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Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

tracy.posthaven.com

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Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#11

Post by sokoloff »

oragnediscussy wrote: post #6
ipaddr wrote: post #2

"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…

The point is that B players have a very hard time ever recruiting A players and actually almost always hire people that are worse than themselves (i.e. c players). This is very true and should be something founders watch out for very carefully as they scale.

"Yes and..." I think a lot of times this is intentional.

A player wants to hire A players so the A player can more effectively beat their rivals in the marketplace.

B player wants to hire C players so the B player can more effectively beat their rivals in the company.

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#12

Post by skrebbel »

ipaddr wrote: post #2

"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…

Meta nitpick, and I’m not certain, but I think the author (named Tracy) is a she. Or a they which lets you avoid the problem altogether.

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#13

Post by sieabahlpark »

skrebbel wrote: post #12
ipaddr wrote: post #2

"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…

Meta nitpick, and I’m not certain, but I think the author (named Tracy) is a she. Or a they which lets you avoid the problem altogether.

[flagged]

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#16

Post by georgeecollins »

I hate this BS about A managers hire A people, B people hire C etc. This is total MBA thinking (I think it comes form GE, or at least they espoused it) on a forum where people routinely mock MBAs.

I have been lucky to work in a field where teams frequently work in parallel and success or failure is pretty clear cut. And teams are often stratified based on the priority of project. Many times-- not always -- the "B" team crushes the "A" team. Why? Some reasons include: the A team is performative and focused on the things that burnish the careers and reputation of its members. B teams have more of a sense of the wolf being at the door and that if they don't perform their task they will feel the consequence. Being underdogs promotes teamwork.

Obviously people have profound differences in their strengths and weaknesses and some people are completely inappropriate. But calling people stars or A player covers up a lot of lazy thinking that includes a lot of bias. I have worked at smaller startups that say "we only hire A players". Obviously that is delusional but worse it covered up the more profound questions. Why did you hire the wrong person? Why did that person or team fail?

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#17

Post by dilyevsky »

lbriner wrote: post #7

A common theme seems to be founders who want to keep all the cool stuff about being a small business while they scale to the ARR of a corporate. It can't happen. 1000 people don't all care about some new feature shipped by someone over in the payments team so don't subject them to it. Most of us have been there in the painfull all-hands meeting falling asleep because the more people you have, the less they will care…

I could see it happening in b2c just not your regular b2b saas

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#18

Post by dilyevsky »

mariambarouma wrote: post #10

Ha! one of the slam-your-own-dick-in-the-door moves that startups seem destined to repeat Seen it SO many times when startups decide they need "grownups" in big positions to be credible externally

Hey it worked for google (eric) and facebook (sheryl) so it will work for us!

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#19

Post by williamstein »

skrebbel wrote: post #12
ipaddr wrote: post #2

"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…

Meta nitpick, and I’m not certain, but I think the author (named Tracy) is a she. Or a they which lets you avoid the problem altogether.

You are correct. The author's pronoun is "she" and there is a bio page about her here: https://leade.rs/speaker/tracy-young

Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR

#20

Post by molsongolden »

ipaddr wrote: post #2

"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…

The A player thing is less about how good they are at hiring and more about how strong of a player they are overall. Founders generally need to be A players to be successful founders.

An A player will still make hiring mistakes but they have the skills/ability/aura/whatever to convince other A players to come work with them.

Many A players won't want to work for/with a B or C player because they won't see this as a good opportunity.

Not sure if they actually meant that B players can't hire B players but maybe. This sort of framing is pretty high level though.

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