Chad Stearns

Chad Stearns, Chief Financial Officer

Chad Stearns has spent his career on both sides of the startup financing table. As Chief Financial Officer at Cadents, he owns the company’s financial strategy, projections, and the operating discipline behind its raise.

Chad began in technology banking at Silicon Valley Bank in 1988, and over the next seventeen years, at Imperial Bank, Greater Bay, and as Chief Credit Officer of Pentech Financial Services, he evaluated and structured financing for hundreds of venture-backed technology companies. He then spent sixteen years at Cisco, where he held financial leadership for a $300M+ services budget, managed P&L for incubating IoT businesses growing 32% a year, led the services workstream for a $400M divestiture, and helped build Cisco’s Customer Success organization from a founding team of five to more than 1,200 people, leading its Strategic Execution Office with a focus on renewals and retention.

Chad joined Cadents at its founding, having worked on Julie Case’s team at Cisco on the software lifecycle programs where the problem Cadents solves first came into focus. He holds an MBA in Finance from Santa Clara University and an economics degree from Duke. He builds financial models the way he once audited them: assuming a skeptic will read every line.