Olin Hyde and the trouble with a better hammer

Olin Hyde has a useful description of an engineering mistake: build a hammer, then go looking for nails. He recognizes the impulse because he has followed it himself. A promising piece of technology can make its creator feel that the difficult work is finished. The remaining task, apparently, is to find someone sufficiently perceptive to buy it. The customer may have a less flattering interpretation of the arrangement.

Hyde’s career has given that disagreement plenty of exercise. He helped build LeadCrunch, the business that became Rev Intelligence, around artificial intelligence for finding customers. He now leads Trilight Defence, a cybersecurity company. Across the change in subject, the commercial question stays stubbornly plain: what problem is important enough for someone to spend money solving?

His answers come with the experience of building companies, changing direction and watching technical promise meet practical demand. He can talk about models. He can also talk about selling encyclopedias. That second qualification deserves a little space.

A computer at twelve, a doorstep before college

Hyde wrote his first line of code at twelve on a home-built computer. Later, he sold encyclopedias door-to-door to help pay for college. The two activities make an appealing pair: a machine will accept an instruction without asking whether this is a convenient time. A household has options.

The sales experience preceded a more formal attempt to understand buying. At Miami University, Hyde studied Interdisciplinary Studies and wrote a thesis on mathematical modelling of organizational buying behavior. He graduated in 1988. The combination put mathematics beside marketing years before those interests became the ingredients of a company.

His first job after college was as a research analyst at Andersen Consulting. He later earned a Master of Advanced Studies in systems engineering at UC San Diego. His earlier ventures included National Facilities Group, acquired by Accruent, and Auto-Semantics, acquired by ai-one. The career already contained both the work of creating a business and the experience of handing one on.

Six months of Saturday homework

LeadCrunch’s early commercial education had a regular appointment. Beginning in July 2016, Hyde and co-founder Sanjit Singh met a fractional chief marketing officer every Saturday for two hours. They kept doing it for six months. Each meeting ended with homework.

The questions were elementary in the most demanding sense. What business were they in? Who were their customers? Where could they find them? What did those customers want to achieve? How would LeadCrunch help? Having software did not automatically settle any of these matters.

The founders had raised $300,000 in early funding. They needed to build a team and explain a new offer in an already crowded market. Time spent wrestling with positioning was time taken from product work, business development and fundraising. Bringing in experienced marketing help gave the questions an owner and the answers a deadline.

There is a modest comedy in entrepreneurs assigning themselves weekend homework. There is also a recognizable business problem underneath it: the people closest to a product may have the hardest time describing it without describing how it was made.

A question about customers can sound almost too small for an ambitious technology company. Yet it contains a series of decisions: whose working day will improve, who can authorize the purchase, and what evidence will satisfy them? A founder can answer each one beautifully in the wrong order. The Saturday sessions gave Hyde and Singh a routine for bringing those decisions back together. Their calendar makes the point rather well. Understanding the market was a task they returned to, week after week, with something to do before the next conversation.

The buyer has colleagues

By 2017, Hyde could describe the offer in terms a customer could use. LeadCrunch looked for prospects resembling a company’s good existing customers. Its purpose was to discover promising accounts beyond broad labels such as industry and company size, then help reach the people involved.

His argument against those labels was personal as well as technical. Knowing the category into which someone falls gives only a partial understanding of them. The same limitation applies to a business. A useful match depends on details that a coarse classification can overlook.

He also drew a boundary around automation. Pattern recognition benefits from a machine’s speed and scale. The relationship still requires people. A sales team does not get to delegate the entire business of earning trust because an algorithm has furnished a name.

In a later conversation, Hyde explained another complication: a business purchase can involve several decision makers. Individual preferences may pull in different directions. His approach sought common ground within the group. Anyone who has tried to get colleagues to agree on lunch can appreciate why a larger purchase takes some thought.

“When artificial intelligence works, we call it software.”

Olin Hyde

Thirty-five was a complicated number

LeadCrunch reached No. 35 on the 2020 Inc. 5000. It also placed third on that year’s Inc. Regionals California list. Those are company rankings, and the distinction matters. The result belonged to an organization whose leadership, product, marketing and delivery had to work together.

The scale had changed considerably from the early positioning sessions. A September 2020 account put annual revenue at $8.4 million in 2018 and $11.7 million in 2019. It described a company with roughly thirty-five staff and sales teams in several American cities, serving more than five hundred enterprises over the preceding three years.

Numbers give the story a useful check against vagueness. They also leave room for an awkward fact about ambition: recognition arrives relative to other companies, while a founder may be measuring performance against an internal target. A high place on a list cannot tell you whether the team met the plan it had written for itself.

A culture that kept moving

Hyde’s response to the ranking was unusually candid. He had wanted stronger growth. In a leadership conversation, he described thirty-five as a consolation prize because the company had missed its 2019 growth goals. It is an answer that puts a little gravel into the usual celebratory interview.

The same conversation revealed how he thought about people. Recruitment emphasized mastery, purpose and autonomy. Daily work emphasized focus, optimism and trust. He wanted employees to contribute to a shared goal and had an equity plan intended to let them participate in the value they created.

He treated culture as something that changes with the business. A document could record it, but the document could not finish the work. The company had begun by borrowing from Salesforce’s approach and then revised its own practices. The daily behavior of the team remained the test.

Those priorities fit an ambition he voiced elsewhere: technology should help people do useful things, and his career should leave something worthwhile behind. The aspiration makes the personnel decisions consequential. A company gives its founder a place to pursue an idea; it also gives everyone else a portion of their working life to spend.

Leaving the team he built

On January 6, 2021, Hyde stepped down as LeadCrunch’s CEO and resigned from its board. He announced the departure the following month. He said his vision had differed from the board’s, while expressing support for the company as a shareholder.

His account of the experience gave considerable credit to employees. The company had needed generalists while discovering its market, then specialists as it grew. That change creates difficult decisions alongside the visible achievements. Growth requires different work from different people at different stages.

He also put a duration on the search for the right problem: four and a half years of pivots. The lesson he took away was to spend more time understanding customers’ problems and less time working through algorithms. It is a striking admission from someone whose credentials make the technical work sound like the natural center of the story.

Leaving a role does not erase the education it supplied. It changes where that education can be applied. For Hyde, the next public chapter would involve a different kind of customer anxiety.

An old classmate, a different problem

At Trilight Defence, Hyde works with Patrick Hart, a childhood classmate he has known for more than fifty years. Their relationship includes decades as business collaborators and advisers. Hart brought experience in European cybersecurity and connections with Ukrainian operators defending critical infrastructure.

The company’s offer is to simulate nation-state cyber attacks so organizations can test whether their operations can withstand them. The customer is being asked to examine uncomfortable possibilities before an actual attacker supplies the demonstration. Hyde’s current work brings technical capability into another setting where a buyer needs to understand a practical outcome.

In June 2026, he wrote about the uncomfortable conversations that come with leading a cybersecurity business. His concern was whether companies were testing their defenses hard enough and asking useful questions about failure. The commercial subject had changed from finding an opportunity to exposing a weakness.

His personal geography has changed too: his public profile now lists Nendaz, in Switzerland’s Valais region. Earlier biographies describe a cyclist and a reader of books about large ideas. A Miami alumni profile recorded a growing interest in community work and mentoring, with more to his identity than the company he happened to lead.

The hammer image remains a useful way into his career, because it lets the engineer laugh at his own habits. The door-to-door salesman has a part in the story too. Someone still has to open the door, listen, and decide that the offer answers a problem they actually have.