Nov 13, 2025
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 wrong than to do it correctly.
And we take a lot of pride in making sure that our products
are always designed to measure those talent signals and even
compound them. So as you find
11:19
multiple talent signals across the life cycle of that
pre-employment hiring engagement, you get a compounding, really
almost like a talent blueprint of the person you're
looking to hire, or maybe even like the candidate DNA of that
person. And it gives you a depth of information and data
about the likelihood they are to succeed for that specific job role
you're hiring. And that's really, really valuable to
us. And we can talk a bit about why
11:46
that matters more as we enter into this new era of work. Before we
go there though, I'm fascinated. What types of talent can Criteria
be used for in the hiring process? Is it across all verticals?
mean, tell me a bit about that. Criteria is a pretty diverse
company. So with 4,000 customers around the world, we are really
present in maybe 20 different verticals. So that makes us
pretty...
12:15
pretty broad in who can use us for hiring. So, you know, we
joke around anything from, you know, hiring for truck drivers
all the way to rocket scientists. Like there's customers across the
whole spectrum in engineering, venture capital, uh you know,
executive management, truck drivers for uh companies, uh frontline
workers, all the way up to rocket scientists at
companies.
12:45
So recently you were a keynote speaker in London and you provided
your closing thoughts on AI in the workforce. So I'm going to steal
your thunder right now because you gave this to me and set it up.
So work 4.0 belongs to those who pair adaptive mindsets with
distinctively, yeah, human skills. Workplace.
13:14
AI will be our most tireless colleague, but the future's real
competitive edge is still human potential, continuously
renewed. Wow, unpack that for my listeners. Because we're all
getting a bit nervous about will we have job security, what do
we need to do to retool, and is everybody suitable?
Yeah, I think what's kind of amazing is
13:44
um You look at some reports from the World Economic Forum or
other entities and they're saying things like by 2030, 39 % of
skills related to kind of the current candidate applying in the
workforce will be obsolete. Wow, that's a lot. That's a lot. It's
almost half, right? And what's amazing about that is
then what are we hiring for, right? Because the last few
decades of us
14:12
hiring has been so focused on how many years of experience did you
have, what degrees do you hold. And it doesn't mean for
many people who, right, college is the best fit, getting a
degree is the best fit for many people. But ah I think what it
highlights is there's more to being workforce ready than only
getting these static credentials. And for people like me,
I've dropped out of college twice. Both times I had
some...
14:41
transactional event with one of my businesses. And that was
obviously the right choice for me, right? And I've reflected
on that and I feel good about where I'm at and where I came
from. But I think workforce readiness these days is going to
continue to index on the more dynamic talent signals and the more
dynamic credentials we have as opposed to static credentials. So
what that means is my ability to think on my feet, critical
thinking, adaptive reasoning.
15:11
Those are all things that we kind of measure, if at all, we measure
them kind of secondarily in our current process. And these
other core talents like digital fluency, AI literacy, self
leadership, resilience, those are all things that are more of
these dynamic credentials that we need to make sure we measure
really, really well, because the reality is with the advent of AI
in the work
15:40
place, hard skills are more immediately attainable. And what
I mean by that is maybe if I'm hiring for an accountant role,
I care more about is that accountant a strategic thinker? Do
they understand the tax code to the right depth? Do they understand
the strategy for valuation of the business? And then of course they
have to click some buttons in QuickBooks or NetSuite or other
systems. But I think AI is going to...
16:09
augment the hard skills of our workforce. And that's going to make
us more index on the softer skills, emotional
intelligence, the adaptability, right? Those dynamic credentials as
opposed to how many years have you been clicking buttons in
QuickBooks? And it will require, I guess, more critical thinking,
right? True. Right? Because you will be your... uh
16:36
day-to-day job will be augmented by AI, leaving you time to upskill
or to make those critical decisions, more, I don't know, avenues of
strategic development in the company. that's right. Yeah, redeploy
to higher value opportunities for sure. think if 30 to 40 % of your
day is...
17:04
tasks that can be augmented with AI, then that 30 to 40 % of
your human first excellence can be redeployed to other
parts of the business. an example is at Criteria, we serve uh tens
of millions of assessments, um about 10 to 12 million per year.
And we have about five or six million candidates that come
through that process.
17:31
when they need technical support or help with the software, they
often reach out to our live chatbot. we at Criteria um want
to make sure we prioritize a five-star candidate experience. So
even though candidates aren't the ones paying for the service, our
customers are, we know that our customer satisfaction is tightly
linked to how satisfied our candidates are. Got it. uh
17:54
One of the things we had was thousands and thousands of tickets
every month from those five million plus candidates coming into our
support system. And what we were able to do was augment our support
staff with uh AI chat bots that are trained on deep knowledge bases
of criteria and past candidate issues and technical
troubleshooting. we were able to achieve about a 94 %
candidate ticket deflection, which is really, really massive.
And it didn't mean that we
18:24
know, laid off half of our support team or something, it means
that, you know, those support team members moved into other
high value roles in the organization or were able to now
redirect their energy to making long lasting materials like help
docs and guides that can then further retrain the AI to make that
even better. So that's just an example of augmentation of skill
and then redeploying that human excellence to another part of
the business to help you grow. So it has criteria use the same
time.
18:54
methodology for their staff? For our staff, every single person at
Criteria goes through our assessment products, of course. We drink
our own champagne. I had to ask that question. I'm a little biased,
but I think I didn't know about the category before joining
Criteria. And again, with my origin story, I've hired hundreds of
people around the world. And I will never run another team without
using
19:22
a criteria talent success platform to hire those people. So
I'm a firm believer and because I didn't know about it before
and now I'm using it, it's a big gap in my knowledge. So I would
say most of our market potential for criteria doesn't actually know
that these tools exist. A lot of them have a retention challenge or
they're having an issue hiring the right people and people
like me before I joined criteria don't actually know that this tool
set is available. part of my mission is to...
19:51
make sure that startups and founders and mid-market companies are
aware that this is available because it solves a big problem for us
building the best teams. so uh last plug for Criterion, then
we're going to move on in the interview here. uh How do um
customers experience Criterion? How do they uh get onboarded?
mean, what is it, the HR department? Where does, where's the
origin? Yeah, really great. So
20:19
We call ourselves a talent success platform because we help people
pre-hire with our assessments and video interviewing products. And
that's normally the HR talent acquisition leader. So
someone who's in charge of recruitment for a company or essentially
all the pre-employment functions. And then because we have this
rich data set that comes from those pre-employment
activities, we have a post-hire product that we call Develop by
Criteria. And Develop is designed to use all of that psychometric
data
20:48
weekly check-ins with your employees, uh frameworks for behavior to
help grow those team members after they're hired using all of that
data and science. So a lot of our customers experience criteria on
the pre-employment side and then continue to follow through on the
post-employment side with our develop product. Wow. Is there
patent protection with all of the science that you have
developed over the years? I think there's obviously copyright.
21:17
um of our assessment tests. think patents and software are
inherently tricky, but we feel really good about the
protection of our IP. Excellent, excellent. So let's switch gears.
um I met you at the TICON. um You haven't been our keynote speaker
yet, but you have moderated panels, and I've seen you in other
events. Tell us about what do you enjoy, what do you
like to talk about when you're keynote speaker?
21:47
For me, it's just such an honor to share my learnings as an
entrepreneur, as an executive with the world. I still am in
this phase where when I give a keynote or moderate a panel,
it doesn't really feel like a real thing. It just feels like
another discussion for me. That's just kind of my style. I
just think that the world stays connected by sharing information
like that. And for me,
22:16
I'm lucky to be at the convergence of 20 years of Criteria's
product, helping people make hiring decisions and this once
in a lifetime emergence of generative AI intersecting with our
workforce skills. So I talk a lot about that. Of
course, I'm building my own teams to build the Criteria software
and platform.
22:42
So I'm also thinking about what is next for my team, how do I
upscale and enable? And then of course I'm talking to our thousands
of customers on a regular basis trying to make sure that we are
leaders in the industry. those are areas I really love
talking about. I'm an engineer at heart as well. So I tend to
be quite good at bridging kind of the commercial and business side
with like core engineering. So I have a deep background in
23:11
AI and ML um even more traditionally prior to the generative AI
boom and now even more so post generative AI boom. We're applying
generative AI in ways that um we are on the frontier fine tuning
models for our uh really predictive models at criteria. So
those are all areas I love to talk about and it's really an honor
to be able to share that with people no matter the forum. Well
maybe there'll be a podcast episode two with Chris on this.
23:41
What about, you you love to share, I don't know where you find the
time. You've recently started a nonprofit, the SoCal Tech Forum. So
share with my audience the types of activities, where's the venue,
who is gathered, and what made you start a nonprofit, right? Yeah,
it's a great question. I didn't know I would be starting a
nonprofit either, but that tends to be how these things go.
24:11
It's been just a journey. ah We started off as a meetup group. my
goal for the meetup group was in the Inland Empire
specifically here in Southern California, we don't have many tech
meetups. I'm of course networked well in Orange County and Los
Angeles. And I think that particularly with these
technologies that are
24:35
in our day-to-day life, it's very important that we build community
around information and knowledge sharing so we can all learn and
get up to speed on AI. A lot of business owners are going through
transitions with their workforce, with their team that just were
never really imagined. for us, we started this meetup group in the
Inland Empire because there was definitely a market gap in getting
together. I started off
25:02
paying for and hosting the events, breakfast, etc. And we had
so much good interest. had sponsors that decided to volunteer to
support, starting with a company called Clutch Coffee and
Rancho Cucamonga, who has a deep history of roasting coffee and
brewing technology in Rancho. And uh we've since got some
other great partners to support us. And in just a little
under two years, we've...
25:30
surpassed 750 members in the group. uh that was the reason
once we started getting sponsors involved that it made sense
to have a 501c3 nonprofit formed. And we have a leadership
board now, which I'm really proud of. And we host an event at least
once every month on the first Saturday of every month. And they're
always technology or technology adjacent topics. They always
involve.
25:56
technical and non-technical folks, business owners, entrepreneurs,
startups. yeah, it's been really fun. Again, an
opportunity to funnel and give back to the community and teach
people about disruptive technologies. Well, you heard it here on
the Founder's Sandbox, the SoCal Tech Forum. It will be in the show
notes, all right, how to um get involved and perhaps attend one of
those Saturday meetings. um I wanted to give you an
opportunity.
26:25
to provide how people can best contact you, either for speaking
opportunities, a CTO of Criteria, the nonprofit. How is it best to
contact you, Chris? Yeah, I'd love to hear from you. So you can
contact me on LinkedIn. So linkedin.com slash in slash Chris
Dayden. All one word. And you can learn more about me as a speaker
or CTO of Criteria at chrissdayden.com. excellent.
26:56
have that in the show notes. All right, I want to bring you back to
the Founders Sandbox, all right, which is the platform and
the podcast. I really get excited about um this part of the
podcast. um I work with my clients on resiliency, um
scalability, and purpose-driven, right? All with great
corporate governance. I always like to ask my guests
what...
27:24
the meaning of each of those three words has for them. And
each of my guests has a different oh interpretation. And it's just
a lot of fun to listen to what I resiliency, what's resiliency for
you? I think it's appropriate that I answer that in light of
kind of work 4.0. So for me, when it comes to resiliency in
work 4.0, um it's about the art of constantly reinventing
yourself.
27:53
but in faster cycles. And I think what's really important to
everyone is that in Work 4.0, hard skills can become obsolete
quicker than before. And that reinvention is critical to
really being resilient in this new market. How about scalable?
You've scaled a couple of companies, you've been an aqua hire. What
does scalable mean to you, Chris? In Work 4.0, scalable will
mean
28:22
adequately augmenting the talent you have in humans in your
organization with the ability to harness the true power of AI and
to do that without losing culture or trust. I think many
organizations think of the first half of that. Very few of the
organizations can execute on human plus agentic AI and also
maintain trust.
28:51
and without losing culture. Have you seen any best practices? This
is a little bit off script in terms of companies that have, or are
scaling, right? Because this is just scaling pretty quickly in the
last year or so. Sure. And are there any best practices out there
in building that trust? Yeah, I think having a real holistic AI
strategy is key.
29:18
One main component of a holistic AI strategy is how can you get
tools to the fingertips of every staff member in your organization
so that it's embedded in their workflow? Because a lot of the
top-down AI strategy from organizations, like a CEO says, you must
use AI and we must be 25 % more efficient, is really shallow when
it comes to strategy. And it very rarely results in a culture
29:48
sustaining in a company for this AI growth and augmentation. So
what I've been really impressed by is, you know, when I host things
like AI monthly global office hours at Criteria, or I host
one-on-one sessions with employees to learn about how they're using
AI, because you're able to push those tools down to your team
members and let them use it in a safe and comfortable area, it
allows you to see what people creatively do with AI. And most of
the time,
30:17
I could say there's probably 60 or 70 % of use cases that I would
never have expected my staff to use AI for, and I would have been
the bottleneck of creating if they were waiting for me to do it,
and instead give them a safe experimentation zone. And I think that
is key to a sustaining AI strategy for So your best practice is
actually a criteria from what I'm hearing here. And it's very
becoming because I'd like to talk about playfulness in the sandbox,
right?
30:46
I read recently, was an EY um study, I think it was this last week,
that about 40 % of employees that are forced to use AI tools give
up after a month. They don't see the utility in their day-to-day
tasks they're doing. So there is something to what you just
said, building trust, but building it from the bottom up, right?
Yeah, I resonate with that for sure. And I think the only way
people break that barrier
31:16
is by seeing their colleagues successful with it. Very rarely
is a demo from an executive leader going to be, I mean, it might be
enough to begin a culture of AI. Like I had to do a lot of demos
and show people kind of the art of the possible. And then as
soon as I saw pockets of AI intelligence in the organization,
the quicker you can elevate those people to lead and present
their findings, the faster...
31:45
you build up kind of the natural human competition between your
team and everybody all of a sudden will get more behind it. And
that's really important. I think you've reached a point of success
in your AI strategy when you were once leading the AI learning
sessions and now you are not. How cool is that? You heard it here
in the founder sandbox. All right. Purpose driven. What's a purpose
driven enterprise for you? I think that
32:12
This is timely based on our discussion just now where
organizations need to harness AI at the right times.
think purpose for criteria, for example, means how do we
measure talent signals that are able to give us the best
candidate blueprint or the best candidate DNA possible? And
for us,
32:40
every single day, regardless of the technology, what fuels us
is having that purpose-driven statement of
collecting talent signals around the world for any team.
And you really do get lost in that sometimes, for good
and for worse, when you're just trying to collect as many talent
signals as you can. And being purpose-driven means always
doing the right thing when it comes to that.
33:09
mission statement that you've set. And for us, it's collecting
talent signals. I think that AI can do that well in a lot of areas,
but AI can also be very dangerous in those areas. So when it comes
to Work 4.0, having that purpose-driven enterprise statement
is very, very important because it anchors us for our new
product development. It anchors us for how we're using new
technology to help people make the best teams.
33:39
Going back to that, to build the trust, we might clip this
out, um does criteria maintain a group of scientists to
actually peel back the layers and make meaning out of the signals
that you are capturing to create new signals? That's one
question. The second is, does criteria have an ethicist
on board?
34:08
on call or how do you ensure there is guardrails around
talent signals? Yeah, those are really great questions. think for
criteria, when we say we're rooted in science, it wouldn't mean
very much if it was just a bunch of engineers and product managers
kind of deciding what science is, right? So for us, we take a
lot of pride in our product IO psychology team. So a lot of
them are
34:37
industrial organizational psychologists by trade that are working
full time for criteria. And their role is assessment
development, assessment validation. uh And particularly in the
light of fine tuning AI models, they are very, very hands on in
creation of those models, validating those models. There's a
lot of legislation we have to comply with, not only the
normal data privacy stuff like GDPR and CCPA, but also
35:07
industry specific laws like the New York bias laws and others that
help protect uh candidates as they are applying for roles. So
that is very, very near and dear to our heart. And also we conduct
adverse impact studies and we do case studies with customers
to make sure that the product is uh behaving the way that they
intended to behave.
35:32
You know, we've got norms for all of our assessments and we adjust
those norms based on massive populations of data. So
all of that is how we ensure scientific signal. This is
amazing. Last question. Did you have fun in the Founder
Sandbox today, Chris? I had a lot of fun in the Founder Sandbox.
Really a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Chris.
So to my listeners, if you like this episode with the CTO of
Criteria, Chris Daden.
36:02
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