Charlie Liu

Hello everyone, I'm Charlie Liu and welcome back to the MCC show, Making Cents with Charlie. We have an interesting guest today whose career path sounds like a movie script. He started in anthropology and forensics before realizing that financial data tells equally powerful stories. After years as an accountant leading operations and partner programs, he is now the Head of Adoption at MCC, where he's at his happy place: the intersection of technology, finance, and change management. Let me give a warm welcome to Dan Langdon. Dan, I'm really excited to have you both with us at MCC, but also on this podcast.

Dan Langdon

I'm excited to do this.

Charlie Liu

So Dan, we'd like to start with some rapid-fire questions to get us loose and have a little bit of fun. First one: hot sauce or chili flakes?

Dan Langdon

Can I do both? I love them both equally. Anything spicy. I lived in Ghana for a little bit and everything had spice in it. They even have this soup called Pepe Soup, which is just peppers boiled in a broth. That was the heat level I got used to.

Charlie Liu

I may make my way down there next year, especially as we start opening our office down in Africa. Next up: paper book or audiobook?

Dan Langdon

I prefer reading. I've gotten more into audiobooks lately, especially on planes, but I find it hard to keep my attention span on them. I find that I drift away a lot and have to rewind.

Charlie Liu

The new hack I have to keep my attention is to read and listen at the same time, just because one is not enough. Speaking of books, what's your favorite author or favorite book?

Dan Langdon

For non-fiction, I love Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I'm a big fan of the US Civil War and have been to Gettysburg twice. The book is a biography of Abraham Lincoln focused on his presidency. It’s called Team of Rivals because he brought together his political opponents into his cabinet, like William H. Seward, who ran against him and became Secretary of State. It’s really about bringing diverse opinions together, particularly ones you don't agree with. For fiction, anything by Ernest Hemingway. I tried to see Hemingway sites wherever I can. He lived briefly in Toronto, and his house was actually two doors down from my daughter's daycare.

Charlie Liu

If you had the option to travel to the past or travel to the future, what would you prefer?

Dan Langdon

The larger chunk of me wants to see the past. Maybe it's a reflection of my age and the fact that I have a young child—I feel like the future belongs to her, and that generation will make it a better place. The future right now seems very unpredictable, probably more so than at any other time in my life.

Charlie Liu

Let's get into the storytelling themes. You started in forensic data and then you got into financial data. What is the story there?

Dan Langdon

I have many interests and find it hard to stay in one place. When I finished secondary school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I chose a liberal arts degree thinking I’d combine history and archaeology. In my first year, I took an anthropology course and gravitated toward the human remains side. I studied at the University of Alberta under Owen Beattie, whose team famously exhumed the bodies of the Franklin Expedition.

I did my honors thesis in estimating time since death using human remains, spending time at the medical examiner's office looking through autopsies and using data to reconstruct situations. I loved that blend of arts and sciences, but I knew I didn't want to go into academia. Later, I went back to school for a Bachelor of Science thinking about medicine, but as I met more doctors, I realized I would love medical school but wouldn't enjoy actually being a physician.

Charlie Liu

I had a similar experience starting in medicine. In high school, I did an internship at Mount Sinai in downtown Toronto shadowing surgeons and working on cadavers. What deterred me was talking to the young doctors. Some were meant to do it, but many others just took the career path purely for the financials, and that didn't feel good. So I made a pivot. I tried chemical biology, chemistry, and physics, and hated them all. Eventually, I figured I needed to make money, so I went into accounting and finance, and later stumbled into business informatics by accident.

There's a crazy statistic out there that 60% of people end up working in a career path completely different from what they studied. If you're younger and don't know what you're doing, it's going to be okay.

Dan Langdon

I realized I needed to make a real career choice, so I sat down with my now-husband and we went through my options using a matrix framework his parents had used with him. We listed medicine, law, and business. Business was a fluke on my radar because I had lived in Ghana working with a finance department and realized I liked it.

We scored the choices across five criteria. Financial production was one, but flexibility was the most important to me. I wanted to choose what city I lived in and have career growth because doing the same thing over and over wasn't for me. Business school ranked first, law second, and medicine third—largely because with medicine, you are completely stuck mapping your life around where you get into med school, residency, and post-doc fellowships.

Charlie Liu

What you're saying is so important: you have to be intentional and understand your non-negotiables. You sat there and put yourself in the shoes of your future self. If young people don't know what to do, my advice is to build capacity. If you want to invest but don't know how, start by saving money so you have the capacity to invest later. Choose the paths that build universally applicable, transferable skills so you are better equipped when the time comes.

Dan Langdon

Transferable skills are critical. In many ways, I've made a career out of being a generalist. For me, being open to change and looking for curiosity is everything. When I hire, I always look for curiosity. If you can get genuinely excited about a client’s business as a consultant, they are going to enjoy working with you so much more.

Another major factor for me was teaching others. When you can teach something, you know that you truly understand it. Years ago when I was a junior at Vena, my manager Justin Hsu pushed us to answer technical user questions in our newly adopted Slack chat. It was awful at first because I didn't know the answers and had to look everything up. But Eugene (co-founder of MCC) and I embraced it. By constantly answering questions, we rapidly became system experts, which got us invited to product sessions and executive discussions. My successful career at Vena literally started by answering questions for people in a Slack channel.

Charlie Liu

I love that story because early on, I focused on short-term, selfish gains. But hitting rock bottom shifted my mindset toward service. I truly believe the purpose of life is to serve others. When I stopped caring about myself and just started helping people for free, our business potential exploded. MCC literally started because I was just out there helping people for free.

NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has a line: you cannot escape your past. We found out recently that a lot of people are helping us build MCC today simply because our team sat down and coached, trained, or helped them out of tough spots 8 to 10 years ago when we were at Vena.

Dan Langdon

It’s amazing to look back on those early days and see how knowledge transfer uplifts an entire team culture. I saw that exact same dynamic recently when visiting our South African office.

Charlie Liu

Since our theme today is helping younger folks navigate their careers, here is another piece of advice: Find an in-person job. As executives and managers, we see a massive difference in the ramp-up time, collaboration, and camaraderie in an in-person office versus a virtual one. Virtual work is fine later on, but early in your career, you are robbing yourself of a massive growth boost by staying remote.

Dan Langdon

I completely align with that. Most people I talk to can pinpoint massive directional career changes that happened because of a casual conversation in a physical space when walking past someone. Your first job should absolutely be in person. Years ago, Vena had a very liberal remote work policy, but I went into the office every single day because I was learning so much from the people around me. Those accidental interactions built lifelong friendships, co-founders, and colleagues.

To wrap things up, we always like to end the show with your "two cents" of high-value advice. What is yours?

Dan Langdon

Early in my accounting career, I had to do a painful monthly account reconciliation. I hated it so much that I found a way to automate it. Once it was automated, another member of the team realized how easy it was and offered to take it over completely. I realized right then that I was onto something.

My approach has always been to work myself out of a job and find a new one in the process. I try to approach whatever I am doing with the realization that I won't be doing it the same way the next time. Now at MCC, I get to use technology to help other finance professionals automate themselves out of painful manual tasks and into the strategic work they actually want to do.

Charlie Liu

That is great advice. Focus on creating value, focus on learning, and automate the things that should no longer be done manually. Dan, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. And to all our listeners out there, thank you so much for tuning in.

Dan Langdon

Thank you, everyone.