Cfo Thought Leader

Less than a year after his arrival at Splunk—a fast-growing, San Francisco–based software developer—CFO Jason Child appears to have been fully repatriated to his native land. To be clear: The “land” to which we refer is not the code-crunching zone of software development but the turf of business growth and scale—a locale in which Child resided for more than a decade while serving in multiple finance leadership roles at Amazon. Child first joined that company in 1999 as a corporate controller before being reassigned to the firm’s FP&A function. During his 12 years at Amazon, the online retailer grew into a colossus, with annual revenue jumping from roughly $1 billion in 1999 to $50 billion in 2011, the year following his departure. Since his stint at Amazon, Child has occupied the CFO office at multiple companies, including Groupon, where, less than a year after his arrival, the company would raise $700 million in an initial public offering—the second-biggest tech IPO in history at the time, behind only Go