I was hoping he'd say hire 3 amazing programmers. In general any company that works online right now would benefit more from the order of magnitude increases in

I was hoping he'd say hire 3 amazing programmers. In general any company that works online right now would benefit more from the order of magnitude increases in productivity that great programmers bring. The jobs he describes are all managerial (the stats guy less so), and as such require communication - which means that at best, they're going to bring incremental improvements. Obviously those get magnified by the staff that reports to them. Which means that you're actually hiring 3 amazing people and multiple more "staff" to magnify their effect. In my opinion, you're better off hiring 3 amazing programmers.