John Senaldi is a former Founder, President and CEO with over 30 years of leadership experience in small through large companies spanning multiple industries.  He’s a seasoned executive with a strong track record of achieving profitability and growth by aligning and engaging organizations to the next level of performance, developing and coaching leaders, and optimizing strategies for existing and new products and services.  Instead of running businesses, he now focuses as a strategic advisor and business coach, leveraging his substantial “lived it” expertise to help CEOs of small to midsize companies accelerate business success.

His areas of expertise include: Business, New Product Development & Technology Strategies for successful growth and profitability, Leadership & Organizational Execution, Strategic Planning and Coaching.

Most recently, John was Founder and CEO of Freeslate, Inc., a $25M instrumentation business that he formed by taking a division of Symyx Technologies, Inc. private by leading a management buyout (MBO).  At Freeslate, John restructured, pivoted and repositioned the business for growth, culminating in sale to a venture-backed company with >25x return to shareholders.

Before Freeslate, John ran a $150M instrument and consumable business for Bio-Rad Labs, growing the business >10% annually while turning it around to profitability.  Earlier, as VP/General Manager, John led a startup business within Molecular Devices Corp (MDC) by acquiring and developing several technologies into products, ramping up the organization and bringing the products to market.  John’s prior role at MDC was VP of Worldwide Marketing, where he was responsible for Strategic Planning and Marketing/Product Management.  Through each of these experiences, John was either facilitating, heavily engaged with or driving the strategic planning process to make effective decisions.  Typically, his strategic planning expertise was applied to helping growing organizations make effective portfolio investment/initiative decisions that fit for strategy, financial expectations, as well as risk and timing optimization.

John’s early career roles provide him with a unique perspective, having successfully delivered business results while holding leadership positions in diverse functions (engineering, marketing, business development, R&D, manufacturing) at Becton Dickinson and General Electric.  Such experiences provide him with a rare combination of both the strategic skills to develop comprehensive growth strategies and the tactical knowledge how to drive operational results.

John holds an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (HBS), an MS in Electronics Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and a BS in Engineering from Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

In his spare time, John volunteers for several non-profit organizations focused on social causes, providing strategy consulting through the HBS Community Partners program in San Francisco.  He also loves to ski and sail.  John, his wife Julie, and their two daughters live in the San Francisco Bay Area.