On January 1, 2022, David Schlanger changed jobs without changing companies. After five years running Progyny, he became executive chairman. Pete Anevski, the president and chief operating officer, took over as CEO. There was continuity in the arrangement: the two had worked together for nearly a quarter of a century. The person receiving the keys already knew the building.
For a business biography, it is an unusually useful place to begin. A promotion tells you what an executive has been entrusted to do. A handoff tells you how the work has been divided, who else has earned trust, and what the departing CEO believes he can still contribute. Schlanger’s new remit covered strategy, corporate development and advice to his successor. He was staying involved with a narrower assignment.
The change also put a boundary around a distinct period. He had joined an existing company, led it through a public offering, and remained long enough to help establish its life on the stock market. By the time he moved into the chairman’s role, Progyny had entered the S&P MidCap 400. A career spent negotiating transitions had produced another one, this time involving his own desk.
A natural progression in roles and responsibilities.David Schlanger · November 2021
An education with an escape route
Earlier, there had been a less formal handoff: from lawyer to business executive. Schlanger earned his undergraduate degree at Georgetown and his law degree at Michigan, graduating from law school in 1984. He began at Latham & Watkins, working on corporate finance and acquisitions. A client connection opened a route into management; the firm’s managing partner left open the possibility of returning. The temporary experiment became a career.
His next jobs included acquisitions at Medco Containment Services, business development at Merck, and corporate development at Synetic. The connection between them is practical. These are jobs concerned with how businesses fit together: what to buy, which partnerships to pursue, and how to make an agreement work after the signatures have dried. They offer a view of a company that extends beyond any single department.
By 1995 he was in senior roles in the group of companies that would become part of his WebMD career. His responsibilities included finding acquisition opportunities, evaluating them and negotiating their terms. He also worked with teams supporting sales, marketing and product development. The eventual CEO had spent years at the intersections of the business, where a commercial promise has to survive contact with operations.
The apprenticeship before the title
In May 2013, WebMD made Schlanger interim CEO. In August, the board made the appointment permanent. The sequence matters. He arrived in the top job with more than a decade of experience inside WebMD and its predecessors, rather than an introductory tour of the offices. Steven Zatz became president alongside him. Leadership was already being organized as a partnership.
Schlanger’s earlier corporate development work had included relationships with media, technology and content partners. That is a useful apprenticeship for running a digital publisher: the product, the audience and the commercial customer must each make sense in relation to the others. A transaction can be announced in a day. The relationships supporting it have to keep earning their place.
There were measurable results during his tenure. WebMD reported first-quarter 2015 revenue of $143.3 million, compared with $133.8 million a year earlier, a seven percent increase. Advertising and sponsorship contributed $105.8 million; private portal services contributed $29.3 million. The figures describe a business with several moving parts, and a CEO responsible for how they added up.
His WebMD chapter ended in September 2016, when Zatz succeeded him. The company described Schlanger’s departure as a mutual agreement and credited both executives with stronger financial results and brands. The wording leaves the event where it belongs: a documented management change. Within months, another company would be announcing that the same executive was joining its team.
Someone else had built the beginning
Progyny announced Schlanger’s appointment on December 16, 2016. His CEO tenure began in January 2017; he joined the board that March. Gina Bartasi, the outgoing chief executive, explained that she had intended to spend two years in the role before passing it to someone with experience building and leading businesses. Schlanger was being recruited for the next stage.
That distinction gives his story its shape. He was taking responsibility for a company that already had investors, customers and a commercial direction. Progyny had raised almost $15 million in a financing round earlier in 2016. The assignment required turning existing momentum into a business capable of operating at greater scale. A promising beginning still leaves a great deal of work for the person who inherits it.
Anevski joined in January 2017 as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. He had been WebMD’s finance chief while Schlanger was CEO. The relationship traveled with them, but the company did not: they were applying familiar working experience to a different organization. In its account of the investment, Kleiner Perkins described recruiting the pair because Progyny needed operators who could manage rapid growth.
There is a quieter form of ambition in that assignment. The origin story belongs to other people, and the executive’s contribution has to appear in execution. Hiring, sales, financial reporting and the division of responsibilities all become part of the result. They are also difficult to compress into a photograph. The photograph would arrive soon enough, in Times Square.
A bell, and the arithmetic behind it
On October 25, 2019, Schlanger rang Nasdaq’s opening bell to celebrate Progyny’s IPO. He was less than three years into the job. The occasion placed him at a highly visible point in the company’s history: the chief executive standing for an organization that was becoming publicly traded. Behind the ceremony lay a transaction with a precise set of terms.
The offering was initially priced at $13 a share for 10 million shares. Progyny offered 6.7 million newly issued shares; existing stockholders offered 3.3 million. The distinction matters because those two streams of proceeds went to different recipients. Money raised by selling new shares could support the company. Money from selling existing shares went to the holders selling them.
The prospectus put gross proceeds for the initial offering at $130 million, before the underwriters’ additional option. Its table allocated approximately $81.2 million to the company before offering expenses. A bell ceremony makes a transaction look wonderfully simple. A prospectus soon restores the footnotes. For a former corporate finance lawyer, this part of the occasion would have been familiar territory.
Going public also gave Schlanger a new reporting rhythm. The business would now publish results for outside shareholders to inspect. In 2019, Progyny generated $229.7 million in revenue. In 2020, revenue reached $344.9 million, a rise of roughly 50 percent. Its client count increased from 87 at the end of 2019 to 135 a year later. These were company results delivered by a team under his leadership.
Another marker followed on April 20, 2021, when Progyny entered the S&P MidCap 400, replacing Domtar. Index membership gave the publicly traded business a new place in the market’s classification system. In the sequence of Schlanger’s tenure, it sits between the IPO and the succession announcement: one more dated milestone before the division of executive responsibilities changed.
Two years, a larger business
A smaller remit, a longer partnership
By November 2021, the company was preparing investors for that change. Schlanger described it as a “natural progression in roles and responsibilities.” Anevski’s promotion would take effect with the new year. Michael Sturmer would become president, while Beth Seidenberg would move from board chair to lead independent director. Several pieces moved together, making the handoff broader than a change to one name on an organization chart.
Schlanger also said the arrangement would leave room for “outside personal interests.” His new employment agreement made the chairman’s position part time. There is something refreshingly concrete about that detail. Senior executives often speak expansively about the future; here, the future included a different allocation of hours. The company would retain his experience while the CEO’s daily responsibilities passed to Anevski.
The assignment remained close to his earlier work: strategy and corporate development. In November 2023, Nox Health announced his appointment to its board, alongside Lloyd Dean and Bill Lewis. Schlanger’s comment about the appointment focused on helping guide commercialization. The vocabulary had stayed consistent across the years. He was still concerned with how an organization turns its offering into a working business.
Progyny’s 2026 proxy continued to list him as executive chairman. It described a board leadership structure in which his knowledge of the business informed oversight, working in coordination with a lead independent director. Anevski remained CEO. The arrangement established in January 2022 had become an ongoing division of labor, with each title carrying a distinct set of responsibilities.
Read across those jobs and the career becomes a succession of decisions about where experience is useful. Schlanger moved from advising on transactions to making them, from corporate development into the CEO’s office, and from daily management into a chairman’s remit. He accepted work prepared by predecessors and eventually passed work to a colleague who knew it well. The last move is a fitting continuation of the first: a change of seat, with plenty still to do.