Meet Everlaw CFO Wesley Pua

This week, Everlaw welcomes Wesley Pua as its new Chief Financial Officer. Wesley brings more than 20 years of experience spanning finance and operational leadership at companies in aerospace, online education, ecommerce, and web hosting. Most recently, he served as CFO of Bluehost and Fabric, after holding senior leadership roles at Udemy and Planet.

His resume tells only part of the story. Wesley has also been a musician, skateboarder, rock climber, dancer, and cook. Those experiences shaped a worldview grounded in curiosity, fairness, service, and the belief that the best results come when every part of a system works together.

That perspective informs how he approaches finance, too: as a harmonious operating system across the company that helps leaders decide what to do next.

We sat down with Wesley to discuss his unconventional path to the CFO role, what drew him to Everlaw, and how he will help the company navigate its next phase of growth.

Your path to becoming a CFO wasn’t exactly conventional. How did you get here?

Growing up, I didn’t know what the C-suite was or dream of becoming an executive. I began studying finance in college and quickly became fascinated by the field and by how financial decisions shape the direction and trajectory of businesses.

As I began my professional career in financial services, I was able to get broad views of industries and financial mechanics. After moving to the Bay Area, I went from analyzing companies from the outside to helping build them from within. When I joined Planet, I was an early employee and helped build that company from the ground up. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to work across early-, mid-, and later-stage companies, wide ranges of industries and business models, and teams that challenged the status quo.

The experiences that don’t show up on LinkedIn matter just as much. I grew up playing in bands, skateboarding, dancing, rock climbing, and cooking in restaurants. All of those experiences broadened my worldview and influenced how I operate today. Hospitality taught me customer service, collaboration under pressure, and the satisfaction of iterating quickly and receiving immediate feedback. Music taught me how to pay attention to the forest and the trees. Each passion had a technical element that emphasized why details matter. I continue to carry all of those lessons with me.

What drew you to Everlaw and legal technology?

It was a combination of a few things: the mission and impact, the technology and market, and the opportunity to help build a company at an important point in its evolution.

Everlaw’s mission to promote justice by illuminating truth resonated deeply. Technology that expands access to information, truth, and justice is profoundly empowering.

Legal technology is compelling because the work is consequential. The quality of the underlying evidence, the speed with which teams can find insight, and the defensibility of the process materially affect the outcome. Everlaw is working on the foundational part of the problem: helping teams collect, review, analyze, and manage evidence in a secure and defensible environment in a domain where accuracy and trust are essential.

The time is now. AI is changing legal workflows where the winning companies will not be defined by access to a model alone. They will be defined by customer trust, ease of use, and the ability to fit into a broader ecosystem with innovative workflows. Everlaw has an opportunity to be both a great product in its own right and an important platform within the ecosystem. With many opportunities ahead of us, we’re at the stage where finance can help connect ambition with execution. This is the kind of work I find very fun.

You’ve described finance as an “operating system” for growth. What does that mean?

A traditional back-office finance function tells you what the weather was. It reports the numbers, explains what happened, and controls spending. That work is necessary, but it’s only a part of the story. It’s a report card.

By the time something appears in the financial results, the business has already done the thing. Product defined the direction, engineering built the tools, and go-to-market engaged the customer. An operating system creates feedback loops and helps people make informed decisions about what comes next. It provides milestones, goals, guardrails, on-ramps, and off-ramps. I think of it as a map: There may be many possible routes to a destination, and our job is to help the company choose the most effective one with its eyes wide open.

In practice, that means translating strategy into a small number of clear choices: which customers and segments we are prioritizing, what outcomes we are trying to create, what capabilities we need to fund, what assumptions sit behind the plan, and what signals would cause us to adjust. It means giving teams timely information they can act on, not simply producing reports after the fact.

The goal is not to make every decision a finance decision. The goal is to make decisions more explicit, comparable, and accountable so we can move faster with more confidence.

Is there a connection between playing bass and being a CFO?

Absolutely. The bass player usually isn’t the front person or the flashy member of the band. The job is to make the band sound good by connecting rhythm, melody, and harmony.

The CFO role is similar. Sales, marketing, customer success, product, engineering, etc., are the musicians. Different people take the lead at different moments, while others provide harmony or support. My job is to understand the whole system and help those parts perform together.

Music is also deeply mathematical when you get nerdy about it. There are shapes, structures, and patterns in both music and finance. But, the more important connection is that neither is about one person performing alone. The outcome depends on how people listen and work together.

You’ve worked across many company stages and market cycles. What lessons will you bring to Everlaw?

One principle I live by is, “Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.”

For a growing company, that means building consistent, sustainable, repeatable, and increasingly predictable ways of operating. We should understand how investments connect to outcomes, and be ready to respond as conditions change. The goal isn’t to optimize for one specific milestone. It’s to build the rigor and resilience to be ready for whatever opportunity or challenge comes next.

I’ve worked through different market cycles, capital events, and stages of company growth. Again and again, the most interesting challenges turn out to be systems problems. The work is to understand the pieces, make the tradeoffs visible, and help people move forward together.

What would you like Everlawyers to know about how you work?

I am deeply collaborative. I ask a lot of questions, talk to people across the organization, and rely on subject-matter experts who know far more than I do about their fields. My job is to help us get to the right decisions — and I use “us” intentionally.

I enjoy taking something technically, operationally, or emotionally complex, breaking it into its parts, and bringing it back together in a way that reduces friction. I try to bring calm, clarity, and a low-ego approach to hard problems.

I believe in “each one, teach one.” I benefited enormously from people who offered guidance and made room for my questions, especially because I didn’t grow up with much privilege or a clear map into this career. I try to do the same for others. We can learn from everyone.

Since joining Everlaw, I am learning that the opportunity is even bigger than I understood from the outside. We have a unique group of folk with unique talents. I’m excited to meet more Everlawyers and to help enable the curiosity, creativity, and technical expertise to get us where we want to go.