One thing’s for certain: These are uncertain times. And if there’s any CFO who knows how to navigate through a crisis, it’s Greg Mrva.
As CFO for GoFundMe, the crowdfunding platform used by more than 72 million people last year that’s raised $30 billion for individuals and nonprofits since its inception, Mrva’s bread-and-butter is moments of difficulty: emergency medical expenses, school fundraisers, disaster relief. Put bluntly: “The constant of GoFundMe is uncertainty,” Mrva told CFO Brew.
“Our business is intense every day,” he continued. “Every day people have issues that they come to GoFundMe to raise money for. Crisis is definitely a part of our business.”
But crisis is “by no means” the biggest or only part of GoFundMe’s business, Mrva stresses, it’s just that the company is especially adept at navigating through difficult moments. While everyone else flocks to GoFundMe in emergencies, as happened amidst the devastating LA wildfires in January, the company spends its time year-round improving its core functioning so it can get money to those who need it when it matters most.
“There are these intense crisis moments that happen on our platform, and our platform responds to them incredibly well in terms of its ability to scale, and also in terms of [getting] our local team on the ground, engaging with local officials, fire departments, police officers, making them aware of the help that’s happening on our platform,” Mrva said of GoFundMe’s reaction to the wildfires earlier this year
That’s the benefit of dealing with uncertainty constantly: You’re always ready to go. In 2025, all CFOs will have to develop the same crisis mode skills Mrva has spent his tenure cultivating. Probably time to take notes.
Trial by fire. Perhaps fittingly for a CFO so well-versed on uncertainty, Mrva’s introduction to GoFundMe was (helpfully) hectic.
“It was a bit of a trial by fire,” Mrva says of his first days at the company. That’s because his first week just so happened to align with GoFundMe’s quarterly business review. “It was like, ‘Welcome to GoFundMe, and now we’re going to sit through two days of intense KPI metrics reviews of all the various parts of our business,’” he recalls.
Shocker: That was actually a blessing in disguise.
“These were 16-hour days where you’d start at 8am, and then you’d go until 6pm or 7pm, and then you’d go have dinner, and then you repeat it again,” Mrva explained, but that just fast-tracked the usual process of getting to know colleagues and building a baseline of the business.
Coming prepared. Though he was thrown into an intense first week, it’s not as if Mrva had arrived there by accident. He’s focused much of his career on the consumer internet since some of its earliest days.
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After moving to California at the height of the dotcom boom, Mrva transitioned from working at an investment bank into a role with one of its clients, an online games business called Empath Interactive. “We took it public; it failed,” he noted. “And that was a great introduction to Silicon Valley.”
He later moved to Yahoo, where he served as head of corporate development in what he calls “the heydays in the middle aughts” when heavyweights Sue Decker and Terry Semel were at the company. From there, he moved back to investment banking, running the consumer internet practice at Morgan Stanley, where his clients included Snap, Facebook, and Alibaba.
Next up: a stint as CFO of StubHub. He felt ready for his first-time CFO gig. Thanks to his previous roles, Mrva had already “advised literally hundreds of internet companies on pretty important events in their own lifetime” like going public, accessing capital markets or completing M&A transactions.
“All of [this] gives you a pretty good strategic perspective of what’s going on in the sector, like how the competitive landscape is evolving,” he said of those experiences. “What the strengths and weaknesses are of various companies, and that’s actually pretty good preparation for being a CFO.”
Investing wisely. His tech focus is part of what helps Mrva navigate uncertainty today. Take GoFundMe’s LA wildfire response. The company’s prior investments were ultimately a large part of what helped GoFundMe traverse that challenging moment, Mrva noted.
“Over the last three years, we’ve invested over $100 million in our trust and safety platform,” he explained. “We work with major banks, major processors to ensure that our business can scale and that there’s absolutely no misuse. That’s our big investment, so when tragedies happen like the LA wildfires, we’re there to support the communities in those times of need.”
And in an era where companies of all stripes are pouring money into AI investments, Mrva says GoFundMe is “leaning into everything AI.”
Internally, Mrva’s team is using AI to “look at forecasting,” as well as in sales and marketing and coding. On the platform itself, they’re using AI to help people tell their stories, prompting users with questions to deliver a first draft so they’re not faced with a “blank sheet of paper” when trying to explain why people should give to their cause, he said.
“We’re investing heavily because we see that it’s working,” Mrva said of the company’s tech investments. “All the evidence I need is that the donation volume on our platform is growing, and that’s obviously what we want to see.”