The Founders Sandbox

In this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, host Brenda McCabe sits down with Chris Daden, CTO of Criteria Corp, to explore what it takes to scale purpose-driven businesses in the era of Work 4.0. Chris shares his fascinating origin story—starting with a childhood shaped by tech-savvy parents and leading to multiple exits, international teams, and leadership at a global talent success platform. He breaks down how Criteria uses science and AI to remove bias from hiring, why soft skills matter more than ever, and how to future-proof your workforce in an AI-augmented world. Learn about his nonprofit, SoCal Tech Forum, and why building trust is essential for AI adoption at scale. transcript: 00:18 Welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. The Founder's Sandbox is in its fourth season. I'm here, your host, Brenda McCabe, and I'm live this month's podcast is 00:31 from the Founders Space in Pasadena. And I'm joined with my guest, Chris Daden of Criteria Corp. um And a colleague of mine in the startup ecosystem. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So am I. So um I want to briefly give some background on the Founder Sandbox for those that are listening in today. um 00:56 Each episode features in-depth conversations with founders of small and mid-sized owner-operated companies and operators that support the ecosystem. And together, through storytelling, we explore how to build scalable, resilient, purpose-driven businesses with great corporate governance. And you're going to discover today with Chris, his origin story. I always like to start with how the person 01:24 that's a guest to my podcast, really started getting involved with the ecosystem of startups. And your story is quite fascinating. I'm gonna give a spoiler alert here. You and I met, I guess two years ago, at a Thai con event where you were on a panel. I was the MC em and we got to talking over dinner and just your origin story and the multiple exits you've had. 01:53 really um lit up a bulb in my mind. said, Chris, you have to be in my podcast. So it's two years later, and I'm so glad that we're making this happen. Lucky to be here. Thank you. forward to it. So this podcast, again, we're going to talk about a lot of things because Chris, not only are the CTO of Criteria Corp, a talent success company, where you help organizations meet objective evidence-based 02:23 talent decisions that both reduce the bias and drive better outcomes. But also, you're a two times 40 under 40. You've had multiple exits of prior companies. You're a speaker, a founder, a board member, and recently you started your own nonprofit in SoCal called the SoCal Tech Forum. 02:51 Oh, and I forgot you're a member of the Forbes Technology Council. we're going to have... Couldn't have said it better. Thank you, Brenda. So with that, again, my episodes on particularly Spotify, we have a title that's on each episode and we've chosen Scaling Work 4.0 for this month's podcast. Again, it's Chris Daden, CTO of Criteria. So let's start. What would you... 03:21 Call your tagline. Tell us about your origin here in Southern California. Sounds great. Well, just a little bit about myself personally. I've been in tech for ah quite a while now. It's really the only career I've ever had working in tech. So I started in my youth, frankly. My father was a member of the British Merchant Navy. you can imagine with that career involved, he traveled all around the world. uh 03:50 Also, of course, gave me lot of inspiration for the global companies that I run today and the teams that I've started around the world. So although my father wasn't directly in computer science, you know, that career of being in the merchant Navy definitely shaped my global perspective. when he stopped working in the merchant ship Navy as an officer, he started developing his own software for weather routing for large 04:21 merchant ships and container ships. So what was amazing about that was it was ran out of a spare bedroom in my parents' house just upstairs while I was growing up there. And uh we used to even have a rack of kind of four by four Dell just desktop computers that were stacked on top of each other with a switch to switch between them. And we're running the workload that my dad made with the software there on those computers. 04:51 It was very visible and evident in my childhood. My first kind of internship was maybe when I was 13 or so ah in the closet of that office. We pulled the doors off and put a desk in it and that was like my internship desk for the summer. started with programming in the dotnet ecosystem. So what year is that more or less? Yeah, it's probably like 2005, 2006. uh 05:21 So it uh was a great introductory language. Fun fact, there's a YouTube video online of me when I'm about that age doing a tutorial of how to make a calculator. So very few people have found that. I'll leave it to the public to find. But you can hear my very young 12-year-old voice in a YouTube video. it's still there. So anyway, that's part of my origin story for sure. That's what got me into computer science. 05:48 My first company, started my senior year of high school. I was aqua hired into an organization in Irvine. And then I got to join what I would call kind of a real company at that time. um One that had, you know, engineers around the globe working on solving problems and SAS for organizations of all kinds. So that's kind of where I kick started my career. I'm spending the next maybe eight to 10 years in Orange County building companies and 06:16 Now I find myself as the CTO of Criteria, which of course I'm not a founder of, but the energy that I like to bring to the team and the passion I have for what the next era of work has to offer gives me that founder-like energy. Yes. So um how long have you been with Criteria? Were you the first CTO? Were you an aqua hire? Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, great question. So Criteria has a great history, almost 20 years of science and 06:46 um just developing a great core platform that's been used by thousands of customers around the world. I've been there as CTO for the last three and a half years. So when I joined, was right after acquisition of a couple companies in Australia that were great additions to our product portfolio. And one of my roles right away after joining was to help integrate those teams, finish retiring some of the technical debt that comes with acquisitions. um 07:15 really just all the excitement around building for the next chapter of criteria and making sure that I can contribute in my many ways to our success. So back to that tagline that due to your father's um origins in the Navy, m you have a wide global perspective. Tell me about those teams that you had in India before Criteria. 07:41 Yeah, look, I started doing business in India a little over 10 years ago. I was just reflecting on that last week. I had the luxury of visiting my team again. We also just created a new team for criteria. So I was able to go visit them. We all got together for the first time. It was a lot of fun. But about 10 years ago, I started in a city named Indore and that's in the state Madhya Pradesh. And when I started, it was a tier three city. And, you know, I really stumbled across 08:09 who is now my general manager for my last company. I stumbled across meeting him through like a development agency and we really hit it off and you know at the time I was 18 years old and you know was willing to take some risk I guess because I wanted to work with an engineer and had to build my product and company and you know what it's like being a scrappy founder and I just rolled the dice and said sure like 08:34 Why don't you come work for me full time? Let's find your friends as well and let's start a company together. And his name is Vikram. And to this day, he's still the general manager of my last company in automotive SaaS that I had recently exited in like 2021 timeframe. He's still operating that team. Company's going great. So that's been a lot of fun to see that success. But yeah, over a period of 10 years, it's become... 09:00 from a tier three to a tier two city. So things like basic infrastructure have been developed. So just so much fun and so much reflection there. I'm lucky to have, know, that's my, Criteria's new team is now my fourth India venture. So this is my fourth generation. Oh my goodness. It's a scaling work 4.0. So let's go back to Criteria. again, over dinner a couple years ago, 09:29 You started talking about how the science of finding talent is really the bedrock of criteria. And you've been there three and a half years. Talk to us about that, the talent and the science that is driving this company's technology and being used today in hiring across the world. Yeah, I think. 09:58 Hiring is one of those things that we don't always teach hiring managers or people in organizations. I think we were laughing about that. If you're, say, a great senior software engineer and you've been coding for 15 years or something, I think it's assumed that when you get promoted into, say, an engineering manager role, you're now going to be a great hiring manager. And I think hiring science is something that is often... 10:22 underappreciated in organizations, particularly startups and mid-market companies who may not have the resources, right? Because to be good at hiring science, you also have to invest resources in it, right? So really you don't see most really advanced hiring science or like, you know, psychology teams being involved in hiring until the enterprise level. for criteria, we're all about using technology to harness as many what we call talent signals as possible. So we have a 10:52 an assortment of assessment tests that can measure things like your cognitive ability, your adaptiveness, your personality fit to a job role. And we do that in rigorous and scientific ways. I think there are probably more ways to do hiring w