How focusing on innovation fuels this award-winning CFO
Liyuan Woo ’97 has an eye for great brands. And she’s most passionate about category creators — brands that disrupt the status quo to solve problems in a novel way. Her goal as a chief financial officer: to provide financial strategy that fuels innovation, scales ideas and builds new markets.
“I have a bit of a challenger personality, so I enjoy the breakthrough thinking and innovation required to be a category creator,” says Woo, who is CFO at TOCA Football and was recently named Orange County Business Journal’s CFO of the Year in Private Industry. “Speed and adaptability matter when you’re creating something new.”
TOCA Football provides tech-enhanced soccer training that evaluates factors including accuracy, speed, body movement and reaction time. The data serves to create a universal player rating system, a standard that has long been missing from the sport. The company also operates immersive sports entertainment and dining venues. It recently extended a Major League Soccer partnership through 2036.
“My financial team is very outcome driven,” says Woo, who helped the company secure $35 million in new funding earlier this year. “It’s about how to optimize data and facts to ensure that decisions will drive the biggest return on investment for the business.”
Woo’s passion for category creators was first sparked at SharkNinja, known for its rapid product development cycle in areas such as kitchen appliances and home cleaning products. Her next stop was The VOID, a trailblazer in immersive virtual reality entertainment. At BeautyHealth, Woo led a public offering and oversaw the hypergrowth of the company’s flagship skin health innovation brand, HydraFacial.
She credits insights gained throughout her career — including at Deloitte, bebe and Gymboree — for shaping her success. “It’s always about learning something new and carrying it forward from one role to the next,” she says. “That adds a fresh perspective and nontraditional lens to my work. It’s a big part of my motivation.”
