Some careers announce themselves with a clean title and a straight line. Andrew Liebendorfer’s makes more sense as a series of rooms he learned to walk between: the engineering lab, the client meeting, the product review, the operations floor, and finally the CEO’s office. Each move appears to change the subject. Look again and the same question keeps returning: how do you make a complicated system behave well for the people inside it?
Today, Liebendorfer is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Grow Therapy, the New York company that connects people with providers who accept insurance while supplying those providers with the tools and administrative support to run their practices. It is a role near the center of a business with many moving parts and little tolerance for sloppy handoffs. Clients, providers, insurers, product teams, operations teams, and executives all need different things, often at once.
Chief of Staff is a title with a peculiar problem: it can sound grand while explaining almost nothing. In Liebendorfer’s case, his earlier work supplies the missing definition. He has spent years learning how to translate between specialists without becoming a tourist in their work. His résumé reads less like a climb toward status than an apprenticeship in coordination.
The engineer leaves the lab, but keeps the method
In 2013, a student photograph of Liebendorfer appeared in The Bent, Tau Beta Pi’s magazine. He was studying chemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University and working a co-op at Vancive Medical Technology on a wearable sensor. The short scholar profile placed him in the recognizable world of engineering ambition: a real material, a real device, a real surface on which it had to work.
The profile also recorded a plan. After another co-op, he expected to pursue pharmaceuticals or battery technology. It was a perfectly respectable forecast. It was also wrong, which is one of the friendlier things a career can do to an intelligent twenty-something.
What survived was more important than the forecast. Chemical engineering trains a person to think about flows, constraints, feedback, failure points, and the stubborn consequences of small changes. Those habits do not belong only to pipes and polymers. Organizations have flows too. Information stalls. Decisions accumulate pressure. A process designed for ten people becomes absurd at one hundred. The vocabulary changes, but the systems remain.
Liebendorfer graduated summa cum laude. His campus record included Tau Beta Pi, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, a service fraternity, and SpartanTHON, a student-run fundraising event. Even before his working life became cross-functional, his attention had spread beyond one technical lane.
“He was patient, and listened far more than he spoke.”A former manager describing Liebendorfer’s client work
Medallia, or the education of a translator
After university, Liebendorfer joined Medallia, an enterprise software company built around customer experience. There he moved through professional services, solutions architecture, and product management. The sequence matters. Professional services puts you near the customer’s messy reality. Architecture asks you to understand how the technical pieces fit. Product management forces choices about what should be built, for whom, and in what order.
A former manager remembered that Liebendorfer advanced quickly and, within two years, was leading some of the company’s largest strategic clients. The same recommendation includes a small office scene more revealing than a promotion announcement: there was often someone around his desk learning from him. Generosity, in that picture, is not a personality ornament. It is how knowledge moves through a company.
Another client recalled thoughtfulness, energy, and a can-do attitude. Taken together, the comments sketch a style with little appetite for theatrical certainty. Listen first. Understand the inside of the system. Offer guidance once the problem has taken shape. Then help other people see what you see.
This is the useful trick in Liebendorfer’s path: none of the earlier roles disappears. The services operator still hears the customer. The architect still maps dependencies. The product manager still asks which problem deserves the next unit of attention. The engineer still distrusts a process that cannot survive contact with reality.
The appeal of the seam
Grow Therapy was founded in 2020. Liebendorfer joined the company’s operating story early enough to watch a young platform become national infrastructure. His responsibilities included operations leadership before the Chief of Staff role. Public descriptions of his work are spare, but the company’s expansion shows the kind of environment around him: more providers, more insurance relationships, more software, more teams, more promises to keep.
In 2026, Grow Therapy announced a $150 million Series D. The company said it had facilitated seven million visits during 2025 and ten million appointments over its lifetime. The round brought plans to deepen partnerships with employers and health systems. Each new channel is a growth opportunity. Each is also another seam, a place where ownership can blur and good intent can become delay.
That is where an experienced Chief of Staff earns the chair. The role is not simply to make the CEO faster. It is to make the organization less lossy. A decision should arrive where it needs to go with its meaning intact. A team should understand not only what changed but why. An unresolved problem should become visible before it becomes expensive.
There is an irony here. The better this work is done, the less visible it becomes. Smooth handoffs rarely get their photograph taken. A meeting that ends with genuine clarity produces no dramatic artifact. The operator’s best day can look, from the outside, like nothing went wrong.
The operator’s best day can look, from the outside, like nothing went wrong.The quiet standard of executive operations
What the public clues reveal
Liebendorfer’s own online description begins with two words: “curious and driven.” They are common résumé adjectives, almost too polished to notice. His work history makes them more specific. Curiosity appears as movement across disciplines. Drive appears as increasing responsibility. Neither requires him to become the loudest person in the room.
His public recommendations add patience, thoughtfulness, analytical rigor, and a habit of helping others learn. In a recommendation he wrote for a former colleague, Liebendorfer praised calm energy, honest standards, detail, and the ability to inspire trust. The qualities people choose to praise are often the qualities they have learned to value through experience.
Listen for the real problem
The first request is often a symptom. Patient listening makes better guidance possible.
Learn across boundaries
Range is useful when it makes translation faster and handoffs cleaner.
Teach what you know
Knowledge becomes operating leverage only after it moves beyond one desk.
Keep standards calm
Rigor does not need a raised voice. Trust grows from clear expectations and follow-through.
These are modest virtues, which is another way of saying they are easy to underestimate. Startup folklore prefers the brilliant improviser. Scale prefers the person who can reduce avoidable improvisation without suffocating initiative. One makes a good anecdote. The other makes next Tuesday work.
A career built from useful continuity
It would be tempting to describe Liebendorfer’s story as a pivot from engineering to business. That makes the change sound cleaner than it was and the continuity smaller than it is. He did not leave systems behind. He changed the material.
At Vancive, the object was a sensor adhering to skin. At Medallia, it was software adhering to the realities of large clients. At Grow Therapy, it is an organization trying to connect providers, clients, insurers, and technology without letting complexity become the customer’s burden. In every case, the design has to survive the surface where it lands.
That is the part worth stealing. A nonlinear career becomes coherent when you stop following titles and start following the problem-solving habit underneath them. Liebendorfer’s habit is to understand the system, listen at its edges, and make the next handoff more reliable. It has carried him from a scholarship page to enterprise software and from product analytics to the CEO’s side.
The spotlight will remain elsewhere. That is normal. Chief of Staff work is partly the art of directing attention toward the decision, the team, or the customer who needs it most. Andrew Liebendorfer’s public record suggests he is comfortable there, in the quiet machinery, making sure movement becomes progress.