Corporate FP&A · Consumer Tech · Travel Marketplaces

Finance that reads the map & builds the engine.

Corporate FP&A leader with 13 years in consumer tech, currently at Viator (Tripadvisor Experiences). I own global revenue and variable-cost forecasting, annual planning, and long-range planning for a $1B+ revenue travel marketplace across 20M+ annual transactions — and I build the systems behind the forecast: BigQuery/SQL pipelines, R models, and web apps that replaced spreadsheet forecasting for business partners.

Nicholas Smith
$1B+
marketplace revenue forecasted
$30M
marketing savings unlocked
+400bps
forecast accuracy improvement
80%
reporting time automated away
20M+
transactions modeled annually

Building the finance engine behind a $1B+ marketplace.

At Viator, I've scaled corporate FP&A alongside the business itself — the marketplace grew from ~$200M past $1B+ in revenue, expanded into long-tail destinations across Eastern and Northern Europe and Asia, and reached its first EBITDA-profitable year — a milestone my commission-pricing work contributed to directly, unlocking $30M in revenue-neutral marketing savings. When Tripadvisor explored taking the Experiences business public, I helped drive the IPO-readiness work, rebuilding 15 years of segment history across the full marketplace funnel — the kind of scrutiny that sharpens every model and narrative.

The newest part of my job looks less like finance and more like engineering. I architected and now operate a forecasting platform covering $1.1B in partner GBV — it replaced an Excel process with self-serve daily updates and analysis that business partners run themselves, and cut reporting time 80%. It shipped in a few weeks using AI-assisted development, with no dev team and no vendor contract. I also ported a six-method statistical forecast engine to a new cloud platform on my own. That's the shift I care most about right now: less time spent producing the numbers, more time spent on sharper analysis for the business partners I support.

Before Viator, I spent three years at Yahoo owning the $500M+ Yahoo Mail P&L and building the daily revenue model E-Staff used for IR guidance and Board reporting on a $2B ad business. The habit started earlier still: equity research at Cambridge Advisors, forecasting companies for the investment committee while publishing my own research on Seeking Alpha — then private capital at Waitt Company, modeling a $2B portfolio spanning real estate and private operating companies and building the bank valuation model its President & CEO used to help price a $40M exit.

What I bring

  • Global revenue & variable-cost forecasting across 20M+ annual transactions
  • Ensemble time-series modeling in R — Prophet, ARIMA, ETS, TBATS
  • Board-level financial narratives & exec storytelling
  • Marketplace economics: supply, demand, pricing, take rate
  • AI-assisted development: production web apps on BigQuery + R
  • International expansion & investment ROI cases

Career

From equity research and private equity into product finance, and up through corporate FP&A leadership at one of travel's biggest marketplaces.

2016 – Present

Viator (Tripadvisor Experiences)

Senior Financial Analyst Manager Senior Manager, Corporate FP&A
  • Engineered a six-method R ensemble (Prophet, ARIMA, ETS, TBATS, NNETAR, STL-ARIMA) behind the global revenue forecast, improving accuracy 400bps, and ported it to a new cloud platform.
  • Supported IPO-readiness for the Experiences segment (Tripadvisor’s 2022 confidential S-1) — rebuilt 15 years of segment history across the full marketplace funnel, bookings and take rate through GAAP revenue and EBITDA.
  • Unlocked $30M in revenue-neutral marketing savings by shifting commissions from gross to net pricing — a key contributor to Viator’s first EBITDA-profitable year.
  • Drove ROI analyses behind expansion into long-tail destinations across Eastern/Northern Europe and Asia, contributing to 50%+ market share growth in priority markets.
  • Architected and operate an AI-developed forecasting platform across $1.1B in partner GBV, replacing Excel with self-serve daily updates and analysis for business partners — reporting time down 80%.
2013 – 2016

Yahoo

Financial Analyst, Corporate FP&A → Senior Financial Analyst, Product Finance

  • Owned the $500M+ Yahoo Mail P&L; partnered with Product and Sales leadership on monetization strategy, with mobile analysis presented in CEO strategy sessions.
  • Drove modeling and strategic analysis behind mobile ad format changes, contributing $20M+ incremental revenue and supporting Mail’s first $100M+ year of mobile revenue.
  • Built advertiser expansion investment case that funded a new sales team, adding 200+ advertisers and $10M+ incremental revenue in year one.
  • Replaced manual revenue and ops reporting with R, SQL, and Python pipelines — 50% faster, $100K saved.
  • Built daily revenue forecast model for Yahoo’s $2B+ display advertising business, used by Executive Staff for IR guidance and Board of Directors reporting on $3M+ daily performance.
  • Developed investment case for Search feature expansion tied to a $100M incremental revenue opportunity; justified 10 engineering hires.
2012 – 2013

Waitt Company

Private Equity Analyst Intern

  • Modeled and analyzed a $2B private equity portfolio; built bank valuation model used by the President & CEO to set the exit price on a 13M-share, $40M position.
2009 – 2013

Creighton University

BSBA, Accounting & Finance — GPA 3.7, Dean's Honor Roll

  • Published equity research on Seeking Alpha as an undergraduate, syndicated to Yahoo Finance.

Projects

Things I've built that finance teams actually use every day.

Daily Revenue Forecast Dashboard

A self-serve web app for business partners: daily revenue pacing vs. Plan and Forecast of Record, plus a trend-adjusted reforecast that re-projects the month from each new day of actuals — with filtering by region, channel, and partner, and one-click data export.

Architected and operated end to end: BigQuery data mart and scheduled SQL, a six-method R forecasting ensemble, and a Google Apps Script web app that updates daily from the cloud — replacing Excel-based forecasting and cutting reporting time ~80%.

Google BigQuerySQLR · Ensemble ForecastingGoogle Apps ScriptSelf-Serve Analytics

The demo is a from-scratch recreation with synthetic data — partner, channel, and region names are fictional.

Writing

Published equity research on Seeking Alpha — syndicated to Yahoo Finance — plus macro writing on Substack.

The Everything Bubble (Part II)

The Everything Bubble (Part I)

3 Speculative Biotechs Worth Watching

Village Super Market: The Perfect Small Cap for a Secular Bear Market

Galena Biopharma: Late Stage NeuVax Justifies Higher Valuation

Kodiak Oil & Gas: Small Company, Big Potential

Antares Pharma: A Promising Pharmaceutical Play

Toolkit

Finance craft plus the technical stack to automate it.

Forecasting & Planning

Revenue ForecastingVariable Cost ForecastingLong-Range PlanningAnnual PlanningBoard ReportingInvestment ROI Cases

Data & Engineering

SQLGoogle BigQuerySnowflakeRGoogle Apps ScriptAI-Assisted Development

Modeling & Analysis

Financial ModelingEnsemble Forecasting (Prophet / ARIMA / ETS)Marketplace EconomicsUnit Economics / LTVPricing StrategyTableau

Resume

One page. Everything above, distilled.