Scale Like a CEO

Scaling Leadership and AI in Retail: Interview with Trevor Sumner, CEO of i-Genie.ai

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 50

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What if your market research told you a product was winning in a country where it isn’t even sold? Trevor Sumner has seen that kind of failure up close—and built a company to fix it. As CEO of Igenie, Trevor explains how tapping billions of real digital signals—Google searches, social posts, transcribed TikToks, ratings, reviews, and product launches—creates sharper, faster consumer insights than traditional surveys ever could. We unpack how this AI-driven approach helps brands like Unilever, Kenview, Coca-Cola, and Clorox understand pricing perception, experience drivers, and competitive moves with clarity.

The conversation doesn’t stop at data. We go deep on scaling from 20 employees to 60, the moment when a founder can no longer be in every room, and why the 80 percent rule of delegation is a lifeline. Trevor shares how he sequences focus areas—standing up sales and marketing, then turning to product and engineering—while keeping information lines open so nothing drifts. He’s candid about delegating too late, the trap of expert-founders getting stuck in details, and the fix: co-define outcomes, agree on first steps, and check the trajectory early to avoid being “six miles off in orbit.”

Culture becomes the glue that makes all of this work. Instead of a poster of vague values, Trevor uses dozens of blunt operating statements, celebrates the right risks, and institutionalizes public recognition to make desired behaviors visible. We talk about the realities of remote-first teams, global cultural nuance, and practical rituals like open office hours that surface ideas and issues before they metastasize. If you lead a growth-stage team—or want to replace noisy survey data with high-fidelity behavioral insight—you’ll leave with frameworks you can use today.

If this conversation gave you a useful playbook for delegation, culture, or AI-powered consumer insights, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review to help others find it.

Trevor:

And so what are the key what are the biggest problems we need to solve? And then kind of go in to solve that problem. And that often means, you know, hiring a leader in that area and making sure they get up to speed so that you can really kind of offload that problem to somebody who's, you know, fully trained up that you fully trust to be able to tackle it. And so I tend to you kind of use this rule of 80 that if somebody can do something 80% as good as you, that you should delegate it, right? And as you look to do that, you know, it's really key when you bring somebody on is to one, get them to 80%, right? And then on an ongoing basis, work to get them from that 80 to 100%. So for me, I'm not a micromanager. I hate being micromanaged. I think everybody does. I hate micromanaging. If I'm caught in the details, that's a real problem. At the same time, I try and keep robust frameworks of what I'm looking for in each function to continuously say, here's where the bar is.

Speaker:

Welcome to this episode of Scale Like a CEO. Our host, Justin, sits down with Trevor Sumner, CEO of iGenie, for an in-depth conversation exploring the cutting edge of retail technology, artificial intelligence, and how these innovations are shaping the future of shopping experiences for consumers and brands alike.

Justin:

Trevor, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, share a little bit about you and your business.

Trevor:

Great. My name is Trevor Sumner, born and raised New Yorker, as you can kind of see from the background for those who are actually tuning into the video. Grew up on Washington Square Park in the apartment that was filmed for I Am Legend for those who know the movie right on Washington Square Park. Grew up in the city with the metabolism of the city, seeing a couple thousand people a day, dodging traffic all day long. Ended up getting a computer science degree in 1998. So caught the first internet boom and went from startup to startup, high growth software, caught some IPOs and some IPAs. And some MA. I founded my first company in 2010. It was a local online marketing platform driving people from online to in-store, grew up to about 100 people, sold that to the Blackstone group. And since then, uh continue to start or join early stage companies, helping them grow. I invest in a couple startups, I advise a bunch of startups, but how come people invent the future? So that's that's a little bit about me. And now I guess you're probably wondering what I do now. I'm the CEO of IG, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit.

Justin:

Yeah, that's great. So I'm sure we're gonna have lots to talk about, and you'll have lots to add given your depth of experience in startups. So let's talk about IG for a moment. What problem does your company solve and what does that matter right now?

Trevor:

So super fascinating, founded by a guy originally named Stan Senatan, who was the head of consumer insights for Unilever, consumer packaged goods company, spending $350 million a year on consumer insights, mostly on like surveys with a lot of a lot of money spent on surveys to figure out whether consumers think about brands and trends and products. And so he's spending $350 million and getting survey results like, hey, Hellman's mayonnaise is doing really well in India. And he said to himself, that's really funny because we don't sell Hellman's mayonnaise in India. And so ultimately, surveys have this giant problem with fraud, abuse, slow, it's limited. We could talk about that. But while he was at Unilever, he built this thing called the People Data Center, which said, aren't there digital signals that we can leverage to get this information? And he spun that out into Igenie, which I joined about a year ago to help him go from a small bootstrap startup to a venture-funded one. And what we do is we synthesize those same great consumer insights from billions of Google searches and social posts and TikTok videos that we transcribe the audio for, ratings and reviews, every product launch that happens in online. And so we take all those billions of signals and we could tell you what people think about every single brand, every single product, what drives good experience, bad experience. What do people think about your pricing and the value equation, which is super important these days, the tariffs and the uncertainty there? And being able to monitor your competitors and making sure you have better data to win your markets. And our biggest customers are like Kenview and Unilever, Coca-Cola, Clorox, these brands that we know and love that are large multinational companies. We're about, we were 20 people six months ago. We're now 40. We'll be 60 by the end of the year. So we're growing really, really quickly. And we just raised $7.5 million Series A. So it's a pretty exciting time to move away from survey data to really high fidelity digital data powered with a lot of AI.

Justin:

That's incredible. So congratulations on the series A. That's a great milestone. And the your growth also amazing being able to grow that fast. So let's talk about that growth. So as you're hiring, I'm guessing you're needing to either promote or hire new leaders to continue scaling at that clip. So tell me a little bit about what are you looking for as you're bringing in new leaders or promoting leaders?

Trevor:

Yeah, I mean, it's it's as you get to about 20 people, there's this shift that happens, right? At 20 people, as a founder, as a leader, you can basically insert yourself into any conversation, any crisis, listen to everything and fix it. Somewhere between 20 and 30, you lose the ability to do that at all. And all of you just lost, right? It becomes too large a problem set, too many conversations happen away from you. And that that hiring of leaders and inspiring leaders is really, really important. For me, I think about our company culture and thinking about how do we instill the values that we care about. I think about their personal motivations. Are they a curious person? Are they a hardworking person and an overachiever? You really want somebody who you don't have to micromanage, right? And at the same time, you want somebody who's a great communicator and manages up well. These are the problems. They don't hide problems. That's the worst, right? Because I can't solve problems that I don't see. I may choose not to solve problems that I do see because I have to triage all the fires that are happening because everything's on fire all the time. But if you don't see those issues or those issues are being hidden, that's that's really terrible. And I also think people who are willing to who are looking to grow, right? Who have real aspirations, because probably my greatest accomplishments, and I don't really talk about this when people ask me, well, what have you done? Is is really about mentoring the up-and-coming leaders. My my proudest accomplishments have names to them and names that have gone on to these storied careers. And I think they would say, some of them would say, I hope, that I had an impact on their trajectory. And so I think those are some of the things that we that we look for in terms of leadership and and also just how how we can be uh better better leaders to them and thinking about servant leadership and enabling enabling those leaders to be successful.

Justin:

Yeah. I want to go back to you were talking about that tipping point at kind of 20, 20 to 30 employees, where you know, you really have to create, you know, a bench of leaders that are able to function independently from you. I use in a lot of my work, I use a model called the grinder model, and it describes the different phases that an organization goes through and the crisis points that it hits. And I think what you're describing there is that you know, phase one is creativity, where you know, you're just kind of selling smoke and mirrors and kind of building whatever you can build. And phase two is really direction, where you've got to get leadership that's aligned because you're growing. And then going into phase three, which is delegation, so kind of more distributed leadership. I'm curious, in your experience, because you've been through this, you know, multiple times, I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit more about some of those hallmarks that let you know it's time to shift the way that you're leading the company.

Trevor:

Yeah, I think it's a couple different things. One is, you know, it's always hard. I I've run engineering teams, I've run product teams, I run marketing teams, I run sales teams. So, you know, to a certain extent, I can do all of those things, but you have to choose when to delegate. And I think one of the things that you look at, you know, from my perspective, especially with Igenie, is, you know, there is a limited amount of me and a limited number of problems that we can solve. And so what are the key, what are the biggest problems we need to solve? And then kind of go into solving that problem. And that often means, you know, hiring a leader in that area and making sure they get up to speed so that you can really kind of offload that problem to somebody who's, you know, fully trained up that you fully trust to be able to tackle it. And so I tend to you kind of use this rule of 80 that if somebody can do something 80% as good as you, that you should delegate it, right? And as you look to do that, you know, it's really key when you bring somebody on is to one, get them to 80%, right? And then on an ongoing basis, work to get them from that 80 to 100%. So for me, I'm not a micromanager. I hate being micromanaged. I think everybody does. I hate micromanaging. If I'm caught in the details, that's a real problem. At the same time, I try and keep robust frameworks of what I'm looking for in each function to continuously say, here's where the bar is. And I had a designer at a company that I was the CEO of called Perch, which did computer vision at retail. And she called me to Octopus. And she's like, How do you have so many arms in different areas to understand it? And it's really two pieces is one, I've had the chance to run a lot of these different departments. So I have a good framework for doing so. But two, you teach people the information that you need so that you can stay informed about what really, really matters, and then give guidance about here's where we need to get to. And to be able to have a great relationship with somebody that they feel comfortable saying, here's what's going on, here's what's going well, here's what's not going well, and give it an honest assessment so that you can add value and serve them in mentorship and lending a hand where is where it's necessary. That's really key. And if you spread yourself too thin, what you end up is not being able to do that. So for IGenie, like right now, we've just focused on first enabling a sales and marketing team. We didn't have one until two months ago. And I feel really, really good about that. Now shifting focus to product and engineering. And I hired a CTO and I need to hire a head of product management. And then I'm going to really focus in and there now that I feel good about sales and marketing, but still having the framework and the information lines to make sure that that doesn't go away, doesn't get away from me.

Justin:

Yeah. So, you know, speaking of delegation, that's something that comes up a lot when it, you know, when you go from, and I know you weren't the founder of Igenie, but but you know, as you go from kind of the founder team of one or two to then scaling, delegation can be challenging because you're used to doing everything and it's hard to let go. So I'm I'm curious, you know, if you can think of a time when you've either delegated too early or too late. And, you know, what lesson was in that experience?

Trevor:

I'm bad at this. As you tell from my detail orientation, right? That makes it super hard for me to let go, right? And I feel like I have really, really high standards. Like I'm a CEO, but I was once like a recognized SEO expert, right? And so there's SEO going on on my on the website, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, what's going on over here? Like, is that the right place to put my time? Probably not. I I'd like to couch it as some Steve Jobs, like the details matter and every little thing. Like, but realistically, I think it's something that I that I struggle with. So overall, I would say I delegate late, and that's a challenge for me. And the way that manifests itself is I compensate by having to work too much, having to burn myself out, right? And not getting the right, the right help early enough and enabling the right help. So I can think of just my entire career as delegating late. In terms of delegating early, the things that have have really burned me is when I I delegate and I have a sense of what I really, really want, and I don't communicate it well. And I don't take those first two or three steps with the person to make sure we're on the right path together. And the old adage, if you're off six inches at launch, you're off six miles in orbit. And if you just wait too long and you just go check in now that we're in orbit, I have found myself very far off from mission path. And that's those types of failures are tough because they're they're really your failures as well as the person's, right? And and mostly yours. So again, I really think about the servant leadership model. Any anytime there's a there's a people failure, it's because I hired the wrong person. That's my fault. Because I didn't get them the right guidance, that's my fault. Or we hired somebody and then we had to contract, or there were the wrong priority for the business, and then I had to let them go. And again, my fault, right? So I I take these things really kind of personally and and I try and be thoughtful about delegation, but I'm again, I I struggle to let go. I I think the other part about it, to be honest, is I never really thought about this. I love it. I love being in the trenches. Like I like SEO, I like having that knowledge. I like, or SEO metrics are off the chart, and in part because I've had a little I like looking at the graph, and I look at the graph a little too often, knowing just get some positive feedback about the details and that your frameworks are working, that you're having the impact. And and maybe I need to let go a little bit more of that too.

Justin:

Yeah, it's challenging. When it's something that you're passionate about or you get excited about, you want to get into the weeds, but is that the best use of your time? And also that early delegation thing. I have challenges with that as well. Is like, hey, here's what I want done, like, go do it. But you really have to spend more time getting clarity and ensuring clarity and then checking in early to make sure that we're saying getting on the right trajectory because you let that go too far and you're gonna be way, way off.

Trevor:

Yeah, and I think that's also exponentially worse when you're growing this quickly, right? Because when you're when you double in five months and then you're gonna increase another 50% in another two or three, those two to three months, you're not looking at that thing. There's there's this HBR study that a negative employee impacts six people around them, right? So if it's a negative employee that you don't address, that has the ecosystem expand. But I think that's also true of company values or mission or just general initiatives, right? And so, especially those early hires, you really need to spend time to make sure that are aligned with the mission, the culture, the values, that you have the right working relationships before you then have several people one step removed. And then separately, I think it's really important as that happens to go to those people and get feedback about their manager and what's going well or what's not going well, not just listen kind of one level deep. I think, especially for a startup, it's critical you're talking to everybody. And one thing I do is, for example, is I have open office hours as an invite to the entire company every Tuesday and every Friday morning. I invite everybody in who wants to just drop in. You talk about your family, talk about a problem that you're trying to solve, talk about an idea that you think might be interesting, or just get to know people. And I think that's also really, really important.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, and what I'm hearing is a lot of notes of culture. And so I'm curious, you're growing really fast. And so how are you defining the culture that you want to guide the organization as you grow into the future?

Trevor:

Yeah, it's a great question. And I to be honest, I find a lot of the cultural exercises that I've been involved in to be a little bit of window dressing, right? I think I've seen these as these big five values and a paragraph each. And I'm like, okay, I tend to think that this is a little bit more evolving over time in terms of what you're focused on. Right now we're focused on quality, speed, and scale, right? In terms of thematic ways that you make decisioning, but that's not company culture, right? And so we put out a presentation that's not, you know, some fluffy five-point derivative or, you know, a picture, you know, one of those pictures you put on the office wall that we all look at and laugh as a little bit cheesy. But really, it's about, I don't know, 45 pages. And each each page is just one of these statements, these hard-hitting statements about how we work together, what we strive for, you know, everything from you know, client centricity or you know, showing up and you know, not not being afraid of our errors. You know, I think instilling some of these things are really, really important. And then, you know, making examples of them. We have leadership calls with the entire company every two weeks. And so, you know, when you see behaviors that you want to celebrate to make sure to highlight those. So one of ours is it's okay to make errors as long as we learn from that, right? And I think that's one of the hardest things, especially in a risk-taking type venture. A lot, a lot of executives talk about trying to create an environment of risk taking and large, a lot of big companies fail. You know, Jeff Bezos talks about day, you know, day zero a lot. So, you know, talking about a failure and what we learned from it and why that made something better is a great way to reinforce some of the lessons that are harder to to grok and to celebrate making errors, right? If they're the right error, we we made the right bet to test an hypothesis and became better because of it. That's a great win. And so I think I think it's it's it's about reinforcement, most of all, and making sure to tie it back to the the artifacts where you're trying to codify. But that said, I think for a lot of people, they don't read the thing, right? So, you know, it's a lot about hiring, it's a lot about you know making sure the water cooler talks about these types of values.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, I like, I like that you're highlighting the positive behaviors and the positive examples because so many organizations, you know, they put their values on the on the wall, but then nobody reads them, nobody pays attention to them. And the way that I look at culture is for most organizations, it's like an iceberg, and you've got those explicit values, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, and that's really nobody really pays attention. And then the actual lived experience of the employees is everything below the water line, and it's probably not the same as those stated values. And so I think of it as organizations who are really good at at defining and then creating culture are able to lift that iceberg out of the water so that the lived experience actually matches the stated desired culture. And that takes a lot of work. And it it would be as if you were putting enough energy to lift the iceberg out of the water because it is really hard to do that work.

Trevor:

Yeah, and I think you you can't lift it yourself. And so you got to find these collective ways and levers to do that. One of my favorites is we all use Slack or Teams or some type of messaging app. I create a shout-out channel for employees to shout out each other. And this is invaluable. It is free. All the studies show that public recognition is the highest form of motivation and employee retention, above giving raises, above everything, right? Private one-on-one from your manager saying, good, good job. And and what happens is if you get senior leadership recognizing people, that's good. But people who other or work that otherwise would be below that iceberg or below the water level starts bubbling up and it becomes more public to everybody, that's a huge win. Now, interestingly, IGenie is a remote first organization. So when you talk about culture and some of these principles, it's a lot harder. And so even things to me that are no-brainer, the shout-out channel, actually struggles to get implemented specifically culturally. So what I found is we have a large group, a lot of data scientists, data engineers in in India. And I can't get them to use the shout-out channel. I just can't. And I'm not it it seems to be a cultural thing. I was like, is there really nobody that I have to be work with that has done anything good in the last two weeks? Just throw it on there. They they sometimes these these things don't translate, and you have to understand that as well, and try and figure out how you break through to different cultures and different teams.

Justin:

Yeah, yeah. There's the organizational culture piece, but then there's also the global cultural piece, and being able to operate on those different levels can be can be challenging. Well, Trevor, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. This was been has been some really good stuff, and I love talking about culture. So um if folks want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to do so?

Trevor:

Yeah, well, I'm I'm on LinkedIn a lot. That's probably the best way. Um, or you know, you can go to igenie.ai and submit, you know, because I am the octopus. Every every lead that flows by, I actually get a notification in my teams just to see what's happening. Um, and so you know, if there's a note saying, hey, you know, trying to connect with Trevor, that'll that'll get to me as well. But LinkedIn is great. Um, I I I try and post a lot, I try and communicate a lot, and I'm I try to be responsive and um and helpful to people.

Justin:

Great. Well, thank you so much, Trevor.

Trevor:

It was a pleasure.