The show’s guests in this episode is Jacob Chase. He is the Founder and CEO of The INFIN, a performance intelligence platform built to help companies see the true value of their human capital.

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Decoding Human Performance with Jacob Chase

Hello, welcome to the Experimental Leader Podcast. I’m Melanie Parish. I’m an author, an executive coach, a content creator, and it’s great to be here with you today.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m an academic psychologist. I’m the author of The Glass Cliff: One Trans Man’s Leadership Odyssey. I’m the co-host of the Experimental Leader Podcast.

It’s nice to be here with you today, Mel.

Yeah,

I’m good. What are you thinking about in terms of leaders?

I’m thinking about succession planning. I’m getting to the end of my five year term as chair, and I was really pleased as my term was wrapping up that we had not one, but not two, but three candidates apply to be chair of my department after me, and I think that part of that had to do with deliberately thinking about succession planning and leadership development when we early in my term, when we wrote our strategic plan, we wrote in the goals of leadership development, and when it was time to find a new leader, I think people were ready to go.

So, what’s the thing you’re thinking about in terms of succession planning?

I’m thinking about being deliberate and intentional, and leaving yourself a long runway. It’s succession planning is not something you can do as the last few months are ticking by.

Well, I think people do it all the time, like, oh no, we need a plan.

Yeah, it’s important to the resilience and the health of the organization to to be thinking about and develop like develop everyone who who’s got any kind of interest in leadership can bring them into the conversation

that’s interesting.

What are you thinking about?

I’m thinking about accountability. I had a conversation with a client today about sort of like managing employee management, and so we were talking about sort of the intersection. We ended up with a Venn diagram of sort of the thing in the middle, the triangle in the middle of three things: one is like how well they do the work, one is like revenue gen, like how they like generate revenue, and then the third is like how much management they take, and or the minimum amount of management, so are they self starters, are they able to manage their own workflow, and and it’s really interesting, if you only focus on the, if you only focus on the revenue gen, and the how good is the work, it sort of leads to like a perfectionist sort of culture, like everything has, we’re optimizing everything all the time for both profit and production, or productivity, but if you actually sort of take, have that other measurement of the least input possible, like, how do you, how is it? Does the work happen sort of automatic, and then it gets less gritty, like it becomes like everybody can relax a little, and it reminds me of like Japanese efficiency stuff that says there shouldn’t be any heroics, like the work should flow. So I’ve been thinking about that. I think it’s really interesting, and it’s kind of about accountability, but it’s also just about like people management.

That’s interesting. I grew up when I was a kid, I worked in retail, and I worked for my father in his store, and he grew up in his father’s store. So we was like third generation retail, and one of the things he told me is touch the merchandise as few times as possible.

Interesting, touch the merchandise as few times as possible. That’s interesting, like you don’t want to be in like, like everything held together like with scotch tape and clenching, that’s really a. Interesting. Well, we have a guest today. I’m super excited about our guest. His name is Jacob Chase, and he’s the founder and CEO of Infin, and it’s a performance intelligent platform. He started on Wall Street, and then he moved into real estate, and he got interested in human performance, and he created a technology that connects individual performance to business results. So, I’m really excited to talk to him.

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Jacob, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Melanie. Mel, it’s a pleasure to be here. Really, I’m grateful for the opportunity to come chat with you guys.

Yeah, it’s great to have you. I guess I’ll start by just asking you, like, where are you experimenting in your life or work right now?

Yeah, look, running a company, especially kind of in earlier stages, there’s a lot of experimentation to figure out, like, what’s working well, what’s not, and how do you kind of gravitate towards, you know, where the customers are pulling you, and you know there’s a lot of experimentation about satisfying different stakeholders and really trying to figure out the right mix of moving the business forward while making sure everyone is served properly.

And what’s new about your approach to human performance?

The way that I think you know there’s measuring human performance has been around for a long time, right? Like we’re always trying to figure out who are our top people, how are they contributing, how are they making a difference, and and ultimately when we’re all working together it’s generally to advance the interests of the organization, and you know everyone kind of has their perspective of who’s contributing and and who’s not, and the way that we do it differently is we aggregate all of the individual perspectives into kind of a decentralized assessment of of who’s contributing, whereas kind of the traditional status quo and HR-led performance management tends to be much more centralized and and misses a lot of the things that are important to us as humans in our interactions with each other, but matter and contribute to advancing team efforts, and so we try to capture all of that in our, in a unique way,

So when you gather all this data that comes from broad sources. Do you have to weigh it in terms of who’s closer to understanding the group’s mission or who’s closer to understanding a particular individual’s performance?

Well, so the weight comes in through an iterative mechanism, where you know the importance of your perspective is determined by how highly esteemed you are in the team, and so the people who are more highly esteemed have a greater weight in their perspective of what matters, and you know this is important for a couple reasons, where you know, this the CEO or an executive often you know focuses on business performance as being important, but if you have a new joiner to your company, fresh out of college, not doesn’t have any job experience, the things that are important to them are, you know, a boss that teaches them the ropes, colleagues that help them get integrated into the organization and helps develop them and learn their careers, and you know it doesn’t. It’s hard to say that one perspective is more valid than the other, and both are important to the overall success of the organization, although their weights can be dramatically different, given that, you know, waiting, or you know, value naturally accrues to leadership, and in this particular mechanism, and places a different weight on their perspective than the new joiner.

What about the idea that, you know, the CEO might not have worked on a project with Emily, but I’ve worked on a project with Emily. Do I get more weight because of that?

In regards to evaluating Emily’s contribution.

Yeah.

Certainly. Right, like you know, you think about your organization as a network, and you know each individual as a node, and you know each person is only working with a small subset of the whole organization at any given moment, and so they really only have a valid perspective on a small subset of people at any given moment, but it’s through kind of the diffusion of opinion within this network that each of these weights can be assessed, and when you ultimately, you know, kind of the core output is a proportionate share of contribution, and so you can calculate each person’s proportionate share of contribution, kind of, as you know, as, as assessed by everyone that they’re working with, and that proportionate share of contribution can be applied to business results. And you know, begin to put dollars and cents to an individual action for each person.

Yeah, so as you get a better estimate of an individual’s performance, what opportunities does that open up?

Yeah, I mean lots, right. So the information that flows through this network are observations, right? People see things about their colleagues, both good and bad, and that information can be packaged up and provided to each person. It’s like, you know, people get much more feedback about their own performance in a real-time way to help them elevate and carry forward their careers while at the same time you have some system level intelligence that allows you to kind of have a bird’s eye view of where the areas of intervention may be required and the areas that are doing really well and may have more investment opportunity from the organizational perspective I can share a quick story. We built this kind of a simple prototype when I was running this real estate business, and you know, the first thing that stood out in the data was two underperforming managers in the field that we didn’t know about, and you know, lo and behold, we go do a little bit of digging, and everyone on both teams were flight risks, and there were real problems that needed intervention, and it, it showed up in, in the network analysis, from, from, you know, everyone inputting their observations.

That’s interesting. I was wondering, How you think about things like implicit bias, and how you manage that in this?

So I mean, that’s really important, right? And you know, I think that the perspective I have is bias often comes from a single source, where one person may have a biased opinion or a predisposition to do certain things, but when you have an aggregate assessment, a collective opinion, that bias tends to be neutralized, and you know the way that we think about it is much more like a market system where everybody’s got a perspective on what different things are worth my Wall Street guy talking, is you have your value investors and your day traders and your short sellers and your quant investors, and all of these different perspectives of what things are worth, they wash out in a market system to kind of give you a moment by moment assessment of value, and we think that that same principle is at play here, where everybody’s perspective of what is valuable contributes to that assessment in a way that kind of neutralizes the bias that is inherent in the centralized system.

How do you think employees feel about this kind of assessment?

I mean, our experience has been really good, right? Like, there’s there’s a validity to it that, because it is crowdsourced, more or less, you know, people tend to find a 360 review process to be more relevant than a manager review process, and this is kind of a 360 on steroids, where you know, everyone’s got a perspective about everything, and you know the information is just more valid, like sometimes, especially at the beginning, a person’s results may not match with their existing idea of where they stand in the team, but they tend to agree with it, and they tend to respond in a way that you would want them to in order to get better, because people want to improve. I think intrinsically is part of human nature, and you know when they get the information about the things that are holding them back, the responses is really positive.

You said something, and I’m gonna push, push into it a little, which was most like the single, I don’t remember exactly what you said right now, but that one person is the one giving negative feedback, like if it’s, if it’s biased, I’m not sure the data actually bears that out, like if you look at university professors by gender, female professors get much more negative feedback than male professors, which tell like, like universally you in fact, it’s illegal, like in Ontario, we’re not, you’re not allowed to use that data for any performance management, and so that’s sort of the bias I’m thinking about. I wanted to frame what I was in my head thinking about, so that actually shows a gender bias and. I know that there’s inherent implicit bias with race and orientation and all sorts of things, and so, so I just want to dig in there a little bit more to see how you’re protecting people from that implicit bias being in their performance evals, or whatever, or a performance management tool, because if people who like, if women are more likely to get negative feedback because they’re women, then and promotion is tied to that, or or even pips, or you know, whatever you’re doing to manage talent, I’m, I’m, I’m feeling some concern over your comment, and so I just want to give you a chance to speak to it.

Sure, and look, that’s it’s an interesting test case, so what I would speculate is in that environment where the feedback is overwhelmingly negative towards a particular group, the method of collecting that feedback itself is probably biased, where that is a centralized assessment platform in a kind of small environment of information that is being gathered that is being kind of internalized by a single person providing that information back, but those same people, if you’re gathering information not only from their superiors but all of their colleagues and everyone whom they are serving underneath them, I would suspect that that bias would be very different, and that you know the perspectives of all of the people whom that individual is interacting with would probably be different than an overwhelming, you know, negative bias that would be perceived by a male superior.

Jacob, you probably have enough data that you could test for bias in your data set. Is that something you’d be interested in doing?

Well, sure, but I think that the other, the other perspective is like, who is to determine what is unbiased, and you know our, our platform uses the judgment of the collective in aggregate, right? So the, the full team, the full company, and that’s that’s the group that is self-judging, right, and it is really kind of that perspective that I think is the best method that I’m familiar with for neutralizing bias, because, like, the set can’t get any larger, and the, the distribution of how value accrues, you know, I think I think is is a very accurate model.

What do you think the big wins are that you’ve had with this system?

I think the big wins are two, right? Where one important one is the capturing of intangibles that matter, where you know some people may have great metrics, but they suck to work with, right. And how do you quantify that? How do you measure that? And a market system does that. It captures the intangibles, where, like, you know, the stock market companies post their financials every quarter, right. And two companies can have the exact same financials, but wildly different market values based on all of the other factors beyond the data, and you know this system uses a very similar distribution mechanism. The other one is then applying the individual assessment, or the individual contribution to the business results, including all of the intangibles, where the performance of the business kind of determines the size of the pie, right, that determines how effective the group together is at pursuing the business interests, and when you cascade down dollars and cents into that, you have, you know, I think a real mechanism for the distribution of rewards that is beyond kind of a traditional hierarchy and centralized mechanism, and with that you kind of have an unlocking of a real meritocracy where people have direct line of sight into the business success that they’re helping to generate, and their proportionate contribution of it, and there’s I think there’s a much more positive incentive structure there than is often the case in centralized structures that can be highly political

and also biased, I mean, I’ll say, and also biased,

Sure

Like this, this bias. This, no matter how you’re measuring it, where can people find you, Jacob? And, and, like, can they buy your product today? Like, what?

Yeah, absolutely. So we are out serving the world, and you know, we are doing kind of company-wide diagnostic assessments, as well as kind of ongoing real-time feedback for everybody, for companies, and I’m most accessible, probably on LinkedIn, you know, slash Jacob D. Chase, and my email is Jacob at the infin.com and I’ll answer everything personally. And we are here, we’re here to serve, and you know we’ve got a method that we think is is proving to be valuable and you know can help identify opportunities and intervention requirements across organizations.

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That’s really interesting to look at a new system, for, you know, performance.

I think, yeah, it’s an innovative and ambitious system. I think I was interested in your questions about bias. A couple of years ago, a graduate student who graduated from my lab went off to work for the police services just to pour over data to see if there’s any evidence of racial bias and racial profiling in either arrests or just encounters conversations with the police, how often they talk to people.

Well, and I’m quite aware that I’m asking about this system and bias, but it already exists in all in the in any business setting that bias already exists. So you know the fact that you’re using a new system doesn’t remove the bias.

Yeah, and Jacob, how has tons of data. I think

I know. I’m like fascinated for.

I think it’d be fun and interesting to do those analyzes.

Yeah, it’d be really interesting to just see, because he, he actually, because he has this complex data, there’s lots of things you could pull by identity, right?

Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s a fascinating idea, and the idea that it’s so codified and specific gives you a chance to look for ways to iterate, improve, and gather data, which is like super cool.

I was watching your science brain turn on, which is it doesn’t always show if your leadership brain is usually here.

Anyway, it’s been great being here with you today. Go experiment.

Go experiment.

Important Links: 

LinkedIn – Jacob Chase

Website – The Infin

Jacob Chase

Jacob D. Chase is the Founder and CEO of The INFIN, a performance intelligence platform built to help companies see the true value of their human capital.

Jacob began his career on Wall Street, working as a restructuring banker at Lazard and as an investment analyst at Angelo Gordon. Here he learned how capital is allocated, how businesses succeed or fail, and how performance ultimately determines survival.

He later left finance to bootstrap a diversified real estate business to nearly $30 million in revenue before a successful exit. Here he earned firsthand experience as an operator responsible not just for investment analysis, but also for the people who ultimately drive business outcomes.

Across finance, real estate, and now technology, Jacob observed a consistent pattern: companies measure financial capital with precision, but treat human capital (often their largest investment) with surprising ambiguity. Performance systems are often political, bonus processes create friction, and cultural
integrity erodes when contribution and reward aren’t aligned.

He believes individual well-being and business performance cannot be separated — that long-term cultural health depends on honest, transparent performance economics. When organizations lose clarity around value creation, they eventually lose both workforce trust and financial performance.

Through The INFIN, Jacob is building technology that connects individual contribution directly to business results, helping leaders and teams move beyond subjective reviews toward measurable effectiveness.

His work sits at the intersection of finance, entrepreneurship, and human performance, challenging companies to rethink how they measure talent, allocate rewards, and build sustainable meritocracies.

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