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Finance is where I’ve always wanted to be.
Even when I was young, it was obvious. If you asked my high school friends what career I would end up in, they would have said, “David went into accounting and finance? Big shock.”
It wasn’t because I dreamed of becoming an accountant. It was because I was fascinated by how businesses actually worked.
My father owned a small costume jewelry company. I couldn’t have cared less about the jewelry itself, but I was captivated by everything happening behind the scenes. I watched him manage costs, sales, inventory, and people. Somehow, a simple product became a business that supported our family and created jobs for others.
Long before I knew words like “profitability” or “monetization,” I understood that there was something remarkable about turning an idea into a sustainable business. Somewhere along the way, the numbers became my language.
That curiosity has stayed with me throughout my career.
From auditing at Deloitte to serving as a consulting CFO and eventually leading finance organizations across healthcare and biotech, I’ve had the opportunity to see businesses at every stage of growth. Looking back, though, the biggest lessons I’ve learned haven’t really been about accounting.
They’ve been about people.
The Best Companies Always Put People First
One thing has been remarkably consistent throughout my career. The organizations that perform the best are the ones that treat people well.
I saw it in my father’s business. I saw it while working with clients as a consulting CFO. I’ve seen it leading finance teams in healthcare. And I see it every day at ImaginAb.
You can build sophisticated financial models. You can implement better systems. You can optimize every process imaginable. But none of it matters if you don’t surround yourself with smart, ethical people who challenge each other to do better.
That’s become one of the guiding principles of my career. Work with people who have high moral standards. Work with people who make you think differently. Work with people who are smarter than you.
I’ve never found a better formula.
Finding Purpose in Healthcare
My career naturally evolved from public accounting into CFO roles at healthcare companies, including HemaCare Corporation and ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, before I joined ImaginAb.
Healthcare gave finance a different meaning for me.
At ImaginAb, we’re developing innovative approaches in immuno-oncology and radiopharmaceuticals with the goal of improving how cancer is diagnosed and treated. Everyone has been touched by cancer in some way. That perspective changes how you think about your work.
Like anyone, I have difficult days. Budgets don’t always cooperate. Markets change. Plans evolve. But even on the toughest days, I can remind myself that what we’re working toward has the potential to improve people’s lives. That makes the challenges worthwhile.
When I joined ImaginAb in 2019, part of my role was bringing more biotech expertise into the finance organization. Understanding clinical trials wasn’t just helpful—it was essential.
Finance couldn’t simply report on what had already happened. We needed to understand how clinical development worked, what each milestone meant, how different trial designs affected costs, and how those decisions translated into financial strategy. That allowed me to have meaningful conversations with our scientific and operational leaders because I could speak their language.
Just as importantly, I was fortunate to work alongside an exceptional controller. She came without a biotech background, but together we combined our strengths and built a finance organization that could support the company’s growth.
Adapting Through Change, One Process at a Time
In my seven years at ImaginAb, we’ve experienced numerous changes.
I joined the company in 2019. Months later, the world shut down. Like everyone else, we suddenly had to figure out how to keep the business running remotely. None of us predicted it. We simply adapted.
One of the most important decisions we made during that period was automating our accounts payable process.
Before then, invoices were moving through endless email chains. Approvals got buried. People were chasing signatures. Payments became unnecessarily difficult simply because everyone was working from home. Automation removed that friction almost overnight.
As the company expanded internationally, opened a UK subsidiary, grew our headcount, and managed suppliers across multiple countries and currencies, those automated workflows became even more valuable. They helped us scale without creating unnecessary administrative burden.
AI Is Creating an Entirely New Opportunity
Automation solved one set of problems. AI is solving another.
The first wave of AI was useful, but relatively simple. We learned how to summarize documents, draft emails, and answer questions more quickly.
That’s no longer the exciting part. Today, I’m much more interested in how AI can actively participate in solving complex business problems.
Recently, I needed to build a sophisticated Excel model with multiple input variables and sensitivity analyses. Instead of building it from scratch, I described exactly what I wanted, and within minutes, I had a model that was essentially complete. During a software conversion that became far more complicated than expected, AI helped us reconcile transactions, identify inconsistencies, and isolate errors that would have taken hours to uncover manually.
My controller and I could have done the work ourselves without AI, but it would have taken much longer.
We’re seeing similar progress in our finance systems as well. AI-powered invoice capture extracts data automatically, while intelligent approval routing ensures invoices reach the right people without the endless email follow-up that once consumed significant time every week.
The real challenge now isn’t learning how to use AI. It’s asking better questions: How do we apply these tools to solve bigger problems? How do we create more value for our organizations? How do we improve people’s lives?
Anyone still thinking of AI as an email-writing assistant or a way to summarize complicated documents is only seeing a small fraction of what’s possible.
The Company You Keep Matters Most
If there’s one lesson I’d pass along after decades in finance, it has very little to do with accounting.
Choose the people you work with carefully and find organizations that treat people well. Surround yourself with people who are ethical, curious, and willing to challenge your thinking.
One of the reasons I enjoy working in biotech is that I’m surrounded by people who are extraordinarily smart. Every day, I work with colleagues who know things I don’t know. They push me to think differently, ask better questions, and become better at what I do.
I’ve found that to be true throughout my career.
Technology will continue to evolve. AI will become more capable. Finance will undoubtedly look very different ten years from now than it does today. But the fundamentals won’t change. Great businesses are still built by great people.
The numbers may have drawn me into finance all those years ago. The people are what have kept me here.
