The assumption is: "And remember that A players can recruit other A players, …”, not “ "And remember that A players can ONLY recruit other A players, …”.

(Added: My Ph.D. in mathematics is useful for something.)

This is helpful, thank you.

I cracked a laugh at the end :) I wonder what their faces will look like when they learn about contraposition

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

Oh shut up

> Or a they which lets you avoid the problem altogether.

At the cost of being ungrammatical, inelegant and IMHO profoundly disrespectful.

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.

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

I’m sure this is the case at some companies. But in my experience, it’s because the B player is as bad at hiring as they are at their job. This repels A players, who can smell bullshit, leaving a pool of Bs and Cs and guess which there are more of.

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.

Yep, just put people in bins so you can keep them organized. It’s always worked, so why stop now, right?

It’s not as easy as A and B and C people (or any other labels).

I’ve professionally led a team doing physical labor, and currently a team of teams doing intellectual labor (software development) and several between. They have been excellent, productive and profitable as well as respectful, ethical and honorable.

The reasons behind their success are complicated but always start on the same foundation: respect. Genuine, difficult to come by, and more difficult to maintain, respect. For the customer. For the user. For each other. For other departments. For the community. For the competition.

From there builds trust, and from trust comes ambition and the ability to focus on the purpose of the job (yes, it’s a job in most cases, not a mission or vision).

This is what I see some growth CEOs miss. They lack respect for people outside the “right” mold and don’t hire (or keep) them. Then to their surprise, their teams become dysfunctional.

Many tired anecdotes teach us about this (too many chefs, etc.) yet the same mistake is made with relentless repetition.

Your point just illustrates how shallow this analysis is.

The author is quoting Steve Jobs who would parrot it to his original Macintosh team. The Macintosh was an overpriced black and white appliance that nearly bankrupted Apple. Wozniak's team on the other hand built up the Apple II to be cheaper, faster, more modular. The Apple II saved the company. Ironically Wozniak is the A person and Jobs is the B person

Not sure if anyone doesn't get this but just in case this isn't clear, the entire point of the quote isn't that people can be neatly separated into A/B/C classes, but that lowering the hiring bar can lead to a slippery slope effect that continuously lowers the bar, hence the short-term benefit of hiring someone good enough has to be measured against the long-term cost of this slippery slope effect.

It’s a low IQ point of view popularized by VCs. You can hire A/B/C if you pay enough, within some competency band as well.