Lauren Dillard, the Chief Financial Officer of LiveRamp, the leading data collaboration and identity resolution company, has built an unconventional yet highly effective career through cross-functional leadership and long-term institutional knowledge.
Dillard joined LiveRamp in 2014 as head of investor relations. Over the years, she advanced through diverse roles, including chief communications officer, interim chief marketing officer, and senior vice president of finance and investor relations. She was elevated to CFO in late 2023, and today she oversees not only finance but also HR, IT, and security functions.
In a recent interview, Dillard explained how her extended tenure—now over a decade—has sharpened her decision-making. Rather than clinging to past practices, she uses deep company context as a foundation to drive necessary change. “Tenure is less about being conservative or aggressive and more about being informed,” she said. “The deeper your context, the greater your responsibility to use it as a platform for change, not a reason to avoid it.” Her broad exposure across communications, marketing, strategy, and operations allows her to evaluate decisions holistically, considering impacts on employees, customers, and investors.
Dillard credited her background in public accounting—growing up around CPAs in her family—for instilling discipline and rigor, but she ultimately chose operating roles for closer proximity to real business impact. After early experience in corporate finance elsewhere, she gravitated toward positions where she could help shape outcomes rather than merely advise on them.
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To foster cross-functional collaboration, Dillard emphasized building genuine partnerships and structured alignment, such as through project management offices. She highlighted LiveRamp’s ongoing major pricing transformation project as an example where upfront goal-setting across finance, go-to-market, product, and IT has driven effective teamwork. “Cross-functional collaboration is less about finance asserting influence and more about finance earning trust by deeply understanding the business,” she noted.
Dillard also shared insights on building board credibility through proactive education and transparency, the value of mentors like Warren Jensen for broader perspective, and her optimism about San Francisco’s resurgence as a tech hub under renewed leadership and increased economic energy.
