standpoint, not just a cost savings efficiency exercise. How do we unlock the things that we couldn't do before? And how do we make sure that as we're doing those, we also find a way to do it profitably?
John Furrier
>> Well, the beautiful thing about this market with AI is that the revenue's in the conversation. In other waves I've lived through, IT projects and cloud revenue was never the real benefit you had. If you're a SaaS vendor, yeah, you had revenue, ARR. But if you were like a cloud provider or a player in the ecosystem, you talked about speeds and feeds. IT projects. Now you're seeing revenue because the benefit of it is people get more productive. You can quantify— quantify— this comes up a lot in my conversations. What's your reaction to that?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah, I think when I think about revenue, I think push comes to shove whenever you've got GAAP, you've got IFRS, and we were talking about cash at the beginning of this thing. Revenue is kind of the truth teller, right? Lots of people want to talk about ARR and CARR and all of these forward-looking metrics for here's where the company is going. But you've got to make sure that whatever you're talking about from CARR actually translates into revenue. And then your leadership team and the company and all of that. And as you speak to investors, you've got to have a clear bridge between those two because lots of people can tell exciting stories about some of those other metrics that aren't quite as governed or there aren't standards around it. But, you know, push comes to shove whenever you actually have to take CARR and turn it into revenue.
John Furrier
>> I was just talking with Rob Bearden, founder and entrepreneur who I've known for 15 years, just on before you. He was there during the big data movement. He was talking about how the first wave of big data is about analytics. You can see visualization of things you couldn't see before. Now we're seeing action agents, real time come into the picture. So it's not just what's happening. I can actually see what's happening and why the impact. So now you inject intelligence into that data. That's the holy grail. So here we are, real-time. So what's that? What's the AI-native CFO mindset? How do they organize? How would you share your thoughts? Because as a CFO, knowing, hey, I got to get to real-time, or I'd like to know what the end of the month is going to be before the end of the month, run scenarios on that. these are the kinds of things we're starting to hear more of. That was like unheard of a decade ago.
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah. real-time, I think that's been a buzzword that people have talked about for the last decade, two decades, three decades, you know, having access to real-time data. I like to think about it in terms of real-time means we're able to inform the business at the speed that decisions are getting made. And that, in today's day and age, that's happening very, very quickly. And you have to keep up with that. So that's how I think about access to real-time data and making sure that we're not spending our time doing the function of, you know, the finance team of the past. Like, we've got to have agents, automations. We've got to rethink how we structure the finance team so that we can actually keep up with the speed that these decisions are getting made.
John Furrier
>> What would be the customer profile for you guys that's most active on the platform?
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh my gosh. I think it's anybody who has any sort of subscription and that subscription could be anything along, you know, like the pricing models we were talking about, usage, invoicing, AI, tokenization, wallets. You find a lot of companies are scrambling and they need help. And there's so much pressure to show real results and putting in the infrastructure that will help you not just kind of check the box of like, oh, we're using AI, but we're showing real results. And it's not even necessarily— I mean, efficiency is kind of table stakes that kind of came into play more so like 2022, 2023. But now it's like, let's show real progress on what we can do that we couldn't do before.
John Furrier
>> In your job, What's your focus? What are you optimizing for? What's— give us a day in the life. What's on your roadmap? What's on your to-do list? You're serving other CFOs, so you're building for yourself, basically. What's your focus these days?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah, no, I think part of that is helping our own team navigate and become a true AI-native finance team. A lot of this, I talked about a couple of things. Couple times now, there are many activities and insights that we can unlock that we weren't able to unlock before. We're thinking about how do we, you know, automation has been around for a long time, but we're just thinking about, again, putting better tools, processes. And really a lot of this is layering agentic workflows on top of what we're doing so that if there's something that's repetitive, We don't have to do that again.
John Furrier
>> Do you see yourself more operational now?
Jon Cochrane
>> I spend most of my time doing operational stuff.
John Furrier
>> So ops is big for you then?
Jon Cochrane
>> It's huge. Yeah. And we're doing operations. It's less— and finance is no longer like a back office function. Our team is increasingly working with sales, with our account managers. We're working with our marketing team. We're in all of these meetings because they need finance's help as part of that. And so we're really, as I think about the transformation of our own team, I don't really think about it from a back— like, it's not a back office function anymore. It really is, we're going into each department and helping become more front office, which to me is much more fun than just being kind of like a traditional accounting team.
John Furrier
>> Well, I love this market. Billing and product issues are always going to dictate the value proposition change all the time. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, John. Thanks for sharing. The insights.
Jon Cochrane
>> No, thanks.
John Furrier
>> You live in the world we're talking about. The CFO is becoming more operational, but also the HR folks are getting involved because agents are also doing work. Workflow produces productivity that produces numbers, that produces revenue. And of course, it changes the economics, cost and top line. That's the impact of the business model transformation we're seeing with AI. Doing our part here on theCUBE. We'll be back. Thanks for watching.
>> Palo Alto studio connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, hosting theCUBE here with Gabe Olave, my co-host. So I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at theCUBE's NYSE studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is a part of our NYSE Wired program and community where capital markets and technology are intersecting. This is the Business Transformation Edge. The next competitive edge will be in who can inject AI into their system and how do you manage it, how do you build it, operate it, and invest in it? That's a CFO conversation. That's the C-suite activated across the entire dimension. Of course, the CIO and CISO doing their job. But this is a role of operations now in business. That's the focus. Jon Cochrane here, the CFO, Maxio. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you.
Jon Cochrane
>> No, thanks for having me on, John. It's a pleasure to be here.
John Furrier
>> The Jefferies conference is happening. Your CEO is giving a talk right now. Billing is going to be the topic. But talk about what you guys do. I want to get and then get into some of the dynamics. What does Maxio do?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah, no, Maxio has been around since about 2009, our roots. So, almost 20 years now. We help— we focus on the B2B software vertical. We help companies with everything from quote to cash. So lots of nuances there, twists, turns, stuff like that. But we've been doing it for a long time now.
John Furrier
>> So essentially when a salesperson goes in and tries to sell something, in a company. They have a product, they have pricing, they have to put a proposal, get a quote, get a PO, do all that work, bring it into the system. Is that kind of the workflow?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah. No, everything from how do you actually handle that back and forth between the sales team and then ultimately processing it through the quoting process, getting the signature. We help with that to making sure that the invoice gets out on time. You collect cash on time, reconciling deposits. All of that stuff.
John Furrier
>> Cash flow is king. You got to get that order, get the sale, deliver it and collect the cash.
Jon Cochrane
>> Look, cash, it always comes back to cash. So I've had a variety of different roles, but it's like inevitably, regardless of your role on the finance team, it always comes back to where did the cash go? How does everything reconcile?
John Furrier
>> And you and I were talking before we came on camera that you were a customer before coming in as the CFO, and you guys are very product-centric from a CFO finance perspective.
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh yeah
John Furrier
>> , about the DNA of the company.
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah. No, we've really supported CFOs since the founding of the company. I was a former customer, I'm a CPA by trade. I was controller at another software company. Again, I was a customer before I pivoted my career about 7 years ago and came in as a product manager, led the product team for a period of time. And that's when I joined the team, the thing that was most exciting was I could finally build solutions to all the old problems I was having with the systems I was using. And yeah, we take product development and serving the CFOs and accounting teams really seriously because we also take it personally because I personally use the product. And we want to do a great job for that.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the agility requirement. AI is bringing a lot of intelligence in. One of the top conversations we're having on theCUBE is obviously it's finance, it's tech involved, they still got domain expertise, but switching pricing from subscriptions to usage. I remember when cloud came out, a new business model subscription. They would go to ARR and now people are switching to usage. These are real-time decisions that companies are making. It used to be the switch from license to subscription was a long process.
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh yeah.
John Furrier
>> And now people are trying to make this on the fly. You got usage with APIs. Talk about the pricing dilemma.
Jon Cochrane
>> Well, yeah, there's so much change happening so quickly and the last thing you want to be caught in is your CEO or your board or the strategy of the company shifts, which it seems to happen every single month. And you don't want to be caught in a situation where you can't actually roll that out in a scalable fashion to your customers. So, rewind kind of pre-AI tokenization and wallets, kind of the debate and tradeoff was do we go with a platform that can handle usage-based pricing? And there's a lot of folks who specialize in that. Or do we go with a vendor who can support, call it more of the enterprise sale? Now you have a whole new third leg of the stool where you have companies that have specialized in like AI tokens, wallets. But it's very hard whenever you want to mix and match those models, combine them together, you know, and have depth within each one of these. But that's exactly where Maxio, that's where we focus is across all three, mixing and matching, helping folks be able to actually have the agility that you need to keep up.
John Furrier
>> What's the CFO's problem right now? What's on their mind that you guys are seeing and targeting for the solution? What's their big pain point?
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh my goodness, John Furrier where do I get started on that?
John Furrier
>> Order it, number it, stack rank it, go from 1 to top 3, on the long tail. There's a lot. Sure, there's many things, but what keeps them up at night? What are the top things, Warren, that you guys help solve?
Jon Cochrane
>> You know, I just think that CFOs are increasingly playing an important role in shaping, making sure that the direction, you know, we're keeping up with the direction of the company, we can actually monetize. There's a lot of conversation right now around, okay, what's the token spend? How do we control costs? And I think that conversation is shifting now. To how do we make sure that we don't miss out on monetization opportunities. And if you don't have the right foundation— so when I think about what keeps me up and where am I focused, it's, OK, how do we make sure that our organization can keep up from an agility standpoint, we can support our customers so that they can actually bring these ideas to life from a go-to-market revenue generation standpoint, not just a cost savings efficiency exercise. How do we unlock the things that we couldn't do before? And how do we make sure that as we're doing those, we also find a way to do it profitably?
John Furrier
>> Well, the beautiful thing about this market with AI is that the revenue's in the conversation. In other waves I've lived through, IT projects and cloud revenue was never the real benefit you had. If you're a SaaS vendor, yeah, you had revenue, ARR. But if you were like a cloud provider or a player in the ecosystem, you talked about speeds and feeds. IT projects. Now you're seeing revenue because the benefit of it is people get more productive. You can quantify— quantify— this comes up a lot in my conversations. What's your reaction to that?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah, I think when I think about revenue, I think push comes to shove whenever you've got GAAP, you've got IFRS, and we were talking about cash at the beginning of this thing. Revenue is kind of the truth teller, right? Lots of people want to talk about ARR and CARR and all of these forward-looking metrics for here's where the company is going. But you've got to make sure that whatever you're talking about from CARR actually translates into revenue. And then your leadership team and the company and all of that. And as you speak to investors, you've got to have a clear bridge between those two because lots of people can tell exciting stories about some of those other metrics that aren't quite as governed or there aren't standards around it. But, you know, push comes to shove whenever you actually have to take CARR and turn it into revenue.
John Furrier
>> I was just talking with Rob Bearden, founder and entrepreneur who I've known for 15 years, just on before you. He was there during the big data movement. He was talking about how the first wave of big data is about analytics. You can see visualization of things you couldn't see before. Now we're seeing action agents, real time come into the picture. So it's not just what's happening. I can actually see what's happening and why the impact. So now you inject intelligence into that data. That's the holy grail. So here we are, real-time. So what's that? What's the AI-native CFO mindset? How do they organize? How would you share your thoughts? Because as a CFO, knowing, hey, I got to get to real-time, or I'd like to know what the end of the month is going to be before the end of the month, run scenarios on that. these are the kinds of things we're starting to hear more of. That was like unheard of a decade ago.
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah. real-time, I think that's been a buzzword that people have talked about for the last decade, two decades, three decades, you know, having access to real-time data. I like to think about it in terms of real-time means we're able to inform the business at the speed that decisions are getting made. And that, in today's day and age, that's happening very, very quickly. And you have to keep up with that. So that's how I think about access to real-time data and making sure that we're not spending our time doing the function of, you know, the finance team of the past. Like, we've got to have agents, automations. We've got to rethink how we structure the finance team so that we can actually keep up with the speed that these decisions are getting made.
John Furrier
>> What would be the customer profile for you guys that's most active on the platform?
Jon Cochrane
>> Oh my gosh. I think it's anybody who has any sort of subscription and that subscription could be anything along, you know, like the pricing models we were talking about, usage, invoicing, AI, tokenization, wallets. You find a lot of companies are scrambling and they need help. And there's so much pressure to show real results and putting in the infrastructure that will help you not just kind of check the box of like, oh, we're using AI, but we're showing real results. And it's not even necessarily— I mean, efficiency is kind of table stakes that kind of came into play more so like 2022, 2023. But now it's like, let's show real progress on what we can do that we couldn't do before.
John Furrier
>> In your job, What's your focus? What are you optimizing for? What's— give us a day in the life. What's on your roadmap? What's on your to-do list? You're serving other CFOs, so you're building for yourself, basically. What's your focus these days?
Jon Cochrane
>> Yeah, no, I think part of that is helping our own team navigate and become a true AI-native finance team. A lot of this, I talked about a couple of things. Couple times now, there are many activities and insights that we can unlock that we weren't able to unlock before. We're thinking about how do we, you know, automation has been around for a long time, but we're just thinking about, again, putting better tools, processes. And really a lot of this is layering agentic workflows on top of what we're doing so that if there's something that's repetitive, We don't have to do that again.
John Furrier
>> Do you see yourself more operational now?
Jon Cochrane
>> I spend most of my time doing operational stuff.
John Furrier
>> So ops is big for you then?
Jon Cochrane
>> It's huge. Yeah. And we're doing operations. It's less— and finance is no longer like a back office function. Our team is increasingly working with sales, with our account managers. We're working with our marketing team. We're in all of these meetings because they need finance's help as part of that. And so we're really, as I think about the transformation of our own team, I don't really think about it from a back— like, it's not a back office function anymore. It really is, we're going into each department and helping become more front office, which to me is much more fun than just being kind of like a traditional accounting team.
John Furrier
>> Well, I love this market. Billing and product issues are always going to dictate the value proposition change all the time. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, John. Thanks for sharing. The insights.
Jon Cochrane
>> No, thanks.
John Furrier
>> You live in the world we're talking about. The CFO is becoming more operational, but also the HR folks are getting involved because agents are also doing work. Workflow produces productivity that produces numbers, that produces revenue. And of course, it changes the economics, cost and top line. That's the impact of the business model transformation we're seeing with AI. Doing our part here on theCUBE. We'll be back. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier