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.
Read MoreJoining 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.”
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CFOTL: I briefly looked at the company history when preparing for our talk. Is it true that the founder’s wife had a personal experience that shaped Tempus’s mission? Could you share that with the audience?
Rogers: Eric Lefkofsky, our founder and CEO, had a wife who was diagnosed with breast cancer. That experience really reflected the lack of data-driven decision-making in patient care. He set out to create a company that could bring together different data elements for a given patient and help doctors get them on the right treatment path. That was the genesis of the company. Since then, we’ve pursued a number of different directions and areas, but those early days were about building on that initial idea.
Read MoreCFOTL: And then Eric said, I need a finance guy—and there you were, an up-and-comer at Groupon. Does that sound right, or would you nuance that story? Also, tell us more about Tempus AI today.
Rogers: Tempus AI is a healthcare technology company focused on bringing the power of data and AI to healthcare. We started in oncology, and today we have several product lines. We run one of the largest next-generation sequencing labs, where we analyze samples from oncology patients to help identify the right care. What differentiates us from a traditional diagnostics company is that we also integrate with hospitals’ EHRs or data warehouses to pull in other data elements. We contextualize diagnostic results so physicians can put patients on the right therapy at the right time.
Alongside our patient-facing work, we also partner with biopharma companies, licensing de-identified multimodal records to support drug discovery. Ultimately, our goal is to unify these massive datasets and apply AI-driven algorithms to generate insights—everything from patient stratification to closing care gaps, or even creating new diagnostics. We are incredibly patient-focused, helping those receiving care today while also advancing treatments for the future.
Tempus AI | www.tempus.com | Chicago, IL