Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, talks with Matthew Tharp, CEO of Hunter.io, about the discipline that separates leaders who use data honestly from leaders who use it to win arguments.
Matthew Tharp is a two-time startup co-founder and the CEO of Hunter.io, an all-in-one email platform built to help businesses find and connect with the people who matter most to their growth. Before Hunter, Tharp served as VP of Product at FlowHub, a cannabis retail software company processing over $3 billion in annual sales, and held leadership roles including Chief Product Officer at Gamalon and VP of Growth at Blissfully. He co-founded Zaius, a behavioral marketing platform where he raised $13 million and grew the team from zero to 50, and BoldChat, which pioneered proactive chat for sales and marketing before its acquisition by LogMeIn.
When a CEO must decide whether their team is using data to confirm a favored narrative or to expose a real gap in performance, Tharp’s rule is direct: the data must be used to interrogate the hypothesis for failure, not to defend it. At BoldChat, Tharp says, “what we felt we were really, really good at was using data to figure out what story the data is telling” — and he traces the erosion of that discipline directly to a senior hire who used metrics to hide problems instead of surface them.
This episode is for CEOs building a leadership team culture around how data gets used, not just what data gets collected.
Key Takeaways
- When a CEO models data interrogation publicly, teams learn that surfacing bad news is safe, which removes the incentive to hide failures behind favorable metrics.
- A senior hire at BoldChat who used data to “legitimize their argument” rather than expose failure modes coincided with a slowdown in the company’s growth, a pattern Tharp identified only after digging into how that leader was using metrics.
- Adaptive leadership, not a fixed style, produced the strongest results for Tharp when he stepped in as CEO of Hunter.io to replace two founders with high credibility and full organizational buy-in.
- Skipping a seed round for a Series A paired with an acquisition, and concentrating investment in a single lead investor, mired Zaius in organizational and vision integration work that slowed the company down instead of accelerating it.
- In heavily regulated industries like cannabis retail, the standard SaaS playbook of building one standardized 80%-use-case product breaks down, because state-by-state regulatory differences require the opposite approach: architected flexibility instead of standardization.
How CEOs Should Decide Whether Their Team’s Data Practices Are Honest
The test a CEO must apply is not whether data is being used, but what it’s being used for. Tharp draws a direct contrast between two approaches: using data to prove a predetermined story right, versus using data to find out what story is actually there. “A lot of people use data to prove themselves right,” Tharp says. “A lot of people try to leverage data to tell the story they want to tell.”
At BoldChat, Tharp’s team identified the metrics most likely to expose a gap and then interrogated those metrics for failure modes, rather than mining data selectively to confirm a direction already chosen. That discipline broke down when a new senior leader joined who came from larger companies and was accustomed to using data to “legitimize their argument.” Tharp’s team eventually traced a slowdown in growth to that leader using data to hide failures while optimizing the appearance of success.
The fix, in Tharp’s account, is not a policy but a modeling behavior: when a CEO interrogates their own assumptions publicly, calling out where the data contradicts their hypothesis before presenting conclusions, teams learn that honest analysis is safe. “If your leaders aren’t hard at hiding behind the numbers,” Tharp says, “there’s really no motivation for you to do that either.”
Why Adaptive Leadership Matters More When Replacing Founders
A CEO stepping into a company built and run by its founders faces a specific structural problem: the incoming leader has to earn credibility that the outgoing founders already had by default. When Tharp became CEO of Hunter.io, he was replacing the platform’s original founders, who carried what he describes as outsized credibility and the ability to act without asking permission.
Tharp’s approach was not to impose a single leadership style on the organization but to adapt his own style to the specific problem the team needed solved, while also asking the organization to adapt to him. “The more we were able to adapt the company to who we were in the moment, the better our growth has been,” Tharp says. That mutual adjustment let the team shift from protecting what the founders built toward building what comes next.
Tharp is direct about where this leaves his own past experience: “I think you have to adapt your style to the team you have and the problem you’re trying to solve.” Across every organization he’s led, he says the teams that flourished were the ones where he adapted his leadership style the most.
What Regulated Industries Teach CEOs About Abandoning Standard Playbooks
A CEO operating in a heavily regulated, state-by-state industry cannot rely on the standardization playbook that works in most SaaS categories. At FlowHub, a cannabis retail point-of-sale and inventory platform, Tharp’s team confronted a market where every state enforced different regulations, and where competitors within the same state deliberately differentiated from each other despite operating under identical rules.
The standard SaaS approach, Tharp explains, is to identify the 80% use case, build it efficiently, and create a standardized product from that middle ground. That approach is structurally incompatible with a regulatory environment where flexibility has to be architected into the application itself rather than engineered out of it. “None of that applied,” Tharp says of the playbooks he’d relied on elsewhere. “It was almost like the inverse is where we started from.”
The result, Tharp says, was a product built by throwing out prior assumptions and building directly from the specific restrictions and functions the regulatory environment imposed, rather than adapting a proven template. He credits that approach with FlowHub’s success in the category since.
Closing Framework
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Data is a witness, not an ally | Identify the metrics most likely to expose a gap and interrogate them for failure modes, rather than mining data to confirm a decision already made | At BoldChat, this discipline surfaced a senior leader who was using data to hide failures while optimizing for the appearance of success |
| Model the behavior you want from your team | When a CEO publicly interrogates their own assumptions and surfaces contradicting data before presenting conclusions, the team learns that honest analysis carries no penalty | Tharp credits this modeling with removing his teams’ incentive to hide problems behind favorable numbers, across every company where he’s held senior leadership |
| Adapt leadership style to the team, not the reverse | Incoming CEOs replacing high-credibility founders must adjust their own approach to the specific organization while asking the organization to adjust in return | At Hunter.io, this mutual adaptation when replacing the founding team produced stronger growth than holding a fixed leadership style |
| Regulatory complexity requires inverted playbooks | In state-by-state regulated industries, standard SaaS standardization fails; flexibility must be architected directly into the product from the constraints themselves | At FlowHub, building against cannabis retail’s state-level regulatory differences, rather than standardizing around an 80% use case, produced a product Tharp says outperformed competitors in the category |
Quotes from This Episode
- “A lot of people use data to prove themselves right. A lot of people try to leverage data to tell the story they want to tell.” — Matthew Tharp, CEO, Hunter.io
- “What we felt we were really, really good at was using data to figure out what story the data is telling.” — Matthew Tharp, CEO, Hunter.io
- “If your leaders aren’t hard at hiding behind the numbers, there’s really no motivation for you to do that either.” — Matthew Tharp, CEO, Hunter.io
- “I think you have to adapt your style to the team you have and the problem you’re trying to solve.” — Matthew Tharp, CEO, Hunter.io
- “It was almost like the inverse is where we started from.” — Matthew Tharp, CEO, Hunter.io
Frequently Asked Questions
How should a CEO tell whether their team is using data honestly or to win arguments?
Watch for whether team members are identifying the metrics most likely to expose a problem and drilling into them, or selectively citing metrics that confirm a conclusion they’ve already reached. Matthew Tharp identified this shift at BoldChat when a senior hire began using data to legitimize decisions rather than stress-test them, which coincided with a slowdown in company growth.
What should a CEO do differently when replacing a company’s original founders?
Adapt your leadership style to the specific team and problem rather than imposing a fixed approach, while also asking the organization to adjust to you. Tharp applied this when he became CEO of Hunter.io, replacing founders who held outsized credibility, and says the resulting mutual adaptation produced stronger growth than holding a rigid leadership style.
Should a CEO in a regulated industry standardize their product the way most SaaS companies do?
No. Standardizing around a single 80% use case works in most SaaS categories but fails in state-by-state regulated markets, where flexibility has to be built into the architecture itself. Tharp’s team at FlowHub abandoned standard SaaS playbooks entirely and built the product around the specific regulatory constraints of each state instead.
Executives Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
