11 ms·

Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups. 1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP

• simonw 2y ago
  I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy. That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture. And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience. How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.
  • j45 2y ago
    First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build culture. No excuse, but still.
  • next_xibalba 2y ago
    > How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.
    • jodrellblank 2y ago
      How does that align with Dan Luu’s article “95th percentile isn’t that good”[1] and the general observation so many of us have that the companies we work for and interact with and buy from are executing so badly on so many fronts? That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective. If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies? [1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
      • johnny22 2y ago
        a small focused group of tryers is probably a big help
      • cellis 2y ago
        Because of switching costs. If you start a new thing this is definitely the case. It’s often said that a new product (startup), can’t be a marginal improvement; it needs to be 10x better. 95 percentile is not 10x
      • ozim 2y ago
        I think what you are missing: - not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one will pay for excellence of some services or goods - being exceptionally good at something doesn’t guarantee someone will buy from you, people might just don’t like you or your branding - there are bunch of other market forces that you have to overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95% on a single thing
  • greesil 2y ago
    At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?
    • j45 2y ago
      Learning why it’s done the way it’s done before bringing up the beginner questions they get answered over and over is reasonable.
      • greesil 2y ago
        If you're hiring junior people then sure. In Mr Beast's interview with Lex Fridman, he says he actually prefers hiring people from outside the entertainment industry because those folks really want to do what they did before, how they did it before, and not the Mr Beast way. Reading between the lines, I think he ends up hiring a lot of junior people because they're not set in their ways. Also probably they'll work long hours because they're just getting their start.
        • charlie0 2y ago
          I've also heard this exact same thing from my employer who hired ke straight out or college. Most of the company was comprised of young people. My boss, who was C level told me young people are easier to mold and now that I'm older I 100% agree with that. It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.
          • greesil 2y ago
            But how do you know what's good, and what's bad without a diversity of experience under one's belt? You could be working at a cult, or the greatest company ever. What Mr Beast does works for Mr. Beast. Same for your employer.
          • j45 2y ago
            They also don't know better. It's a lot of work to stay open minded, flexible, free, and not know better. Still, investing in their development can yield the kinds of people that an organization may be after.
  • nrp 2y ago
    That’s one of the most interesting parts of this document. Many people will read it and think “I would never work at a place like that,” and many others would think “that’s exactly the environment I want to work in!” More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
    • gleventhal 2y ago
      It clearly biased for young people or those without a family with something to prove, the perfect type of employee to exploit and vampirize.
      • thinkloop 2y ago
        There's no exploitation, he wants them to get rich, he wants this to be their last career. He's asking who's interested in going on that journey.
        • nothercastle 2y ago
          How exactly do they get rich? No obvious mention of profit share or any other actual reward expect the growth of the beast media brand
        • Viliam1234 2y ago
          The important thing (not mentioned in the document) is how much he pays them. That determines whether "wanting them to get rich" is real or not. Once I worked in a small software company, and the boss kept telling us "if the company grows, we will get more money, and we will all get rich". Young and naive, we worked hard. When the company grew, he... hired more developers. Well, of course. That is obviously much more profitable than increasing the salary of the existing developers. At the end, he was the only person who got rich. Why did we ever think it would end up differently? I guess, because we were young and naive, and also because he told us so. Being older and more cynical, if you want me to get rich, pay me. (Or make me a partner in business.) Otherwise, five or ten years later, when the company gets big and I will probably be burned out, you will have no incentive to waste money on the burned out guy, when the alternative is to hire someone fresh.
  • tpmoney 2y ago
    What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.
    • naming_the_user 2y ago
      Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me. To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home. To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.
      • grogenaut 2y ago
• grecy 2y ago
  > I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin. So if he doesn't micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do? It's not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no "Here's my past experience". None of that matters at his level of success.
  • FrozenSynapse 2y ago
    > I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin. content for dumb kids
• fabianhjr 2y ago
  > 4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees. That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)
• throwaway984393 2y ago
  [dead]
• wahnfrieden 2y ago
  There’s a difference between writing down that you hire A-players in a document, and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles
  • sumedh 2y ago
    > and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles How do you know they are unqualified?
    • wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Reports from insiders of nepotism hires and lack of qualification
• threeseed 2y ago
  I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice. And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • kjksf 2y ago
    It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in. Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing. Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people. It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good. The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player. Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition. Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.
    • XorNot 2y ago
      Of course now you have a function which isn't non-optimally performed, it's now not being performed at all. Because you're probably "running lean" so actually you have no redundancy for that function. And then there's the sociological effect of course: are you even any good at identifying poor performers, does the team view it that way? You can be one employee departure away from an exodus since someone being laid off is usually a good sign for everyone else to reconsider how they feel about their position. Bad management is pretty good at generating a never-ending stream of "underperforming employees". Like let's state the obvious here: you're looking back the 7 prior companies you worked for. Are the people you thought should be fired still there? Are they still turning up every day and doing something? Because in that context, whatever their fault, they are a more reliable resource to the company then you were (this isn't judgment: my resume is long too).
• XorNot 2y ago
  > 2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups. "Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!" ...seriously?
  • inemesitaffia 2y ago
    Good by what measure?
• vluis 2y ago
  [flagged]
• caseyy 2y ago
  > can't deny the success I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions. I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me. He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles. Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • paulcole 2y ago
    > But success has different definitions. Yes, except doesn’t Mr. Beast define the kind of success he’s aiming for in the PDF? > I do not consider Jimmy successful. By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?
    • talldatethrow 2y ago
      Probably by more common definitions held by people OP respects... For example, millions of people would not call him a success because he doesn't have a family with children (although Mr beast has definitely implied he wants one in the future). Many millions more would say that he's not a success because he doesn't do anything that's a net positive for society, instead he's mostly a drain on people's time and mental capacity.
      • paulcole 2y ago
        Uh, ok? If you're going to debate why this guy is/is not a success we can all make up our own little definitions and go on all day. But he defined his goals in this PDF and it seems like he's reaching/making progress towards those goals.
• kumarvvr 2y ago
  Success, but at what cost is more important, for those who are evaluating success. A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs to climate are equally important. We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.
• lxgr 2y ago
  Is anyone seriously denying the success? What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.
• zx10rse 2y ago
  SBF was very successful too.
• yard2010 2y ago
  That's gross. IMHO, ofc. A bit like scientology or crusade-age Christianity, you know it's wrong, but you can't argue with the success, so y not?
  • amne 2y ago
    Just like you can't argue about a lion eating a gazelle keeping the lion alive. Some people think it's gross but the lion is alive and ready to hunt again.
• calmbonsai 2y ago
  Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net detriment of society. You don't have to imagine very hard.
  • nothercastle 2y ago
    So most tech startups?
• oulipo 2y ago
  A lot of people here (and in tech in general) are conflating "being efficient" with "having success"... that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"
  • cdrini 2y ago
    I don't think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal. Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success. So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    > that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.
  • chii 2y ago
    > is BAD, not a "success" that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value. Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.
    • consteval 2y ago
      Not entirely true - bad things can be measured. Harm exists and has a value. The value, in this case if you wanted to derive, would be the amount of money consumers spent on random advertised things. Sure it would be hard to measure - but you could argue that money is money consumers lost as a result of Mr Beast (or maybe YouTube as a whole). For example, looking to the tobacco industry: they were incredibly economically successful because they leveraged the weaknesses of the human brain to sell their product, namely nicotine addiction. This is now largely considered immoral, but let's look past that. We can still measure the badness, or harm, of the tobacco industry objectively. We see how much money was/is spent on cancer treatment, COPD treatment, etc. These analysis have been done before and it's pretty damning, billions of dollars. In some cases, the cost of tobacco straight up exceeds the profit. Meaning, from a communal economic standpoint, they are a net-negative. Yes, it's true, tobacco, while wildly popular, is economically in the red. Of course, we live in a staunchly capitalistic, individualistic society. Communal economic cost/benefit is almost never looked at. Which is why we had the problems with the tobacco industry, and why the obesity epidemic grows. Mr Beast videos are not of this scale, but I would argue they are of this nature.
• lupusreal 2y ago
  Literally nobody is denying that MrBeast is successful so what is the point of saying that nobody can deny it?
• jorvi 2y ago
  I mean, there is also just hardcore survivorship bias at work here. How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic / network capture? You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content. I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.
• spencerchubb 2y ago
  I read the entire document and I don't understand where you saw bad culture or micromanaging. Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that's a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.
  • smt88 2y ago
    > Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there. This is a deeply naive understanding of employment. Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture. Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can't choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn't.
    • javier123454321 2y ago
      This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and productive Youtube production company. People here work incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job, seeking it out specifically. > Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all And this is BY CHOICE. I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • nothercastle 2y ago
        Yeah people will do the job for free basically. I don’t think you could have the same culture if your business was cleaning port-a-pottys.
        • smt88 2y ago
          We know this isn't true because of the necessity of unions. Mining coal and many other trades are a lot worse than cleaning toilets, and people still had to do them nearly for free.
• evilfred 2y ago
  literally everyone says they only hire A-players. Beast hired someone now accused of sexting with teens. is that an A-player hire?
  • fabioborellini 2y ago
    Maybe the subheading “no does not mean no” can be also taken literally.
  • Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    Unfortunately, the person he'd hired to predict the future was not a A-player.
• marxisttemp 2y ago
  > Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees. The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.
  • Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    Pretty well so far
  • ocean_moist 2y ago
    I personally think (and I think the prevailing sentiment is) that giving early employees equity is crucial. There is no way I would do any work for an early stage startup (or, in general, if I can help it) with no stake in the company. In bigger companies, it's a zero sum game. They don't really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.
• darby_nine 2y ago
  > Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering. EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there's little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.
• FactKnower69 2y ago
  >2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups. I love coming on here and seeing the world's wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as "only hire good workers; don't hire bad workers"
  • Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    He gives clear and actionable definitions, which is what makes it remarkable and different to everyone else saying or implying what you wrote. You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.
• johnnyanmac 2y ago
  And as all the past 2 months show, you don't get to this level of success without exploiting, if not outright abusing, your labor. >I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Id bet so too. Becuase he's definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data. > Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups. It really depends on your stage of scale. You don't need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.