Episode 213 · 10 July 2025 · 44:06

How to manage a genius, with Steve Roest, CEO of PocDoc

Featuring Steve Roest

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Managing geniuses: Steve Roest's story begins
interview#geniuses #hiring #experts
I'm not necessarily the cleverest person in the room
interview#leadership #humility #self-awareness
The personal tragedy that set Steve on his mission
interview#personal-story #motivation #tragedy
How to lead experts when you're not the technical expert
interview#leadership #experts #technical-skills
Not all brilliant people are natural team players
interview#teamwork #scientists #engineers
Solving complicated problems vs. solving customer problems
interview#problem-solving #customer #complexity
Screening for ego in the hiring process
interview#hiring #ego #screening
Creating artificial conflict in interviews
interview#interviews #conflict #assessment
Keeping geniuses aligned without stifling innovation
interview#innovation #alignment #management
Where to find Steve and key takeaways
outro#contact #takeaways #summary

Show notes

How to Manage a Genius — with Steve Roest, CEO of PocDoc

Guest: Steve Roest — CEO and co-founder of PocDoc, one of the UK's fastest-growing health tech startups, leading a team of scientists and engineers despite not being a scientist or engineer himself.

What do you do when you're leading people who are smarter than you?

Steve joins Al and Leanne to share how he turns his so-called "weakness" — being the non-technical founder — into a leadership superpower. He explains why you don't need to be the smartest person in the room to lead brilliant teams, how he screens for ego in the hiring process, and why the best ideas come from freedom shaped by clear goals and customer needs.

They dig into how leaders succeed through vision, coordination, and culture rather than technical control, why confidence isn't the same as competence, and how to keep world-class experts aligned without stifling innovation.

Top 3 Takeaways

You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. Leaders succeed by focusing on vision, coordination, and culture — not technical control. Steve proves that a non-technical founder can lead world-class experts effectively.
Confidence isn't the same as competence. Hiring for collaboration skills is just as important as technical ability. Steve shares how PocDoc screens for ego and team fit — including creating artificial conflict in interviews to see how candidates respond.
Brilliance needs boundaries. The best ideas come from freedom — but only when that freedom is shaped by clear goals and customer needs. Scientists want to solve complicated problems; leaders need to point them at the right ones.

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

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Al ElliottWhat if you want to hire people who are genuinely brilliant? I'm talking about the top 1% of experts, the PhD scientists, the AI engineers who could probably code circles around most of us. Well, that is hard enough, but how are you supposed to manage these geniuses?

Leanne ElliottThe conventional wisdom says you need to be the smartest person in the room to lead great teams, but what if that could be completely wrong?

Al ElliottOur guest today manages some of the cleverest people on the planet.

Steve RoestMy name is Steve Roest, and I am the CEO and co-founder of PocDoc, which is one of the UK's fastest-growing health tech businesses.

Al ElliottNow, Steve openly admits that he's not the most technical person on his team, yet he's successfully leading scientists and engineers who are developing cutting-edge medical diagnostics.

Leanne ElliottSteve believes being the non-technical founder is actually his superpower. So if you've ever felt intimidated by the expertise around you, or wondered how to hire and manage brilliant people without micromanaging them, this episode is for you.

Al ElliottJoin us today as we discover how the most innovative companies in the world manage their technical teams.

Leanne ElliottWelcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning where behavioural science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne and I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.

Al ElliottMy name is Al, I'm a business owner.

Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of work.

Al ElliottAfter this very short break, we'll hear how a personal tragedy in Steve's life set him on this mission and why he wants to prevent anyone else going through the same heartbreak. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems, and in our case, about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.

Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.

Al ElliottNice. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Leanne ElliottWelcome back. Let's go and join Al and hear Steve's story.

Steve RoestMy name is Steve Roest, and I am the CEO and co-founder of PocDoc, which is one of the UK's fastest growing health tech businesses. I'm also the creator and host of one of Europe's largest health tech podcasts, which is called The Health Tech Hour. And in my spare time, of which I, to be fair, don't have quite a lot, I run something called The Last Friday Club, where I help entrepreneurs in a free, safe space to answer any challenges. I give up the last Friday of every month to help entrepreneurs.

Al ElliottI think you admitted to me when we chatted before that you are not necessarily the cleverest person in the room. So how do you manage all these geniuses?

Steve RoestSure. So I don't have a clinical background or a healthcare background, which is definitely true. PocDoc's initial area of focus was cardiovascular disease. So heart, the prevention of heart attack and strokes. My passion for that, I guess, comes from when I was 14 and my dad was basically the same age that I am. Now, almost to the day, he had a huge stroke due to undiagnosed cardiovascular disease. So I've always, it was catastrophic for him, as you'd expect, catastrophic for our family. All kinds of bad stuff happened as a result. And it meant that I had a really deep understanding of that disease area. So while I wasn't a healthcare professional, I really understood that use case from a very personal patient perspective, which was very helpful. And that really created the drive for the Healthy Heart Check. Our PocDoc's Healthy Heart Check is now the number one diagnostic test on the high street. It's available in Boots, Superdrug, Well, and it delivers in 9 minutes the equivalent of the NHS health check, just using one of our rapid test kits and the PocDoc app. But to answer your kind of original question, I'm not sure I've necessarily ever been the smartest guy in the room. I'm not sure I've ever been the dumbest guy in the room either. I think that what I've learned through my career of having done multiple ventures is you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to ask the right questions. And actually, when you're dealing with highly technical, complex, multifaceted problems that need to be solved highly collaboratively, it actually isn't beneficial to be the smartest person in the room because that doesn't actually necessarily create the right environment to solve those problems. In the best way. And so we've developed cutting-edge biochemistry, we've developed cutting-edge applied AI to transform a smartphone image of a rapid test into a fully quantified cardiovascular risk assessment. I'm an expert in neither of those places, but I am capable and confident enough to challenge the individuals in those groups and ask common sense questions. And challenge them to sort of establish why we should do one thing and why we should not do the other. What I've seen consistently with highly technical groups, highly technical individuals, is that there's often a default to perceived wisdom in those groups because of the incredible level of qualification and experience it takes to get to be proficient in those specialties. And often it's a bit of like wood for the trees. issue. So under no circumstances am I in my R&D group saying, well, you know, this is how you dilute samples and this is how you run experiments and this is what we do with the freeze dryer and things like that. Like, that's definitely not what's happening, but I can set questions and goals and challenge them and help them solve problems in a way that they might not necessarily be able to do themselves. So I'm a huge advocate for technical businesses to have senior people that aren't technical or don't have technical backgrounds as well, right? You can't run an R&D group without someone that's highly qualified in that scientific area or clinical area. I'm definitely not saying that, but having that blend at the top is really helpful. So I'm the non-technical co-founder, if you want to put it like that. And my 2 other co-founders are both scientists. So I come from a commercial business background. They come from a scientific background. I've become a lot more scientifically literate. They've become a lot more commercially literate. That's how I would explain that one.

Leanne ElliottSo, right from the start, Steve's challenging this idea that you need to be the most qualified person to lead experts. What's important is how he frames it. He's not saying technical knowledge doesn't matter. He's saying the role of a leader is fundamentally different. And Steve's story goes deeper than just management philosophy. His motivation is deeply personal, and I think that's really important for understanding how he approaches leadership. Let's hear about why he chose a business route rather than becoming a scientist himself.

Al ElliottCan we just go back to the point, which I know is not a great point to go back to, but after your dad had his stroke, you obviously read up on it. You learned a lot about it. Why didn't you go down a technical route? Why didn't you become a clinician or a scientist?

Steve RoestIt's a really, really good question. I think from a young age, From the point at which my dad's stroke happened, my mum became his sort of default carer. I mean, he was in hospital for a really long time and he was bedridden for an even longer period of time. And so we, my sister and I, who was 2 years younger than me, were sort of left to our own devices for a few years. I was really focused on following sort of, I guess, my dad's footsteps. So my dad, In the '90s, this is sort of when I became conscious of what he did for a job, I guess. He was in and around all of the telco space, which is what the internet was called back then. So he started and ran a number of those early online ventures where you put the CD in the machine. He ran CompuServe, if anyone listening remembers CompuServe. And then, and so, you know, we used to have TV crews over at the house filming all of these different random Things. You know, I remember they came over one time and we had one of the first ever internet through the TV boxes, which was just such a poor product. It was just completely unusable. It was horrendous, but it was sort of now seeing what Netflix is and it sort of actually wasn't, it was sort of like this very, very initial version, but this was all on a dial-up modem, so it just didn't work. And then after he had his stroke, he was out of the workforce for a while. And the first job that he could get coming back really was the CEO of this troubled startup. He was the first CEO that the founders had hired. They'd raised $1 million as a Series A, right? So just put that in perspective, a Series A is $1 million. And they weren't really making any progress to market. They had huge issues. They had all kinds of stuff, but their tech was really good. That business was a business called Shazam. So he was the first CEO of Shazam. And back when there was no smartphones, this was all pre— this was years pre-smartphone. And so I did my work experience ripping CDs off so that they could build up their music library and things like that. So I was always really— we used to have venture capitalists over, my mum would cook them dinner and things like that. So it was a really weird childhood in some ways, very good in some ways, but otherwise definitely non-standard. But it made me realize that I found the elements of high risk, high reward that you could get within tech, whether it was a startup or not necessarily a startup, but that sort of high growth industry where you are willing to trade time and effort and pension effectively against a highly nonlinear accelerated route. of growth, I was totally fine with that trade. Like, I was completely fine. I mean, even when I was a kid, I knew from an early age that I could work in a way that other people couldn't work or wouldn't work. And so, not all the time, you know, like I've been quite public about the fact that I failed my first year at Oxford because I didn't work hard enough. After that, I worked really, really hard. So it wasn't like it was, I was some beast the whole time, but I could look around and realized that I was able to work harder than other people were if I really cared. And I sort of self-selected for industries that valued that. My claim to fame, so to speak, is that I think I'm still the only person in college history to have failed their first year and ended with a first with distinction. So I flamed out in my first year because I came from a state school. And a sort of inner-city state school. And it was a really horrible school experience for me. I mean, it was awful. But got to Oxford, super happy, had had like, you know, this sort of 3 to 5 years leading up to that was this very turbulent, difficult period of time at home with my dad after I was 14. And it was a very, very strange existence. Got to Oxford, had this huge freedom, also got to Oxford and realized that the gulf between my education and everyone else's education was enormous. I mean, it was, talk about imposter syndrome. I was completely blown away. I was dealing with people with intellects that were just like a mystery to me. I mean, it was insane. And so for the first time in my whole life, before or since, I just stuck my head in the sand. I was a rower before I became the captain of my college rowing club. I went into the social life piece and strangely enough, I failed my first year, nearly got kicked out. And actually, weirdly, this is kind of funny, but every single person I spoke to, so my tutors, my dad, quite a lot of my friends from home, Who else? Quite a few other people. They said, you are not Oxford material, mate. Look, you tried it, didn't work. You're a state school kid. Look, good on you. But even my dad told me to quit. He was like, just lower your expectations. Just, there's no harm, you know, because he got kicked out of university at the end of his first year or second year. And I sort of spent the summer thinking it through. My girlfriend broke up with me as well from Oxford as well, which sucked at the time. And then I just thought, you know what? I'm not having this. Like, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna quit. I've never quit. I'm not quitting. So I studied straight through, um, straight through my research. And then from there, I was sort of off at the races, really.

Al ElliottThis is such a classic trait for an entrepreneur. When everyone tells you to quit, you dig in. Now, it doesn't always work out, but when it does, it's a personal victory because entrepreneurs love to prove the world wrong.

Leanne ElliottThey absolutely do. And early exposure to startups and these high-growth environments have absolutely shaped Steve's risk tolerance. He discovered that he could work harder than most people when he really cared about something. That's such a crucial trait for leading innovation teams.

Al ElliottBut here is the key question. If you're not the technical expert, if you don't always understand the work that your guys do, how do you actually lead these teams day to day? So, at Oxford, you were surrounded by people who you felt perhaps had got a better education or that you perceived maybe knew more than you. You now see, you've now surrounded yourself deliberately with people who are experts in a narrow field. How much do you need to know as a leader about what they do to help them or to guide them or to lead them?

Steve RoestThat is a really, really good question. And I think that it's not necessarily, I think that's a question that I ask myself continuously as I seek to improve. And the job of a CEO and founder is to help the company win. I think the thing that I fall back on is that the first thing is that these groups with highly technical people do not need you to tell them how to do their job. So if you have an AI engineer and you are telling them how to code a model, they aren't very good at AI. That's the reality. Similarly, if I have an R&D scientist and I'm explaining to them how to plan and run an experiment to develop a new piece of biochemistry, that's not right. That person is not the right person for that role, or you as a leader are massively overstepping your boundaries. The only exception to that, for example, is there are many technical businesses, scientific businesses where the CEO or senior leader is an expert in that field. But that person then ultimately is the head of that group. They're not necessarily acting like a CEO, they're more acting like the head of that group. And that's okay. And that can work really well. And there's loads of examples of that working really super well. Like, for example, Bill Gates is a great example in Microsoft. He was awesome at coding. So he ran effectively an engineering group, which is really good. Congrats. Like, that works really well. In our business where we've got multiple different departments that all have to come together to build a medical device, which is multifaceted, that's not really very practical. And that's also the same way. in many other places. So the first thing is that they don't need you to do their job for them. And if they do, they're probably not right or good enough. The second thing is they don't know, for the most part, the overall vision of where you're trying to get to. Okay? Because they're in their piece of the puzzle trying to deliver on what you are asking them to do. When I'm talking about this, I mean predominantly technical businesses that are trying to solve technical, scientific, engineering challenges. So your job isn't, you have to appreciate that if you haven't explained to them how these pieces come together, and if there's no proactive plan about how these pieces come together, they will not do that themselves because they're so busy solving the thousands of hard problems that they need to solve to finalize the product or improve the product. You can't expect them to have headspace to then also be great at inter-team operability. It's just, in my experience, that doesn't happen. So that then leads onto where I play the role, which is one, this is where I believe my value add is in these things, making sure that there is a very clear set of goals that we're trying to get to with some timelines that are then broken down into a set of priorities that we think we need to achieve to achieve the goal. Because in medical devices, really, you fail thousands of times in thousands of ways, and then you sort of make it successful. So it's actually about how you create a mentality and a process to fail slightly better each time and avoid going down rabbit holes that suck up time, suck up cash, and won't go anywhere. So whenever something fails, there might be 100 reasons why it didn't work. The ability that you have to try, as this is what I try and do, is help guide people into solving the problems that will help us move forward more quickly, as opposed to getting distracted by things that aren't necessarily relevant. So I see the role of a sort of non-technical founder in a technical business as almost like the person that sets the overall plan and agenda, And is responsible for challenging the people in those groups, um, and helping them make better decisions about how they solve those problems, but not solving those problems for themselves.

Leanne ElliottThis is such an important distinction that Steve is making. A leader's role isn't to tell experts how to do their job. It's to help them understand how their work fits into the bigger picture.

Al ElliottAnd this is a trap that a lot of owners and leaders tend to fall into. They either try to become technical experts themselves, which is obviously impossible at scale, Or they are completely hands-off and provide no direction whatsoever.

Leanne ElliottSteve's managed to find this middle ground where he's setting clear goals and challenging assumptions without overstepping into the technical details. But this approach does create its own challenges, particularly when you're dealing with brilliant people who might have very strong opinions about how things should be done.

Al ElliottAnd the brutal truth is this: not all brilliant people are natural team players. Academic environments often reward individual achievement over collaboration. So the challenge is to help these experts work as a team, and it's not always easy.

Steve RoestI mean, I'd even go further, is like, we have scientists, we have tech engineers, and then we have other people, if that makes sense. So it's not just tech sales. We have a whole scientific group as well. So there's a huge amount that has to come together there. But all of that would be useless unless we had understood from the beginning And obviously this stuff, it does move around. I'm not saying it doesn't, but at the beginning we had a very clear idea about what our product needed to do to solve a real customer problem. And we hung everything, all of our design decisions, our innovation decisions, our technology decisions were hung off of that thesis. So they came after, we knew what our technology roughly could do conceptually, But we developed it to solve customer problems. We didn't develop the technology, then try and use it to solve customer problems. When I started in health, there were a few things that really struck me as really odd. One of them is referring to sales as funding and growth or revenue growth as adoption, right? I think those are almost like codes that some groups of people, some tribes of people prefer to use to distance themselves from the nitty-gritty of actually selling. And sometimes that might be because they're not familiar with selling. Sometimes they're not comfortable with it. Sometimes they view it like a black box and someone just making it rain and things like that. But I think those kind of distinctions are super unhelpful. So my background is purely in what was really deep experience in and around commercial B2B sales. So I really understand this area deeply. And that sort of forms some of the stuff that I help other entrepreneurs with, particularly in technical companies. So I think the way that we've built things at PocDoc from day one is that there's no barriers between the groups, first of all. Obviously sales, for example, can't sell something that doesn't exist. So particularly in medical devices. So you can't, history's littered with examples of companies that have salespeople out there selling vaporware that never materializes. So that's pointless. So we've been very clear that they're only able to sell what's actually available. Now, there might be some things that they talk about, oh, this is coming, this is coming, but that's a very clear rule set fundamentally. The second thing is, is I'm a huge believer, and this is the way I came up, is that the best salespeople are the people that understand the product the best. The really great elite sellers really understand every aspect of the product. So to your point around, do we let the scientists talk to the salespeople? Well, actually, the salespeople sit at the center. So if you think about our tech stack, we've got physical microfluidics, we've got AI diagnostics, we've got a digital infrastructure that integrates back up with the patient record and integrates with risk assessment tools and does all kinds of other bells and whistles, connects people to treatment. Salespeople in our organization actually sit at the center of that and understand all of those aspects. Whereas if you're a specialist in R&D, you're desperately every day trying to solve 100 hard things that day. You probably don't have a lot of exposure to how we integrate backup with the patient record. But if you're a salesperson and you don't understand that element, then you're not going to be able to go and talk to the healthcare system about how that works. So actually, they're in this very privileged position to get a really good overview of how all this stuff fits together. And then the final piece, if we go back to what we talked about before, businesses, not just PocDoc, businesses exist to solve customer pain. If you can't solve a pain for a customer, then I don't quite know what the longevity looks like for your business. And so actually, salespeople are really that frontline. of listening to customers, ensuring that the great technology that we've developed solves those issues for those customers, and then feeding back any new problems or new things or new opportunities back into the business. So I'm a big believer, and I sort of write about this on LinkedIn quite a bit, about how we need to move past sales being this sort of quote unquote dirty word. And that's why I don't like the use of funding instead of revenue or adoption. It sort of makes it a bit more childish.

Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number 1 management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number 1 marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?

Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work.

Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)And 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking.

Al ElliottAnd you're not gonna say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in threes—

Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Seamless.

Al ElliottSeamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.

Leanne ElliottIt is. It's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)It can.

Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)I am.

Al ElliottGo and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

Leanne ElliottBut come back.

Al ElliottYeah, come back.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Definitely come back, because Nudge isn't as good as this, so come back.

Al ElliottI'll cut that out.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Keep that in.

Leanne ElliottPutting salespeople at the centre makes perfect sense from a systems thinking perspective. They're the ones who need to understand every component and how it all fits together for the customer.

Al ElliottThere is a problem, though. Scientists and technical people want to solve complicated problems. That's what they live for. But businesses need to solve problems the customers have. So we have this situation where sometimes the thing your technical people want to work on is something your customers don't actually want. Do you find that people who are working on very hard problems, that they might be a little afraid of actually going to market with it because that will then say nobody wants it?

Steve RoestWith the Healthy Heart Check, I'll just talk about the Healthy Heart Check. We knew quite a lot about the pathways that we were going to solve for the healthcare system before we started any development. So that is how you should build products and services. Now, sometimes you might be ahead of the curve, and a lot of innovation is ahead of the curve, as in you're solving a problem that people might not realize that they needed quite yet. Like Uber, for example, solved an issue that we didn't realize we had, but it turns out, oh my goodness, did we have that problem, right? We've really had that problem. But if you'd have asked at the time, I'm not sure necessarily many people would've landed on that spontaneously. So there is an element of that. But with the Healthy Heart Check, we deliberately spent a huge amount of time on understanding the customer problem. And the reason that we did that, and I guess maybe I was more instrumental in that potentially than my scientific co-founders, was that I had already identified that one of the biggest issues, one of the biggest all-cause All failure causes in health tech, med tech, is lack of product-market fit. It's not that the product doesn't work as you specified it to. It's not that the science doesn't work. It's that what you built no one wants, or what you built no one will pay what you need them to pay for you to have a viable business model. And I personally did not want to waste my time all of those years in R&D only to get to the point where Nobody wants the product. That was— so I don't think that— if you think about how much money and funding and this ecosystem within universities and science and technology in the UK is hugely vibrant, innovation, coming up with innovative ideas is not really the issue that we face. It's actually the one somehow, somewhere, some due diligence to ensure that those innovations are fit to be turned into a business and support with the translation of those things into a viable business. And one of the things that affects innovation, quite rightly, particularly in medtech, is this really long journey from what they call the valley of death. So between starting development and getting it through regulatory approval is literally years. I mean, years. So that's quite difficult to create funding, to keep the business going, to keep going, to keep focused and get that through. And there's no guarantee about when that will get through regulatory. So that's quite a difficult market condition to solve for. And it's getting harder because of really the confusion in the UK, at least around what the NHS will purchase at scale and what they won't. So there's a massive gulf at the moment. So to do health tech and med tech, you need to raise private capital, basically, because of the level of innovation, the investment in R&D, the valley of death before you can generate revenue. You're out a lot of money before you can generate revenue. And then you've got no guarantee around what that revenue is. And so there's a gulf between the venture capital funders or the private market funders and the number one customer in the UK, which is the NHS. Those groups do not talk to each other. So you've got the main providers of capital who don't understand what the NHS is looking to purchase, and the NHS, which won't sit down with the venture capital people to explain what they're looking to purchase. So it creates a very difficult situation.

Al ElliottBut also a gap that you've exploited by understanding both sides of that.

Steve RoestYes. I mean, we've been really lucky so far, touch wood. And we've been, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was hard graft, but we've spent a lot of time. I guess I just didn't fundamentally on a really personal level, I could have done lots of things with my time. And although I feel and felt really passionately about PocDoc and Healthy Heart Check, which is by the way now the number one diagnostic test on the high street, which is great, very exciting. I didn't want to be one of those companies that didn't solve a real problem, but was on the sidelines talking about how great their technology was. I would prefer to have a white label company with a huge impact than a branded company with no impact. Obviously, if I can have a branded company with impact, that's the best. But I was really geared around making a difference, partly motivated because I want to prevent anyone going through what me and my family went through with my dad. But also, this isn't a dress rehearsal, people. We only get one shot at this thing that we call life. So let's go and sort of have it a bit as opposed to, I don't know, just sort of frittering things away. That was sort of my take on it. And I knew even in the best scenario, you were talking about 2 and a half years from starting the lab to a product in the market, it's a huge amount of effort. It's not like you're chilling on the beach in that time. There's a— you're working your absolute socks off. And to the idea that you could do that and then get to market and you've completely missed product-market fit, I was like, we can't, we just can't do that.

Leanne ElliottLet's talk about product-market fit. In research and development, or R&D, we see this all the time. Brilliant innovations that never find their market because the focus was on the technology, Rather than the problem the technology was trying to solve. Steve also mentioned that PocDoc screen for ego in their hiring process. That means traits like narcissism, someone who is preoccupied with their own importance, grandiosity, a person who has an exaggerated sense of their own purpose, and self-absorption. That's when people are preoccupied with their own feelings, thoughts, and experiences, often to the exclusion of others. So when you're dealing with people who are genuinely world-class experts, How do you separate confidence from arrogance?

Al ElliottIn this kind of industry where you do have experts, sort of top 1% of people in the world, do you find that some of them have an ego to match?

Steve RoestAbsolutely. And we screen for that. So tell me more about that. Well, so in any area where technical competence is valued and where technical competence is achieved through qualifications, over time, particularly in academia, the value system is not necessarily meritocratic. And the reward structure that they've been used to does not necessarily incentivize collaboration, team effort, working towards a singular goal at the expense of personal credit, personal ego. And so if you think about how the academic structure works, it's very much around How many times have you been published? How many times have you been cited? What research money have you brought in? It's very— the process is very much around, I'm right, you're wrong, in a sense. Even when you submit a paper for a peer-reviewed journal and they respond, you respond back sort of arguing your case. And that's quite hard for people to sort of break free of, to understand that actually, while you may be right and you may have won this argument, there's still another 999 problems that we're trying to solve today that aren't related. And actually, by digging in over there, you've created this weird kind of, this sort of weird atmosphere that actually works against the principle of everyone pulling together and everyone working towards a team goal or a company goal. So actually within those highly technical areas, we try and screen for people that are more interested and motivated by achieving team goals, goals that are above themselves as opposed to individual accolades. Obviously, the fact that you are the lead scientist at one of the UK, at PocDoc, which is one of the UK's fastest growing health tech companies, the Healthy Heart Check that you've built has scaled across the high street and is finding thousands of at-risk patients every month. That's incredible for your CV. And we've published lots of academic papers and you're listed on the academic paper, for example, things like that. But at the end of the day, nobody, including myself, is bigger than the company. Nobody is bigger than the mission. That is what matters. And trying to screen for that, I'm not saying we always got it right, particularly not in the early stages, but that's really what you're looking for.

Al ElliottNow, I'm not from an academic background, but my brother is. He was a professor at a UK university for decades. I learned that academic goals are very different to business goals. For example, publishing papers and winning arguments is very different from building products collaboratively.

Leanne ElliottAnd the research tells us that individual brilliance doesn't automatically translate to team performance. In fact, teams with moderate individual talent but high collaboration often outperform teams of superstars.

Al ElliottSo how do you actually identify whether superstars can work as team players in the interview process? Steve mentioned they have a couple of specific techniques exactly for this. Can you give me, without giving away your secret questions for your interview process, but just give maybe me and the listeners an idea of what sort of things you would be asking to uncover whether this person is centered about them or centered about the mission?

Steve RoestSo you can create instances in interviews where you sort of artificially create some conflict. And you can do it openly by saying things like, well, what would you do if this thing sort of happened? How would you react? Or you can openly disagree with something that somebody says in order to see how they react. And with technical people, in my experience, when you do this with salespeople, they understand exactly what's happening. They see through it pretty much immediately because any good salesperson's deeply entrenched in objection handling skills. Like, that's why salespeople are often some of the hardest people to hire for, because they're so good in an interview situation. They are really, really good. And some cultures are significantly better. Like, for example, American salespeople, generally speaking, will crush interviews. So actually trying to understand the reality is hard. You have to come up with all kinds of other clever ways to to screen for those. But within technical group, it's very difficult, I've found, for a technical person in an interview situation to not engage in a debate if you seek to do that. It's just what they like. They like it. They're used to it so that you can start to sort of prod and push and see what happens when you get When you sort of create a slightly antagonistic environment, that's one thing. The second thing is you can also look at some of their work history is often indicative. So what you find is like if people have moved quite a lot within technical roles, that can, it's not always the case. And so I don't want people to start shouting at me. It's not always the case. And there's no definitive test, as you said, this is more like building a picture.

Al ElliottYeah.

Steve RoestBut if someone's moved on every year or 18 months and there isn't sort of another compelling reason for that, what often is the case is that basically they come in and it reaches a point with their coworkers where they're just not playing ball, right? I'm right, you're wrong. And then it boils up and it boils up and then they move on. And then the same thing happens at the next place. They come in, they start working, then they disagree with the direction of whatever's happening. No one's listening to me. I'm really smart. No one's listening to me. You're all idiots. And then the whole thing blows up. And often those individuals will say things like that in interviews when you ask them, because obviously some scientific people and technical people, unlike salespeople, aren't necessarily as guarded in interviews. And so they might say things like, well, I thought we should be doing certain things and management disagreed with me. That might be true, but that also might be a signal that there's something else that's gone on. And if that story repeats itself, then that's a bit of a pattern. But as I said, there's no single thing, there's nothing, there's no single test, but actually looking for people that are willing to subsume themselves to the team ethic and the team goal is really, really important. Because particularly in anything technical, like I said, you can go off down 100 rabbit holes if you need to, you know? And that's really what that academic process is about, is exploring rabbit holes to find niches that you can publish unique pieces of research in. That is not building a business. It's actually the opposite of building a business. So actually trying to find those people that are wanting to build things and bring them to market, That are innovative still, but very focused, very directional on solving specific customer problems. That's what we try and screen for.

Leanne ElliottCreating artificial conflict to see how someone responds. That's really getting at emotional intelligence and collaboration skills, not just technical competence. And generally speaking, technical people respond differently to conflict than salespeople because they're used to academic debate, whereas salespeople, well, they live to overturn objections.

Al ElliottSo imagine you've found and hired these brilliant people. You've screened for ego. You've identified they can work collaboratively. Now, how do you give them enough creative freedom to innovate without letting them disappear down rabbit holes that just don't serve the business? Someone could come up with something absolutely brilliant, and then you go, that's cool, Derek, but it's gonna take 3 years and we need to launch something in 9 months. How are you managing that without like curbing their enthusiasm or?

Steve RoestSort of pushing down. Yeah. So exactly. It's a great question. Like I said at the beginning of the show, I don't have all the answers. And one of the things that I try and I guess subsume myself to is that my job is to try and help us improve and win ultimately. And I'm open to the fact that I'm wrong and I might be wrong from day 1 to day 2. But what I will do is I will always focus on how I can get better. How I can help the group better. So to this point, absolutely, you don't want to stifle creativity. That's the last thing that you want because then why are we all here? It's not a battery farm. We want people to be alive and enjoy it coming in and passionate and feeling like they're breaking boundaries and all of that amazing stuff, which they are. Where I come back to it is that we have to have a plan. It has to be directional, i.e., We have agreed that we will be launching a healthy heart check. The customer needs for this roughly look like this. So therefore, the product and the design and the functionality roughly has to somehow align with those things. How you technical people, scientific people solve the AI engineers, how you solve those challenges, bring the creativity, completely fine. Open field, green field. But let's not spend our creative time solving problems that aren't on this agreed list of problems that we have to solve, because these problems are hard enough as it is without us going off and finding another problem that we might be able to solve elsewhere. And what I have found is that there's so much IP that we've generated, some that we've patented, some that's still secret in-house that we won't disclose because it's unbelievably valuable. That even within a predefined problem set, you still create groundbreaking technology. You don't have to necessarily have this sort of freewheeling R&D group that can ping off in all kinds of different places. Now, separate to that, I mean, there's all kinds of history around like, you know how they invented the Post-it note? You know that story where like the guy was messing around to try and make a super strong glue and then made a super weak glue and suddenly they're selling 3 billion Post-it notes. So we keep ourselves open to those type of things. But bear in mind, the products that we're building, so the Healthy Heart Check, the Diabetes Health Check, and our Kidney Health Check, the actual test and AI diagnostic pathway in those is completely new and groundbreaking. It's never existed before. So we are by definition doing new things in the launch of those products. So the individuals in those groups, have ample opportunity to break new scientific ground. But similarly, we don't exclude anyone from doing anything that they want to do themselves. And we've often discussed about, do we do what Google does, which is carve off half a day where people can do their own free sort of research? I think the reality is that if you have a very directional customer problem plan, which we do, which is also one of the reasons why I think we've been able to engage so successfully with the venture capital and private markets in the UK around investment is that your R&D is all geared around solving those problems, which means it's really applied and actually relevant. So, and I think what we try and talk to our teams about is that you can go off and create new ideas, but isn't it better to create ideas that solve massive global problems? That's the holy grail. That's where we want to get to.

Al ElliottSteve, thank you so much. You've been so open and honest, and it seems unusual for someone at your level to be so open and frank about the challenges and the opportunities. Thank you so much. If people want to learn more about PocDoc, I'm guessing it's PocDoc?

Steve RoestIt's pocdoc.co, P-O-C-D-O-C.co, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Steve Roest, or on Instagram where I'm @SteveRoest.

Al ElliottThat was the amazing Steve. Go and listen to his podcast, link in the show notes. The 3 key takeaways for me was, first of all, you don't need to be the smartest person in the room to lead brilliant people. Secondly, your job as a leader is to set clear goals and challenge the assumptions, not solve technical problems. And third, screening for collaboration skills is just as important as technical competence.

Leanne ElliottAnd this was the most important bit for me. Steve has invested time in designing a recruitment process that is specific to the jobs he's recruiting for, and the talent he needs to do them. It's not a one-size-fits-all CV sift and interview. It's evidence-led and fit for purpose. So with that in mind, it's no surprise that Steve finds the very best talent, or that PocDoc is one of the UK's fastest-growing health tech companies.

Al ElliottIf you're leading technical teams or you're thinking about hiring brilliant people, well, Steve's just given you a really practical framework to work with to attract, to This is Truth, Lies and Work.

Leanne ElliottWe will see you next week.