Six years as CFO. A rebrand from Datical to Liquibase. Then the board asked her to run the whole thing. She said yes and kept the finance discipline.
The CEO in the frame she chose - straight on, no props, the software company she runs behind her in every direction.
Liquibase makes the software that engineers use to change databases without breaking them, which is a job most large organizations do dozens of times a day and would prefer to keep quiet about. Patti Soch runs Liquibase. She joined in 2016 as Chief Financial Officer, back when the company was called Datical and the market for database DevOps was mostly a slide in someone's investor deck. She became CEO in 2022. In between, the company changed its name, adopted the identity of the open-source project it commercializes, and kept selling to banks and government agencies that would rather not talk about their release pipelines in public.
The category she works in is legibly boring - schema migrations, change scripts, drift detection, policy checks - and load-bearing for anyone whose Tuesday morning depends on a healthy production database. Liquibase's open-source project supports 60-plus databases. The enterprise product wraps compliance reporting, audit trails, and policy enforcement around it. That is the pitch. Soch is the one delivering it to boards, to buyers, and to a roughly 70-person company whose engineering center of gravity sits partly in Austin and partly in Ukraine.
Soch is a UT-Arlington accounting graduate with an MBA from SMU, which is a very Texas set of credentials. Her first job out of school was as an accountant at a venture-backed software company. Two CFOs came and went while she was there. When the second one left, the board pulled her in and made her Vice President of Finance. She was 26. That story gets told in almost every profile of her, and she seems fine with it, in part because the punchline is that the board was right.
The next twenty years read like a compressed history of Austin enterprise software. Phurnace Software, where she ran finance, was acquired by BMC. Gazzang, where she ran finance, was acquired by Cloudera. There was a stop at Tango Health as VP of Finance. Then Datical, in 2016, as CFO. The pattern is that finance chiefs at venture-backed companies either preside over an exit or preside over a pivot, and Soch had done both by the time Datical asked her to join.
In 2020 the company renamed itself Liquibase, which had been the name of the open-source project the founders started around 2006. Adopting the OSS name was a strategic choice - developers already knew the tool, and the community was the flywheel - but it also made the commercial pitch more direct. The company sells the enterprise edition of the thing developers already download. Soch, as CFO, sat through the numbers side of that transition: rebrand costs, sales pipeline reset, category education spend. When she took the CEO seat in 2022, the rebrand was done and the work of turning developer affection into enterprise contracts was fully hers.
In late 2024 Soch flew to Lviv, Ukraine, with Liquibase's VP of Marketing Kristyl Gomes to visit the company's Ukrainian teammates. Liquibase does engineering work with SoftServe out of Ukraine, and the war had turned remote support into a slack channel of well-wishes. Soch went in person. Her one public sentence about it - that she was moved by the ability to find joy in the face of adversity - is the sort of thing CEOs write when the trip is real and not a photo op. The trip itself is the argument. It also fits a pattern she is candid about in interviews: transparency, sometimes to a fault, and a belief that showing up beats sending a memo.
Soch describes her leadership approach in two phrases that on their own sound like corporate throat-clearing but together form a specific operating stance: inclusive leadership and balancing empathy with high performance. She has said, in an April 2025 interview, that the moments that shaped her were the ones that taught her to build teams where every perspective got a hearing. Read next to her early career - the young woman promoted over an executive vacuum at 26 - the lesson is not abstract. She has been in the room where a team of people who all looked and thought the same way ran a finance function into the ground twice. She notices the pattern.
The company she runs sits between developers, DBAs, security officers, and auditors, none of whom love each other. Liquibase's product exists precisely because those constituencies have a hard time agreeing on how database changes should ship. Soch's leadership pitch - empathy, transparency, high standards - is a decent match for the go-to-market. You cannot sell database governance to a bank without walking the buyer through why you made every implementation choice you made. She over-communicates as a matter of preference, and her market rewards it.
Liquibase raised a $10M Series C in February 2019, bringing total funding to about $27M. Since then the company has stayed relatively quiet on the round-announcement circuit, which for a CFO-turned-CEO is either restraint or preference or both. Reported revenue sits in the single-digit millions, employee count around 71, and the customer list leans public sector, financial services, and enterprise IT. That is a growth-stage software company that is not chasing a headline valuation; it is chasing renewals and expansions from customers who cannot afford to break their databases.
Database change management is a small niche until you consider that every company running a modern application changes its database. Liquibase is one of two names that come up in most technical evaluations. The other one is proprietary. Soch's bet - which is really the company's bet, but she carries it - is that the open-source project's community is a durable moat. If a developer at a bank has been using Liquibase for eight years to version-control her schema, the enterprise sales conversation starts on the same side of the table.
Soch is not a founder. She did not write the SQL parsers Liquibase has patents on. She spent her first two decades as the finance operator who cleaned up other people's messes and helped shepherd companies to acquisition. What she is doing now is running a company through the middle of its category - past the point where the pitch was novel, before the point where a bigger acquirer would call. That is a very specific job, and one CFOs are underrated at.
Her Twitter handle still points to @Datical - the company's pre-2020 name.
She sits on the advisory board of the CFO Leadership Council.
Two of the companies where she ran finance were acquired - by BMC and Cloudera.
She holds two Texas degrees - UT-Arlington for accounting and SMU for the MBA.
She has been at Liquibase since it was Datical - nine-plus years, one company, two job titles.
She uses the phrase transparency to a fault to describe herself in leadership interviews.
"Moments like that taught me the importance of building inclusive leadership teams - ones where every perspective is accounted for."
"We want to be an organization that delivers results, but we also want to be one that values people. We set high standards because our customers depend on us to deliver."
"During my recent visit to Ukraine, I gained a deeper understanding of Ukrainian culture. I was truly moved by their resilience, determination, and ability to find joy even in the face of adversity."