This post contains abridged excerpts of a conversation with serial entrepreneur Stuart McClure, CEO of two companies, Wethos.ai (revolutionizing the future of work) and Qwiet.ai (ending cyberattacks by securing code). Stuart was a founder of Foundstone (vulnerability assessment company acquired by McAfee) and Cylance (AI-powered cyberattack prevention company acquired by Blackberry). Read on to learn Stuart's thoughts on:
- Rethinking hiring and understanding how new hires fit an organization
- Aligning culture inside a company
- Rethinking high performing teams
At both Foundstone and Cylance what was the growth curve in terms of hiring? When you are hiring rapidly how do you then make sure that you are hiring the right people for the right role at the right time?
Stu: At Cylance we went from zero in product revenue to $100 million ARR in two years and two months. In that time frame, in a seven-month period in there, we went from 200 employees to 800 employees.
In seven months we hired 600 people, and so we sourced them, recruited them, onboarded them, enabled them, et cetera. How many mistakes do you think we made in that process?
And I don't mean to say it was a mistake in hiring this person or that person. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that an individual’s talents and skills were misplaced inside of the existing infrastructure. They were never going to be successful in certain cases and we didn't have the insight and the quantitative measure.
That motivated me to start Wethos.ai. Human beings are incredibly complex and complicated, but at the end of the day, we all boil down into incredibly pattern-driven behaviors that are highly predictable.
The problem is you have to be able to measure as many of these characteristics as humanly possible to get the highest predictability out of that human machine. That's what I'm really keen to do as I go forward in my career: to quantify both, traits and cognitive biases, in a way that allows us to predict success, failure or struggle in a specific position, in a specific company. I'm just passionate about it.
Can that objectivity be brought to defining and capturing the traits of a person? Because humans are very subjective in nature. How can you codify people in that sense?
Stu: We all are very pattern driven. We see the world based on our perception and our constructs and by that makes it very, very predictable.
But the problem is we don't have the data to predict it, and it's the collection of the data which is the most important. So to your question, which is how do you provide an objective measure onto human behavior?
There's multiple ways to measure this. There's the direct measure, which is asking you questions, self-report, self-assessment.
Another way is to simply watch your behavior, how you type, what you type, what you do, how you do it. You can measure all of that. Third is to ask peers around you, people that know you well, e.g., what's Rahul like working with them? They have a subjective measure of your objective measure.
And then there's public-private data. What can we collect on Rahul that'll tell us things about him, e.g., social media? You bring all those things together and you have an incredibly powerful way to determine and predict almost well, how will Rahul act in this setting, in this project with this individual?
If we can teach a computer, teach a system to learn about the traits and biases, it is really, really fascinating.
We are all driven by the biases day in and day out. They're invisible to us. We rarely think about them, much less quantifying.
Yet they drive us every day, invisibly and consciously, and we're bound to them. We're almost slaves to them, in fact. We really have to start to make ourselves aware of these biases.
I tend to have what I call entrepreneur bias. I found success in a couple of things, I think I can make anything successful. That's just not true, but that's what I think more times than not.
That's an incorrect bias. You should at a minimum be aware of it and, ideally, feed that into your decision making system. There's countless others. There's Dunning Kruger effect, or spotlight bias. There are 200 documented cognitive biases that drive us unconsciously all the time. What if you can measure all that? What if you can measure the 200 plus professional traits that make you successful at work. To me, that is the next generation of the workplace.
When it comes to hiring, a lot of times we make decisions based upon very short interactions and short amount of data. How do you get that hiring decision right?
Stu: You spend so little time interviewing somebody, and you're pulling basically from your old experiences, which come from old biases that you've built over time. It largely boils down to, “Hey, is Rahul a good guy? Is he a good guy? All right, let's hire him.” What does that mean he's a good guy or she's a good gal?
We have no way of quantifying that today, but it's absolutely possible. But we have to put a lot of energy and effort into that quantification and measurability and then track it over time. I think that’s the forefront of machine learning on the predictive side, to apply it to human behavior.
Once you hire somebody, then we’re asking, why aren't they working out? We do a 360, we do a nine box, we do the annual reviews, and then you're stuck with people that are really not fitting in. They're just not working out and you need to take action. But you have no way to explain it. You're just like, “Look, it's not working out”; “We got to let you go”; or “The position you're in just doesn't work.”
There's no way to actually help people. Imagine going to somebody that's really not working out and saying, “Look, it's not working out, but that's because you're here. You go across the street to our competitor and you will thrive.”
I can't say how many times at Cylance we would let somebody go because they weren't working out for us. They would go to a competitor and they were rock stars. So was it that they weren't good, or was it that they weren't good at Cylance?
They weren't good at Cylance because of the way our culture was, the way our biases were aligned, the way our traits were aligned. It just didn't align well, and there's nothing wrong with it, it's just different. You just want to find higher alignment.
Jim Collins talks about that in his book Good to Great. He says you got to have the right people in the right seat on the bus. I think you're referring to that, that you may not be in the right seat in the right bus at the right time.
Stu:That's exactly it. That's what you want to find, but you need a system to do it. You need to find a system, a way of measuring that can be applied to everybody, that allows for us to almost plot you on a graph. So we know where are you aligned, where's the overlap? Here's the company and here's you. Ah, okay, these positions inside this company would be great for you, but not those other ones, not these ones here, so you don't want to put them in that spot.
It's not based on hard skills. It's not like, well, he's a good programmer, she's great with numbers. No, no, no, that's a whole other beast.
It's really about whether we are culturally aligning you to be successful inside of a project, inside of a team, inside of an organization? That is the future.
How do you define culture? When you're starting a company, how do you have a vision for what kind of company you want to build?
Stu: The vision has to start first, for sure. Then you build the culture around it. I've always set my visions to be very big, like prevent 100% of cyber attacks. Most people look at that and be like, “You're just crazy. There's no such thing as 100%, much less can you prevent the stuff?” But I usually set them pretty big.
You set a big, big vision so that people know that we have a lot of work to do and there's a lot of ground to make up.
But then you start to define the culture that makes up that vision and mission, and then ensuring that you hire and align continuously to that culture. Now, you can define the culture all you want, but I guarantee you have hundreds of cultures in your organization. Just because you, at the top, say this is how it is, the likelihood of 100% of that lower level getting aligned is very slim. It falls off.
And then, all of a sudden, you just have dozens and dozens and dozens of individual cultures. You could have a culture by individual pairings on a team. Aligning of all of these cultures is the Holy Grail. That's what CEOs strive for their whole careers to align everybody to the same mission.
It's this alignment of all these cultures, that's why we call this the ethos of “we”, the culture of “we”. So we found a new term and a new company called Wethos that does exactly this.
We quantify human traits and behaviors as well as cognitive biases, to measure individuals in specific projects and specific teams and aligning all of the cultures in an organization. If you can do that, you're getting the most out of every individual and every team and you're getting the highest efficiency, effectiveness and high performance that you can.
What you're saying here is you're codifying what it means to be a high performing team based upon the individual behavioral assessment.
Stu:Yes, and you need the ability to subjectively define high performing, because you might have a company where they believe everybody's got to be the same and that's the way we high perform. Now we believe a fully diversified, cognitively diversified team is the most high performing potential team.
You now have the ingredients to success. Now whether or not you orchestrate those ingredients into a successful outcome is really based on execution. But we can give you the roadmap.
By measuring qualities of individuals, you can ultimately define the best successful team makeup for your organization or for your company. To me that is the future of work.
Going back to those two exits, Foundstone getting acquired by McAfee, Cylance getting acquired by Blackberry, going from a startup into a large company. How do you protect the hustle?
Stu: I like the way you put that, protect the hustle. It's really hard. That leads me to a book I'm reading right now called Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins. The whole premise behind it is the historical reference to burning the boats and how meaningful it is to success. If there's always a plan B, the path of least resistance is often pursued. If there's no plan B, the only way forward is through. Then you're going to go through.
I do believe there is something very powerful about that. When you go into a large company where there's always plan B, I mean you're pretty set. You know your paycheck does not depend on this week's performance or next week’s or on the week after. So how much do you hustle? Then hustle has to be innate in you. It's not a trait that can be generated.
It's just either it is in you or not. That makes it very challenging. The only way I've tried to do it and was again centering around that mission and making sure that you align the individuals that you're partnering with to that mission, that they believe the same way. You can align the individual to the outcome that you want and you have a powerful formula.
Thank you so much for taking the time, Stu. I really appreciated this was such a fascinating conversation.
Stu: Thanks so much. Take care.
You can listen or watch the full conversation in which Stu provides more details about the Wethos dimensions of behavioral assessment and leveraging AI for high performing teams, as well as his thoughts on AI in cybersecurity.
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