�Ǹ�Թ�

While he was an undergraduate at CU �Ǹ�Թ�, never set out to be a founder, nor be in business in general.

“I was studying Anthropology and I thought I was going to be like Indiana Jones. That didn’t happen.”

But he built a career in business anyway. Now, Randall is founder and chairman of , a digital intelligence company that has spent 15 years helping legal and corporate clients make sense of publicly available online information.

Randall never had a perfect plan, and little people do. What he had was a willingness to notice when something wasn’t working and change course before it became a bigger problem. That instinct carried him from a factory floor, to a founder and CEO.

Building the Instincts First

Randall came to CU in 1996 from Pittsburgh, drawn in by the mountains and the college-town energy of �Ǹ�Թ� in the late nineties. He calls it a special place to be, for the school itself, and everything around it.

Post under-grad, Randall began building a career in manufacturing, learning how things actually get built and fixed. His early career centered on continuous improvement and quality control, first through Six Sigma, where he achieved a black belt certification, then through the Toyota Production System and Alcoa Business System.��

It was systems-driven, challenging work that was a world away from the fast, improvisational image most people have of startups in today's world. But that industry changed after the 2008 financial crisis that reshaped manufacturing overnight. Randall left Alcoa, and began independent consulting around Pittsburgh, where he started talking to people in the startup world.��

As Randall moved deeper into entrepreneurship, he also recognized gaps in his formal business education. A two-week executive education program at the University of Pittsburgh eventually led him to Harvard Business School’s Program for Leadership Development.

It was a prime example of how opening one door can lead to many others, and the program, offered to working professionals already deep into their careers, gave him the necessary tools to launch his own business. It gave him a network of people he could call when something went wrong, and professors willing to dig into the specifics of a business he was actively building.

Wrong Market, Right Idea

SMI Aware was founded by Randall in 2011, where they focused on pre-employment background screening through social media and the web. The idea came at a time when social media was still young and questions around how online information should be used in employment screening were still evolving.��

Randall and his co-founder largely bootstrapped the company, supplemented by seed funding and one angel investor. The two spent close to a year building the product before launch, and found footing quickly by generating cash within the first month.

However, the market itself was a problem due to the commoditization and price sensitivity of pre-employment screening. Randall and his team had built something real, just for the wrong customer.

But the realization wasn’t immediate, and it took until lawyers and corporate security professionals kept calling. They didn’t want to curate their own reports, rather, the finished product handed to them, contrary to what investors were looking for. For a while, SMI Aware tried to serve both worlds at once.

“We’ve got to ask the girl to the prom who wants to go with us.”

That’s how Randall describes the moment his team finally accepted where the business belonged. By 2016, the shift was complete. Randall's own analysts ran the platform now, and clients got a finished report instead of a login.

The pivot paid off, turning a low-margin commoditized product into a higher value service built on trust and accuracy. It also meant walking away from the customer they’d originally set out to serve, a decision that took years to fully commit to.

The Discipline Behind the Adaptability

While the pivot was taking place, Randall made the strategic decision to buy out the other partner and take over as CEO. Early partnerships rarely account for a pivot that changes the whole direction of a business, and Randall admits they got lucky navigating it without more friction than they did.

What carried the company through those early years was cash discipline. Randall didn't take a salary for the first several years, paying his small team before he paid himself. He didn’t know what cash flow meant, or what an accounts receivable was. All he knew was that if the cash wasn’t coming in, he couldn’t make payroll.

"I didn't need a business degree to figure that out. I'm looking at the bank account every day.”

That instinct shaped how the business grew. He never took on big outside money, so no one was pushing him for faster growth or bigger numbers. Eventually, they were able to pay back their seed funding from Innovation Works, and their angel investor. It grew slower than it might have with more cash behind it, but it grew in his way.

By the time the company had real cash saved up, that discipline had become second nature. Randall still checks a dashboard he built himself every day, the same habits from those early years, just with a nicer interface.

The Final Adjustment

At the end of 2023, Randall made one of the hardest calls of his career, stepping down from his CEO role into founder and chairman. He recognized that the skills required to build the company from scratch were not necessarily the same skills it would need for its next stage of growth. He also wanted to create more space for his family and other interests.��

Letting go of control was harder than the decision itself, but it’s an underrated yet important trait of a founder. For thirteen years, every problem had come to Randall, but it was time to hand over the reins.

"Early on, when I found myself sometimes grabbing the steering wheel again, right from the passenger seat, that doesn't always help. Sometimes that creates more problems."

Randall had to learn to sit back and let someone else drive, even when that meant watching the new CEO, Josh Janow, make decisions differently than he would have. He still shows up when needed, still talks to Janow regularly as an active board member, but the instinct to control every outcome is one he had to unlearn deliberately.

That instinct, wanting to be the one steering, the one taking the risk, is the same one that built the company in the first place.

"It's about wanting the ball. You want the decisions to stop with you. You want to take the risk and you want to take control."

Today, Randall is focused on becoming a better chairman, strengthening SMI Aware’s governance and building a board that can support Janow and the management team as the company continues to grow.

Randall never planned to become a founder. He built a company anyway, pivoted it when the market demanded it, and eventually learned the hard lesson to hand the ball to someone else.

But learning from the hard lessons is how he built his adaptive career in the first place.