Most CEOs talk about innovation. Drew Allen lives it.

From taking his first trip to China at 13, to speaking Mandarin and Portuguese, to attending an AI hackathon hosted by the PayPal Mafia before most CEOs even knew what a large language model was, Drew Allen is not your average CEO.

As the leader of Grace Technologies, Drew has quietly built one of the most experimentally driven, AI forward, high performance cultures in the industrial electronics space. And in this episode of CEOs Unscripted, he pulls back the curtain on exactly how he did it and what every CEO can learn from his approach.

This is a conversation about curiosity, experimentation, reinvention and why the CEO who transforms themselves first is always the one who transforms their business.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why being present in the market is the single most underrated competitive advantage in sales
• The Jim Collins flywheel that has driven Grace Technologies from day one
• How to build a culture of small scale experimentation so you never have to risk the farm
• Why Drew runs 50 to 200 experiments at any given time and what he is looking for
• The AI hackathon that sped up Grace Technologies’ AI journey by 12 months
• How Drew used Claude to build a sales forecasting ensemble model in an afternoon that would have taken a data scientist six months
• Why you cannot coach drive and what to look for when hiring instead
• How to find the real bottleneck in your business using the five whys exercise
• Why transforming your business always starts with transforming yourself first

📌 Episode Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Cold open: The management insight most CEOs overlook
• 00:59 — Welcome to CEOs Unscripted
• 02:33 — Meet Drew Allen, CEO of Grace Technologies
• 03:44 — Drew’s backstory and family entrepreneurial legacy
• 06:35 — What 3M in Asia taught him about business
• 08:34 — The Toyota Way and being present in the market
• 11:24 — Why Grace Technologies needed to reinvent itself
• 13:27 — Building an engineering team from scratch
• 14:52 — The Jim Collins flywheel and how Drew applied it
• 16:40 — Balancing instinct with strategy
• 17:48 — Fire bullets not cannonballs
• 19:21 — Decision making under pressure
• 20:20 — Building a culture of experimentation
• 22:42 — How SpaceX thinks about time vs cost
• 23:09 — What failing the right way looks like
• 25:19 — High performance culture and what it really means
• 26:40 — Removing toxic high performers
• 27:33 — Why you cannot coach drive
• 30:02 — Hiring for curiosity over credentials
• 31:37 — How Drew became an AI forward CEO
• 33:29 — The AI hackathon that changed everything
• 35:48 — How Claude sparked a wildfire inside the company
• 36:26 — Transform yourself before you transform your business
• 39:42 — Deciding which AI experiments are worth scaling
• 42:02 — Building a sales forecasting model in one afternoon
• 44:31 — What the data changed about how he leads
• 46:14 — Why Drew believes entrepreneurship beats philanthropy
• 48:57 — Advising and investing in early stage founders
• 49:39 — Advice Drew gives entrepreneurs at every stage
• 51:46 — How to find the real bottleneck using five whys
• 54:48 — Drew’s closing thoughts
• 55:42 — Jane’s closing thoughts

🎙️ About CEOs Unscripted:

CEOs Unscripted is a bi-weekly podcast for mid-market CEOs, no fluff, no jargon, just real conversations from leaders who have been in the trenches.