Earmark Podcast | Earn Free Accounting CPE

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Devon Coombs: [00:00:00] I've worked on contracts. I think my largest one was $20 billion, which is just astronomical. And, um, and some of the relationships. Yeah, they're just really amazing to work on both sides of those transactions and see them evolve and to work at those numbers and then to be homeless 15 years ago and be like, Holy crap. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:19] Are you an accountant with a continuing education requirement? You can earn free Nasba approved CPE for listening to this episode. Just visit earmarked app in your web browser, take a short quiz and get your certificate. Hey everyone, welcome back to earmark. I'm Blake Oliver. Today we're joined by Devin Coombes, a financial leader at Google Cloud with an incredible story. Devin went from being homeless at 21 to negotiating multibillion dollar deals at one of the world's top tech companies. Welcome to the show, Devin.

Devon Coombs: [00:00:51] Hey, thank you so much, Blake. It's a pleasure to be on.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:54] So you were homeless at 21? Uh, take me back there. Like, how did this happen? How did you end up there? I imagine it was before you got into accounting, because accounting is fairly lucrative. Like you don't have to be homeless if you're an accountant. What were.

Devon Coombs: [00:01:09] You doing? Yeah, not if you're doing it right, at least. Right? That's right. I've met. I've met a few people who got divorced or had some pretty rough spots afterwards, but, uh, but that's that's a different story. So I was actually in the music industry when I was 18. I was in the music industry. I came out of the foster care system. My mom unfortunately passed when I was 15, and I had never met my father, and I tried to take that in stride and start my own business. This was before the 2007 recession. I was in Los Angeles and lots of musicians and actors in Los Angeles, and I was lucky enough to have a lot of friends who had dads in the music industry, and I pretty much lived in their studios until I was 18 and decided I'd build my own. And so from 18 to 21, I owned a recording studio in North Hollywood called Antipop Records, where I also to build it. I was waiting tables and doing a variety of night jobs, but I eventually built it and was recording bands and really didn't know what I was doing from a business side at all. I was just passionate about it. And this ultimately led to payments and things like broken down busses or broken down cars. I had a car that someone paid me and that fell apart while I was driving on the highway. Like literally the bottom fell out and I was like on a Fred Flintstone kind of scenario, just running on the street. It was ridiculous. Um, but I was completely destitute. Uh, after that, I the business failed.

Devon Coombs: [00:02:24] I learned how rough it can get when businesses fail. My partners and my friends who I lent money to wound up, um, wound up essentially stealing from me at the end when things get rough. And I was out on my own, I was living in a car that I had. I hadn't even paid off. I was sleeping in the car and kind of wondering, you know, where does it go from here? A pretty destitute, you lose a lot of friends. You find out who your real friends are when you're completely broke. And I had no family and no one to turn to. And I tried to decide, what do I actually have control over and what went wrong. And accounting, funny enough, was a good way to explore that. So I went and committed to taking some business classes to learn how I screwed it up or what was in my control, despite the recession. And I fell in love with accounting through that. Funny enough. And that kind of started me off down, down the CPA journey, which was remarkable for me. And so yeah, I had no clue that it would lead to me. Now I'm I'm leaving Google now, and I'm going to be working for this firm, PCG, and building out a practice focused on being lean and helping the community and really trying to see what accounting can be for people. Um, but I never thought it would be multibillion dollar deal negotiations when I was homeless, living in my car, you know, 15 years ago. So so that was a bit of a rant. Happy to go unpack whatever you'd like.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:43] Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have, I guess, somewhat similar stories. Um, you know, I moved to LA as a musician. I was a, I was a, I was a cello major in college. And so I wanted to be in those recording studios, like in your recording studio working with bands playing. And, um, I had a safety net. Right? So, uh, but it was a strange experience because I'd never really thought too much about money growing up. And then when I got to LA and I started paying rent and I started gigging and I was, I was working as a barista at Starbucks, and I'm watching the money come into my account, and I'm watching the money go out of my account. And every month it just keeps getting a little bit lower, a little bit lower, right. Like something is not working here. And I guess it wasn't until I actually had to pay my own bills that I started to pay attention to money, and that's really what got me interested in accounting, I think was just trying to understand what am I not doing right, or how does this all work? So I guess I'm curious. Like, what was, uh, you know, when you were running the recording studio? Uh, like, how did it how did it go down into the ground, right? I mean, I know those are tough businesses. There's a lot of competition in LA. Uh, you know, bands don't have a lot of money to pay for recording time, that sort of thing. Like, what was it that that that crashed the business?

Devon Coombs: [00:05:18] Yeah. Well, first off, it was just lack of business knowledge I'd say was the fundamental challenge. Like I was passionate. We actually I built a really cool studio. I was really proud of it. And we had good recording quality. But the first piece was just I had no clue about fixed costs, or I had no idea of how to make these things profitable. It was more just buy cool stuff, record bands and they'll pay me my fair rate. And um, and that should work. Like if you're passionate about something, it should work. That's not how the world works. We all know that now. And learning things about like break even and fixed cost analysis and, you know, projecting cash flows and financial forecasting was just a game changer for me, and that was not in my. I grew up in complete poverty. I had no clue about anything other than living paycheck to paycheck until I took a class like accounting. And so that's a whole other issue. And that's why I also teach at community college and high schools, because we need to improve financial literacy overall for our America.

Devon Coombs: [00:06:08] But what really killed me, we were actually kind of afloat. Despite all of that, despite my complete ignorance, we we stayed afloat just kind of through mere grit until 2007. A combination of the recession and then automation like Logic tech came out and my $100,000 studio of equipment, or over exaggerating 50 to $100,000 of equipment that I had bought and set up, could be replaced with someone's, you know, a computer and a Midi app. And so my rates went from charging 50 to $100 an hour for a recording session to I had to compete with people charging ten during the recession, like, oh, come record in my home record in my kitchen and I'll. And it'll get a similar quality for especially for what I was doing, like rock bands and folk music. He didn't need a ten mic setup for that. And yeah, so it was just crazy to see. So this AI revolution actually feels a lot like that. And I think you and I talked about that last time, it really feels a lot like that kind of change in the atmosphere.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:07] So yeah. Yeah. I remember we talked about that on your show. Uh ambition aligned great podcast. Everyone go subscribe. Um, I had a similar experience. I was a cellist. We were in LA at really I think we didn't overlap, but we were there similar times. And I, you know, the recession hit and it was these, these orchestral samples that took over in, in my domain. So you no longer need a live cellist, you no longer need a live string quartet or an orchestra, even you can get pretty good results with a synthesizer, just a keyboard, a laptop, and a sound library that you could pay a few hundred dollars for maybe a few thousand, like depending on the quality. And a lot of people really couldn't tell the difference for the kind of work that we were doing, which was, you know, television or just like backing for bands or something like that. So yeah, we have both been victims of automation in our first chosen profession.

Devon Coombs: [00:08:08] Yeah, I know it's such a trip and it's such a trip to think you are the one who triggered that. Like, it does feel a lot like the AI revolution now, you can still survive in that profession, but it's a different career. You're the orchestrator of it all. You have to be the orchestrator of the music and the composer. You can't be the executor anymore. And I feel very similar with what we're doing in the AI space and accounting.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:29] There's a metaphor here, there's an analogy here. And yeah, that really is what it's like if you're a controller or a CFO or even just honestly a manager, a staff accountant is now able to manage AI agents or very soon we'll be able to. So it's like you'll have a team of of bots that do help you do your work. Is that where you see this going?

Devon Coombs: [00:08:53] Yeah, 100%. I'm working a lot. I've been fortunate enough at Google being on the AI deals desk and also now transitioning to PCG, where I'll be leading our strategic being strategic advisor for them and a director in their group of seeing where the AI space is. And it really is. It is. Well, I'll tell you what it isn't to define what it is. It isn't us all building these custom AI tools that are going to be chatbots and take over the world. It is individuals like you and I and professionals who are going to be really savvy, using Llms to become a thousand times more effective and bring down bring down costs. But the second is a genetic or genetic workflows, right? Of someone orchestrating just what you said. Like I just, I was just reviewing the PPA of a company and like they do, doing the financial due diligence for a company that all it's doing is taking all the steps between real estate. Like let's say you have a like trying to get an HOA doc. You have to call the company. You can have a bot do that now, and then the bot can call the company. No one can tell that the bot is calling the company and then you can write down it can write down all the information that that discussion has, and it can give it to another bot, who can then determine if that's an HOA that they'd be interested, interested in pursuing or not, and then that can send it to the loan. Like the loan facilitators. All of those like little jobs in between, are just going to be little bots talking to each other, and humans can't even tell the difference. You won't be able to know that you're talking to a bot anymore or not. And so that's kind of the future. And then for us accountants, we'll be managing those workflows and looking for quality and improvement out of out of it, which is very weird and fascinating future, but similar to what we did. Right. It's just like it's taking the cellist, you're taking the cellist out, and now it's just someone using Midi, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:10:39] Essentially, yeah. The composer at the keyboard. The orchestrator Ater producing all those sounds themselves. They still have to have the vision for it. You have to know what you want. You have to at least be able to hum a melody. But now we have all this automation to do it. It lowers the cost. So there are there are downsides, right? If you are doing that job that is getting automated, you're not going to be doing that job anymore. That's what you and I experienced. But if you are the orchestrator or the composer who can learn these tools, you have like infinite work now.

Devon Coombs: [00:11:21] So yeah, 100%. Yeah. And so that's the challenge though is I that's where I feel sad. And that's why I'm going back into teaching is to teach people these tools, because we are kind of closing the door for a lot of the profession, like at least for me, going in and learning from people was really helpful. Like I learned most from failing my failed business, but it was also helpful to work in CPA firms. And if you take away all those staff jobs or automatically just make you the creative mastermind of it all, you're going to miss out on some experience. So figuring out how to retool the next generation is going to be really important there.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:54] But continuing our analogy, right. Like if you are learning as a musician, it helps to be in the studio playing an instrument to see how it all happens, or be in the orchestra or be in the string quartet. And if you can't do that anymore, how do you learn the bigger picture? You can't just take accountants out of school and give them like a manager role. They have to somehow learn into that role. But what jobs are there going to be?

Devon Coombs: [00:12:22] Yeah, that that's that's the challenge. It's a real challenge. What I don't know. And it's up to the profession that hopefully we can at least keep those spots open or figure out as educators how to have a multifaceted approach to thinking big picture. Yeah, but for me, it's challenging. I don't know, like, can you be a composer without knowing an instrument? I don't, I don't know if you could be a composer without learning an instrument.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:46] I don't know of any. There has to be. You have to have something. You have to. You have to play the piano at the very least. Right? So it's fascinating. Yeah, it's. Well, I want to come back to that, but. Yeah. But first let's continue on this, this journey you had. Right. So you you were living in your car, you were working whatever job you could to pay the bills. I assume you you got out of the car and into some place to sleep and you started taking accounting classes. Like what made you want to get into, like, business or accounting? It was the the studio failure or.

Devon Coombs: [00:13:27] Well, the studio failure was a big motivator. But I was thinking more like, oh, maybe I'll go be a also, just because I was jaded about my partners at the time, I just had no contracts and I was like, Maybe I'll go be a a music attorney. That was kind of. And I have to learn business as part to go to, to law school. So that was kind of my thought. And I took accounting and did an internship with accounting because I was picking up any odd job for pay. And I was like, wow, I really like I'm really surprised how creative I can be in this space, how much there is to learn it's numbers, which is very technology driven when like me working in the studio and it was like creative problem solving. And so I actually really enjoyed it. I was surprised by how much I liked doing the work, that it kind of derailed me from law, even though I was really good at that as well. And then I also worked with a CPA who was a nice guy, but quite frankly, he wasn't that good. He was kind of scatterbrained and unorganized and not like. And he had a successful firm. He was making great money. And here's this guy who I'm like pretty disorganized, pretty like not keeping clients happy, running this weird tax practice. And he was making bank. And I was like, that would be nice. But like, if he could do it, I could I could probably do it, uh, and probably do it a little better. And so it actually he motivated me in that way. And it was nice of him to give me that opportunity. Decent guy. But yeah, just like his kind of incompetence It kind of encouraged me a bit. I mean.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:40] It's funny to think that, like, you could the worst CPA probably makes more money than the best orchestra musician. Like.

Devon Coombs: [00:14:48] Yeah, exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:49] You know, I mean, that's that's just that says something about the value of what we do.

Devon Coombs: [00:14:54] Well, and that gave me such security like. And that's why accounting, I still believe is such a great profession is it gave it gave me that direct path to security, like, oh, I can finish college. There's this group of a lot of CPAs are great mentors and great people. There's this group of people who want you to succeed if you're going down this path. And it was a clear path to making at that time, was like $50,000 a year. If I got into Big Four and that was a life changing amount of money for me, I could actually pay rent and take go on dates that weren't like, you know, go on a hike or something. I could actually have a real life. And it was. Yeah. And that accounting unlocked that for me 100%. And all of the people around the profession. It's just such a like it's still one of the only one, not the only, but one of the few apprentice driven professions now, where people actually take people under their wing and try to help them grow their careers. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:42] So you were doing your classes at Northridge?

Devon Coombs: [00:15:46] Yeah, I started at a community college. Yeah, I started at a community college called Pierce College, and I had some of my best teachers there, and that's why I go teach at community colleges. Now. I think there's a lot of students that just need can't afford it and need the help. And I want, you know, you can still get really quality education.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:00] Do you ever watch that show community?

Devon Coombs: [00:16:03] Yeah, I love it. Yeah I think yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:05] Pierce College is the is the is the model for that college. And that's why they named Chevy Chase's character Pierce.

Devon Coombs: [00:16:12] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's why I watched the show, which is funny. And to be clear, Pierce College itself was pretty janky going there. There was always just like fences up and buildings that were, like, old and deconstructed. You've been to the Valley. It's just so hot. The heat destroys all the buildings. But I make great teachers there. I met a lot of times you get cool professionals who kind of wanted to give back, and they go to that, to learn. So I did that. And then I went to CSUN where it was just a state college, but I got full I got a full ride there at CSUN, and I got to meet Chuck Noski, who was a former alum who wound up being the CFO for Wells Fargo. And he became a close friend and mentor of mine through going to State College. So I didn't pay for college. I got paid to go to college and then got a great career out of it. And quite frankly, I don't know any of my friends who who went in other professions who got that kind of benefit. It was I, I still think accounting is just killer for that.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:05] Well, and CSUN is a really well respected program, like amazing CFOs come out of CSUN and like, you don't hear that a lot about like, Cal State Northridge. Uh, I think it's sort of under the radar. I remember when I was thinking about doing my accounting, it was actually, like difficult to get in there.

Devon Coombs: [00:17:23] Yeah, they made it tough. We had a Professor Weiss who's still there, and he must be a bajillion years old. I love the guy, but he's this top forever. And he was a lawyer, too. And he would he would you have like a 40% pass rate for his intermediate accounting class? He's like, I want it to be hard for you to be here because I want the people who succeed here to be good in the profession. And he gave examples of like putting up a piece of paper and he's like, if you're going to pass this class, I need you to not crumple this paper, because once it's crumpled, you can't de-wrinkle it. And like, that's the importance of this reputation. It was a great, great school.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:55] So then where did you go after you got your accounting degree? Did you go to Deloitte after that? Straight after.

Devon Coombs: [00:18:02] Yeah. So I went to Deloitte, I got my CPA, I took all my tests in a matter of like two months, passed them all. Um, and, uh, at my wife's prodding, I didn't want to. I was pretty tired from, like, working multiple jobs and going through school. But I took that CPA, which was one of the best things I ever did. I'm glad she pushed me to do it that summer. Um, and the hot, hot heat of Sherman Oaks and a bad AC and a crappy apartment. But I still knocked it out. And then I went to Deloitte. And one of the cool things about my career at Deloitte was bringing in my business knowledge. So I came in a little older than a lot of the 22 or 23 year olds. I was 26 or 27 at the time and doing audit. I was doing audit. Yep. And I made it a goal of my mind to win business my first year because no one, everyone was like, wait till you're a director or senior manager and then you can worry about winning business. Me owning a business knows that the most important thing about doing anything is being able to make money and make clients happy. And I didn't want to just be some staff person who did reconciliations. I really wanted to learn, and I was already top of my class at CSUN and a little older. And so I did cold calls and to like a thousand different people on LinkedIn. When LinkedIn was a new platform and met with controllers and actually won a client in my first nine months at Deloitte.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:20] Did you just do that on your own, or did you like, did you ask somebody if you could do this? Like, how did.

Devon Coombs: [00:19:25] I just did it? I just did it. Yeah. And I took the credit card and like took a bunch of people out to dinner and lunch and just put it, ran it under business development expense and won a client. And I remember the partner I worked with at the time was like, there's no way this is going to work, Devin. You're like, no one does this. I'll humor you. I'll go with you to the pitch. But like, this just doesn't happen. And then we won the pitch and he's like, what the. Like, he just was flabbergasted. And it was a great company called Goguardian in, um, in, uh, Culver City. And I like, got our lead and audit my first year and it was like a first year audit. And I learned a ton through that experience. But I also learned that, like, Deloitte wasn't going to compensate me for that ambition. They gave me like $100. They gave me like $100 bonus for winning $100,000 client. And I was like, okay, maybe, maybe this isn't the right place to stick around.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:15] Did you say you did, like a thousand cold calls?

Devon Coombs: [00:20:18] Yeah, a thousand. Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:19] So you just like every morning I'm calling X people that I found on LinkedIn seeing if I can get a meeting.

Devon Coombs: [00:20:27] Yeah. So I'll say cold calls or cold emails, but it would be essentially go on LinkedIn, search for every controller in Los Angeles and just write them and say, hey, I'm at Deloitte. I'm trying to learn more about the profession, and I'm also trying to like, help people. And so I know I'm new to this, but if you give me your time, I'd love to learn from you. And I promise you I'd give you more attention than most of the partners here. And one guy, I got ten calls, and then out of that. Oh, those ten, like, real like. Hey, well let's talk. One guy gave me the shot, which was really cool. This guy, um, Elliot at Goguardian, and it just totally, like, totally changed my perception of the career. I got to do 606 with them. It was like one of their first 606 clients out there and do a first year audit, because we didn't have any tech space out there. And I really wanted a tech client I didn't want to do, like we had a lot of financial services, which was kind of boring to me.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:19] So you got to lead an audit in your like first year?

Devon Coombs: [00:21:23] Yep. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:24] That's that's so cool. It must have given you kind of a A reputation at Deloitte.

Devon Coombs: [00:21:29] Yeah, they paraded me around the senior managers. They actually put me in a meeting in front of all the senior managers and said, hey, if Devin can do it, why can't you guys? Which was pretty brutal.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:40] Oh, man. Yeah. Now you're the enemy of all those senior managers. That's great. Oh.

Devon Coombs: [00:21:45] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Made my career very short lived at Deloitte, unfortunately.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:49] Really? So. Yeah. Tell me about that. Where did. What happened after that?

Devon Coombs: [00:21:53] Well, it became clear that no matter how high performing I was, like, I got the top ranks over there, that there's no way I could skip the ladder. It's just the culture. So like, hey, stick around. And in eight years, maybe you could be on a faster track to partner. But then I got a call from a friend in San Jose where my wife's family is at Effectus group, which was a much smaller firm. They were saying, we heard you won some business. If you could do that for us here, we'll give you a commission and we'll double your pay. If you start doing 606 and IPO implementations here. And so I moved up. I said, hell yeah. And I talked to my, like, all my friends at Deloitte and my mentors, and they said, Devin, you'd be stupid not to do this. We'll take you back any time and we'll probably take you back and get you a promotion if you do this. But we can't get you a promotion if you stay inside, which again, another problem with the industry. It makes absolutely no sense to me. But yeah, we'll get there. Um, and so yeah, I got to I joined the company Effectus Group, which was a huge advantage to my career because we were a 20 person firm when I joined and I got to lead over ten, 606 implementations, I did a few s-1s. I did a lot of PPC and due diligence work on acquisitions, and it was just essentially me running the show like we're such a small firm. It was me working directly with the clients and building my reputation up here, which was just awesome.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:11] So this is a CPE podcast, so maybe this would be a great opportunity for you to give your perspective on 606 ASC 606. Like, like briefly, what is it for those who are new and tell us about your experience with it, because I think that was all rolling out at that time. It was like brand new, right?

Devon Coombs: [00:23:35] Yeah, I was I did a ton of implementations for six. So six ASC 606 is a revenue recognition standard that launched at that time. I can't quote the exact date, but what I'm guessing about ten years ago, about ten years ago. So 2015. Yeah, 2015 ish. Um, and the whole the whole main guidance there that changed was we were moving away from revenues recognized as earned to revenues recognized as performance obligations are satisfied. And so we went away from a more prescriptive type of guidance to a more judgment board guidance. And there was a lot of discussion on what defines your performance obligation as a company. What's what's the definition of it in the context of your contract and on its face. And, um, and no one really knew how to apply it. It became really. Are your SKUs actually that what is defined as a performance obligation according to the literature? And does that mean you have to refine all of your data sets, and how do you recognize revenue accordingly? And you even had situations where you could recognize revenue well before Billings. Right. And you'd have these concepts of like contract assets and contract liabilities instead of deferred revenue. And so mainly this changed software and cloud based companies because you no longer just had like a license portion of your revenue, you had to split like you used to have more of like a radical license revenue of, yeah, we sell your license and we'd figure out, like over the term, we just kind of recognize it radically, which honestly, from a consistency standpoint made I think it made it easier to account for and easier to compare companies. So maybe we went a little off there from the fasb's perspective. But for us, it was like you have to split the license portion from the support portion, even if it's not explicit in a contract. So assigning fair values and then ultimately recognize the license portion up front, which is a really large change for a lot of software and SaaS based companies.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:34] Yep.

Devon Coombs: [00:25:35] Yeah. I'm happy to talk more about that. I could talk about 606 for 1000 hours, and I'm going to come on earmark and do a bunch of deep dives in the near future as soon as I. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:42] I'd love one. We've been talking about this like some webinars, deep dives into this for software companies. I find it fascinating, uh, because, yeah, you can't just simply like, the accounting can't just simply follow the contract anymore is kind of the my big takeaway. Yeah. That's kind of you could do that in the past, right? You could just like, like you said, recognize revenue over the term of that contract. And you didn't have to split out all this stuff. And now it feels like it's a lot more complex than it used to be. Do you think it's. Do you think it's helped, like in terms of investor information. Do you think that it's made financials more useful, or is it just created more work for accountants?

Devon Coombs: [00:26:28] Yeah I think. My $0.02 is that I think it's created more work for accountants. I can't, I can't. I think it's added a lot more complexity. And I believe the spirit of it was good. I believe like the idea was if everyone aims towards honesty and the best efforts, that if we try to look at the substance of the underlying transaction and match the pattern of revenue recognition and classification in alignment with that substance over the form, the contract, that's more valuable to the investment community. The reality is, no company has the resources to actually do that level of diligence or the effort. So now it's just created this very complex requirement and oversight that you really need very technical accountants. There's probably only a few hundred of us in the world who at my level of experience to come in and actually do it correctly. Um, and it becomes even much more challenging to audit because auditors don't even know that level of the technical requirements of the guidance. And so it's created this big. I guess it just created this big hurdle for a lot of companies. And, um, and not necessarily a huge value add, even though the spirit of it was correct, I just don't think the companies have the resourcing or the audit firms have the resources to implement according to that spirit. And it raises some questions around like that cost benefit principle of like, dude, was it really? Did we really provide a benefit that outweighed the costs there?

Blake Oliver: [00:27:53] Right? I feel like that gets lost when the FASB meets. They forget about that foundational principle of accounting that the the cost of the information should not exceed the benefit of the information. So how did you become an expert on 606? Like, I mean, you're very, I don't know, self-motivated. Did you just like learn it yourself? Like, where did you figure this stuff out?

Devon Coombs: [00:28:19] Yeah. So what was what was actually really funny was it was the firm. I was lucky enough. I was one of the first people to do it at Deloitte. Deloitte didn't even have this. They spun up this technical accounting advisory practice. But I was part of the beta for that, essentially like the pilot group, because I had won that client and they were looking for that type of work. I was like doing pretty complex technical work, like stock based compensation, 606, um, valuations of derivatives. I kind of find my specialty there. And then when I went to Effectus group, that was the bread and butter. Over those years, no one knew how to implement it. Everyone was stuck in the 605 world and VSO, and no one knew what, like how to do SSP allocations. Just no one knew the guidance. And it came out and it was like thousands, thousands of pages of literature, like no one had the time to go read and digest this information. And so, um, I, I found the title. And so I went through and I actually printed it all out and I read from page to page, from start to finish the entire guidance, and then just practiced it on a bunch of clients. And so I had ten different clients that I did 606 implementations for in a period of two years. And I just like I just would go through them. And my life was essentially 606 and IPOs for that two years. And the market was really hot at the time. So everyone was ramping up for IPOs and.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:39] They all had.

Devon Coombs: [00:29:40] To be on.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:40] 606 in order.

Devon Coombs: [00:29:42] Yeah, they all needed to get it in order. Um, and.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:45] You read a thousand pages of 6 or 6 guidance.

Devon Coombs: [00:29:48] I made it my I printed it, I go through 30 pages every single night, and then I'd see how I'd apply it. But the best way I learned was just case studies of like, okay, here's my they're looking for here's a software company or a call center company. And they have this level of professional service that they also do on it. How would this apply to the guidance? And I, I went through thousands of examples like that over a period of two years, and mostly from imposter syndrome. I was like, I'm only one year into my career. 1 or 2 years into my career, and I'm leading these huge engagements. Um, I better catch up. But then I realized no one knew it. And so I quickly became the expert. And that was kind of exemplified when I had led automation anywhere. 606 implementation, which was like a multi billion dollar unicorn out here in the Bay area. And I won the engagement. Like in my first six months at Effectus group, I had won this one of our largest engagements to do this massive implementation, because I had become an expert in the space, which blew my mind and and made me realize like, if you really something about this profession, if you really try and become an expert in a little niche like you just put some effort in for six months or a year, you can really blow other people out of the water, right? Like there's not a lot of accountants who get a deep dive expertise in 606 or or stock based comp or some of those complexities.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:13] Okay, so how did you go from Effectus group to Google?

Devon Coombs: [00:31:17] Yeah, that's a great question. And so I would actually had started teaching while I was at Effectus Group and doing more business development, and my career was going really well. But my daughter was born and it was a huge blessing in my life, but it was a big wake up call because I remember actually being like, just cutting the umbilical cord from my daughter. And I got a call from one of the head partners at Effectus Group who I don't believe is no longer with them, and I thought he was calling to congratulate me. I was like, hey, hey, Devin, uh, because I sent that email, I sent the email in the morning saying, hey, I'm going to the hospital with my wife. I can't work anymore. I'm going on paternity leave for only for a couple of weeks, like 2 or 3 weeks. He called me and in the hospital he said, hey, Devin, can you send out this invoice to this client? I'm like, hey, I won't say his name, but hey, I am I'm in the hospital. I just got the umbilical cord. And he was like, that's gross.

Devon Coombs: [00:32:13] Like, can you just go home and send the invoice? And I said, no, I'm off. I'm at the hospital with my wife, with my new baby. I'll be I'll be back in three weeks. I gave you all the information. She said, okay, but we'll talk about this when you're back. And then in my head I was like, okay, I would I was already working 100 hour weeks very regularly in this space. And I said, okay, this this isn't the kind of person I want to be. Um, I want to be a present father. And Google had a really good reputation for work life balance, and one of the managing directors of Effectus had left to there and been reaching out to me regularly and about a 606 role they needed in Google Cloud. And so I followed up with them the next day, and I kind of got a job within the first month. And so funny enough, I joined Google. Like the first like my anniversary with Google was about one month after my daughter being born, specifically because of that reason. And so.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:02] So so basically, you took the initiative to learn 606 in your role at Effectus. You kicked butt there, and then you just were able to join Google, and it was because you took that initiative to learn this thing that was really difficult, and not a lot of people wanted to figure out. And so like was that was you were the ASC 606 guy there at Google.

Devon Coombs: [00:33:26] Yeah, exactly. And the interviews were really tough. I interviewed with a few other people who were 606 experts there, and I was just able to outcompete all of the other interviewers. And they're like, you're your years of experience are less. But they actually upleveled me when I joined because, um, because my expertise was so high in the area, they were all kind of shocked. And then I was able to get an early promotion at Google because I was able to come in with, like, surprisingly, a lot of the people who were from Big Four who had went to Google only had 1 or 2 big clients, maybe like a Cisco or an Apple. But me getting to work with ten plus startups in S1's was much more relevant to like the pace of a Google Google Cloud at the time. And so I was quickly able to make a name for myself as like a very sales friendly, um, uh, advisor. And I got to do a lot of really amazing work at Google Cloud.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:18] Which includes negotiating billion dollar deals. Tell me about that, because not a lot of accountants get to be in the room when those deals are made.

Devon Coombs: [00:34:26] I think that was that was the coolest part of the job that I wasn't expecting is at the time, Google Cloud was was brand new. Essentially, it was like in the first few years of the business and we were figuring out what we we were almost a bit still like Google does a lot of different bets, and Google wasn't sure if it was going to become this giant, the giant behemoth that it is now growing 30% year over year. And, um, just tens of billions of dollars of revenue. And being in those rooms was just very fascinating because I would work with a sale, we generally have a sales person, and we'd have salespeople on the other side as well salespeople, legal people, finance people. Um, deal negotiation experts, maybe 2030 experts on the call and the idea and these drafting sessions were how do we get an optimal outcome for both sides? And so they wanted an accounting expert in the room to help from a finance perspective, but also to help from a contractual perspective on managing things like how can we get to keep the customer happy, happy, but still not have the negative consequences of this termination for convenience language. Can we add a penalty in? Can we figure out some contingency rights, and what would that look like from a valuation perspective? In order to optimize our backlog and our accounting and finance outcomes while still meeting the customer's needs. And so that became a really amazing experience for me to just to learn from the best in the world. Um, like some of the top VP's at Google Cloud who have been the top, top salespeople at other organizations on just how to negotiate deals and how to do it right, and how to do strategic partnerships, but also how to give good, helpful accounting advice to our partners. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:04] What kind of deals are we talking about? Like, can you give me names? Are these household names?

Devon Coombs: [00:36:11] Yeah. Yeah. Um. Google is. If you pick any random Faang company, you probably probably have some kind of deal with them. Unless they're a strict competitor. Right. And so you can pick any, any major name. And I can't think of which ones are disclosed. So I got to be careful there. But yeah, I'd say most of our fortune five like randomly choose from the fortune 500 and we probably have a contract with them. Right. And I've worked on contracts. I think my largest one was $20 billion, which is just astronomical. And, um, and some of the relationships. Yeah, they're just really amazing to work on both sides of those transactions and see them evolve and to work at those numbers and then to be homeless. 15 years ago, I'd be like, Holy crap. Right? Yeah, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:54] You're sitting in the room making a $20 billion deal happen, and you're thinking, I used to sleep in my Honda.

Devon Coombs: [00:37:00] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then what? A trip is also how undervalued accountants are. It's unfortunate. Like, I was in the room working with the top. I would I had the top salespeople in the world who would call me on my cell phone and ask me for advice at all times of day, but they'd be getting commissions as a percentage of that billion dollars, right? And then I'd be getting I still got paid well at Google. I'm not complaining, but like, not $1 million commissions, you know?

Blake Oliver: [00:37:27] Right, right.

Devon Coombs: [00:37:28] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:29] Yeah. Sort of just the extreme the the at Google. I'm sure it's it's just everything is extreme because of the size of the of the company and and the deals being done. That's amazing. So okay so you're leaving Google I want to talk about PCG. Okay. But before that before that I write automation. Going back to this this idea that accountants, everybody really is becoming or has the potential to become an An orchestrator, as opposed to an individual session musician or or or the recording engineer. Right. Or the producer? We're all producers now instead of just musicians. So what, uh, what kind of AI stuff are you doing in real life at Google that, like, makes you think that this agentic workflow stuff is going to be what everyone's doing?

Devon Coombs: [00:38:27] Yeah, I would say seeing the output of people using it versus not is what's showing me the future. And so first I'm lucky enough. So in Google I did the AI deals desk for a while. Then I was the chief of staff for the Controllership organization for a few years, which was an honor, and I got to really develop expertise on how we can optimize internally and internal structuring. And then I went back to be the AI deals desk in the new stage of what does this mean from an AI perspective? And I've got to see how we're partnering with our clients, and a lot of it from a Google perspective is how can we use our LMS, um, in order to facilitate stronger efficiencies like cut costs. Right. And a lot of that's through, I'd say voice, speech, text recognition, but just the ability to have conversations with your phone and it would actually be beneficial. And so that's where I'd say the first thing that I'm seeing kind of change the landscape. So imagine if you had to write a memo instead of writing the memo by hand and doing all the research on your walk, you could talk to your phone about all the concepts that you're aware of that need to be drafted in the memo, and then just tell it to draft it for you. And now you cut out all the staff time and you cut out. But that's applied to all different industries.

Devon Coombs: [00:39:51] Imagine fast food industries. You no longer have to talk to a person at the drive through window. You're just you're talking to a robot. But you would never know. You would never know that it's a AI agent. Or imagine that on the extreme. I've heard of things like imagine that you don't even plan your own trips anymore, that you have an agent that's like, hey, you haven't taken a trip in three months. Well, we've already worked with these other agents to give you these three packages, and we're confident in knowing your background that this would be your favorite. And we booked the flights and we've we've rented the cars and we've booked the hotels, and we've turned in your notice to your employer about your taking your vacation. And you just have to go on the trip. Right. And so how do you take all of these admin tasks out and kind of automate it as long as it's technologically grounded? Um, the big limitation there is data. And so that's something that's always going to be like whoever has proprietary access to workflows, if you're really knowledgeable about a specific industry, that orchestration element that's still needed, but it's not people that's kind of the IP. And the transaction is, are you bringing an expertise about a certain workflow on how to combine these different bots that are owned by these LMS, and then you have the hallucination risk also of just like they still make up crap.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:09] Although that's gotten so small now. I remember when I first started, you know, adding AI into our workflows here at earmark, hallucination was a problem. It would, you know, the AIS would invent facts that were not in podcast transcripts and would create multiple choice questions that just did not meet with reality. But now that there are these thinking models, I have not seen that happen in a long time since we moved over to like cloud three seven or to, you know, GPT one. We just don't get hallucinations at any scale anymore. So I feel like that's being solved. But like you said, the issue is access to data. Agents are only as useful as the information they have, just like people. Right? So are you comfortable giving? A chat bot an agent, access to your email, your calendar, your Google Drive, all of that. I've done that now. Claude just enabled that where I can I can search my Gmail now from Claude.

Devon Coombs: [00:42:10] That's cool. Um, but that's a big privacy question, right? It's a huge a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with that.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:16] I don't know if I would trust ChatGPT with that information, just based on some of the things that Sam Altman has said. Anthropic, on the other hand. Right. I feel a little cozier with them, but still, that could be really misused. And so I've said on our show, on the podcast that I feel like even though Google was really slow to start with AI and still is struggling to, you know, build it into the products in a way that people actually want to use it long term. Whoever has the data that the AI is going to work with will win because that's how you make it really useful, right? You need to be able to edit my calendar and send an email on my behalf and attach a document, right? That stuff like these chatbots alone are just useless. Like from that standpoint, like in terms of like being agents for me. So I trust Google already with all my stuff. Right? We're a Google Workspace company. So for me to let Google, you know, add an LLM on top, not a big deal.

Devon Coombs: [00:43:25] Yeah. Google's just LLM has to get better. Unfortunately it's just so much it's unequivocally not as good as ChatGPT.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:32] And but that's see that's that. But that's solvable because all this.

Devon Coombs: [00:43:35] Yeah they'll get.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:35] There though right. It's like yeah they don't have to like develop the llms. They just have to develop the workflow around it. And um, yeah. And same thing for Microsoft, right?

Devon Coombs: [00:43:48] Yeah. And so I think that's going to be the interesting thing to see where where this all goes. I kind of envision there's kind of three paths I can see either going like these fine tuned models. I have friends I'm more than happy to introduce you to the company called to bot like Ex-google engineer and ex Big Four who are creating like technical accounting writing software. And it's about fine tuned models against all the guidance. Pros of that is you might have a more like a more automated technical memo writing software that's based really honed in on the guidance. The problem is, llms are so good that they might just catch up. Like even the fine tuning might not be as good as the LLM and based on the investments. The next is like I have a friend called Inquis who's a founder and he he's ai assisted writing flows. And so the idea is you still do professional writing, but we have AI agents in the background who can help, like once you're done with it, to package it as an email, to package it as a video, to package it as whatever you need to increase the workflows and help you finish the doc. So that's so that's interesting. And I see I see the value there. But then you have the data question which is then kind of like Google and all this.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:56] Yeah. And you pointed out something which is that the the models are getting so much better so fast that like, um, you know, some stuff that I'm trying now with O3, with ChatGPT, it's so good at it. I don't even need to create a project where I have custom instructions. I just say what I want and I give it some data and it does it. Whereas I used to have to break all these, you know, writing tasks down into smaller steps, you don't even need to do it anymore. So it's like, ah, the llms going to advance so quickly that all of the, all of the workflow that we're building on top to kind of solve the things that can't quite do just gets, becomes irrelevant. I don't know.

Devon Coombs: [00:45:37] Well, that reminds it reminds me of the music industry, right? Man. It's like it's just like the midi music used to be crap. It used to be like Zelda music or video game music, and there's no way. But now it's really tough to tell unless you're doing like a Lord of the rings or something. It's really tough to tell the difference between a synthetic cello and a live cello. And yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:57] Have you tried taking ASC 606 and like dumping it into like the latest model and seeing if it can just like, figure it out? Like the way you did. Right. Like that. You read through a thousand pages of guidance and a bunch of examples and you figured it out. Like how long before we have an AI agent that can just do what you did?

Devon Coombs: [00:46:20] Yeah, well, that's the thing. I think we're there. I think so the way I see it is, only two things are kind of saving. The profession is one, you need at least the judgment to know it's right. And luckily, because of the judgmental standard, you can have interpretations. So it's not going to be the best at giving you options based off of certain pieces. Like, I actually think that we can go this way and based on the consistency of all our policies. The second is the privacy. Like, you just can't dump a bunch of company policies and confidential documents into ChatGPT. Or we can and just see what happens, you know.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:52] Yeah, people are doing it.

Devon Coombs: [00:46:54] Yeah. We'll see what happens. Um, you shouldn't be. Who knows? Because then it's very obvious, at least to me, that it becomes searchable. Like once you start asking questions in ChatGPT or adding information, it becomes part of the network that you can search against. And so, yeah, things with NDAs and stuff can become pretty risky. Um, so being able to interpret it and ask the right questions in a confidential manner is still valuable, but it's only a matter of time before we have like private workflows, like you said, private databases or private clouds that have companies data on it that you can use the GPT these llms against. That's probably the private cloud, whole private cloud, um, movement is actually going to be pretty huge in the future. Kind of like how we use we went from we kind of went from servers on site to cloud. Now I think we're going to go more back to private cloud for privacy concerns when we're using these datas.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:43] Yeah, definitely. I would love to have my own LLM. Lm. You know, I've toyed around with that idea. Just like, you know, get a computer, run an LM on it. But it's just so convenient to use the cloud.

Devon Coombs: [00:47:55] Yeah, exactly. It's so tough. It's so tough.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:57] So. But it's funny. It's like it's it's cloud is actually in some ways more expensive now than on prem. But the convenience of it is what, you know, like that's why people are doing it.

Devon Coombs: [00:48:10] Well it's just like get what? Like photos, right? Like who wants to upload all their photos to a hard drive and then get out the hard way just to spend 100 bucks a month and get a cloud agent, even though it's more expensive. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:21] So you mentioned you're leaving Google Cloud and you're going to PCG. What is PCG?

Devon Coombs: [00:48:25] Pcg is principal consulting group. It's a small firm in the Bay area, but they also have a New York and a US presence, um, focused on technical accounting, financial due diligence and fractional CFO work. Um, main reason for doing it is because, partially because of this movement. First off, I had a lot of opportunities to stay at Google or to leave Google, but I feel with the eye movement, it is really a time where we can add more value to the profession by leaning in and using this technology to teach people help help drive better outcomes faster. And so I think consulting is just a great way to do that. Um, and it's also just a great group of people. Most Big Four accountants who have created a really good, valuable like communal, like a very community focused firm, like everyone's very supportive and having a good time and trying to do great work for people in their clients. So, um, so I thought that would be fun for the next adventure, to go teach and to go build out a firm kind of leaning into this AI future rather than working my way up at the big bureaucratic company. But I did learn a ton at Google. It was, like, hugely valuable for me to take those skills and try to take that and combine it with AI to help others in the profession.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:32] There's no better time to be going off on your own, really. Uh, I mean. Ai is so helpful for all this stuff that I have to do as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a startup founder, if I don't know how to do something, I can just ask perplexity now, right? And I can get like, pretty darn good answers. Um, I had to draft a legal agreement, an operating agreement, and it would have cost me thousands of dollars in legal fees to go back and forth on the phone with a lawyer. And more annoying would have been the time required, but I was able to just get on a call, record the call, and use that transcript to draft the terms and and then get an AI to kind of drop this into a template that an attorney could review. And, and, you know, look for any issues. That's where we're at now. So I feel like you're getting into consulting at a great time because, well, as long as you're not just like making fake PowerPoints, right? Like McKinsey, you know, if you're actually doing real work, then, uh, you know, you can be ten x 100 x any other consultant.

Devon Coombs: [00:50:38] Well, that's my goal, right? Is I want to I'm like, hey, if I can do better quality work with higher judgment applied with all my expertise and ten one tenth the cost, and hey, if I do that for you, pay me two times whatever I'm charging you, you know, like, let's work it out. So you're still going to get a win at the end of it. You know.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:57] Make sure you get a percentage, get points on the deal like those salespeople. You know that's.

Devon Coombs: [00:51:03] Yeah that's where the win is. We don't do the best as accountants. But yeah that's what I'm excited for. And I think it's going to be a fun, a fun adventure to go on and a way to help people through the process. So if anyone's looking for help on a technical accounting or fractional CFO, that's I applied. You know, people can reach out.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:18] So technical accounting. So like the stuff you were doing with ASC 606, revenue recognition, all that, but also also CFO type work.

Devon Coombs: [00:51:26] Yeah, fractional CFO work, financial due diligence. Um, I've done I've done a ton of I have a very extensive background from like technical accounting implementations, S-1 preparation, post acquisition, integration. Kind of imagine me as your fractional CEO, I guess would be the best way to think about it.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:46] Fractional chief accounting officer I love it. Yeah. Devin, where should people go to connect with you online or to get in touch with you about any opportunities?

Devon Coombs: [00:51:55] Yeah, it might be. Go to my website. Devin, you go to the website. Um, or you can go to my LinkedIn, Devin Coombes on LinkedIn or my YouTube channel, Ambition Alliance, where you were on and was a really fun episode talking to you.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:07] So go listen to that one. And Devin, I can't wait to collaborate with you more on technical content. And just I look forward to. Yeah, uh, hanging with you on a future podcast episode.

Devon Coombs: [00:52:19] Yeah. And if you're ever in the Bay, let's go on a hike or something. Man, it'd be a lot of fun. Absolutely cool. Okay, well, have a great day.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:26] You, too.

Devon Coombs: [00:52:27] Thanks.