Stephen Zhao Email & Phone Number

Stephen Zhao is a Senior Finance Manager at Illumio at Illumio. Colleagues describe him as "When I hired Stephen three years ago, the CFO organization was looking to bring in finance talent to embed in the business and have dotted line reporting to the software engineering, R&D development, and Cloud operations executives. Stephen built this critical business partnering function from scratch and came up to speed in record time on the SaaS and Cloud business model. He took the initiative to pull together a business case product line reporting format based on client bookings and revenue, information from our pricing team, and cost of revenue inputs to provide a more granular view into highly scrutinized corporate P&L’s and deeper levels of detail on gross margins by client. I will never forget the times that I observed Stephen committing to continuous learning via YouTube videos and reading business books (i.e., complex Excel modeling and AWS cloud economics). During stressful cycles of executive and board reporting, Stephen falls back on his hard-working attitude and handles these situations by asking questions, validating his approach, and thinking through upfront more efficient ways to execute his work. Equipped with a CPA designation and years in public accounting as an auditor, Stephen was able to expand his scope by establishing himself as the FP&A lead for all our technology groups to prepare and present the operating and financial plans. I believe Stephen has the confidence, expertise, and knowledge to progress to the next level in his career. He held supervisory responsibilities and served as mentor to our India COE FP&A team and has demonstrated to me that he can assign work with duty of care, that he values and develops employees to be successful, provides relevant advice; commits and delivers with integrity, transparency, and quality. I recommend Stephen without reservation for always executing his job enthusiastically with excellence, for his work ethics, integrity, his raw and unique talent to impact change and influence outcomes with data, his genuine passion for the business, and relentless attention to detail. "