Editor’s note: In today’s A Day in the Life, Saurabh Chauhan (pictured), founder and CEO at Peakflo, shares with FutureCFO audiences why finance leaders are the most rigorous buyers he deals with and why he finds running as the only thing that reliably clears his head.
FutureCFO: What does a typical day look like for you?
Saurabh Chauhan (SC): I moved to the United States from Singapore last year as the first person on the ground for our business here, so my day runs across two clocks.
The working day belongs to customers in the Americas. My evenings and late nights belong to colleagues and customers across Asia, where much of the team and the customer base still sit.
Late afternoon, when Asia is asleep and the East Coast is winding down, is the only quiet stretch I get for thinking.
The part that would surprise people is how much of it is not management. I still run discovery calls, I still sit in implementation reviews, and I still write to customers directly when something breaks.
That is possible because of how we are built: thirty of us serve more than a hundred enterprises across nine countries, because we use AI internally the way we expect our customers to, at roughly 20x the output per person.
The leverage buys judgement over volume, and it keeps me close to the work rather than managing layers of people who are closer to it than I am.
I also spend more time on site than most people in my role. I have stood at a Jurong port in Singapore watching a team stamp delivery notes, walked a factory floor in Indonesia to understand why an invoice sits for eleven days, and sat in an office in San Mateo working through a billing process nobody had written down.
You cannot learn any of that from a requirements document. Finance operations are physical before they are digital, and the gap between how a process is described and how it actually runs is where all the interesting problems live.
FutureCFO: What excites you the most when you work with the Finance Function?
SC: Finance leaders are the most rigorous buyers I deal with, and that is most of why I enjoy the work. They do not accept claims. They ask what the number was before, what it is now, and who measured it.
I have had CFOs push harder in a first meeting than investors did in diligence. You cannot charm your way through those conversations, so when one goes well you have usually learned something.
The part I find most exciting is getting past the stated problem together. Almost every conversation opens on data entry, and data entry is a solved problem.
Every serious product in the category can read an invoice, and most teams have already bought one. But sit with a team for a day and what consumes them is not typing. It is what happens when the invoice is wrong: a missing delivery note, a quantity that does not match what was received, a line item nobody can explain. Someone has to take that to the supplier, wait, follow up, and hold the thread until it closes.
No CFO has failed to notice this. It simply has never been measured, because it lives in inboxes and phone calls rather than in the ledger.
Once it is visible, the ceiling is obvious: capacity to clear exceptions is bounded by how many people are free to have conversations, which is why so many functions have automated hard and still feel exactly as busy.
What I find genuinely exciting is what happens when that coordination no longer needs a person in the middle. I have seen a team absorb several hundred invoices in the days after a natural catastrophe without adding anyone.
The people who used to chase are now doing analysis. That is a better job, and I think it is where the whole function is heading.
FutureCFO: Can you share an experience which was key to your professional growth?
SC: I moved to Colombo in October 2015, at twenty-three, to launch an e-commerce business in a market where the group had no presence. I had come from management consulting and had never led a team. I started with about five people and finished with roughly sixty by 2017.
The formative lesson was not about scale. It was about refusing to copy.
Sri Lanka was the smallest of our five markets by population, and the received playbook was volume: acquire aggressively, discount hard, grow gross merchandise value.
Applied there, that playbook would have produced a business that grew and lost money. What Sri Lanka actually had was the highest income per head of any market we operated in.
So we built for basket size rather than order count, went after categories where that mattered, and partnered with brands whose customers would spend. The business tripled year over year.
I have carried one thing from it into everything since: the temptation to apply a proven model to a new context is enormous, and it is almost always wrong in the specifics. Read the market you are actually in.
Saurabh Chauhan, Founder and CEO, Peakflo
FutureCFO: Is there anything outside work—such as a travel experience, a book, participation in a sport event or any volunteering experience—that serves as an important inspiration to your work or life?
SC: For the last two years I have served as a judge for Y Combinator, reading applications from founders around the world.
It is unpaid and it has nothing to do with my company. I do it because it is the best corrective I know for my own thinking. You read hundreds of applications in a compressed window, from people in markets you have never worked in, solving problems you did not know existed.
Some are extraordinary and badly explained. Some are beautifully explained and hollow. Learning to tell those apart quickly, and being forced to write down why, sharpens how I assess my own decisions.
It is also humbling in a useful way: for every idea you think is original, several strangers are working on something adjacent.
The other is running. It is the only thing I have found that reliably clears my head: no signal, no meetings, one physical thing to do.
About thirty minutes in, the thinking reorders itself without my help. Most of the decisions I am proudest of arrived on a run rather than at a desk, and I have stopped treating that as a coincidence and started protecting the time.
