CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When Jesse Waldron describes Thyme Care’s work, he begins with the patient experience. Cancer patients, he explains, are often thrust into a healthcare system that can feel overwhelming both financially and emotionally.
That reality sits at the center of Thyme Care’s mission. As an oncology care navigation company, Thyme Care helps patients move through their cancer journey while also partnering with health plans and oncology providers. The company works at the intersection of those relationships, helping coordinate care and improve outcomes.
Waldron tells us that Thyme Care partners first with health plans, which identify members undergoing active cancer treatment. From there, the company works directly with patients and collaborates with oncology practices and health systems delivering care. The goal is to help patients navigate treatment while helping health plans manage rising oncology costs.
A key part of that model is Thyme Care’s virtual care team. The organization employs approximately 550 nurses, social workers, and health navigators, Waldron tells us. Those professionals support patients between appointments, helping ensure they stay on track with medications, receive timely care, and have access to guidance when questions arise.
The company’s virtual approach also expands its reach beyond major population centers. Thyme Care serves patients across the United States, including rural communities where access to large academic medical centers may be limited, Waldron tells us. He points to community oncology practices in places such as rural Tennessee as examples of where the model can make a meaningful difference.
Today, Thyme Care serves more than 120,000 members actively undergoing their cancer journey, Waldron tells us.

Five weeks into her role as CFO of Catalant, Christina Spade is helping guide a company that she believes is positioned for a different era of consulting.
Catalant was founded out of Harvard Business School in 2013 and began as an independent consultant matchmaking company, Spade tells us. Today, she describes the firm as a “Consulting 2.0” business built around agile, fit-for-purpose consulting designed to help organizations solve problems and create value more quickly.
The company’s evolution mirrors broader changes in the consulting industry. Independent consultants were often viewed skeptically a decade ago, Spade tells us. But as organizations sought greater efficiency during and after COVID, many finance leaders began looking for more flexible ways to access expertise.
That shift helped Catalant move beyond matching individual consultants with projects. The company now works with Fortune 500 organizations, assembling teams of experts tailored to specific business challenges, Spade tells us. Technology and AI play an increasingly important role, helping match consultants to projects and supporting consultants as they execute client work.
Spade’s strategic mindset is reflected in one of her favorite quotes from golfer Sam Snead: “Only play against par.” Rather than focusing primarily on competitors, she believes organizations should concentrate on the business problems they are uniquely positioned to solve.
That same philosophy informs her view of consulting economics. While billable hours remain important, Spade tells us that clients increasingly prefer outcome-based engagements. Success, she argues, should be measured by whether a project achieves its intended objectives, whether that means improving efficiency, strengthening customer understanding, or developing an executable AI strategy.

When David Forlizzi describes Salsify, he begins with a simple observation: “We all use it every day.” Unlike some of the highly technical software businesses where he previously spent his career, Salsify’s value proposition is visible to anyone who shops online.
Product content sits at the center of the company’s platform, Forlizzi tells us. Whether consumers are browsing a brand website, Amazon, or another online retailer, they rely on product descriptions, photos, videos, and specifications to make purchasing decisions. When that information is inconsistent or incomplete across channels, it can undermine confidence and influence buying behavior.
Salsify helps brands manage and distribute that content across major retailers and commerce platforms, Forlizzi tells us. By serving as a central hub for product experience management, the company enables brands to deliver a consistent message while helping retailers improve conversion rates through stronger product information.
As CFO, Forlizzi sees continuity in the company’s strategy. The fundamentals of the SaaS model—“land, expand and retain”—remain unchanged, he tells us. What has evolved over the last two to three years is a stronger emphasis on profitability as access to capital has become more challenging in a less certain economic environment.
At the same time, AI is reshaping the software landscape. Salsify has embraced that change, and Forlizzi tells us the company views its position positively.
When asked what drives success today, his answer begins with the product itself. More than 800 participants attended a recent user conference, primarily customers, and their enthusiasm was evident, Forlizzi tells us. Strong customer experiences, dedicated employees, and a shareholder base that includes both venture capital and private equity investors have helped create what he describes as a unique situation that is “working quite well.”

When Jaylene Kunze was asked to help rebuild a struggling subsidiary in the United Kingdom, she packed up her family and moved overseas with her nine-month-old daughter. The assignment was one more example of the type of challenge that would come to define her career. Rather than following a traditional finance path, Kunze gravitated toward what she calls “the fixer” role, stepping into situations where businesses needed operational repair, process improvement, or organizational change.
That mindset began to take shape through compliance and Sarbanes-Oxley work. While many viewed the documentation requirements as burdensome, Kunze tells us the process forced her to understand “the intersection of people, process, and systems” behind the numbers. It gave her visibility into how businesses actually operated and prepared her for increasingly complex leadership roles.
Her appetite for transformation became especially valuable when Tendril transitioned from venture-capital ownership to private-equity ownership. Kunze tells us the company ultimately combined six businesses into what became Uplight. As CFO, she oversaw diligence and integration while helping absorb five acquisitions within seven months.
The experience delivered lasting lessons. Culture, she tells us, matters more than many leaders expect. Different organizations often make decisions in entirely different ways, creating friction that financial models cannot predict. She also learned the cost of pushing too hard. Her team successfully completed aggressive integrations, but Kunze tells us she underestimated the human toll and would invest more heavily in staffing and support if given the opportunity again.
Today, those lessons continue to shape how she approaches leadership, growth, and change.

A conversation from years earlier still stands out to Bruno Annicq. While working at AOL, he was supporting business leaders and helping tell the story of the business through data and analytics. Then a senior executive, Holly Hess, approached him with an unexpected suggestion: Why not become the CFO of AOL’s platforms business?
Annicq’s reaction was immediate. “Wait, me? Are you sure?” he recalls. Until that moment, he had never envisioned himself as a finance leader. Hess, however, saw something different—a broad skill set developed through engineering studies, consulting at McKinsey, and operational leadership roles inside AOL.
That willingness to build capabilities outside a traditional finance path has shaped Annicq’s career. He studied engineering not because he intended to become an engineer, but because he believed the skills would prove useful later. After McKinsey, he deliberately sought operational experience, joining AOL during a period of significant change that included Verizon’s acquisition of the company and AOL’s involvement in the Yahoo acquisition.
Those experiences reinforced lessons about adaptability and uncertainty. They also sharpened a principle he continues to emphasize today: distinguishing the “important” from the “urgent.”
As CFO of WellHub, Annicq applies that mindset to forecasting and capital allocation. Seeking greater precision, his team reimagined its forecasting process using multiple models inspired by the Windy weather application. The effort improved forecasting accuracy from roughly 10% error to 2%, Annicq tells us. More recently, the team expanded those capabilities with AI-powered tools, enabling greater forecasting depth across markets and customer segments.
For Annicq, finance’s strategic value is clear: better information creates the confidence to invest, move faster, and help the business grow.