Most CEOs talk about innovation. Drew Allen lives it.

From taking his first trip to China at 13, to speaking Mandarin and Portuguese, to attending an AI hackathon hosted by the PayPal Mafia before most CEOs even knew what a large language model was, Drew Allen is not your average CEO.

As the leader of Grace Technologies, Drew has quietly built one of the most experimentally driven, AI forward, high performance cultures in the industrial electronics space. And in this episode of CEOs Unscripted, he pulls back the curtain on exactly how he did it and what every CEO can learn from his approach.

This is a conversation about curiosity, experimentation, reinvention and why the CEO who transforms themselves first is always the one who transforms their business.

In this episode, you'll learn:

✅ Why being present in the market is the single most underrated competitive advantage in sales

✅ The Jim Collins flywheel that has driven Grace Technologies from day one

✅ How to build a culture of small scale experimentation so you never have to risk the farm

✅ Why Drew runs 50 to 200 experiments at any given time and what he is looking for

✅ The AI hackathon that sped up Grace Technologies' AI journey by 12 months

✅ How Drew used Claude to build a sales forecasting ensemble model in an afternoon that would have taken a data scientist six months

✅ Why you cannot coach drive and what to look for when hiring instead

✅ How to find the real bottleneck in your business using the five whys exercise

✅ Why transforming your business always starts with transforming yourself first

💡 Key Insight: "One successful experiment pays for a lot of small failures. If you are having to risk the farm, you are probably not thinking about the problem in the right way."

🎙️ CEOs Unscripted is a bi-weekly podcast for mid-market CEOs, no fluff, no jargon, just real conversations from leaders who have been in the trenches.

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⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Cold open: The management insight most CEOs overlook

00:59 Welcome to CEOs Unscripted

02:33 Meet Drew Allen, CEO of Grace Technologies

03:44 Drew's backstory and family entrepreneurial legacy

06:35 What 3M in Asia taught him about business

08:34 The Toyota Way and being present in the market

11:24 Why Grace Technologies needed to reinvent itself

13:27 Building an engineering team from scratch

14:52 The Jim Collins flywheel and how Drew applied it

16:40 Balancing instinct with strategy

17:48 Fire bullets not cannonballs

19:21 Decision making under pressure

20:20 Building a culture of experimentation

22:42 How SpaceX thinks about time vs cost

23:09 What failing the right way looks like

25:19 High performance culture and what it really means

26:40 Removing toxic high performers

27:33 Why you cannot coach drive

30:02 Hiring for curiosity over credentials

31:37 How Drew became an AI forward CEO

33:29 The AI hackathon that changed everything

35:48 How Claude sparked a wildfire inside the company

36:26 Transform yourself before you transform your business

39:42 Deciding which AI experiments are worth scaling

42:02 Building a sales forecasting model in one afternoon

44:31 What the data changed about how he leads

46:14 Why Drew believes entrepreneurship beats philanthropy

48:57 Advising and investing in early stage founders

49:39 Advice Drew gives entrepreneurs at every stage

51:46 How to find the real bottleneck using five whys

54:48 Drew's closing thoughts

55:42 Jane's closing thoughts