1123: From Accounting Rigor to Strategic Leadership | Jim Rogers, CFO, Tempus AI

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

The pivot began when Jim Rogers raised his hand. Groupon was shifting from mobile daily deals to a goods business in Europe, and—still early in his career—he volunteered to help lead the finance work. That step, he tells us, bridged his path from technical accounting into FP&A and set a pattern: seek out the build stage, then make finance a partner to the business.

Rogers started in audit at Ernst & Young before moving through technical accounting and controllership into planning. He earned a master’s in accounting at Northern Illinois University to qualify for the CPA, he tells us. At Groupon, he advanced to head of FP&A for North America, experience that informed his philosophy at Tempus AI: “we’re not here to report the news,” he says—finance should enable decisions.

Joining Tempus in 2017 as the first finance hire—when the company was pre-revenue, he tells us—Rogers built the function, became CFO in 2021, and helped steer the company public. He also stood up investor relations, initially outsourcing the function before bringing it in-house by the end of 2021, he tells us, investing time to educate analysts on a business that spans multiple categories.

AI runs through Tempus’s work. Externally, a physician portal (“positive”) and the researcher tool “Lens” aim to make diagnostics and data more useful. Internally, large language models sift “hundreds of petabytes of data,” Rogers tells us, and surface real-time finance insights. The strategic throughline is discipline: double down on oncology, keep pilots siloed, and expand only when the core is ready—because, as he notes, “no two days are alike.”