Jack McCullough sits down with Julianna Hayes, CFO of Philo, to discuss the transformative role of financial leadership in the streaming industry. Julianna shares how Philo balances affordability and innovation while navigating the competitive landscape of live TV streaming.
This episode dives into leadership strategies, building diverse teams, leveraging data analytics and creating a finance-first approach that supports company growth. A keynote speaker at the upcoming CFO Leadership Conference in Boston, Julianna details her experiences working at both Google and Twitter, what attracted her to Philo and why CFOs shouldn’t “stay in their lanes.”
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Welcome back to another episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. I’m your host, Jack McCullough. By day, I’m the president of the CFO Leadership Council, and we have a great guest. I’m excited to have her. I didn’t know her until a few minutes ago, but this is going to be a great episode. Let’s rock on. I want to welcome Julianna Hayes. She is the CFO of Philo. Philo is an affordable live TV streaming service offering 80 channels, unlimited DVR and on-demand content. Julianna, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
Thank you for having me.
How did I do with that overview of your company? Was I more or less accurate?
It was fantastic.
A lot of people know Philo, but it’s not yet a household name. Perhaps it will be in a couple of years. Do you want to go a little bit deeper and explain what Philo is all about to our audience?
Philo, as you mentioned, is a streaming service. We have both live and on-demand TV. We focus on the entertainment channels for the most part, but we have a broad offering. We’ve also launched 100 new free channels as well. It’s $28 a month, so it’s very affordable, no contract. We have over a million subscribers. That’s Philo in a nutshell.
It’s a great business model. We’re going to return to that. Before we get into that, I want to talk a little about your early years. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a town called Eugene, Oregon. It was a wonderful place to grow up. It is the home of the University of Oregon, so very much a college town, steeped in nature, and a nice place to grow up.
Is Eugene the capital of the state?
It is not. Salem is the capital.
I would have been able to answer that in seventh grade for sure, but that’s one of the ones I don’t know. Did you come from a big family?
Not particularly. I am one of two. I have an older sister, and my mom is an only child. I have only two first cousins, so a relatively small family.
If I may ask, what was the first job you had? I don’t mean out of college, but perhaps in high school or college.
I was big into babysitting, starting in about seventh grade. I started earning quite a bit of money because I was working a lot. I liked having my own source of income. In high school, I expanded to Pier 1 Imports and Restoration Hardware.
I remember them.
I did a lot of furniture retail when I was younger.
I thought Pier 1 was a Massachusetts thing. I didn’t realize that it was a national chain.
Franchise.
They had some great stuff as I recall. I know you went to undergrad at Claremont McKenna. You wouldn’t know this about me, but my niece is a junior there. She’s about the smartest person I know. She’s one of those people I have to be nice to her because she’s family, but I secretly hate her because she’s so smart. She’s nice. Everybody likes her. She’s a good athlete. Basically, everything I’m not.
She sounds wonderful. Claremont McKenna is a special place. The Claremont colleges are down in Southern California, tucked away, still LA County, but deeply east of LA. They’re academic powerhouses down there. It’s a nice place to go to college.
She loves it. My sister’s bumming because we’re not going to get her back when she graduates next year, but she’s having the time of her life and she’s on the basketball team. She’s loving life at this point, but cool.
Google and Twitter
You graduated and you worked for a bunch of places, but there are two that are intriguing because I don’t think most people have ever heard of them: Google and Twitter. You worked for probably the two most iconic tech companies out there. I’m curious, what was that experience like? True rocket ships. What was it like to work at those companies?
It was incredible. I feel very lucky to have had those opportunities. Google was interesting. I started there in 2006. It was post-IPO, but still early in Google’s journey as a company. There were probably about 10,000 employees then, so big, but not like they are now. I remember my first manager there telling me that it would be like drinking out of a firehose for about six months. I would have no idea what I was doing for months. That was okay.
I learned as much as I could and took in as much information as I could. I thought at the time he was crazy. I was like, “Six months, what a joke.” I remember the day I got an inbound question, and I knew the answer to it. I was like, “I got this.’ I was so proud of myself. I looked at the calendar, and it was six months to the day from my hire date. It was one of those places where it was rapid growth, an incredibly successful business. Still to this day, I am where I am because of that experience and what I learned there.
It’s interesting because, do you know Cassie Kozyrkov?
No.
She was the chief data scientist. She was the first chief data scientist there. It’s probably her influence with the six-month thing. She has everything down to a precision. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was your six-month anniversary. It’s quite a run. You went to Twitter. Is Ned [Segal] as nice as he seems?
Ned is a wonderful human who I still talk to quite frequently, but I predated him, which I used to always like to remind him. I started at Twitter in 2012 and it was pre-IPO Twitter. Twitter was probably about a thousand people. That was nothing short of a magical time to start at that company. I thought Google was fast-paced, and it was, and Twitter was a whole different level. It was all-encompassing for good and bad, but also tremendous learning. The very cool thing about Twitter when I started is that, especially for my career, the monetization was starting to take off.
Twitter had been a successful consumer product, and then they were trying to be a successful revenue product as well. My first job there was supporting the US sales teams. I was the finance person who got to do everything from a revenue standpoint. That was coming up with the models, coming up with the forecast, setting quotas for the salespeople, approving non-standard deals, but getting in the weeds of the business from a revenue standpoint. That was super interesting because it was starting to take off. It was also an amazing place to work.
It sounds like. There are no better places to work, but were there people who mentored you along the way or influenced your career path? I’m assuming you worked with a million talented people at these two companies.
So many talented people, so many brilliant people, so many people who I consider dear friends and people I lean on incredibly heavily to this day, especially some of those early Twitter people who might’ve even left in 2014 or 2015 and gone on to start something else incredible. They’re quick texts away if I need something. What I learned at Twitter was this concept of a personal board, not just having a mentor or someone who you officially thought was the person in your mind, but a collection of people. That has served me very well because I feel like there are 8 or 10 go-to people from my time at both companies who I can go to to get advice, help, and ask questions. That’s been incredibly invaluable to me.
That’s amazing. That’s one of the things I encourage up-and-coming financial leaders. If you’re the CFO in a company, it can be a bit lonely, and it’s not a great career decision to go to your boss and say, “I don’t understand this.” Sometimes you can. I use the very phrase you did, you get yourself a personal board of directors. It’s great that you have that all these years later. It sounds like you’ve got some great relationships. Good for you. I’m sure it’s made you an effective leader. I wanted to chat with you about the Philo role, and I’m allowed to ask one foolish question per interview, and hopefully, this is it, but what about the role was attractive to you?
Not a foolish question at all. It was interesting. There were a few things that were attractive to me. One, I was looking for a CFO-plus role. Both the CFO and head of HR roles were open at this company. HR was something that I’d always supported from the side, whether that was through compensation or different analyses. That made this role particularly interesting to me.
I love consumer-facing products. This was an interesting consumer-facing product that I felt like had a lot of opportunity and was an interesting consumer play. The third attractive piece of this job to me was the CEO, a man named Andrew McCollum, who was very human when I met him. I felt like he had the same values that I had around many things, especially around business. I liked him when I met him, and how he talked about business and leadership. Those key elements made this interesting to me.
He was an advisor with the company before or something. He was an investor and on the board or something.
In the very early days. He’s been the CEO for over a decade, so he has a long tenure at the company.
If I have my facts right, he is one of the Facebook founders, right?
That is correct.
That must be a good thing to have on your résumé, as they say.
Some people have heard of the company. They’ve also done pretty well. Whatever I have thought about my rocket ship experiences with companies, they pale compared to what he saw and accomplished, but yes.
Relationships and Building a Team
Facebook is special. You said that my question wasn’t foolish. I want to make sure Jess knows. I still have my allotment of one foolish question over the rest of the interview. I was going to ask you, you stole my thunder a little bit because I was going to ask about what your relationship with Andrew is like. Not so much what’s it like, but how do you build a productive, respectful relationship?
A couple of things. One, everything I hear, CEOs view CFOs as their primary strategic partner. For young professionals, that’s the biggest challenge when they get their first CFO job. It’s like, “How do I build that type of relationship with the CEO and the board?” It sounds like you guys hit it off initially, but how do you work on it and build that trusting, transparent relationship?
It’s a great question. I think it’s incredibly important. I do think CEOs should consider their CFO as their main strategic partner. That is something that I strive to be. I would say we talk daily, Monday through Friday. The weekends are reserved for emergencies only. A lot of that is constant communication, a lot of in-person meetings, a lot of quick pings. I like to show him things early and often. I have a different style than he was used to in previous CFOs.
You’ve talked about this before. There’s a shift from CFOs. Quite frankly, I would say that entire finance teams and departments focused on closing the books. That was at least how everyone else tried to pigeonhole finance people. As you and I know, finance people have a lot more to offer than just that. Not to say that closing the books isn’t important. It’s incredibly important and a huge key piece of it. As the finance team has all the data for the company, you are the one place where you can end-to-end see what is happening from a business perspective. My job is to poke around everywhere, and I do.
For Andrew and a lot of CEOs, it takes some getting used to somebody who is like, “Me again. Hi, I’m here. Did you see this?” It’s an important part of the job. We have an excellent relationship. He’s used to me by now. I’ve been there a year and a half. He knows I’m going to be talking to him all the time. It’s something that I cherish that I can go to him, again, early and often, with things that I want to talk to him about.
That’s great. It’s such a critical thing. It’s funny you mentioned being involved in all of them. A friend of mine, Judy Romano, was a CFO in a very successful company, and she’s now with Gartner. She told me, “Don’t think of yourself as a financial executive. Think of yourself as an enterprise-wide executive who happens to be a financial expert.”
By the way, unless you’re one of those people who works for one of those one-in-a-hundred companies where the CEO is a former CFO, you’re the only financial expert across the C-suite. It’s invaluable. What is your philosophy on building a world-class team, not only in the world of finance, which is reasonably easy for CFOs, perhaps, not really, but it’s easier? I’m sure you’re involved with building it across the entire company.
Across the company, I also, not to brag, have coached my fifth-grade son’s basketball team. It is fascinating how coaching a team, like a sports team in a very traditional sense, and then teams at work share very similar values to me. For me, to your point, building a team, whether in the whole company context or your own finance team specifically, is about the team first. I am a huge proponent of teammates supporting each other, trying to make each other better, and working well together. If you don’t have that, it is an awful environment, and you don’t produce the best results.
For me, the team is the most important thing. Once you have that, it’s pretty easy to keep it because if someone comes in and doesn’t fit into that working relationship with everybody else, they usually sort themselves out pretty quickly or adapt and realize that the best way to get ahead is to work closely together. For me, that is the most important thing. In finance, you also need good, smart people who are detail-oriented, care about getting things right and accurate and make that a goal and a culture for finance.
I have always given myself, whether they were myself personally or the broader team, goals around accuracy and timeliness. Everyone else at the company might have more leeway, but you know full well that finance works on a calendar, month-end close, quarter-end close, year-end close and year-end planning, you have to be tight and accurate. Those are core things for a team that you always need to have. Again, for me, the biggest thing is working well together and being a supportive teammate.
That makes sense. I know from your company’s reputation and its website, and you yourself, value diversity across the team. It occurs to me that your customer base is probably as diverse as any existing customer base. Not that you’re doing it for that reason, but you have a diverse team. Is that a strategic benefit for growing the company and appealing to the customer base?
I always think it’s a strategic benefit to have different points of view. That’s critical. At Philo, we’ve done a nice job of building diversity into everything we do. It’s part of our recruiting strategy. It’s part of our overall team ethos. We also believe that having a diverse employee pool and population will help represent your user base’s diversity.
We do have a very diverse set of customers. They are all across the country, men and women, different genders, and races, from every zip code. It is important to us to make sure that we have diverse employees and that we’re showing diverse content, and having that represents what our users and customers want.
Automate Anything
I want to chat a little bit about technology. As a podcaster, I’m legally required to ask technology questions.
AI, you can say it.
Thank you for saying it for me, but beyond AI, and that’s certainly an important one, what technologies have you implemented, both in finance and maybe across the entire enterprise, that give the company all sorts of competitive advantages, make it more efficient and save some costs? What is your technological philosophy?
From a finance side in particular, I’ll say finance teams, in general, give themselves headcount last because we have to. We have to set the example. The teams tend to be small. What I have learned early on, and we’ve put in place at Philo, is that there’s not enough time in the day, nor enough humans to do everything you want to do from a finance standpoint. Anything we can automate, we try to automate. Whether that’s if we can do it internally, or we use a third-party solution, we’ll do that.
Try to automate anything that you can, including debt creation. Can that be populated automatically once a week, and then you go in and tweak certain things? We try to do a lot of that to free up time for thinking and doing the actual important work and analyses. From a company standpoint, we are a technology-based company. We’re engineering-led. We’ve built a lot of technology that we believe is best in class. Also, we look at how to improve things all the time. Can we make our AWS spending more efficient? Can we look at doing things in a smaller timeframe or in a better way? It’s a constant iteration and something we look at all the time.
That’s great. I’m assuming you’re from the Silicon Valley area or San Francisco Bay Area. There’s probably no shortage of technologically savvy professionals there. You’re in the streaming landscape. It’s been around for a while, but in some ways, it’s still in its infancy because it’s still evolving at such a dramatic pace. It’s increasingly competitive. How does Philo differentiate itself in such a competitive space? How does finance play a role in supporting those efforts?
Great question. It’s interesting because, while streaming is new and still evolving, TV is one of the oldest technologies we still use daily. TV, at its core, is unchanged from how it has been for the last hundred years. Our company is named after Philo Farnsworth, who was the inventor of TV a very long time ago. When the company was first founded, and then when we launched our current service, the thinking was, how do we make it a better, more interesting experience than it’s been in the past? If you go and use the product, you can see from the layout how we’ve highlighted our content. It’s meant to be a good, easy product experience.
That’s one of the areas we focused on. From a differentiator standpoint, if you want to watch live TV, we are the cheapest option out there for many shows and channels. The $28-a-month price point is a big differentiator versus what you would pay for Comcast, for example. We try to make it as affordable as possible for the broad offering that we have of live TV. From a finance perspective, I have the very fun job of making that math work. We are a lean company. We’re 160 employees. We punch well above our weight on the revenue side. We have an efficient ads business that we run almost purely programmatically. We try to do a good job of keeping the business making sense while offering an affordable product to our customers.
That’s great. I love the fact that you used a boxing reference there, punching above your weight class. With it evolving as dramatically as it is, you’d be foolish not to heavily invest in R&D and keep doing that. You’d be out of business in two years if you didn’t. You’re a finance person, and you’re disciplined and whatnot. Do you find it challenging to play the role of financial steward and make sure it’s invested responsibly, but do it in a way that doesn’t slow things down?
It’s a daily challenge. I go to so many meetings and want to say no. As a finance person, a lot of us are trained that way. It’s like, “No more headcount. That’s too expensive.” I’ve tried for a long time, and I think I have teammates who are excellent about this as well, to come from a place of yes. If it’s an investment that makes sense, then I try to figure out how to fund it, coming in with a more open mind about how we could do that. Sometimes, there might be trade-offs, and then it’s your job to show what those trade-offs would be. I try to be more of a problem solver from a resource perspective, and if something makes sense for the company, I allow it to happen.
That makes sense. You’re on a subscription model. There are some challenges with that, too, but I’m curious how finance gets involved in that. Data analytics is the name of the game in certain companies, perhaps in your company, I’m not sure, but how do you leverage data analytics to guide financial and strategic decisions?
To me, it’s all one. I don’t think I’ve made a decision that I can think of without a pretty robust analytical framework or running some data. I’m lucky to have some talented people on the team. We do have a large data science team, and we come data-first to a lot of the problems we’re solving. I ask my team to analyze things. Every ten minutes, I send someone a ping, “Can you run this analysis? Can you look at this? What’s this cohort doing?” You have to try to understand what’s happening and what your customers are doing. We lean incredibly heavily into as much analytics as we can get to make sure that we’re making the right decisions.
I’m guessing you’re a valuable contributor to things like customer retention. You’re providing data that makes all of that more efficient.
Correct. We looked at it.
When I was a CFO, a different era, but I was a CPA. If I stepped outside of GAAP, I almost had to justify why I was even inclined to do such a thing. I was like, what are you talking about? Why are you doing that? We’ve got people who can do that, but now it’s the true value add in the role.
I agree with that. I think your value is poking around, and where you see a problem or have a question, you go over there. Good ideas come from anybody. They often come from engineers, but they can also come from finance people. Having the courage to speak up, use your voice and ask the right questions is super important.
I don’t know your industry all that well, but it strikes me that Philo has a bit of a unique business model. For one thing, you’re far more affordable than all of your competitors, as best I know. What challenges does that present to you as the chief financial officer?
We are well-positioned. We are the most affordable place to watch a lot of these live TV offerings. We’re also differentiated in that our business makes sense financially, but that makes us unique in the industry. From a finance perspective, it’s a constant balance of investment and growth, and then being careful with our costs and ensuring that our business can keep thriving and working.
No Lanes
It seems like it’s working well. I want to shift gears, and this is going to be valuable for the audience. I touched upon the fact I was the old-school CFO. It wasn’t exactly stone tablets or quill pens or anything like that, but it’s so different today compared to what it is for you and your generation of leaders. How do you see the nature of financial leadership and the CFO evolving in the years ahead?
We touched on this a bit earlier, but I do think about finance as the strategic partner for the company. Even when I first started at Google, finance was seen as more of a back-office function. I’ve seen that change over time. It started at Google and then through other places where finance is a partner at the table and can be business-focused, not just the takers of the information process. Like I said, close the books, move on, but come back and push the business with ideas, analyses, thoughts and be seen more as a true partner to the business. There’s huge value in that, and it will continue to move in that direction.
In my career, I have always had stuff like that. All we did was report history after it happened. We weren’t making it happen. The tagline for this podcast is, “CFOs no longer report history, they make history.” I was told I was like the guy who fought in the American Revolution with the bayonets. Their role was basically to stab people who were on the ground to make sure they were dead and not faking it. It’s like, you don’t have a high opinion of finance, do you? That was the perception back then. It might’ve been a fair one.
It was, and I’m sure a lot of the finance professionals have been told to stay in their lane. Don’t stay in your lane. That’s not going to help anybody. It’s not interesting to you, and it’s not going to help the company.
Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the value-add in that too? There are no lanes.
No lanes.
Not at all. I want to ask you a little bit about this, and part of this is I’m trying to change the perception of CFOs. Is there a fun fact about you? Maybe a famous person you’ve met, or do you have an interesting hobby that you’d like to talk about?
The cool thing about working at Twitter is we get to meet many famous people. We’d have famous people come in often. My fun fact is that I got to meet and have cookbooks signed by both Ina Garten and Nigella Lawson. That was very fun for me. I got to meet Ina Garten at both Google and Twitter, weirdly. I don’t know why she was at both places, but I got to meet her twice. That was a fun personal thrill for me.
That was pretty cool. Did she remember you the second time by any chance?
She didn’t, but she’s so lovely. It didn’t matter.
People like that meet so many different people I can imagine. That is pretty cool. Do you have any hobbies? I know you have a lot going on.
I have a lot going on. I do have three children, three boys, two in middle school, and one in second grade. It’s hard for me to say this; I don’t have too many hobbies outside of them because I don’t have one moment to myself in the day. I have tried to start exercising a lot early in the morning. I do that with my husband, which is fun because we’re together for an hour in the morning. My hobbies are my kids. It’s whatever they’re doing. Soccer’s a hobby, basketball’s a hobby, whatever they’re into at the moment. I don’t have a ton of time for myself to do anything super fun.
You mentioned previously that you coach your son’s basketball team. Did you play basketball at a high level when you were younger, or is it something you wanted?
Not at a high level. I played basketball through eighth grade, and I played soccer through high school. I have learned that if you do that, you can coach up to a certain standard with no problem. A lot of coaching, especially for elementary school kids, is keeping them alive and keeping them in a gym doing something. I usually tap out after fifth grade. I’ll leave it to someone semi-more professional than me.
There you go. That makes sense. My next question, and you’ve touched on it a little bit, but it’s so critical for CFOs and for all executives, and even everyone, but you have a lot going on. How do you manage that whole work-life balance thing? Three kids, a fast-growing company, life comes at you hard, right?
It does. It’s a challenge. It’s something you need to work on. If it’s important to you to have any balance, you have to prioritize that. I’ve worked with coaches on this before. I found in the past, even if I was home, I wasn’t mentally focused. I would be drafting emails or thinking about something that happened at work. I’ve also tried to be a lot more conscious about how I end my day, and how I prep for the next day, and try to end that at a certain time so that when I’m home, I’m mentally focused on my kids and much more present.
I got some amazing advice from one of my peer groups. I’m in a CFO peer group, and we didn’t talk about that earlier, but those are also super helpful if you can join one. She told me you’re always juggling different balls in the air, but some are made of glass and some are plastic. You need to know which ones are glass and don’t break those. That has been incredibly helpful for me. I know it’s simple advice, but the email might come out like, “Who can be the class parent?” I’m like, “I can’t do that.”
I don’t have time. I’m not going to try. I’m not going to sign up for one more thing. An email will come out about the parent-teacher conference for your child. It’s like, “That I’m not going to miss,” or a special one-hour volunteer opportunity that you can do with your kids. Trying to do a better job of prioritizing which ones are super important and then letting the rest go. That’s something I’ve tried to put in place.
It’s funny. You made it sound easy, but I’m sure, what’s the analogy, like the duck floating across water looks so calm, but the feet are going 90 miles an hour.
The legs are going quickly.
That makes sense. This has been a great conversation. I’d love to get any advice you have for the next generation of CFOs, maybe those in their first job or on the cusp of getting their first job as a CFO.
I would say what we talked about recently. Don’t stay in your lane. If you’re going to your CEO, or if you’re a VP of finance going to your own CFO or other executives, saying, “Great, the books are closed, the month-end is here and here’s how we did,” but then what? You need to free up your mind, quite frankly, and think about the business and be curious about your business to try to figure out what else is happening and bring those insights. That is what’s going to set you apart. That’s going to be fun and interesting. That is what is going to make you good at your job. Poke around, don’t stay in your lane, do all of that interesting work and thinking, and you’ll always get a good result.
That’s great advice. Again, thanks. You’ve got a lot going on. I’m grateful for your time. I want to give you the opportunity to have the final word.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m appreciative of this. It’s an exciting time to be in finance. It’s an exciting time to be a leader in finance. I would encourage everyone to keep going. I appreciate your time, Jack.
That wraps up this episode of the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs. A huge thank you to our sponsors, Planful and the CFO Leadership Council, for their amazing support. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and visit us at RockstarCFOs.com. Until next time, rock on.
