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, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.
2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
3. Building value > making money
4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.
The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.
I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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?
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"
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".
> 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"
That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.
Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.
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.
I’ve seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having a choice. Usually it is because either:
- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)
- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability
- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.
Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.
It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said "A players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players". That was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will hire C players - and so on.
That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.
Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A compensation.
>I always love the "just hire A-players" line.
As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.
If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.
If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.
>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.
I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.
He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.
It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.
Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.
> micromanaging
He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.
I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).
Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.
I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.
I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.
> 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)
>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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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 was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.
There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.
By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.
You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?
>- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.
Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.
While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.
You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.
A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
> - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.
I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.
The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing things to happen.
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it.
Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.
His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic, useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is about on the same level as any number of classic novels (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister). Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the people involved, as they're thrown into complex social situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.
I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.
What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.
Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing.
I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything:
"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster."
Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.
>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.
So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.
Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life.
This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.
It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.
>IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :)
It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible"
Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.
>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.
Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
> Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles—there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other parts.
I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.
An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.
One thing I find interesting over the last few weeks since this was released (and other MrBeast drama) is how there is now a separation between MrBeast the person and MrBeast the company.
Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.
While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
Honestly I never met Jimmy even though I was in his studio for two weeks working on the video. I did meet a ton of his employees, many of whom I'd gladly work with again, just not on a MrBeast production.
I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).
The bigger the company gets, the more separate it becomes from its founder/face/whatever.
Inevitable.
(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)
> While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.
MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other people willing to give up theirs for his channel
Giving up your life for many millions of dollar is a choice.
His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...
the audacity to ask other people to give up their life for helping you fulfil your dream and even sell it to them as them fulfilling their dream.
is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?
if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
That's like me saying I've given up my life to have the job that I have currently and live where I do. Or you've given up your life for however you spend it.
It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
My biggest critizism of A/B/C is it is always either a delusion, lie, or manipulation. People that talk frequently about "A players/employees" are almost certainly not the ones hiring them. Why? "A players" don't work someplace where they are not respected and ground to dust as a non-owner. That means at best the best employees are "B-players" and probably most of their staff is actually "C-players"
"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.
The no doesn't mean no section was about contractors and dealing with other people. It was a way of conveying that if you ask for something and get an outright refusal, then it's ok to ask again and pivot on details to try and find a fit. MrBeasts company drove a train into a big pit (one of the few videos I watched). That call, would have started with, I'd like to buy a train and a big pit. It probably started as a flat out refusal before he turned up with money.
I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rather" conversations I had in middle school.
Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).
For as much slop as gets produced on YouTube, I think the high quality educational content more than makes up for it. You can literally look up any subject and find a full blown series on the topic.
His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.
This is why those who can appropriately select good information will flourish in this age. I still suck at it (get pulled into mindnumbing shorts for 30 minutes), but then I learned a new musical instrument for _free_ using YouTube.
Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking project.
This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.
I would disagree on the net bad for the world, or at least be skeptical about it. Personally, Youtube was my life changing tool which I used to learn almost everything essential to my career and personal development, and I would assume lots of others would be the same. The type of content it recommends goes with the type of content you interacted with in the past. It just a tool and it matters how you use it
youtube still has a net positive value. the amount of knowledge & learning (and ok, entertainment) i get out of it on a daily basis is immense and i can't imagine the amount of wisdom i'd have sucked up as a kid if i had access to all this.
if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.
What the algorithm seems to favour is a better indicator of what people use Youtube for overall.
I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.
I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads. Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is blocked at home and kids don’t have smartphones.
Youtube is the single most important and valuable learning tool that exists on the planet. There are lectures on literally everything, i have been recently learning my way into geometric algebra and lie theory for my physics phd. Sure, there's a lot of crap and youtube is just as happy to waste your time but if you search out and only watch educational content, your Frontpage will become educational content. It's hard to keep that way because there's tons of fun but uneducational things to watch, but there's browser extensions and things to help with that. Extensions that block the homepage and video recommendations, extensions that let you group your subscriptions and create your own feed. It can be amazing if you use it right, it's hard to use right sometimes
I see it differently. I don't think YouTube fundamentally changes people; it might serve up low-quality content to those seeking it, but they'd likely find it elsewhere if not on YouTube.
On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.
It's infinitely better than television because you can remove ads and choose what you want to see! I know you never compared it to TV but that was the main mode of entertainment before streaming.
I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.
It's not YouTube per se that's bad. YouTube is just a symptom. The underlying pathology is advertising. The attention economy, surveillance capitalism. Those are the real problems. Those are the reasons behind this distortion of the world. They enable people who make moronic meme videos to make orders of magnitude more money than people who actually try to contribute something to society.
There are plenty of terrible books and trash novels. Easily 99% of books are junk (often junk dressed up as non-junk). I think it's very possible that in 2024, YouTube is net more educational than reading. (Speaking in terms of total amount of knowledge acquisition.)
Does youtube have a lot of trash? He s certainly a (very big) outlier but the other trashy content is mostly about expensive cars and shit which is harmless by comparison.
This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is only watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn't exist.
> This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is.
No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.
That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.
Are you arguing that the public fascination with it makes it morally acceptable? If so would you consider gladiatorial fights to the death and gruesome public executions, both of which have been massive crowd-pleasers in the past and no doubt would be again if they became socially accepted, justified by the same argument? If not, what do you think is different here that makes condemning Mr. Beast for feeding unwholesome public appetites wrong, but condemning Roman emperors for it right? Just a question of the degree of nastiness?
Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.
Human nature is full of self-conflict and contradiction. There are more base aspects of it and higher ones as well. This has been known up and down the ages. Vices and virtues. "You're against vice, hence you're against humans because vice is what humans like to choose!" Well, no. You can be against catering to the base urges. You wouldn't feed your dog 10 cakes even if it continues eating it. And that's not hatred of dog-ity.
Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.
Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.
Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.
In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.
One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to optimize every part of his content for years before he really blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to success, given enough time and resources.
As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.
Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.
Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.
I didn’t know that YouTube supports multiple audio tracks for the same video. Can alternate tracks be uploaded at a later point in time? Can the feature be used to replace the original audio in a video?
It might be interesting to contrast MrBeast’s management approach with that of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). He is also a successful YouTuber who leads a team that puts out videos on several channels. While his videos don’t have the huge production scale of MrBeast’s, they seem to be produced on short deadlines and must require close coordination among his team.
If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.
Brownlee is such a mystery to me. The #1 rule of Youtube is show energy, show enthusiasm. Brownlee is like if Urkel were given a sedative and told to review the latest iPhone
You mean he talks more like a normal person talking about a product rather than a Youtuber going over the top with everything? The fact that he is genuine is a big part of his appeal.
He’s been doing it a long time, has an excellent understanding of the tech industry, and is a master at producing content that is easy for everyone to digest. I’ve been watching him for years and have always thought he had a knack for his craft. Just because he has a calm demeanor shouldn’t take away from what he does, but in my opinion should add to it even more.
The #1 rule is clearly not show energy, show enthusiasm. It's the #1 rule for a subset of content, like MrBeast. The content world is a big place, and the silent majority has no interest in loud and obnoxious.
Is product fetishism really better than light entertainment? The MKBHD slop is just branded with that same vibe of the products he likes to cover, namely the self-satisfactions of luxury goods that people mistake for high quality. That gives the false signal it provides more value than Mr. Beast. Yes, MKBHD technically covers products, but so did Top Gear. The content is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an informed purchase decision.
MKBHD intentionally has a small team that makes relatively low budget videos. I think MKBHD mainly has a relatively large audience because he was very early to the high quality videos game on YouTube. I wouldn't be surprised if his edge is lost now and his viewership does not grow faster than would be expected of an active channel of his size.
Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.
MKBHD is not even in Top 500 of the most subscribed Youtube channels, first give me the details of what those other 500 channels are doing then maybe MKBHD... (and I'm saying this as a long time subscriber)
Would you say the same about companies, that the only interesting ones worth talking about are the ones in the Fortune 500? If anything, I would say many of them are rather boring examples, we all know roughly how they're managed and run.
> 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.
I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."
Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.
I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.
I feel the same, but I realized I don't want to be the blunt person; I just want some other blunt person to do my dirty work. This is not really a fair expectation for me to have.
That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.
It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.
Readit News
1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.
2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
3. Building value > making money
4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.
The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.
I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.
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.
More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
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.
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"
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".
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.
That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.
Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.
I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.
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.
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.
- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)
- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability
- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.
Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.
That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.
If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.
If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.
>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.
I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.
He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.
It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.
Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.
Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of 'mediocre people' instead of one 'A-player'; the ratio of more junior to more senior; etc.
Deleted Comment
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.
content for dumb kids
How do you know they are unqualified?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.
> micromanaging
He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.
I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).
Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.
I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.
I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.
You don't have to imagine very hard.
That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)
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"
You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.
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.
>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.
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.
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 :)
According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.
So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.
He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.
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?
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"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"
...seriously?
What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.
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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.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.
You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.
"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...
They're not saying make the best product possible, they're saying make the product that sells the most despite quality.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.
While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
Any good alternatives?
Maybe all of these companies succeeded _despite_ these?
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.
The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.
I actually admire that quote.
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I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
Facilitate instead of forbid.
Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
There. Fixed it.
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?
I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.
Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.
Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.
So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.
Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :)
Cyberinsurance is a bigger and bigger deal now.
Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.
Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.
An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.
Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.
While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
It just seems a bit weird to me.
I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).
Inevitable.
(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)
Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.
His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...
is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?
if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.
Perhaps this is as much a commentary on the state of labor laws and unions as anything else.
I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rather" conversations I had in middle school.
Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).
His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.
Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.
The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word website.
Knowledge share is finally global.
Agreed.
> The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
These seem like the outliers.
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
Overwhelming majority of things designed to exploit human imperfections for personal gain are a net bad. Youtube has become one of those things.
Unfortunate, 'cause that's where the money is.
if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.
I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.
oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk
On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.
I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.
As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that doesn’t make up for the 99%.
This guy has a genuine love of torturing people
No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.
That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.
Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...
In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.
As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.
Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.
Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.
[0] https://www.viewstats.com/
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13338784
If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.
Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.
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I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."
Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.
I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.
That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.
It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.