David Lischner once made his company smaller on purpose. Valant had 20 customers. After a price increase, it had nine. For a founder trying to establish a business, that is a difficult number to explain with a cheerful slide. Yet the retreat helped him find a workable direction: selling software, rather than an elaborate combination of software and services.
The episode belongs near the beginning of his story because it unsettles the usual order of a founder’s biography. First comes the idea, then the company, then the rising line. Lischner’s line has more interesting bends. Before Valant, there was professional soccer. Before the software business, there was a classroom in New York. And after years as CEO, there was a deliberate decision to give someone else the job.
Look across those chapters and the useful question becomes less grand than how to build an empire. How do you recognize when the work in front of you requires a different approach? His career offers several answers, each attached to an actual decision.
A forward, before the founder
Born in Philadelphia in 1962, Lischner grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and attended Cherry Hill High School West. Soccer put him on an international stage while he was still a teenager. He appeared for the United States at the 1981 FIFA World Youth Championship, then entered the Major Indoor Soccer League with the Philadelphia Fever.
Buffalo followed Philadelphia. New York followed Buffalo. Across three indoor seasons, his record includes 28 games with the Fever, 42 with the Buffalo Stallions and 25 with the New York Arrows. He played forward. In 1983, he also belonged to the U.S. squad at the Pan American Games. Those are substantial entries for a résumé that would eventually circulate in software-company boardrooms.
In 1998, he was inducted into the South Jersey Soccer Hall of Fame. The sport remained part of his life: asked for his favorite in 2013, he answered soccer. Some career changes apparently require no change of allegiance.
The classroom comes next
Lischner also worked as a middle school teacher in Washington Heights, New York City, before entering medical school. He completed a Master of Science in Applied Science at New York University. Teaching, applied science and professional sport make an unusual sequence, even before the company-building begins.
It would be convenient to assign every later decision to a lesson from one of those jobs. The record supports a more restrained reading. He had already worked in very different settings before becoming an entrepreneur. His biography contains more than one kind of expertise, and more than one experience of being a beginner.
He went on to earn his MD at the University of Washington, train at the University of Pennsylvania and return to Washington for further training. He speaks Spanish as a second language. These details widen the picture of a founder whose public identity is often reduced to the company he started.
His first business-building experience came with the organization now known as Evidence Based Treatment Centers of Seattle, founded in 2002. Postdoctoral fellows arrived the following year, adding training to the organization’s early work. Lischner remains listed among its owners. Valant would grow out of the practical frustrations he encountered running an organization himself.
Two brothers and an inconvenient gap
By 2004, Lischner had a specific idea for a technology company. He spent that year persuading his brother to join him. David and Ben Lischner co-founded Valant in 2005. Ben brought a software-development background that included AT&T Wireless; David brought experience of the work the software was meant to support.
That division mattered. The problem had been encountered firsthand, and the ability to build an answer was already within the founding team. Much later, Valant CEO Ram Krishnan would identify Lischner’s own Seattle organization as the company’s first customer. The product began close enough to its users that the founder was one of them.
In a 2012 interview, Lischner described an unsuccessful search for software suited to his needs. He also argued for tools with a specific purpose, using a comparison between speedboats and cruise ships. A smaller vessel has an advantage when its passengers know where they want to go. It is an apt image for a founder choosing a defined market rather than promising to serve everybody.
The initial offering, however, was cumbersome to sell and expensive to support. The brothers changed direction in 2007. The reduction from 20 customers to nine came during that early reassessment; a subsequent decision concentrated the business on software. The customer count fell while the company’s purpose became easier to describe.
“Hardest decision was to raise the fees.”
David Lischner, recalling Valant’s early pivot in 2013
Money with room to breathe
By late 2010, Valant was approaching $1 million in revenue. Growth brought a familiar problem: the company needed money to expand before expansion produced the money. Lischner combined equity investment with revenue-based financing from Lighter Capital, giving the business more than one way to fund its next stage.
The repayment structure appealed to him because payments moved with revenue. For a company with uneven cash flow, that relationship mattered. A fixed monthly obligation makes no allowance for a disappointing month. Revenue-based financing builds a different rhythm into the agreement.
Lighter Capital’s account records $11 million in private equity investment in 2014 and another $3 million in venture capital in 2015. It also describes an expansion from about 10 employees to 60. These figures concern the company and its financing, rather than Lischner’s personal wealth.
His recollection gives the people behind the money a place in the story, too. Andy Sack and BJ Lackland were useful beyond the financing itself. Introductions and conversations helped shape the next steps. “Relationships do matter,” Lischner said. Deal terms can fit neatly into a spreadsheet; the quality of the person across the table takes longer to reveal itself.
The day reliability took the floor
Some of Lischner’s most revealing public comments concern a failure. In December 2011, he identified a 24-hour outage as a major hurdle Valant had overcome. The response included substantial upgrades to its IT operations. He reported subsequent uptime of 99.95 percent.
The important sequence is plain: an interruption, an operational response, a measurable reliability figure. Software has a way of moving an abstract promise into a very practical argument. Availability becomes considerably more interesting when the system is unavailable.
That same interview contains an unusually direct admission about an earlier mistake: insufficient due diligence before partnering. He said the company had addressed it. For other entrepreneurs, his recommendations included hiring and retaining capable people and reading The Art of the Start and The Lean Startup.
Asked which technology figure he would want in his corner, he chose Jeff Bezos, citing both an interest in new business models and the proximity of his office. There is something agreeably practical about including the commute in a hypothetical alliance. Lischner’s answers leave room for ambition without entirely abandoning the neighborhood.
When the founder changes jobs
In October 2020, Valant announced Ram Krishnan as its new CEO. Lischner’s own message explained the division of labor he wanted next: business development, product strategy and innovation. The handoff followed a search for a successor and included an explicit expectation that the two would continue working together.
Krishnan brought experience at GE and in leading software businesses. His arrival gave Valant an executive with a different operating history, while preserving a role for the founder’s product knowledge. The company’s current team page lists Lischner as co-founder and clinical advisor.
A founder’s title can make a business look inseparable from the person who started it. A planned succession asks the organization to become more legible on its own. Lischner’s announcement is interesting for its specificity: he named the work he intended to do after leaving the chief executive’s chair.
The distinction also keeps the dates honest. The CEO speaking in the 2015 video is Lischner. The CEO appointed in 2020 is Krishnan. The continuing association is part of the story, along with the change in responsibility.
Another company, another beginning
Today, Therassist lists Lischner as its founder and CEO, alongside chief scientific officer Melanie Harned. The company’s public account presents the venture as a continuation of work he began before Valant. Its presence at a 2025 industry exhibition gives this new chapter a dated public marker beyond a biography.
The sequence is striking enough without a tidy theory about why every job led to the next. A professional forward became a teacher, completed further study, built organizations and returned to the founder’s role. Each chapter has its own demands. None requires pretending the earlier one never happened.
At Valant, one of his consequential decisions left him with fewer customers. Years later, another left him with a different title. A career is easier to summarize when every change points upward. Lischner’s is more useful to examine when the sideways moves stay in the picture.