668: Investors Make Room for a Streaming SPAC | Jason Eustace, CFO, CuriosityStream

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

It was roughly 12 months ago that Jason Eustace was named CFO of CuriosityStream, an upstart streaming media company launched in 2015 by Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks.

For Eustace, CuriosityStream represents something of a flashback career chapter, arguably having more in common with the first 10 years of his finance career than the past ten.

Turn back the clock 20 years, and Eustace could be found in the accounting department of the National Geographic Channel, which at the time was a newly formed joint venture between the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks.

“Nat Geo wanted to marry up their content with the distribution of the cable world, so it was a perfect marriage,” explains Eustace, who saw his responsibilities grow over a 6-year stint that ultimately landed him in a controller role.

Controllership credentials in hand, Eustace then joined Discovery Communications, where he would serve in a variety of finance leadership roles over another period of 6 years.

However, it was his experience at Nat Geo and the more entrepreneurial nature of the business that Eustace uses a point of comparison with his current stint at CuriosityStream.

“National Geographic had been around forever—they had great stories, and it was the ability to put these stories on a more widely distributed platform that really propelled Nat Geo to become a media company,” observes Eustace, whose latest CFO role puts him once more inside a media company determined to open new avenues for distributed content.

Says Eustace: “I always wanted to get back into media. I really loved D.C., but there are limited CFO roles inside the metro area, so when this opportunity came up, I jumped at it.” - Jack Sweeney

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