CFO THOUGHT LEADER

• 1094: Mapping Revenue Levers for Next‑Gen Data Businesses | Dilip Upmanyu, CFO, Cloudera

  Back in the 1990s, Dilip Upmanyu sat in a room filled with servers as he pieced together a homegrown database of costs and SKUs. His employer at the time couldn’t tell which products paid the bills; by dawn, the young financial analyst could. That improvised profitability model, he tells us, still informs his investment mindset today.Upmanyu never mistook rows of numbers for the whole story. Later joining IBM, he moved from product analytics to revenue accounting in a single year, then volunteered to face Wall Street. Preparing earnings decks, he practiced fielding questions until he could anticipate three out of four before the line opened. “Data matter only when you can explain the ‘why,’ ” Upmanyu tells us.A misstep—a brilliant job wrapped in toxic politics—taught him culture diligence. From then on he evaluated environments as rigorously as balance sheets. That instinct paid off when NetIQ sold to Attachmate: suddenly he was steering a global integration that tripled his team and required fresh capital. He treated the chaos as a practicum in fundraising and leadership, logging the final credit hours for his CFO ambition.By the time Cloudera called in 2023, Upmanyu had stitched together every major finance discipline. Today he pushes growth by leading with the firm’s public‑cloud platform and embedding AI into forecasting.

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• 1093: Anime Economics: Serving Fans, Driving Returns | Travis Page, CFO, Crunchyroll

  A little more than decade ago, Travis Page was hauling gear off a tour bus, criss-crossing the country with indie bands. One late night, sweat-soaked and exhausted, he noticed fans waiting in the rain simply to glimpse their favourite artist. Passion like that ought to power a business, he thought. That backstage epiphany still guides him as CFO of Crunchyroll, the world’s largest anime platform.After the music industry’s 2007 crash, Page hit reset—trading road cases for a Wharton MBA and, soon after, a seat at Barclays Capital. Covering entertainment firms during the Lehman-to-Barclays transition gave him, he laughs, “a five-year education in two.” The intensity paid seemed to pay off: at 30, he was head of finance at Remark Media, then a corporate-development deal maker at Demand Media.Sony Pictures Entertainment came calling next. Page helped stitch together seven anime acquisitions, culminating in Funimation’s purchase and, later, the Crunchyroll merger. When Sony needed a strategic CFO to scale the nascent service, his boss put his name forward—before even asking him. He accepted on the spot.Today, Crunchyroll counts “over 15 million subscribers in 200 countries,” Page tells us, triple the total since the 2021 merger. His playbook pairs disciplined capital allocation with fan-first intuition: license or co-produce 99 percent of content in Japan, then “explode” each franchise across streaming, film, and consumer products. Finance’s role? Embedded FP&A analysts sit in strategy off-sites, ensuring every creative gamble lands on a sound financial stage—just like those fans waiting in the rain taught him years ago.

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• 1092: Balancing Mission, Margin, and Market Share | Steven Miller, CFO, Warby Parker

  It was Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and Steven Miller was staring at a suddenly irrelevant budget. Hours earlier Warby Parker had shuttered every one of its 280 stores to protect employees and customers. “Remember that plan we just approved?” he asked the leadership team. “Forget it.” In its place he introduced PAR—Pause, Adjust, Redeploy—a framework that let finance review cash daily, pivot marketing dollars to booming e-commerce, and preserve innovation spend while the world locked down. The episode crystallized Miller’s philosophy: data guides decisions, but agility preserves advantage.Raised as a strategy consultant at Monitor Company, Miller learned early to hunt for competitive leverage. A New York City Urban Fellows stint deepened that lesson when a commissioner advised him to “read the budget if you want to know a society’s values.” The line sent him chasing the intersection of money and mission—from Flatiron’s venture trenches to Majestic Research, where the 2008 crisis forced layoffs and, ultimately, a sale to ITG that began with his cold call. Warby Parker appealed because it made a tangible product and pledged social impact.Miller joined when the firm had 20 employees and no stores; today it approaches 4,000 people and, he tells us, opens “40-plus new locations a year.” Eight capital raises and a 2021 direct listing later, his remit is constant: align capital with purpose. By measuring four-wall EBITDA, inventory turns, and cost lines against revenue, Miller ensures every dollar advances a simple mission—help more people see clearly around the world daily.

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• 1091: Making Finance the Force Multiplier | Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global

  It was a morning commute Chris Greiner had made hundreds of times before. Living in old Shanghai and working in the city’s sleek business district, Greiner’s daily drive to the Jin Mao Tower often stretched well beyond an hour. But on this particular day, his driver told him they’d arrive in just 30 minutes. Puzzled but intrigued, Greiner went along—only to discover the traffic patterns had shifted. “They repainted the lines,” the driver told him with a grin. The same bridge, same road—just used differently.Greiner never forgot the lesson. As CFO of Zeta Global, he often draws from that experience when approaching business challenges. “You might be fixed in your infrastructure, but there’s almost always another way through,” he tells us.That mindset is now shaping Zeta’s evolving AI strategy. Rather than applying AI for efficiency’s sake, Greiner tells us his team follows the real patterns of work—starting with customer behaviors. “We began by observing how marketers use our platform,” he says, “then built automations to eliminate keystrokes and surface next-best actions.”Now, the finance function is adopting the same approach. Greiner’s team is analyzing daily tasks across accounting, FP&A, and sales operations to identify which can be codified and automated. Zeta is building agent-based workflows that transform data into actionable insights—at the push of a button.“We’re letting the work show us where to go,” Greiner says. And like that rush-hour bridge in Shanghai, sometimes a better route is just a few new lines away.

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• 1090: Broadening the Field: Turning Risk into Reach | Jerome Upton, CFO, Genworth

  Jerome Upton still remembers the silence that descends just before a game begins. As captain of his college team, he’d scan the huddle, gauge nerves, and ask, “What does winning look like today?” “That’s where I learned the power of shared goals,” Upton tells us. Years later, the Genworth Financial CFO opens staff meetings similarly—then hands teammates room to execute.The first bold play of his career came soon after graduation. At a small insurer, Upton stunned mentors by jumping to KPMG. “I needed wider fields,” he explains. Eight years of audits sharpened his technical vision, yet the move that truly stretched him arrived when GE Capital—Genworth’s predecessor—offered a divisional‑controller seat with global scope. Overnight his “team” expanded ten‑fold, teaching him to win through trust rather than touch‑every‑file oversight.International assignments followed: boardrooms in Europe, investor roadshows in Asia, client visits in Latin America. Hearing customers critique products in real time “made finance feel less like a ledger and more like a heartbeat,” he says. That perspective proved vital during Genworth’s post‑crisis crossroads. Tasked with raising capital quickly, Upton orchestrated a minority IPO of a foreign subsidiary, executed at speed and premium valuation. The deal slashed leverage and revealed hidden asset value.Today his playbook balances share buybacks and debt reduction with growth bets such as CareScout. Multi‑year downside modeling safeguards the core, while his Gretzkyesque mantra—skate where the puck is going—keeps him focused on tomorrow’s opportunity.

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