The Zeroes Changed.
The Math Didn't.

"Financial literacy isn't two languages, one for the rich and one for everyone else. It's one language that anyone can learn."

What do the financial experts advising on billion-dollar deals and a homeless 21-year-old have in common? Everything except the zeroes.

I know because I've been both. At twenty-one, I was ten thousand dollars in debt, sleeping in my car behind a grocery store, writing down numbers in a coffee-stained notebook. $60 from a bartending shift, minus gas, minus groceries, minus the overdraft fee. A full day of work and I was back to zero.

A decade later, I was at Google, advising on deals worth billions, using the same framework I'd scratched out in that parking lot. The zeroes changed. The math didn't.

Who I Am Today

Today I wear two hats. I am a Teaching Professor of Finance and Real Estate Faculty Director at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business, where I joined in Summer 2026 as faculty advisor to the MBA Practicum Experience; before SCU I taught at San José State University and Ohlone College, 30+ university courses over eight years. And I run Devon Coombs LLC, where I advise senior finance leaders at multi-billion dollar public and private companies.

The road between that parking lot and the professorship ran through Big 4 audit at Deloitte, management consulting at Riveron, and five years at Google Cloud, where I supported $100B+ in deals as a technical accounting SME and led accounting work on multi-billion dollar AI acquisitions. I'm a CPA and an MBA, and I still believe the fundamentals I scribbled in that notebook are the same ones boards argue about. If you want the receipts on the teaching, the official evaluation record is public.

What Devon Coombs LLC Does

I help senior finance leaders cut through the noise on AI, navigate complex transactions, and build teams that execute. The work falls into three buckets: