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In the mid-1990s, when Jeff Epstein was busy satisfying the M&A appetites of media clients for First Boston, one of his smaller, but more boisterous clients asked him to join the firm as its CFO. \xa0

\u201cIt was the type of situation where if they had gone to a recruiter, I would never have made the resume cut because I had never been a CFO and I had never even worked for a CFO,\u201d explains Epstein, who was 32 when he entered the lively entrepreneurial realm known as King World Productions. A one-time family-owned company, King World had seen its stature grow inside New York\u2019s competitive media landscape as the firm began producing \xa0giant hit TV shows such as\xa0Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy\xa0and\xa0The Oprah Winfrey Show.

\xa0\u201cIt was actually a small company with only about 300 employees, but they had three of the highest-rated, most profitable shows on television, with about $300 million of revenue and $60 million of operating income,\u201d recalls Epstein, who would go on to add consecutive CFO career chapters at DoubleClick, Nielsen (Media Measurement), and Oracle Corp., a mix that fortified his footing in both the tech and media worlds\u2014but also revealed little preference when it came to company size.

\u201cKing World had been a family business that had only recently become a New York Stock Exchange company when I joined them, so I had to put in place some basic procedures, but Oracle had been around for many years and already had very sophisticated processes,\u201d notes Epstein, who today exudes as much enthusiasm for Oracle\u2019s approach to simplifying and standardizing its internal processes as he does for the entrepreneurial instincts of King World chairman Roger King.

\u201cThree minutes from when an idea came out of my mouth, Roger King would have picked up the phone and be pitching our largest customer, \u201d says Epstein, whose CFO tenure there lasted 6 years\u2014a span of time during which King World would triple its value and ultimately end up being sold to CBS Corp.

It was following the sale of King World, that Epstein would open the career chapter that permitted his CFO career \xa0to grow beyond a single industry.\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0

\u201cDoubleClick was an early Internet advertising technology company and wanted a CFO from either media or technology, so I had the media experience part,\u201d comments Epstein.

Today, as operating partner for Bessemer Venture Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., Epstein marvels at the continued evolution of the two industries that shaped his CFO career:

\u201cTwo years ago, global Internet advertising surpassed global television advertising revenues to become the biggest media opportunity in the world\u2014so if you\u2019re around long enough, you see some incredible things.\u201d\xa0 \xa0Sign Up for our Newsletter

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