Charlie Newark-French With Grace
Welcome to With Grace. This week, we feature Charlie Newark-French, CEO of Cascade. A seasoned CEO, operator, and investor, Charlie has led multiple enterprise software companies as CEO, including Hyperscience, Sharpen, and now Cascade, while driving the adoption of advanced AI and machine learning in the enterprise. With a career spanning board leadership, venture investing, and hands-on execution, he’s built companies, led exits, and transformed how businesses apply AI at scale. For Charlie, the real shift isn’t AI replacing people—it’s those who know how to use it outpacing everyone else: “The better question isn’t when AI will replace people, but when people who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t.”
How do you see AI evolving in your industry over the next 5 years?
I have been running companies in the AI space for the last 6 years. This has included one company that was building cutting edge ground up/ proprietary ML models and also a company that used third party Generative-AI as a feature within its platform. The future, on a 5 year time scale, is incredibly clear in my mind: human/ software collaboration. AI models are making all members of a team more productive - it really is that simple. When people ask me when the robots will replace people, I simply reply: the better question is when will people who know how to use robots replace people who don’t.
What’s a daily ritual you swear by?
Checklists. And To-Do Lists. I started my career at McKinsey, went to Harvard Business School, and I now run a company that builds Strategy Execution software: I believe in Strategy more than anyone! But I believe even more in execution. Great strategy with poor execution will always be beaten by poor strategy with great execution. My best execution tools are simple: check lists and to-do lists. If it isn’t on my to-do list, it simply will not get done.
The uptake of checklists is fascinating. Following a plane crash in the 1930s, checklists became a mandatory part of pre-takeoff procedures. Safety rates radically improved. The checklist has since made it over to medicine, construction, eduction… and to the companies I have run!
What’s an unconventional approach that’s worked for you?
I refer to it as The Importance Of Lazy Thinking. Each day, you can make, at most, a couple of excellent, high impact decisions. These decisions have a huge calorific burden on our brains. Excellent, high impact decisions require a unique combination of experience, thoughtfulness, reflection, innovation, collaboration, discussion, and intellectual agility - to name just a few things required. You need to save your energy for the decisions that matter most. Everything else needs to be simplified to prevent decision fatigue.
I always ask myself: is this an Innovation Decision or will a Lazy Decision be ok? What I call Lazy Decisions are decisions that rely primarily on either learned pattern recognition (“I have seen this before”) or industry best practices. You will almost always see me wearing the same clothes, ordering similar items at a restaurant, and running the exact same route on my daily run - Lazy Decisions. When it comes to the important stuff, I have some stores of much needed energy, to make the Innovation Decisions.
What’s a key quality or trait you believe is essential for leaders?
The Kings and Queens of the world - especially the start-up world - are the actual creators, producers, hands-on-keyboarders. That’s all that ultimately matters - everything else is just noise. A good leader needs to understand that. That means never moving entirely away from actually doing the job versus just “leading”. And it means knowing that your job is only to make the lives of the actual producers in our world easier and more productive. Set the right direction, remove obstacles, roll-up your sleeves.
What’s a recent aha moment you’ve had?
We are memes. We copy one another like carbon paper. I have probably known this for a while. But my real “Aha moment” was watching every website domain move to .ai. My favorite meme from February 2022 was a chart with an x-axis of speed, on the left of the chart was a snail, and then a car, and then light, and finally on the right hand side “someone becoming an expert in ai”. Ideas (both good and bad) spread through society like wildfire. We are social creatures who look to one another to form our views on and of the world. I think for me the way I use this acknowledgement is that I try - when I can - to step back - as I copy someone else’s idea or phrasing - and ask myself “is this a good idea that I actually believe in?”
How do you approach decision-making in high-stakes scenarios?
The most important thing in decision-making is detecting when a high-stake scenario exists. There’s no signal at the crossroads. By the time you know you are making a high-stake decision, you have probably missed any real opportunity to make a decision and rather you are trapped executing on a tough but inevitable action. If you over-produced widgets in your factory and then didn’t look for the signs to course correct, you’re probably going to need to sell your widgets at a loss. That action will feel like a decision to be made but it's really not, the decisions were made much earlier. I try to look for data anywhere I can - to look for the signal at the crossroads - and to say “stop producing the widgets” as soon as you can.
What’s a recent challenge you’ve tackled?
A start up is just one existential crisis after another. The more you survive, the more crises you have the pleasure of working through in the future! One of the toughest ones that I have had to work through recently was where to roll-out generative-ai in our software. This was at my last company. Customers were looking to us for an answer but they were also suggesting tons of different ideas and the noise from our competitors was crazy - promising the world. We settled on what we called “UseableAI”. Our framework for our decision was simple: what real world problem can be solved with where the technology is today. This ultimately meant that we delivered value to our customers and not broken promises.
