Jonathan Waldstreicher had a fairly specific idea of his next chief financial officer. Older. Experienced. Near the end of a career. Someone with a temperament and biography sufficiently different from his own to balance the room. He even supplied the recruiter with a hair requirement. The imagined candidate was bald.
Then Steven Anheier arrived and spoiled the specification. He was almost exactly Waldstreicher’s age: one month older. Both had young children and strong family attachments. They went skiing together and discovered that even their abilities on the slopes matched. The search for a counterweight had produced something closer to a double.
Waldstreicher hired him. In his telling, Anheier became the person he turned to at both ends of a difficult conversation, working alongside him late and through weekends. His place among the founder’s favorite phone contacts came immediately after the family. Waldstreicher preferred introducing him as a partner. An organizational chart could describe the reporting line; it would struggle to explain the phone. ↗
A career with several points of entry
Before the founder titles, there was economics. Waldstreicher studied at Brandeis University, earning his bachelor’s degree in 2005. He went on to Tufts, where he earned both an MD and an MBA in 2010. The combination put two different kinds of professional preparation on the same résumé.
The sequence matters because his working life has crossed the boundary between evaluating companies and building them. Before his graduate studies, he worked in equity research at Bear Stearns. At Johnson & Johnson, he began as an associate director in the Corporate Office of Science & Technology and later became a director in R&D.
He subsequently joined Apple Tree Partners, where he was a partner. That meant spending time on the capital side of the table as well as the operating side. A founder asking for money and an investor deciding where it should go have different immediate problems. Waldstreicher’s career has given him experience of both positions. The later company-building years grew out of that unusually varied apprenticeship. ↗
The internship that kept introducing people
One of his early breaks began with an ordinary academic requirement: he needed a summer internship for his MBA. He contacted Avi Goldberg, who brought him into GreatPoint Ventures. There he worked on analysis connected with a startup founded by Brian Freeman.
Freeman subsequently took him to a reception where Stryker was opening a business development office. Waldstreicher met David Neustaedter. A few months later, he asked Neustaedter about doing an MBA research project, which he undertook with classmate Nainesh Parikh. When he later interviewed for a Johnson & Johnson fellowship, that Stryker experience was precisely the sort of preparation the interviewer wanted.
Years afterward, a Saturday-night text from Goldberg prompted Waldstreicher to revisit the chain of introductions. The reunion included their friend Ari Katz. His advice to students was concrete: ask for projects. A small assignment gives someone a reason to work with you. The career benefit may arrive several introductions later, long after the original internship has disappeared beneath newer entries on the résumé. ↗
A hiring conversation on the way to the airport
Deborah Sheffield’s move into the company had a different rhythm. She began consulting in 2016 and worked on its quality system. By the time Waldstreicher wanted her full time, she already had a successful consulting practice serving several companies.
He chose an Uber ride to San Francisco’s airport to make the request. The trip from the office took about twenty minutes. A confined space, a definite destination, and a question that could change the company: recruitment sometimes dispenses with the conference room.
Sheffield had already decided. She had been reducing work for other clients and had a January start in mind before he asked. She joined full time in 2018 and became chief regulatory officer. Waldstreicher later described her as an architect and strategist within the business.
The amusing part is the timing. He had been preparing to persuade someone who had quietly been preparing to say yes. In this particular hiring process, the prospective employee was a step ahead of the chief executive. ↗
The company names catch up
The corporate history has its own changes of arrangement. Waldstreicher founded Gala Therapeutics in 2015 and Galaxy Medical in 2020. In 2022 those businesses came together with Galvanize. The name that now anchors his biography arrived after years of work under other names.
The September 2022 transaction also brought a $100 million financing led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. ATP had backed the businesses before the combination. The financing widened the investor group while bringing the operations together.
Such announcements tend to reduce a long period to a round number and a date. The number is useful, but it belongs to the company’s financing history. The human story runs alongside it: people who joined before the combined business existed, projects that carried across its names, and relationships that had to continue through the rearrangement. For Waldstreicher, the public milestone came after an extended period of building. The press announcement gave that work a single, readily legible moment. ↗
A tower, a screen, and a roomful of noise
Waldstreicher’s own account of the financing celebration supplied a less formal image. After the announcement, the company appeared on the Nasdaq Tower. He arranged a surprise Zoom call with the team at headquarters in San Carlos and remembered the roar that came back.
The public display and the office response occupied opposite ends of the same celebration. One was enormous and visible to strangers. The other mattered because the people making the noise knew what had gone into the announcement.
He credited Michelle Machuca, Alexandra DuPont, Sally Jacob, and Valerie Lind for making the occasion happen. Even in a celebratory selfie, the acknowledgments were specific. Someone had arranged the appearance, organized the surprise, and connected the two locations.
A financing round can be represented by a number in a spreadsheet. Here it also produced a shared memory: a founder outside, a team inside, and a video connection carrying the response between them. It is an unusually cheerful use of a work call. ↗
“The roar from our HQ in San Carlos was memorable.”Jonathan Waldstreicher, on the 2022 celebration
Someone has to guard the lunch
His attention to the work around an event appears elsewhere. After an August conference, Waldstreicher described more than 120 current and prospective customers attending a dinner or a technology suite session. Then he moved through the preparations that made those encounters possible.
Rooms needed booking. Messages needed refinement. Printed material, signage, booth deliveries, social posts, menus, and assigned jobs all had to arrive in the right order. Lunch had to be ordered and, in his parenthetical addition, guarded. Event management apparently includes defending the sandwiches.
He thanked Machuca and team members Erin P., Ian Funk, and Brian Carlson. The detail gives the acknowledgment its weight. The work is recognizable to anyone who has stood in an event room while something essential was still in transit.
There is a practical view of leadership in that list. The public encounter depends on months of coordination. Naming those tasks makes the contribution visible. The founder gets the microphone; the microphone is useful because other people have arranged a room in which someone wants to listen. ↗
Eight hours with someone who had been there
Waldstreicher also made room for another executive’s experience. During several days at Galvanize’s Redwood City headquarters, the leadership team worked with executive chairman Doug Godshall. Waldstreicher was pleased that Godshall could give the company more time after Shockwave Medical’s sale to Johnson & Johnson.
They examined the practical parts of growing a business, including sales and product development. Functional leaders compared the earlier company’s experience with their own circumstances and considered where their approaches needed adjustment.
What Waldstreicher remembered was the value of spending eight hours together as a team. His response to Godshall was gratitude for the time. The encounter belongs in the same story as the student asking for a project: even after becoming the executive in charge, he continued looking for people whose experience could sharpen his own.
The scale of the business had changed. So had the seniority of the room. The willingness to sit down, examine somebody else’s decisions, and carry useful ideas back into the work remained part of the method. ↗
Partnership, with a dress code complication
Some of his working relationships produced smaller logistical challenges. On a Southern California trip, Waldstreicher admired colleague Matt Grabner’s trousers. Grabner recommended them. Waldstreicher doubted the fit because the beach volleyball player stood about nine inches taller than he did.
The trousers worked. He bought several pairs in different colors. Future trips then required coordination so they would avoid turning up in identical clothes. It is a pleasantly modest executive problem: the recommendation has succeeded a little too thoroughly.
Other partnerships needed a change of setting. After working weekly with Energenx Medical’s Zhengrong Zhou for two and a half years, Waldstreicher finally met him in person during a December visit. They went to a San Jose Sharks game.
The two stories occupy different corners of a working life, but both make room for ordinary company. A relationship conducted through meetings can acquire a hockey game. A trip with a colleague can produce a wardrobe consultation. His recollections leave those details in the picture. ↗
The hockey outing: Waldstreicher’s account of meeting Zhengrong Zhou.
Back to the beginning, with experience
In February 2026, Waldstreicher announced that he was moving on after the long company-building chapter at Galvanize. He described a new CEO role at a stealth startup in Central New Jersey and an operating partner position at Pierpoint Capital, working with Jarret Fass and Richard Krupp.
The hiring list for the new venture was straightforward: R&D, quality, operations, finance, and accounting. These are the functions a founder must assemble to turn an intention into a functioning organization. After years of executive experience, he was again recruiting across the business.
His LinkedIn introduction offers a compact statement of preference: “I love starting from nothing and building relentlessly.” The new roles put that preference back to work. There is another company to build and another set of people to find.
Perhaps the useful lesson from his earlier hiring experience is to leave the job description some breathing room. Anheier had already demonstrated how easily the right colleague could defeat an elaborate specification. This time, too, the interesting part will be who turns up. ↗