C Players Are Good, B Players Ruin It

If you are receiving this, you either follow me on one of my socials or you are in the FinalLayer community. If you are a FinalLayer founder, reach out to be featured in this newsletter! And, of course, send me notes any time :).

-@hellovidya

A players seek challenge. B players seek credit. C players seek comfort. B players aren't just underperformers. They actively work against the people who would outperform them, and they're good enough at it that most founders don't notice until the damage is done.

Every organization has a mix of these three types whether you name them or not. Some people are pushing for the hardest problems they can find. Some are working out how to make sure the right people know what they did. Some are keeping their head down and doing what's asked without much more. The tricky part is that from the outside, especially in the early days, these people can look almost identical. They show up. They do the work. They're articulate in meetings. The difference is in what they're optimizing for, and that only becomes visible over time.

I call them A, B, and C players. Before I get into it, this has nothing to do with academic grades. You can be a genius with a degree from a top school and not be an A player. I've seen it repeatedly in my career. The framework is about motivation, not raw intelligence.

Here's the first framework. A players seek challenge. B players seek credit. C players seek comfort.

Because A players are chasing challenge, they want to be around people who push them. They actively seek out other A players. B players are doing the opposite. Because credit is what drives them, they bring in people who are loyal, agree with everything, and always make them look good. C players just want to stay in their comfort zone and not push any boundaries.

The second framework: A players are confident. B players are calculated. C players are careful.

Confident means secure enough to say "I don't know." A players will change their mind when the data changes. B players are not necessarily incompetent. They're just competent enough to execute things that will bring them credit, but underneath that is a real fear of being exposed. That fear drives everything they do. C players are careful to the point of hiding. They'd rather do nothing than do something wrong and get called out for it.

Due to popular demand, I'm launching The Founder Launchpad, a 6-week program for small cohorts of founders. We start May 1, Fridays 9–10:30 AM PT. The first cohort filled up fast, I have a couple of spots available if you’re interested.

This is the part most people push back on, but I'll stand by it. An organization is better off with A players and C players than one with B players in the mix.

C players who are doing their scoped work and minding their business are manageable. They're not climbing at any cost. As a company grows, you will inevitably hire some people who are satisfied with a narrower scope of work. That's fine. You cannot fill every seat with an A player at scale because you won't have enough challenging work to keep them all engaged.

B players are a different problem entirely. They don't just underperform. They actively stand in the way of the people who would outperform them. They block A players from getting hired. They play politics at every level. They build a loyal group around them who will always give them credit, and over time the quality of the organization is on a steady decline because you're systematically removing the people who could compete with them.

By the time most founders see the pattern, it's already compounded.

Who on your team controls who gets visibility? Who is creating friction around decision making? That's worth examining before it compounds.

1. Audit your recent hires. Look at who made the call on your last few hires. Were any brought in by someone who needed loyalty more than capability? That's a pattern worth catching early.

2. Watch for the credit tell. In your next team meeting, notice who is making sure their name is attached to outcomes versus who is focused on the outcome itself. The difference is visible once you're looking for it.

3. Protect your A players. A players leave when they stop feeling stretched. If your best people are going quiet, find out why before they're gone.

Getting A player identification right early is one of the highest leverage things a founder can do. The cost of a B player isn't a bad quarter. It's the A players they pushed out.

Content is the only way to drive inbound today. But then, there are many nuances in driving content towards actual conversions. Join me on Thursday at 9 am PT to discuss how to set up your content for success.