1/ Watching the #NFLPlayoffs today and thinking about how to sustain success in team driven ventures (like sports).

A thread on team building: starting w/ sports and ending w/ startups.

2/ Something that most casual fans miss is that putting together sustained success in sports is not about acquiring talented players, it's about having a systemic approach to roster construction. Talent acquisition is a noisy art and it's also a market driven phenomenon.

3/ Just like in stock trading, it's basically impossible to beat the market consistently. The real lesson behind the #A's "Moneyball" system was not that we should use analytics, it was that you have to find market inefficiencies.

4/ One big difference between stocks and sports rosters, however, is that stocks are mostly independent and rosters are not. This means there are ways to pick players that systemically do better than the market picking random players at large.

5/ The teams that do this well use the structure of the game and the CBA to build sustained success. What are some examples of this?

6/ NBA: Stars players are both systemic success and market inefficiency. Basketball is such a star dominated sport, having Steph or LeBron leads to sustained success. There is no point in trying to be successful w/o at least one (and now probably 2) of these types of players.

7/ This was the insight behind "The Process" from @samhinkie but we've also seen teams like the LeBron Era #Heat, the Morey #Rockets , and the current #Nets.

8/ MLB: Use first 6 years of players career w/ controlled contracts. Get rid of players at end of this control for compensatory picks or young prospects, repeat. The #Dodgers are currently the best example of this but the #Rays have been doing this for years.

9/ NFL: Star QB's, trading down in the draft, and elite coaches. No team has sustained success for more than a couple of years w/o an elite QB. Because QB is such an expensive position, teams should either have QB's on rookie contracts or who are elite. Nothing else.

10/ Trading down in the draft creates more shots on goal and more cost controlled assets, which has proven to lead to systemic success. Lastly, great coaches can make a huge difference. This was the model behind #Patriots run but is now what the #Chiefs are doing.

11/ There's more nuanced ways to systemically construct rosters but these are the big ones. Fans ask "how can we improve this team?" but should instead ask "how can we improve the system of roster construction?" It's a fallacy to look at individual roster moves as independent.

12/ There's a lot to be learned from sports in other areas as well though: you can apply similar systems to building technology teams.

13/ Startups need to know their systemic approach to acquiring talent. They can't beat the market approaching hiring the way everyone else does. One lever they have is their culture and mission. What are some others I've found? I call them Moneyball hires and Magnet hires.

14/ Moneyball hires are looking for people who are undervalued by the market. Obvious examples are URM's or people w/ nontraditional backgrounds (coding bootcamps, etc.).

15/ Magnet hires are people who attract other people. If I hire @JeffDean, I'll have a ton of other engineers who want to work for me. So what is Jeff's market value? Eventually, he could save me 50k salary on 100 hires bc people want to work with him.

16/ You can't actually hire Jeff, but talent density and magnetic people are *systemic* advantages in hiring.

Anyways, this was a long thread, but if you made it this far, hope you enjoyed it.