Business strategy
Post LinkedIn lead magnet · Business strategy
Patrick and John Collison spent years trying to recruit one executive for Stripe. She kept saying no. The details are unclear, but it involved years of outreach, dinners, and phone calls. Eventually, she said yes. What happened next: she built one of the world's leading product teams, recruiting 1,000+ people and helping Stripe clear its $100 billion valuation. The point is twofold. First, the impact a true rockstar can have is so enormous that it always makes sense to keep persisting, even if it takes years. In knowledge work, talent is nonlinear. Steve Jobs understood this. He didn't just value good developers. He believed a single great one could outperform an average team by a factor of 50, sometimes 100. Second, teams self-replicate. Everyone you hire is not just that person. It's every future hire they make or influence. A great hire means hundreds more great hires down the line. A bad hire means the opposite. This is why talent density compounds. A-players attract more A-players. B-players breed mediocrity. The hiring butterfly effect shapes a team's trajectory over years. Amazon understood this in the late 90s when they launched what they called the bar raiser program. The principle: every single person you add should raise the average talent level across the team by at least 50%. That rising talent level is also what maintains the challenge-skills balance required for flow. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term, observed: as individuals master challenges, they develop greater skill, and the activity ceases to be as involving. To continue experiencing flow, they need increasingly greater challenges. Raising the talent bar keeps the whole team in that zone where challenges and skills continue to rise together. Frank Slootman, ex-CEO of Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake (which he took to $1B+, $10B+, and $100B+ respectively) has a team of elite operators he brings with him company to company. Your best people can transcend any single company. Play your cards right, and they'll be with you for decades. I put together a full recruitment playbook built around the team flow triggers, including the specific hiring channels ranked by effectiveness and the discovery project framework. Comment "TEAM" and I'll send it over. (Must be connected, otherwise LinkedIn won’t let me DM you)
Mécanisme lead magnet
Comment "TEAM" and I'll send it over.