Coombs, Devon
Devon Coombs, CPA, MBA, is the Faculty Director of Real Estate Finance and an Assistant Teaching Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. He is also the founder of Devon Coombs LLC, where he advises executives and develops education programs at the intersection of finance, accounting, artificial intelligence, and business strategy.
Before joining Santa Clara University, Devon built his career at Deloitte, Riveron, and Google Cloud. As a finance and technical accounting leader at Google Cloud, he worked with CFOs, chief accounting officers, controllers, and cross-functional executives on some of the company’s most significant commercial and strategic matters. His experience includes technology partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, strategic investments, marketplace arrangements, consumption-based business models, and other complex transactions. Across his career, he has supported transactions representing more than $100 billion in aggregate value.
Through Devon Coombs LLC, Devon advises public companies, growth-stage businesses, and professional-services firms on transaction structuring, technical accounting, M&A diligence, finance transformation, organizational strategy, and applied AI. His work often involves decisions where commercial objectives, financial economics, accounting requirements, governance, and operational execution must be considered together. He also serves as an adviser to the CEO of TABot, an artificial intelligence company founded by a former Google engineer.
Devon has taught finance, accounting, real estate, and business topics for more than eight years across universities, community colleges, and professional education programs. He has trained more than 10,000 professionals and has led major learning and development initiatives within the organizations where he has worked. His executive-education programs combine practical frameworks, real business cases, facilitated discussion, and hands-on application. His primary teaching areas include applied AI, deals desk strategy, finance leadership, technical accounting, transaction readiness, emerging business models, and financial decision-making.
Devon is the author of The 10 Laws of Finance, which examines how the same financial principles shape personal decisions, corporate strategy, investing, career development, and leadership. He is also a recurring contributor to the Financial Executives Journal and shares his perspectives through the Gaapsavvy and Ambition Aligned podcasts.
Across his teaching, advisory work, and writing, Devon focuses on helping leaders make better decisions in situations where the facts are incomplete, the tradeoffs are material, and the technical answer alone is not enough.