When CFO.com last spoke with Aidana Zhakupbekova in 2025, she described leading finance at travel and expense management platform Rydoo while overseeing several functions outside the traditional finance organization.
Now, that work has been recognized with a new title. In January, she officially became the company's chief operating and financial officer — colloquially known as COFO.
In this follow-up interview last month, Zhakupbekova discussed how the expanded role has changed her approach to leadership. She also explains how overseeing both finance and operations has influenced a recent M&A deal and shares why she believes more scaling companies will embrace the COFO model.
Aidana Zhakupbekova
COFO, Rydoo
First CFO Position: 2023
Notable previous employers:
- Board of Innovation
- HousingAnywhere
- Rockwell Automation
- Converse
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
ADAM ZAKI: What's been the biggest surprise about adding operations to your responsibilities? What's one operational challenge you underestimated?
AIDANA ZHAKUPBEKOVA: It's actually been less of a surprise than you might expect. Finance and operations are already quite closely linked, so the transition has felt like a natural extension rather than a leap. The one real change has been pace. Finance runs on reporting cycles, and everything eventually fits into a neat spreadsheet, whereas operations demands faster decisions and quicker problem-solving with far less data to handle.
The CFO role across the board is expanding to become more strategic, and that shift has been good training ground for stepping into the COFO role. The operational challenge I most underestimated was how much faster the feedback loops are. You find out something isn't working quickly, but you have to decide what to do about it with a fraction of the data you'd normally want. Getting comfortable with that has probably been the steepest part of the learning curve.
Has becoming COFO simply formalized work you were already doing, or has it fundamentally changed how you spend your time? Is there any advice from last year you would update?
In many ways, it formalized what had already happened. In a high-growth company, responsibilities often evolve before titles do. Over my first year in the company, finance, FP&A, business intelligence, revenue operations and legal had gradually come under my responsibility, so by the time the title changed, I was already working across those functions every day.
What really changed wasn't my calendar; it was the company's stage. Following our acquisition, we needed a leadership structure that reflected how the business was actually being run. The COFO title acknowledged that finance and operations had become increasingly interconnected as we integrated another company and continued to scale.
That said, my perspective has evolved. I spend less time thinking about optimizing individual functions and more time ensuring they work together effectively. Instead of asking, "How do we improve finance?" I'm asking, "How do finance, revenue operations, legal and our commercial teams work together to make better decisions, remove friction and execute faster?" That's where I believe the biggest impact lies.
Last year, I spoke a lot about building scalable finance. I still believe that's essential, but today I'd broaden that advice.
As companies grow, the biggest challenges rarely sit within a single department. They're usually found at the intersection between departments. Finance, revenue operations, product, sales and legal all influence one another.
I'd encourage finance leaders to spend more time understanding how the business operates end to end. The broader your perspective, the more effective you become, not just as a finance leader, but as a business leader.
Has being responsible for operations changed how you think about financial decisions?
Absolutely. It's reinforced that financial decisions are rarely just financial decisions; they're operational decisions as well.
Earlier in my career, the focus was naturally on ensuring strong financial outcomes and disciplined capital allocation. Those priorities haven't changed, but today I spend much more time thinking about how decisions will affect execution, customer experience and the teams responsible for delivering them.
In a scaling SaaS business, the best decisions are the ones that improve both financial performance and operational effectiveness. Looking at both perspectives leads to better long-term outcomes than optimizing either one in isolation.
With a broader organization reporting to you, have you had to evolve your leadership style?
I think now that more of the business reports to me, I have less capacity to weigh in on every decision the way I might have as CFO. I've had to become much more deliberate about what I need visibility on versus what my team should own entirely. That means being clearer upfront about expectations and outcomes, then genuinely trusting the team to get there in their own way.
Knowing the key people across both teams matters more than ever too. Building relationships with them and understanding where each person's strengths lie is what makes that kind of delegation actually work.
As COFO, how has overseeing both finance and operations influenced the Semine integration process?
The COFO structure has been a strong advantage here. When you're bringing two companies together, the challenges that tend to derail integrations rarely sit purely in finance or purely in operations. Usually, it's at the intersection of the two.
You're constantly asking yourself: How do the teams work together? What does the combined roadmap look like? How do you reconcile two sets of processes without losing what made each company effective in the first place? Having line of sight across both finance and operations means I can spot those friction points early on and adapt as needed.
Do you think more companies will combine the CFO and COO roles, or is this only right for certain businesses?
The size and leadership style of the company definitely impacts this decision. In large, complex organizations with genuinely separate operational divisions, there are good reasons to keep the roles distinct. The scope becomes too broad for one person to give each area the leadership attention it deserves.
The model works best in scaling companies, where speed of decision-making matters and the CFO is already operating across the whole business informally. Formalizing that through a COFO structure removes ambiguity, improves accountability and creates a clearer operating picture for the CEO and the board. I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more companies move in this direction as the CFO's strategic mandate continues to expand.
What operational KPI has become just as important to you as traditional ones like margins or cash flow?
Team capacity and how it's deployed. It sounds less quantitative than the metrics I would typically live in, but it's one of the most telling indicators of whether a business is in good health. It's important to know how much of the team's time is going toward strategic priorities versus reactive work, and whether people are being stretched to the point of operational risk.
As CFO, you think a great deal about capital allocation. As COFO, you realize that human capital allocation is just as important, and often harder to get right because it's less visible in the numbers. That has become one of my central areas of focus.
What's the biggest priority for the next 12 months?
The integration of Rydoo and Semine's offerings in a way that adds the most value for our customers is a huge priority right now. The biggest priority for the next 12 months is turning the acquisition into a true growth opportunity, not just integrating two companies, but creating one stronger business.
That means building a joint product vision, bringing our teams and operations together and creating the right foundation to scale. The real test of any acquisition is whether customers feel the benefit. If we do this well, customers will see a stronger product, broader capabilities and a better experience, while internally we will have a more scalable organization that can continue to grow.
