A little more than 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 seemed to paid off: at 30, he was head of finance at Remark Media, then a corporate-development deal maker at Demand Media.
Read MoreSony 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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CFOTL: Crunchyroll operates in a market with a complex mix of subscriber growth, licensing, and production partnerships. Are all of these elements part of your world, and how do you manage them?
Travis Page: Absolutely—every one of those elements is part of our world, and each is critical to executing the plan. Crunchyroll now has more than 15 million subscribers across 200 countries. The United States remains our largest market, but we have millions of fans in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Managing that global customer base—(both acquisition and retention)—has required rapid adjustments; only a few years ago, these were essentially U.S.-centric businesses.
Read More“The second complexity is content. Roughly 99 percent of what we license and co-produce originates in Japan, so we build strong teams in Tokyo and maintain close, cross-border partnerships with Japanese studios. Our job is to secure the rights, deliver shows the way fans want, and then ‘explode’ each franchise—streaming, theatrical, consumer products, everything…
CFOTL: What does that global complexity mean for your finance team? How have you structured it?
Travis Page: We do have finance colleagues in Japan and in other key regions, but we try to keep as much as possible centralized. A core team based in the U.S. can manage a great deal globally, yet we balance that with regional support where local insight is indispensable. It’s an evolving mix of regional and global focus, and we’ll keep adjusting the structure as the business scales.
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