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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work.

The dichotomy sometimes

The blind poster is obviously more savvy than the "A players".

Can you please share the other post you are referring to?

That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not).

And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.

My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.

The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane

> The company culture is extreme almost culty.

Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.

Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.

Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?

This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.

And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.

[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.

> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?

I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:

> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.

See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.

I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”

Your example about 911 highlights how mismanaged this whole operation is and how bad any advice there is.

In an emergency situation you single out random person precisely because there are no set processes who should be doing that, so you create responsibility impromptu.

In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers. Having to constantly prod counterparty in another team signals totally broken and/or inexistent project management. It fits a lean startup where everyone is responsible for everything and everything is a fire you distinguish right there and move on. It does not fit organization where exponential growth of communication channels means communication becomes the bottleneck.

> In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers.

That's what the document was about though. The audience of the document is quite clearly people who will be given the responsibility to deliver a video or product. It's quite literally communicating to them the exact concept you're pointing out here, that you need to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And what's being conveyed is that there isn't a single "one size fits all" responsibility chain. You can't just throw a request over the wall and assume and hope someone on the other side of that wall will come through for you. Most of this document is quite clearly "project management 101". If you're hiring people for a business that is largely centered around having multiple one shot projects in flight at any given time, "project management 101" is exactly the sort of document you want to be handing to new hires. It might be obvious to you, but spend time in any large organization and you quickly come across people for whom taking ownership and responsibility for something and what that entails isn't obvious. Heck I see this on software development teams all the time, where PR requests get thrown "over the wall" at the whole team and the turn around time is delayed as people assume someone else will get to it before they will and forget about it. Most teams I've worked on eventually land on some sort of interrupt or direct assignment system for PRs for exactly this reason, because you need to assign clear responsibility in order to get results turned around faster.

I read the entire PDF and I felt he was pretty spot on about works and what doesn't in running a business.

This is Hacker News, ostensibly created as a website for hackers and founders.

If you are a hacker and a founder then a ton of this advice is spot on.

For example it's a simple concept but he absolutely nails a key factor by distinguishing between A, B and C employees. A high performing team really can't have more than one or two C's. It moves them out even if they're nice, cool, good people. If the team is run by good humans it does what Mr. Beast does and gives them severance.

I can smell a couple C employees fuming on here and in the Twitter thread. I've had C employees work for me and they were always the ones who lobbied me hardest for being more tolerant of mediocrity. Sorry but you just have to hold the line against the average if you want to succeed, this is dictionary definition level of obvious. To be above average, you have to be above freaking average. Half the world is C's and to win your team needs to not be in that half.

While I understand the concept of A, B and C employees to the employer from the PoV of the employee there is also management attrition and lack of incentives.

This concept of A, B and C employees is just ordinary dose of propaganda. A is a salaried employee who is expected to put in extra time and effort as if their livelihood depends on the success of the company, whereas type C employees poison the mindset by doing what they were hired to do. Bs are Cs with inherent sense of pride in delivering excellence who can be coached to become A.

I totally agree. This "excellence" ideology preaches unvirtuous self-sacrifice. Putting extra time and effort means that the employee is sacrificing himself to improve a result which will not benefit him but only a select few.

I argue that in many cases owners and managers, those who are posed to benefit from this ideology, are the ones which poison the mindset by punishing proactivity and being arrogant. There's also D employees, those that are unable to create value by the conditions set forth, they recognize the pointleness of their job and actively do the minimum and create excuses just to not get fired.

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).

It clearly biased for young people or those without a family with something to prove, the perfect type of employee to exploit and vampirize.

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.

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

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.

> Why did we ever think it would end up differently?

Because it has worked, countless times. Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc were all small software companies once, the current hotness is NVIDIA (ok hardware, not software). Obviously it doesn't happen often, or to a high percentage of startups, but hey, he wasn't lying to you, you took the job knowing the deal.

Did the original employees get rich when those companies grew?

It’s not about exploiting. Getting work done isn’t inherently a bad thing.

Lol. Hustle shops pay less and there are more hours. It is not exploitation, but usually there are better gigs. Finance is probably an exception where you know those long hours will be rewarded one day either in the current gig or another future one.

It’s about everyone doing 60-80 hours of work a week though

Lots of people make youtube videos for fun. Work can be fun to the point where it's what you want to do. Not what you have to do.

If you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. If I wasn't employed as a software dev then I would still be writing code on a daily basis.

Some have a passion for their job. I know, it’s unimaginable.

I love my job, but I don't do more than 8 hours generally, and am paid very fairly, and it's quite competitive, we aren't slackers.

I appreciate it for being honest tbh, 99% of job hunting in the IT field is filtering out the bullshit, or the greenwashing that what a company does is Good, Actually.

Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer? Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi? Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.

But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and external) is about reducing energy usage, their green energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the price is lowest.

It's just so cynical.

On the surface, it looks like they're prioritizing what the customer (or market) wants - lower usage/expense - over company profits.

What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?

You don’t understand the model. Residential customers pay most of the fees upfront as hook up fees monthly. You could use 0 energy in many areas and you would still pay almost the same amount.

> 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.

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/

a small focused group of tryers is probably a big help

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

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

Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc.

Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).

Yep, 1,000,000%, yep, can't +1 this enough, saw it at another big tech myself, had friends who saw it happen at Google. The companies that were going from nothing to dominance were so different from the companies that rest today on their monopoly laurels. To go from not successful to successful there were all these insanely smart people pulling 80 hour weeks and all the work life balance stuff came later. Unreasonably hard work doesn't guarantee success but it's always a component of massive success. Mr. Beast is not making this shit up and if you're not down for this you are one of his C employees which is fine, you can be a nice and valuable human in other ways, but those companies who want to go big are not for you. Starting a company, certainly a VC fueled one probably is not either.

"you need to be insanely smart and work 80 hour weeks" ... to pass a bunch of MBAs managing 50-percentilers? How does that make sense?

It makes sense because regulatory capture has become such a large part of how dominant American firms maintain their position. They don't maintain it through talent. They maintain it by breaking the law. Google's now been found guilty of antitrust violations in two markets and a case about a third just kicked off. And of course this is not just in tech, take a look at the cases against the Kroger/Albertson's merger or Ticketmaster.

The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.

The goal is achieved. The founders are rich and fulfilled (and probably exhausted), early star employees have mostly cashed out. This is not at all surprising or hard to figure out. Larry Page tried to establish a corporate structure that would sustain innovation (Google -> Alphabet) but they were never able to recreate what they had in search.

> "Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc."

and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?

If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?

Where's that discrepancy coming from?

You might be stretching Dan Luu's essay a bit far. It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection of it was him saying the 95th percentile in an arbitrary hobby, say amateurs playing competitive esports (e.g. Overwatch), and that if you put even a small amount of time into deliberate practice, you would be better than 95th percentile player in Overwatch. I didn't get the sense Dan Luu was extrapolating to multi-billion dollar companies, what it would take to take the fight to them, and taking their market share.

It aligns, because 95th percentile isn't that good. It's right there in the title.

Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.

The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.

>If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?

Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.

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?

Learning why it’s done the way it’s done before bringing up the beginner questions they get answered over and over is reasonable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's the best company I've ever worked at so far. The fact that mostly everyone was in their 20s to early 30s meant we had an awesome cohesive culture.

Note I said mostly. Of course there were older people, but they were in their 40s and early 50s. They were few and far between, and they were the "adults" in the room when needed. It worked really well.

Age doesn’t mean anything.

It’s just mindset and maintaining it.

In our 20s we might not know better, follow others and end up letting the current take us where it may.

Sometimes when I meet an 18 year old I wonder how they are having experiences where they are growing or the rate of growing is slowing much quicker than someone who was on the early internet.

If you can stay young and build discipline in all ages it works as you are saying.

It’s less about being the adult in the room as much as supporting people to grow and become those people they are seeking.

Sure, at an individual level age might not matter much. But taken in aggregate, age means a lot in the context of company culture building. Take any average 24 year old and see how much they have in common with a 34 year old or 40 year old. Let's not pretend life doesn't change over time and hand wave it with a nice platitude.

>It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.

How do you know they are 'good habits'. I have seen countless years of bad practices lauded internally as amazing/the etalon weight when it comes to code quality. In reality most of them were textbook examples of what should not be done. When you get folks without any previous experience, there's no one to question the status or the authority. If they learn/wisen up, they are likely to leave.

Recent grads tend to be more evidence-oriented than people with experience, IME. They'll e.g. benchmark something to see whether it's faster rather than going by reputation alone.

Hmm - that's quite nice/reassuring, although not my experience. Benchmarking, OTOH, is notoriously hard, esp. the microbenchmark type. The old: lies, damn lies, statistics, (micro)benchmarks.

Makes sense. Training juniors is a thing and maybe this document is also speaking to how at least it's working there.

Past film and tv folks I know have a hard time just diving in and doing it because they're so used to the processes they've had before. Not all are like this, and the ones that aren't, have a huge advantage over juniors with the open mind and experience to boot.

Even the digital side of shooting with a high end phone and editing well enough with tools still seems to not convince them.

On the other side, the OBS crowd, and youtubers are year by year improving their production skills and some of it's kind of starting to look pretty high quality.

Youtube will have no problem if it wants becoming the universal cable network with an obscure channel for pretty much everything that is very decent quality.

An example of risk taking in operations is right there in the pdf - “no doesn’t mean no”

They give the example of picking a filming location you aren’t likely to get permission to film in but would produce outstanding content.

First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build culture. No excuse, but still.

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