Dan Waldschmidt
Most growth plans assume the same playbook that built the business will scale it. It rarely does. Leaders inherit revenue targets that demand a different sales motion, a sharper customer thesis, and a willingness to rebuild commercial functions while the quarter is already running.
Dan Waldschmidt is a turnaround CEO and author of Edgy Conversations who helps leadership teams rebuild commercial performance when conventional growth strategy stops working.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dan Waldschmidt
- He has run the turnaround himself. As CRO then CEO of Panzura, he led 150% year-on-year customer base growth and 288% three-year revenue expansion, which gives the speaking material a current operator’s authority.
- The Edgy Conversations thesis is research-based, drawing on 1,000 case studies of outlier performers across business, science, and sport, and gives audiences a defensible argument for unconventional commercial choices.
- He speaks credibly to enterprise technology buyers. The Panzura mandate sits in hybrid cloud storage and ransomware resilience, which makes him useful for boards balancing growth ambition with infrastructure risk.
- His work travels well from sales kickoffs to executive offsites because the same framework is applied to revenue, talent, and brand positioning.
- The voice is direct and confrontational by design. Senior teams that are tired of motivational keynotes tend to respond to a speaker willing to name what is not working in the room.
Biography highlights
- Chief Executive Officer of Panzura, appointed January 2024, having joined as reFounder and Chief Revenue Officer in 2020.
- Author of Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success, published 2014.
- Founder of Waldschmidt Partners International, a strategy consultancy active 2010 to 2018.
- Wall Street Journal listed his Edgy Conversations blog among the top sales blogs online.
- Contributor at Entrepreneur.com; featured in Forbes, CNBC, and Business Insider.
- Ultra-endurance athlete with multiple 100-mile race finishes, including the Everest Marathon course.
Biography
The hardest part of a turnaround is not the diagnosis. It is doing the work while the business is still running. Revenue targets do not pause for restructuring, customers do not wait for a refreshed value proposition, and the sales team needs a story to tell on Monday morning. Most strategy advice does not survive contact with that pressure.
Dan Waldschmidt’s career has been built inside that pressure. At Panzura, the hybrid cloud storage company, he joined in 2020 as reFounder and Chief Revenue Officer, rebuilt the commercial engine, and was appointed CEO in January 2024. The published numbers, 150% year-on-year customer base growth, 288% three-year revenue expansion, 125% net retention, and Inc. 5000 recognition, came from a deliberate repositioning into the enterprise market and a tightening of the sales motion around ransomware resilience and data security.
The intellectual backbone is Edgy Conversations, his book based on the stories of 1,000 outlier performers across business, science, mathematics, and sport. The argument is that breakthrough commercial outcomes come from a small number of unfashionable behaviours: deliberate focus, willingness to refuse the conventional path, and a narrow definition of what counts as success. Before Panzura, he ran Waldschmidt Partners International, advising leadership teams on revenue strategy, and his columns and blog have been cited by the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur.com.
For senior buyers, the practical relevance is the combination of operator and author. The frameworks are not abstract. They are the same frameworks he is currently applying to a public-stage enterprise technology business with real customers and real quarterly numbers.
Key speaking topics
- Revenue turnaround and commercial repositioning
- Sales transformation in enterprise technology
- High-performance behaviour in commercial teams
- Brand and category differentiation under pressure
- AI and data security as growth narratives
- Leadership of restructured commercial functions
Ideal for
- Chief Revenue Officers and sales leadership teams resetting commercial strategy
- CEOs and boards navigating a turnaround or strategic repositioning
- Founders and scale-up leadership teams in enterprise technology
- Sales kickoffs, partner summits, and executive offsites where the audience is operators rather than observers
Audience outcomes
- A direct read on which commercial behaviours predict outlier results and which do not
- A framework for tightening sales motion and customer focus during a strategy reset
- Specific operating examples from a current enterprise technology turnaround
- Language for repositioning a business in a contested category
- A challenge to the default assumption that incremental change will deliver step-change growth
Talks
Built on the research behind Edgy Conversations, this talk lays out the six behaviours that separate outlier performers from the rest of the field.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that 1,000 outlier case studies have in common across business, sport, and science
- How focus, refusal, and a narrow definition of success translate into commercial outcomes
- Why high performance is a function of operating discipline, not personality or talent