The Scott Woody Interview – Big Think

Estimates vary, but it’s safe to say that less than 1% of venture-backed startups become “unicorns” with a valuation of $1 billion or more. However, that figure jumps to nearly 60% for companies included on the annual Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Which is precisely where Metronome CEO Scott Woody found himself in 2024.

Metronome has filled a gap in the current billing and pricing revolution, spearheading the latest “usage-based” approach and, in the process, earning a roster of heavyweight investors (including Andreessen Horowitz), and a client list that includes Nvidia, Databricks, and OpenAI. So the question is clearly not why Metronome has been tapped as a unicorn contender, but how Woody — a former Director of Engineering at Dropbox — managed to maneuver his company into such a strong position. 

Big Think Business cornered him to find out, and was treated to an instructive blend of super-fast feedback loops and re-imagined CEO networking, allied to the yin and yang of being “memoryless.” Aspiring unicorns, read on.

Big Think: As a student at Stanford you worked on protein folding, among other things — what triggered the pivot that re-set your career?

Woody: I had spent four years at Stanford. It was fun intellectually but decoupled from impacting the real world. Then I took a few classes focused on entrepreneurship. I realized that it’s much easier using business and capitalism to impact the world. With that point of view, within eight weeks, I had incorporated a business [Foundry Hiring] to help companies track their job applicants. The feedback loop was super-fast. And, I realized that I liked learning at that kind of maximum rate. Science is much slower. Startups are a great place for learning and, if I succeed, my impact is quicker, too. That was the pivot. 

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Big Think: What lessons picked up as a neophyte CEO at Foundry Hiring do you still think about today?

Woody: I had a mentor at that time who was one of the most principled people I had ever met. He suggested I read Andy Grove’s leadership book, High Output Management. From it, I really got how important it is to have an internal leadership operating system: old school, integrity first, keep everything open, address any issues directly and don’t let them fester. The success we had at Foundry came from being real and never shying away from hard truths. So having integrity and embracing truth are key for me. Even on your best days as a CEO, you get punched in the face seven different times and you still have to smile and keep learning.

Big Think: Like a growing number of high profile tech CEOs, you host a (Metronome) podcast — do you see the media side of your job as a burden, a distraction, or a pleasure?

Woody: If it was a burden or a distraction, I wouldn’t do it. I see it as a chance to learn from people who are much smarter than me on a whole variety of topics. I get to bring a level of curiosity and learn in a high-bandwidth way. 

Big Think: Metronome made it onto Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2024 — does the thought of becoming a unicorn keep you awake at night?

Woody: Not really. The idea of making the business successful keeps me awake. It’s exciting. Sometimes there’s so much cool stuff to do that it is hard to go to sleep. My ambitions are, honestly, to focus on building a viable product that makes our customers successful. If we do that, we will grow and be rewarded for it. Valuation is a retroactive acknowledgement of the hard work that you’ve done. 

Big Think: You spotted the business potential of billing bottlenecks while you were at Dropbox — what gave you the confidence to take that insight and run with it?

Woody: [At Dropbox] we spent two months interviewing at least a 100 companies about this problem of billing. I was on a quest to find out who had solved it because I thought, someone must have done that. By the 50th conversation, we realized that no one had and that everyone was hitting the same problem. They just didn’t know it because they were each in their own silo. Literally, no company said, “Yep, this is not a problem for us.” 

So then the question became: is this a solvable problem? That’s where the act of faith came in. We said to ourselves, we can solve this. The way I got confidence was ultimately considering what the solution would be. Then, we went and talked to those people again and asked them: “If we built this, would you give me money?” We found that people were willing to give us money even before we built anything. That was a key moment. We knew we had something real.

Big Think: You cofounded Metronome during COVID. How did that affect your strategy?

Woody: Because of COVID, we had to do everything over Zoom. We couldn’t do the high-touch sales thing for enterprise sales. Also, because we were forced to be remote from day one, we had to write everything down about how to do things. That didn’t change our strategy very much. But, if not for COVID, we would have been much more on-site with customers, much more in your face much faster. So, that’s a muscle that we’re continuing to build as we spend time with customers and build those communities.

Big Think: You believe that it’s important for founder CEOs to develop relationships with other founder CEOs because “it’s lonely at the top.” What does that look like in practice?

Woody: In practice, it looks a lot like making friends. As a CEO, you’re constantly meeting new people and you’re almost always talking about social and business things at the same time. If I meet someone I really enjoy, I lean into that. I reach out and make a plan to connect. I’m a CTO turned CEO, so networking is the opposite of what I’m default wired for. But part of your job as a CEO is to network and build community so that you have support when things get hard. So I had to recast my idea of networking. I have had founder CEOs help me. One was William Smith, former CEO of Euclid Analytics and an investor in us. There were others, too, and they talked me through things like product-market fit, early enterprise sales, and getting our first sale. One piece of advice was really helpful — that prospects will pretend your solution is useless and you really have to lean in to your own value.

Big Think: How has the culture of Silicon Valley changed since the arrival of AI?

Woody: It has made it really common for things to grow at rates that historically would have been thought impossible. The reality is that we’re at the very early stages of understanding the true trajectory of any of these breakout AI companies. Still, as a CEO of a non-AI company in this environment, I have to resist being comparative. I have to look at the physics of my business. 

The arrival of AI has also changed all layers of all parts of all companies. So there is great uncertainty and also great potential. We are on the verge of rewriting the fundamental fabric of Silicon Valley. As an entrepreneur, that’s exciting. This all requires a strong growth mindset. You just cannot hold on to what you believed three or four years ago, and you have to change your assumptions every year, or even more frequently. 

Big Think: How do you see the AI landscape developing over the next decade? And do you worry about some of the darker AI scenarios that could play out?

Woody: I’m an inherent optimist and I look at rapid change as opportunity. I cannot think about the next decade when it comes to AI because the next two months is a long timeframe for AI. There’s so much potential unlocked in these tools. They personally have changed almost every one of my workflows. As long as you have a flexible mindset, there’s unbound potential in this moment.

Big Think: What’s your greatest strength as a leader? And your greatest flaw?

Woody: My greatest strength and my greatest weakness are the same. I am “memoryless.” I really do not put stock into what I believed even three or six months ago. I am very willing to change my mind with new evidence. That’s the strength part. In times of rapid change, I’m very down to figure out what the new game is on the field. The downside is, the company looks to its CEO for vision and durability. If it is constantly changing, it is impossible for anyone to follow unless I make a concerted effort to check in with the company every quarter to say, “Here is what I’ve learned and what I think now.” As a leader, what you’re thinking and saying kind of dictates the success of the company. So “memoryless” is a feature and a bug at the same time. 

Big Think: Which literary or philosophical figures have influenced your business thinking?

Woody: There have been many, but I would say the main one is Charles Darwin and the concept of natural selection. I use a lot of analogies drawn from biology. Natural selection is an explanatory fact about the world. The organisms that win are those that can learn and adapt the fastest. That’s absolutely true in business and technology. So I strive to create a business organism with the fastest learning rate and the shortest cycle time. If you have that, you will win.