A 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 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.

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.

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.