TIL: 5 Leadership Lessons on Navigating Culture & Change in the Workplace from a CEO Who's Been There
TL;DR: Culture isn't just about perks and mission statements — it's how your team shows up, adapts, and evolves. Jerry Ting shares 5 practical lessons on how leaders can intentionally shape company culture, especially during moments of growth and change. Whether you're a startup founder, people leader, or navigating org change, there are some gems in here.
What if you could change everything with one bold idea?
That's the question at the heart of Jerry Ting’s founder story.
Before Ting joined Workday as the Vice President of Evisort, he was a law student, buried in contracts, prepping for a future in corporate law.
As Ting studied to become a lawyer, he realized that a lot of the work that would go into it was tedious. Repetitive. Expensive.
Clients were paying hundreds of dollars an hour for something that felt like it could be automated. That discomfort sparked a question that would change his career trajectory forever:
What if AI could do this part of the job better?
That moment became the seed for Evisort, one of the first companies to apply AI to contract analysis.
But Ting didn’t set out to build an AI startup. He set out to fix a problem he knew intimately. And when no tools existed to solve it, he and his team built their own.
This is the story of what happened next, and the five lessons he took with him as Evisort, which was eventually acquired by Workday in 2024, scaled and helped shape the future of how AI-powered document intelligence gets done.
Lesson 1: Do Non-Scalable Things
Ting launched Evisort because he knew he had a problem worth solving. He witnessed firsthand how slow, repetitive, and expensive contract review was, and he had a hypothesis that AI could help. But he didn’t yet have customers, traction, or proof that the idea would work. So in Evisort’s early days, Ting picked up the phone, knocked on doors, and did the demos himself—the kind of work that was manual, and notoriously non-scalable.
For Ting, doing non-scalable work like personally handling outreach, manually delivering demos, and following up without automation wasn’t a limitation. It was a strategy that allowed him to:
- Validate demand directly
- Adapt the pitch in real time
- Learn what customers actually needed
For founders, there’s often pressure to create repeatable systems from day one. But that instinct, Ting argues, is premature. In the early days of entrepreneurship, the goal is often survival, not scalability.
Too many startups over-plan. They invest early in solutions meant for scale, before proving they’re solving something real. Ting believes that early discipline—keeping things small, manual, and customer-obsessed—was essential to crossing the first milestone. Only after you earn traction, he says, should you invest in what comes next.
Lesson 2: Don’t Outsource Conviction
Conviction isn’t something you delegate. It has to come from doing the work yourself.
When Ting was raising early capital for Evisort, he didn’t rely on storytelling alone. He had already gone out, pitched customers, and seen them respond. He knew the problem was real. He knew the product worked. And he knew the gaps in the market better than anyone because he’d experienced them firsthand as a law student.
That same conviction helped him win over investors.
When you're fundraising, you have to zoom out. Communicate the vision in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn’t live in your world.
He advises founders to treat pitching a VC like pitching their own parents: if you can explain why you’re dropping everything to solve this problem—and it makes sense to them—you’re probably getting close to something fundable.
The takeaway: don’t wait for others to validate your vision. Test it, pressure it, and get clear on why it matters. That clarity is what gets early customers to buy, early investors to back you, and early team members to follow your lead.
Lesson 3: Build Culture Like It’s Your Product
From day one, Ting knew that culture couldn’t be an afterthought. He structured Evisort with a flat hierarchy and embedded a founder’s mindset across the team.
Ting started the company with seven people, each of whom grew into leadership roles across core functions like sales, product, and marketing, and carrying the original founder mindset into every part of the business.
By empowering early team members as leaders, Ting didn’t just build a product. He built a scalable culture – one where decisions were decentralized, and entrepreneurial energy wasn’t locked at the top.
As Evisort grew, that cultural blueprint became essential. Core values held. Decision-making stayed close to the problem. And the entrepreneurial energy that defined the early days continued to drive the business forward.
Founders often underestimate how much harder it is to build culture retroactively. For Ting, it was something to be architected, just like the product itself.
Lesson 4: Hold the Talent Bar High
Evisort grew from that seven-person founding team to over 300 employees in five years. That pace would tempt most companies to hire fast and figure things out later, but Ting didn’t do that.
In fact, he told his board he wouldn’t drop the talent bar just to go fast.
Every hire was treated like a long-term investment. He prioritized “talent density”: the idea that a team of high-performers holds each other to a higher standard and elevates output across the board. He avoided hiring for speed or prestige, focusing instead on people who wanted to build something durable and aligned with the mission.
This approach shaped how Evisort survived its biggest disruption: the COVID-19 shift to remote work. The company had just raised a major round. Momentum was high. Then, the world shut down.
Instead of scrambling, Ting focused the team around a single, shared goal. He opened every all-hands meeting by repeating that focus and reporting progress against it. That clarity, reinforced consistently, helped maintain accountability and culture through uncertainty.
The right people, paired with clear leadership, gave Evisort a critical advantage when things got hard, and helped it grow stronger on the other side. When Workday eventually acquired Evisort, the entire team came over. That kind of continuity isn’t automatic. It’s a sign the team was aligned, engaged, and operating on shared values. For founders, the takeaway is clear: if you build intentionally from the start, the culture you create can carry forward, even as the environment changes.
Lesson 5: Think Like an Owner, Even If You’re Not One (Yet)
Long before Evisort was acquired, Ting ran the company like it was his to lose. That mindset—seeing the full picture, making hard tradeoffs, and staying close to every decision—shaped not only how he built the company, but how he navigated what came next.
When acquisition talks began, it wasn’t just about valuation or market fit. It was emotional.
“We created our dream job,” he said. “So if we don’t have that job, how does that impact us and our employees?”
That question weighed heavily. Ting wasn’t looking for an exit, he was looking for a way to keep building, at a greater scale. Fortunately, Workday made that possible. The entire team came over. The work continued. The mission stayed intact, but with more resources, more reach, and more room to grow.
What made the transition work was the culture Evisort had built. It wasn’t a founder-dependent operation. It was a team driven by shared values, clarity of purpose, and high standards, one that could plug into an enterprise environment without losing its identity.
Now inside a much larger organization, he hasn’t abandoned that lens. If anything, it’s sharpened. At Workday, he brings that founder perspective to product innovation, team leadership, and enterprise decision-making without needing to be in the CEO seat.
He also helps lead the development of AI agents—software that can handle routine, manual tasks so people can focus on higher-value work. His interest in agents grew naturally from his experience at Evisort, where AI was used to remove friction from legal workflows. Now, he’s applying that same logic at scale, helping reimagine how AI can support the workforce across industries.
If you're building something of your own, especially with an eye toward scale or acquisition, Ting says long-term survival comes down to three personal traits:
- Tenacity: You’re going to run into problems you’ve never seen before. You can’t quit just because it’s unfamiliar.
- Problem solving: One day you’re head of HR, the next you’re running sales. You’re learning fast, and often in public.
- Relationship-building: How you treat people—customers, employees, investors—matters. When people trust your intent, they give you room to figure things out.
Strong teams and clear goals can get you through the easy days. These traits are what carry you through the hard ones.
From doing the unscalable work to building culture with intent, from holding the talent bar high to never outsourcing conviction, Ting’s story is a reminder that good leadership compounds. And for leaders willing to think like owners, now really is the best time to build.
Learn more here.
Posted Jul 7, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC · locked