Entrepreneur, Visionary, Technologist, Community Builder

Steve McHale was always full of questions, curiosity and adventure—even before he sold his first big company for over $100 million dollars. 

It started, really, in preschool.

“What is your name? What do you do? What about a pet? Do you have a son my age? What is this tool? Where does that wire go? Would you like some lemonade, Mom makes it the best!” 

McHale unleashed a barrage of questions onto anyone he encountered. It was as if a tiny lightbulb (later given a name and a diagnosis: ADHD) lit up in his brain every few seconds. He was unapologetic, hungry to learn and see others from their own worlds. He hopped from thought to thought, feeding his appetite for knowledge. 

“My mom would tell me that I would be talking away, asking questions, and if she wasn’t paying attention I would grab her face and turn it at me,” said McHale, who grew up in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Chagrin Falls and lives there to this day. “I was pretty intense.”

That hunger never left him. McHale would spin his childhood curiosity into an endless capacity to envision the invisible—to reach into the future and harness unimagined technology to change people’s lives in big and small ways every day.

When he began to create one of his early companies, he shifted his insatiable attention to the unique direction the media marketplace was headed. It was 1999, in the early days of his 35-year career founding, investing and building information technology companies. He saw that the world was entering a new phase of streaming music and media and came up with the idea of Everstream.com, a precursor to Spotify. His team stormed out in full force, spewing out idea after idea to mark their territory. This was before iTunes, but like Steve Jobs and other tech pioneers, McHale could sense that accelerating and miniaturizing digital storage, transmission and delivery devices was emerging as the next big thing long before it was ever in existence. 

With Everstream’s energetic and aggressive presence, three publishers were willing to tie their names to the new venture. Success! Or so it seemed. Now came time to connect with other streamers to take the company to the next level. 

But there seemed to be a problem.

“I said to one of my key guys there, “Come on, let’s go on a road trip,’ McHale said. “We set on a mission to meet the other streamers. And it was almost comical—it seemed that every time we would go meet with one, within a week or two they would close the doors. It was almost like we were the grim reaper.”

How could this be? The need was there. The idea was solid. McHale started connecting the dots. He considered the company he had built. In his mind, he pictured a brainstorming board covered in arrows crisscrossing in all directions. An opinion here. A suggestion there. A brilliant idea way over there.

“Something was wrong,” McHale said. “I could feel it in my bones. I remember the moment I realized it. I was sitting in front of my wife. I just looked at her and it was like this blinding flash. I said, ‘I’m shutting this whole thing down.’ Just like that, I said, ‘I’m shutting the whole business down. It ain’t gonna work.’”

He’d been missing something key: a viable business model. But it went beyond that. His enthusiasm had completely clouded his vision, and his instincts had distanced him from the people he needed most. He didn’t notice what was happening around him. 

“I would say I felt like I was asleep at the wheel,” he said. “I was just not paying attention.”

Long-term, this lack of awareness could have doomed not just his current project, but any that followed. Salvation came in the form of a man named Riley Lochridge, the former chairman and CEO of ComDoc, an Ohio-based office products company. Lochridge was the life coach McHale needed. He unlocked the reasons McHale’s visions were not coming to fruition: his lack not only of discipline and awareness, but also empathy. 

McHale had always been someone very different. His early training and notable successes in the 1980s was exclusively focused on the world of material sciences. This involved architecting breakthrough technologies as a system integrator. He had the unique ability to design and weave interdependent component parts of complex technology to function in almost magical ways never imagined before. His days involved hardware, software, user interfaces, protocols and operating systems all tied into principles of engineering, architecture and applied physics. He was deep into diagnostics and troubleshooting—but always more about components than people.

From McHale’s perspective, operations failed simply because employees weren’t trying hard or focused enough. Never mind that they had lives and trials and worries of their own. With Lochridge’s help, Steve was able to see that everyone was going through something different, and that in order to be a servant leader, he had to let people fail and learn and grow—and still have faith that things would work out in the end. 

“I really did lack empathy for those that I didn’t think were struggling,” he said. “I expected a lot from my employees and really had a hard time rationalizing their lack of performance and what I expected of them.”

This was a pronounced and fundamental shift for McHale. He began to let go. 

In some ways, he had to grow and go beyond what was familiar with him, the world of network engineering. He had to stretch to see the value on the non-technical side of people engagement. He thought back to the grace and kindness his mother showed him. Where others saw an overbearing child who asked too many questions, she recognized a gift. “You really want to learn and understand, and see other people in the world,” she would tell him. 

“She would talk to me in a way that would make me feel I was very special,” he said.  “I think that was critical to building my confidence.” This affirmation and understanding made a difference in the midst of childhood struggles. 

And so, McHale worked with renewed vigor to see the value in others—to look beyond the failures and see the hard work and discovery that was happening along the way. With Everstream, he took a step back and restructured the company, a painful transition in which he had to lay off three-quarters of his employees. He was moved when they thanked him on the way out.   

“That, I thought, was really something,” he said. “I was just blown away by that. They thanked me for the experience and the opportunity. I was like, ‘Wow.’’”

Though he’d halted Everstream’s operations, he still possessed significant operating cash in the bank and the core technician team from the failed streaming project. With greater focus, discipline and understanding, he set about transforming Everstream, growing the company into a leader in business intelligence software for diagnostic and analytic troubleshooting in the cable industry. It was deployed in seven of the largest North American cable companies. In 2005, his company was acquired by Concurrent Computer Corp. (NASDAQ: CCUR), in a $15 million stock deal. 

Bigger things were still to come for McHale, who in 2009 founded Explorys, later sold in 2015 to IBM (under the name of IBM Watson Health). Explorys involved a partnership with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and provided the healthcare industry a secure, cloud-based analytics platform that leverages big data for clinical integration, predictive analytics and business intelligence. Its platform provides hundreds of hospital systems across the country to more effectively leverage their data to improve care quality, patient satisfaction and competitive value-based care. For health care researchers and practitioners, it continues to provide population health management insights and accountable care models that both saves lives and makes healthcare more affordable.

The sizable sale of Explorys to IBM has afforded McHale the chance to create a new startup venture—one of a very different sort. McHale held tight to those early lessons from Everstream.com. He would need discipline, focus and the keen awareness that he would never be alone in his ventures. Nurturing others would ultimately be key to his success. 

In fact, his next huge bet was on the very nature of people and how to position them and their communities for success.

This new company looks to develop a novel way to build the social and productive capabilities of underserved urban communities, by blending both large numbers of at-risk and also very skilled populations. It is aimed at jointly optimizing workforce capacity and economic development by scaling self-care and support models, mentoring and managing focused effort for personal and commercial success. This technology-enabled, talent-powered project is still very much a work in progress. But McHale is excited about launching it in the market place in the very near term. He has attracted some of the best minds in the business with a wide variety of thought leaders: scientists, demographers, urban specialist, economists, talent executives and technologists.

The root of this new venture is based on a more evolved philosophy where McHale has reflected on the core value of empowerment: “I learned to say…sometimes you want to lift people up to pass you. For me, I get the passion out of just seeing others be successful. I really love to see that. Empowering people to really find their potential is very exciting to me.”

Rarely will you find yourself pursuing a goal all on your own. That’s why it’s critical to gain a sense of what others around you are experiencing, as what McHale would suggest. Take a step back and ask yourself, “What’s missing?” Broaden your corridors to experience the different perspectives around you to push through challenging times. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, but listening and seeing what’s around you will perhaps bring you more wisdom within than you can ever imagine.