The Mr. Beast Memo
This week, a memo from Mr Beast production leaked. It made the headlines as the 26-years old Donaldson (real name of Mr Beast) is now rich, famous, and controversial.
The doc is a pure masterclass about building a company, and more generally, what work ethics to adopt. This simple 36-pages document is better than much advice I got during my startup time.
There are the few highlights that hit home when I read the doc:
do not hire C-players. There are three buckets of people: A-players, B-players (the next A-players) and C-players (folks will never make it higher). Fire C-players as quickly as possible: they lower the bar and rot your culture. Make sure B-players learn from the A-players. C-players are death threats to early-stage companies and the reason large companies are being outpaced.
obsess about the job to be done: Donaldson spent years alone in his bedroom. After graduating from grad school, he was chatting every morning with other YouTubers what makes a good video. He analyzed every single aspect of a piece of content, from the video duration, to the brightness of a thumbnail.
be metric-driven: the creation process is metrics-driven and based on previous videos. Each engagement, increase/decrease in views is scrutinized and taken as a lesson for new videos. Each video does better than previous ones.
own your mistakes: everybody makes mistakes, and it’s totally fine. What is not okay is to repeat the same mistake because you did not learn from it. B-players become A-players by making mistakes and learning from them. This is why you invest in A-players and (even more) in B-players — you pay for their mistakes so that they do not make them again.
insist on highest standards: Donaldson emphasizes that only the best work is published on the channel. And this is how it should be: you should obsess about your work, throw 90% of it and publish only the best (~10% of your content). As Steve Jobs famously said, “we can’t ship junk”.
One great quote from the memo on hiring A-players
As I type this I realize it may not be the wisest to categorize everyone into 3 buckets but this is how I believe we should look at everyone a part of the production team. You’re either an A-Player, B-Player, or C-Player. There is only room in this company for A-Players. A-Players are obsessive, learn from mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in Youtube, see the value of this company, and are the best in the goddamn world at their job. B-Players are new people that need to be trained into A-Players, and C-Players are just average employees. They don’t suck but they arn’t exceptional at what they do. They just exist, do whatever, and get a paycheck. They arn’t obsessive and learning. C-Players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different company IMMEDIATELY. (It’s okay we give everyone severance, they’ll be fine).
Another one on insisting on the highest standards.
"This channel is my baby and I've given up my life for it. I’m so emotionally connected to it that it’s sad lol. But this is the one thing I will never compromise on, I have 0 issues throwing away a multi million dollar video if I don’t think it’s up to my standards and is good for the audience. We must always be improving and innovating. The camera angles need to always get better, the pacing, the story, the jokes, the color, the lighting, the music, the props, the people, our framing, our ideas, literally everything must always be improving and innovating. Because that is what excites me. That’s literally what I live for, to see these videos get better and better and ultimately make the viewers happy.”
Either if you are starting your career, operating a startup or are just interested in business, I highly recommend reading the entire memo.
And thanks to Kassen for sending the memo