Expel culture · 3 MIN READ · SCOUT SCHOLES · JAN 30, 2026 · TAGS: Expletives
TL;DR
- Dylan Shearer is a Principal FP&A Manager at Expel
- He’s dreamed of working in finance since his childhood and has successfully chased his dreams
- He also is a man of many talents, from finance to pasta-making to building prototype tools for Premier League clubs
Dylan Shearer is a beloved member of the Strategic Finance team at Expel. While he’s known internally (and externally, even) as a pasta connoisseur, this chat with him has proved that he’s much more than a noodle artist.
A career in finance: every child’s dream job
Like any average child, Dylan knew what he wanted to do with his life from the age of 12: go into finance. (Editor’s note: that is not even remotely close to what this 12-year-old was interested in doing.) What started as an interest in investments turned into a fixation on how to make money, and that guided his schooling and the beginning of his career. Upon graduating college, he landed at Goldman Sachs–you may have heard of it. After a few years of big bank experience, his interests shifted to companies driving financial empowerment, and shifted from pricing to financial planning and analysis. From there, it was EdTech to FinTech, to Expel.
“I can confirm that Monopoly is basically the same thing as finance. We’re all trying to avoid going to jail and get money.”
At Expel
Dylan previously worked with two other Expletives, and when they made the jump to Expel he followed shortly after. “My life here is the opposite of Groundhog Day. It’s different every single day, but that’s exciting. It’s a new problem every day and it’s meaningful.” Day-to-day, Dylan and the rest of his team are operating on a quarterly and annual cadence, and coordinate with other Expel teams to plan their fiscal years. And then they build. And track spend. And re-forecast. And do it again, but for all the operating components across the company.
“Joining a cybersecurity company fundamentally changed things for me in terms of how I think about the work that I do. We’re fighting the bad guys, and people really care about that. You can feel it in the way we approach product innovation, or to our customers, or during our sales processes.
“The SOC is Batman. They’re out there fighting the bad guys. They are vengeance in the night, stopping crime. Usually when I tell people I work for a cybersecurity company, I usually don’t say I work in finance, because I get the stolen valor of people thinking I’m also fighting these hackers. But I actually think the supporting functions like finance feel like Alfred, and we’re here to help guide and manage the process.” (Editor’s note: Does that make marketing the bat signal?)
Fun fact and very important questions
Before Dylan could even introduce himself, he was hit with a common important question around here: Would you rather be haunted by Casper or Patrick Swayze? Dylan, ever the overachiever, answered the question and then posed a follow-up question. “Casper–but I thought you were going to let me pick a ghost of a real life person instead. My answer to that one, as a bonus, would be Robin Williams.”
Because of his willingness to offer an unsolicited question of his own, he was asked a second very important question: Would you rather always clap slightly off beat or always laugh a second too late? After a brief moment to ponder, Dylan settled on clapping off beat. “I went to school at BYU and it seems to me the entire population of people that go to their basketball games are cursed with that affliction. So I would go with the first one just to fit in with sports fans, wherever I go.”
Dylan surprised us with his fun fact (which has potential as a Ted Lasso spinoff). A few years ago, Dylan and some colleagues built a prototype product for soccer teams to manage their financial models. It started with the problem: there are many players on a roster, and everyone has different clauses and bonus structures in their contracts. So how on earth do you create a proper cashflow prediction?
After building the prototype to do just that, it was sold to a Premier League club, and Dylan and his other teammates met with the teams to work on the software during a live transfer window. The Ted Lasso moment? Dylan knows nothing about soccer. “I have to admit, I know nothing about the sport. I had to coach myself on these calls to say football and not soccer. I was just there to make cool spreadsheets and build things.” Spoiler alert: he did just that.
