When Laurie Schultz led Galvanize to a landmark US$1B sale in 2021, the outcome was widely seen as a capstone moment—proof that a long, disciplined transformation had worked. But listening to Schultz today, it’s clear she doesn’t frame that chapter as an ending at all. It’s reference material.

In a recent fireside chat with The51’s Shelley Kuipers at Road to the Summit, Schultz returned not to celebratory exit math, but to something far more instructive: how equity, values, and long-term thinking actually compound over time—and why scale, not visibility, is the real unfinished work for women in business.

One of Schultz’s earliest leadership lessons came long before Galvanize—back in 1989, at TELUS (then AGT), when she helped launch caller ID in Alberta. The rollout was wildly successful—and immediately problematic. Women’s shelters, emergency services, and doctors flagged serious privacy concerns almost overnight.

The fix—working with regulators to invent call blocking—became a formative moment.
“You can have values and valuation at the same time,” Schultz said. “And when you’re not sure what to do, just do the right thing.”

That principle has quietly shaped her entire career, from governance software to how she now deploys capital as a board member and investor.

At Galvanize, equity wasn’t a retention perk. It was infrastructure.

When Schultz joined in 2011, the company—then still called ACL—was seen by many as a legacy tech laggard. Customers were leaving. Talent churn was real. But one thing proved decisive: equity was broadly distributed, and then intentionally re-explained.

Every employee had stock options. Almost no one cared—until leadership rebuilt the story around them.

What changed wasn’t just access to ownership, but authorship. Employees were shown, concretely, how their individual work moved the company toward its goal. Equity stopped being abstract and became causal.

“That’s what created the movement,” Schultz explained. “Not me negotiating equity as CEO—but sharing it, and making it meaningful.”

The result is well-known: a company valued at roughly US$50M when she arrived sold a decade later to Diligent at a multibillion-dollar valuation, with option holders paid out along the way.

Schultz is unusually explicit about applying business discipline to personal decision-making. In her early 30s, she built what she calls a “Double Five” personal model—mapping five- and ten-year outcomes and forcing herself to reconcile ambition with reality.

She still uses it.

The point isn’t financial optimization for its own sake. It’s agency. “We obsess over strategy and financial planning at work,” she said. “But at home, many leaders do none of it.”

Her approach was scrappy, not flashy: disciplined saving, modest investing, patience over miracles. Galvanize may look like a lucky outlier in hindsight, but Schultz is clear—luck only mattered because the groundwork had already been laid.

Asked about risk—especially for women navigating equity-heavy paths—Schultz pushed back on the idea that boldness requires recklessness.

She was often the primary breadwinner. She planned obsessively. She didn’t expect shortcuts.

Risk, in her framing, isn’t about bravado. It’s about clarity: knowing what you’re working toward, and choosing opportunities that align with that trajectory—even if it takes longer to get there.

“You can’t force someone to give you equity,” she noted. “But you can choose not to work for them.”

Perhaps the most pointed moment of the conversation came near the end. Schultz cited a stark statistic: while roughly one in five founders are now women, only about 2.4% of companies generating more than $20M in revenue are female-led.

For Schultz, representation is no longer the hardest problem. Scale is.

That lens now guides how she invests her time and capital—favoring opportunities where she can be directly involved, values-aligned, and influential over outcomes. Boards, mentorship, and eventually a family foundation focused on the underdog are all part of that arc.

Her personal mission remains unchanged: to personally and meaningfully impact one million people. Not through visibility. Through proximity.

Years ago, Schultz popularized a simple daily question inside Galvanize: What’s my Picasso for today?—the one thing that truly matters, and the rest you forgive yourself for not finishing.

It’s telling that, post-exit, the question still applies. The canvas is larger now. The stakes are different. But the focus remains the same.

For Schultz, leadership was never about the moment of arrival. It was about building systems—personal and professional—that make the next chapter inevitable.