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Jacob D. Chase is Founder & CEO of The INFIN, building tools to measure value creation and contribution inside organizations. Previously, he was Managing Partner at DRGinvest and spent ~10 years on Wall Street (Lazard Restructuring; Angelo, Gordon & Co.) Learn more about him on his expert page.
In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, Amy Springer talks with Jacob Chase, founder of The Infin, about one of the hardest questions in org design: how do you fairly value what a person actually contributes? Drawing on his background as an investment banker and hedge fund investor — and his experience scaling a 150-person, $30M real estate business — Jacob shares how a single underpaid 'rock star' employee sparked his search for a better way to measure impact. The answer came from an unexpected place: the stock market. Jacob explains how he built an internal 'market' for attributing credit, where every team member's peer feedback aggregates into a live, dynamic picture of contribution. The result is a more credible, less political, and more transparent approach to performance — one that decentralizes accountability, surfaces hidden leadership (and hidden problems), and ultimately connects each person's contribution to fair compensation.
[00:00:00] Amy Springer: Welcome to the Org Design Podcast. Today I am hosting Amy Springer, and my guest is Jacob Chase. Jacob has a company called The Infin and is based out of Denver, Colorado. Jacob
[00:00:17] Jacob Chase: Thank you, Amy. Pleasure to be here
[00:00:19] Amy Springer: All right, kickoff question. How did you find your way to org design?
[00:00:26] Jacob Chase: Sure. I guess a quick background on myself. So my early career was Wall Street, and so spent a couple years as an investment banker and then another eight years or so at a hedge fund, and really got exposure to business from the investor perspective, from the ownership perspective. And, saw all kinds of businesses all over the world really, and me and a buddy started buying a bunch of real estate on the side, and that's what ultimately brought me back to Denver from New York, and it was the side hustle that grew up.
We built over seven or eight years a kind of a diversified real estate organization. We had multiple businesses about 150 people at our peak, 30 million in revenue. And so it, it was a meaningful company. And I'm running this business and seeing the operations of an organization from the inside and it really changed my perspective on, you saw the 30,000-foot view from the investor level is that are really generating those returns, and it was all about org design and people. And I think that's really how I came to to value the topic and really be fascinated with it.
[00:01:34] Amy Springer: I have worked for companies that receive funding, and one time it was a really big firm that invested. In my whole career have been exposed to org design, org effectiveness, the way people work, it actually really blew me away how little he cared about our org design.
[00:01:55] Jacob Chase: frankly, I think it's true in a large sense, where I was wearing my investor hat, it was all about the financials, it was all about the numbers. And, but when I was wearing my operator or leader hat, it was much more about the people, the relationships, the effectiveness of the team, and getting the right goals accomplished, and ultimately seeing those as the inputs to the financial results. And, every good KPI eventually boils down to the actions that you take in order... what are the input metrics that produce the outputs you want? And, the deeper and deeper you dig, it really seems to be all about the internal relationships and the people doing the work that produce those external results. And that really was largely absent from, from my time on Wall Street was that understanding and that appreciation, and I had to, be an operator to really I think, understand the importance of that distinction
[00:02:53] Amy Springer: Do you think it makes sense though that they have no understanding? Do you feel like it does fit the remit and that is actually a really healthy boundary that they're not in that level of detail, or is there an amount of awareness and questioning and understanding that they should have?
[00:03:13] Jacob Chase: That's a good question, and it's a complicated one. Investing is a huge spectrum of activities, right? And, from the roles that we were taking, it was largely hands-off. We couldn't actually impact what was happening in the day-to-day. We couldn't actually influence it. And a lot of those things are really hard to understand and to see from an external viewpoint. And so you know, it wasn't really actually something I think we could have gotten an understanding of for our kind of investor remit. But, there are definitely other types of investors who, take board positions, who help place management, who help establish strategy, who help do a lot more things hands-on within the organizations.
And I actually tend to think that they have a much better understanding of the human side, of the people impact, of the, work that actually has to be done to effectuate a strategy and how to message that and coordinate that. And I do think that those, a lot of that type of investor that insight as well
[00:04:10] Amy Springer: What are the skills from Wall Street that have been transferable? It could be, not, and it might not be an explicit skill, it could be a way of thinking, a way of asking questions. And this is for you within your role, in your position
[00:04:26] Jacob Chase: one of the things that I really take away was just, is just thoroughness, and is like what does it mean to have something thoroughly delivered and, really understanding a business inside and out from the external perspective? What are all the things that matter? What's going on in the industry? Who are their competitors? Who are the managers? What's their backgrounds? What's their tendencies? And that list gets really long. And actually going through with a fine-tooth comb and checking all the boxes not something that you typically do most of the time, and most of the time we kinda satisfice or we do enough to be like, "Ah, that's probably gonna be good enough." But when, hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line, you gotta be thorough, and you gotta really know all the answers, and you assess the risk and the uncertainties, but you have to acknowledge them. But the idea of being extremely thorough I think is one that's really stuck with me and and I'm grateful for that experience. And then, that thoroughness along with kind of real analytical rigor are skills I think that are really transferable and they matter in a lot of different domains
[00:05:29] Amy Springer: So you've got your own business, things are growing. Where did those first show up? Like, where did you find yourself, and this is in the org space specifically, like, where did you find yourself going that extra mile with the detail and not just doing the good enough.
[00:05:46] Jacob Chase: Yeah, so there was a very specific incident I can recall when I was running this real estate business, which was my predecessor company. we had payable guy, and, the job market said he was, salary should be $55,000 a year, but he was a rock star, like in every sense of the word. He's a relatively junior guy, but way above and beyond his job description, did everything with a smile really real cultural torchbearer, like represented all of the intangibles we really wanted to foster within the organization. Everyone depended on him for all sorts of things.
And it's and I'm sitting here as the leader of the organization and like knowing this guy is underpaid, but it's like, how do I actually measure his contribution? How do I value what he is bringing to the table? And, There's the typical HR process of, you get your annual review and your salary benchmark compared to market, and that just wasn't rigorous enough. And, and ultimately, it was asking myself that really digging, following the rabbit hole where it went that led to my current business of what we do now. But I just found fascinating answers to how do you actually value an individual contribution beyond sometimes just the metrics. And and that ultimately is, my business today is, and that's what we do.
[00:07:07] Amy Springer: Yeah, before we dig into that more, I'm intrigued. Accounts payable to me doesn't seem like a position in a company that you would have necessarily stumbled upon and understood their work. How was it that you knew this broader impact this guy had?
[00:07:23] Jacob Chase: It wasn't someone I worked with day-to-day, but we sat in the same office and we knew each other, very well. It just became clear through the feedback of the water cooler talk that, "Who does this?" "Oh, Brandon's got that." Or, "Who does this?" "Oh, he's got that."
[00:07:35] Amy Springer: Yeah
[00:07:36] Jacob Chase: and it was just like, all right, listen, he's doing a lot. And, just understanding the impact that he had way outside, again, the scope of a typical accounts payable clerk it was important for our organization and a lot of people depended on his contributions. And how do you capture that? How do you measure that, intangibles and all? There was a few things that I had to challenge from my own perspective to broaden my thinking of like, how do you actually do it? And, one of the first ones was that my opinion isn't necessarily the right one, where, everybody's got a perspective, right? So I didn't depend on him for much, but, I did depend on him for, some of the cultural stuff and, really setting a good example, and I really wanted to encourage that and highlight that. But it wasn't me who was depending on the work he was doing. And so really challenging that my perspective was the right one was the first key step in, I think, unlocking a better mechanism to value it
[00:08:37] Amy Springer: And what was that first step? Was it around the way you even think about positions and what people are doing, or was it other signals to measure performance?
[00:08:49] Jacob Chase: We are all familiar with the typical or like the ki-- we'll call it the classic talent management model, which is an HR review, which is here's the 10 criteria, here's the scale of one to five, and that's supposed to capture everything that's happening. And, I think we've all had our frustrations with that type of process, but it was the best we had.
But one of the things that I really began to question was that, somebody has to actually establish that metric, that rubric, that criteria that people are gonna get measured. But other people... Like a lot of things that matter to people aren't captured in that. They're absent. So then, all right, but you have to have something, right?
What we wound up doing was looking at the institutions that allocate value well, and this kind of took me back to my Wall Street days, like where, one of the most effective institutions that's been around for hundreds of years are the stock markets. The stock markets function very efficiently with allocating value. But there's some important components with that where, there's lots of diverse perspectives about what matters. And it's so you would have your value investors or your day traders or your mom-and-pop investors or your index investors or your short sellers, and everyone has a different perspective of value. It's only through aggregating all of those different perspectives that you would get a price, and it was dynamic, and it changes all the time based on people updating their thinking.
And so we look to that as the market mechanisms do a good job of capturing the diverse perspectives, but also capturing the intangibles, like the things that you can't really quantify but they really matter. Where, in the stock market you could have two companies with the exact same financial statements but with wildly different values based on the intangibles. Maybe the CEO of one's a crook. Even though the company data looks good, their value's gonna suffer. Or the exact opposite, right? Maybe it's a really charismatic CEO who ha- you know, who gathers a following.
And those intangibles matter, but it's really only a market system that can capture those. And so what we wound up doing was creating an internal market system for the attribution of credit. And so everybody had a perspective from their seat in the organization of who was contributing to team outcomes. when you aggregate it, you've just got some fascinating intel that you couldn't get through an ordinary talent management process
[00:11:26] Amy Springer: with the aggregate, it also allows you to step outside of that pure HR function of performance management and talent management that we attempt to make HR do when actually it is a broader organizational effectiveness, operating model... it's got tentacles everywhere and
[00:11:52] Jacob Chase: really does yeah. And so there's a couple happy accidents through this process that we found, but one, one of them was that we realized that when there's a centralized process for evaluating talent, people become accountable to that process. There's automatically a political incentive where it's like, "I need to elevate myself to this process, maybe hold down some competition," and it really, breeds politics.
But when you decentralize the process, are accountable to your teams, that the way that you become valuable is by serving them. and it really flipped this incentive mechanism in a really positive way that, that by default produced an incentive structure that we all seek within our teams of the team serving each other. And that was a really interesting insight that we learned through that process
[00:12:47] Amy Springer: Did it also call out any other signals in the process too? You know, you mentioned that the value is based on delivering on a team goal. Did you expose, oh, actually these people aren't actually that clear on what they're meant to be doing and I need to put more energy there? Was there any other flow on effects?
[00:13:09] Jacob Chase: So what you think about, like I, I think of the analogy again for the stock market, right? Like the goal is always to just, is ra- to grow your value. And so you can have specific operational objectives that are separate from that, but serve that goal. They are the inputs to the larger one. We didn't encounter things like that you mentioned, but what we did encounter was a much better perspective on leadership, within a team, the people who tend to be, the highest rated amongst the team when it is self-assessing are the leaders. And that cascades up throughout the organization. so when that's not the case it's really obvious. When we did a test at the real estate company, the first thing that stood out was two underperforming managers in the field that we didn't know about.
But the teams who were working with them knew about it, and everyone else who was working with them knew about it, but that information just wasn't getting circulated, to the people who could actually do something about it. And it was just obvious right away. You go do some digging, their entire team was flight risk, so everyone was ready to leave because of these managers that were, doing a poor job. And so it was this self-assessment really surfaced, I think the issues quickly and easily.
[00:14:26] Amy Springer: Had those flight risk people tried to call it out, but there wasn't really that data to support them or there just wasn't that culture in their team.
[00:14:36] Jacob Chase: Part of the problem was they were remote. They were in a different city, and so they just didn't have the same access to us, that they might have been able to otherwise. And that obviously triggered us to put different protocols in place too. There were real challenges that were being papered over in a problematic way
[00:14:56] Amy Springer: Yeah, I'm just thinking there's that when data is collected but no action is taken, that's often more damaging than having never taken the data in the first place. You've already mentioned that shift in your awareness and things have changed. Have you continued to see that with clients you now serve and, rolling out this approach?
[00:15:22] Jacob Chase: Absolutely. It's interesting in that what the data does is it gives clarity to each individual about where they stand. And when like, all right, I'm a high performer or I'm not, based on an objective measure that almost across the board people find credible. People oftentimes find the HR processes, they aren't very credible, they're not reliable, they're gameable. But when the collective assessment, and everyone starts on the same level, and there's no advantage to any sort of leadership or anything like that. When people get their number or their rating, their scores, oftentimes it's a wake-up call. Like not, some people think that they may be a higher performer than the team assesses them as. And, so then the incentive is not for, or like the it's not for management to come do something about it. It's for you to improve yourself. it also decentralizes the accountability in a way that really allows people to have the objective information about what's going and what's not, and, what they need to do about it in order to take ownership of advancing their careers. so decentralizing the accountability falls on the individual. The vast majority of people that we've encountered are highly motivated to improve their contributions rather than being discouraged by, something that they just, that they are bummed out by
[00:17:01] Amy Springer: the market has just been crazy in the last let's go back six years. Been a lot less certainty in work for at least that period now. Do you find this approach also allows for a smoother, I wanna call it a smoother curve. In a normal performance management process, a target was set and then the entire world changes, and suddenly you're like, "Well, there's nothing I could have done. I've not met my target, but the world changed." Does this approach I guess I'm wondering, you know, does it actually allow businesses to be able to smooth that out and create less of that anxiety and the flight risk that might come with that more rigid performance?
[00:17:47] Jacob Chase: I think that's true. So one thing that's really interesting about this system, this network, this market, is that it's dynamic, it's live. Whereas like a single person changing a single observation about someone else recalibrates the, the solution for everybody. And so each person like quite literally has a ticker of their peer-reviewed work performance. And so you can see when there's big changes. You can see in real time, even if no one's telling you, what's happening with with how you're being viewed within the organization, you can respond accordingly. Rather than, be in the dark for months and then all of a sudden, some ax drops. so there's a transparency there that allows people to be responsive based on a changing world that isn't necessarily available in kind of some of the classical models.
So one of the ways that I think this intelligence i- you know, connects to business performance the performance of the business has to determine the size of the pie, right? It's like how well is the business performing? There's, 'cause there's limited resources you know, the markets change and those resources go up and down. But the pie has to be determined by the performance of the business. And what th- this system does is it calculates the size of each person's slice, where you know your proportionate share of contribution of the overall business pie. so just as, the business can grow or shrink, like your aggregate value if you put dollars on it also grows and shrinks bas- based on the performance of the overall. But there's an element of transparency, there's an element of autonomy and agency for to be able to impact that in a way that I don't think has been available historically
[00:19:42] Amy Springer: All the things that we all as workforce members feel and desire and hope for. Clarity, agency, autonomy, everything that makes a workplace feel good. I guess we've talked a lot about the system that you thought up while you had your real estate company. It was informed by your early work experience. You now have a... would you call it a consulting company or is it a-
[00:20:11] Jacob Chase: It's consulting, but it's also, it's a software platform
[00:20:14] Amy Springer: Software too? Yeah, cool. Yeah, tell me more about what you guys offer there and, and how this system fits into the bigger picture there
[00:20:22] Jacob Chase: Yeah, absolutely. We can do very simple pilot implementations, across any size company, that will give you real kind of network intelligence within just a couple of minutes, as a leader of an organization. person also gets hyper-personalized feedback of what's working and what's not, based on, they contribute some observations, they receive some about themselves, and that's how you keep the whole cycle going, all confidentially. Nobody knows who said what. And all very light touch. It's not a heavy lift to engage because AI makes a lot of things easier for us now and, in asking you the right questions about the people that you're working with and and then packaging up your feedback for you as well in a real live, ongoing three sixty review profile of everybody.
And those, that we're implementing that all over the world right now and and having some great success. You can take that same data, connect it to the business performance and start putting numbers and dollars to individuals and what appropriate compensation should be, which was ultimately the question I was trying to answer with my accounts payable guy is. It has to depend on the business performance and then how, what proportion is his contribution of that overall business performance. And we're helping companies really take, I think, big steps forward in, in establishing truly meritocratic cultures where, what you contribute is actually what gets valued and rewarded in the same way.
[00:21:54] Amy Springer: So who do you find that you're speaking to within the companies you're in and, and your prospects? Who comes to the table to have a chat with you guys?
[00:22:04] Jacob Chase: it's really been CEO-led where CEOs are really, they're trying to establish the right incentive structures, cultural structures, and, they have to really believe in a system that they think will bring that out in order for it to take hold in the organization. So it's really CEO-led conversations
[00:22:25] Amy Springer: Cool. All right, so any CEOs listening in on the podcast, make sure you look up Jacob on LinkedIn.
[00:22:33] Jacob Chase: LinkedIn is great, /jacobdchase or email jacob@theinfin.com. I would love to, to hear from any of you with any interest
[00:22:43] Amy Springer: Oh, before we wrap up, anything we missed, Jacob, that you would want listeners of the Org Design Podcast to hear or know?
[00:22:52] Jacob Chase: The only thing that I think I would emphasize is, we think about the inputs. It's what are the input metrics that ultimately produce the outputs? We talked about that and when you get each individual the right inputs for what they need to contribute to their teams in order to elevate the collective performance, it's a really big unlock.
And I think that emphasizing that point is getting people the information they need to do their best. It really enables a lot of positive performance changes across organizations. That's the only thing I would emphasize that I think is there for the taking for people who are interested
[00:23:30] Amy Springer: Yeah. And only getting more and more important to understand all of that, as work is shifting. Cool. Well, thanks for joining the Org Design Podcast. Have a good week
[00:23:42] Jacob Chase: Thank you so much, Amy. Bye
Just as Jacob describes mapping contribution to team outcomes, Functionly helps leaders design clear org structures where roles, accountabilities, and outcomes are visible to everyone. Map your org, clarify who owns what, and connect people to the work that drives results — at functionly.com.