A founder has two jobs: increase revenue or reduce costs. For both, headcount is the biggest lever.

In a vacuum, every hire should cost less than the revenue they generate — that’s the entire justification for hiring. But in practice, unless someone is an A player, they impose costs that don’t show up on a balance sheet: more alignment meetings, more all-hands, more difficulty assigning clear KPIs. They consume the attention of the people who are actually driving output. I define an A player as someone who, even accounting for these second-order effects, increases revenue without increasing costs. In practice, that means they don’t consume other people’s time — and when they do, the interaction is additive. These people think better. They don’t ask questions they could have answered themselves. When they speak, it’s novel. It moves the room forward.

A B player, by contrast, might do useful work in isolation. The traditional justification has been: sure, they cost the A player 4–5 hours a week in alignment and hand-holding, but they save them 7 hours of manual work, so the net is still positive. At $60K versus $100K, that math has historically worked out.

Not anymore. With AI tools — Claude, Cursor, Gamma, and what’s coming next — the manual work that justified B players is evaporating. The 3 hours of net savings they provided? An A player can now reclaim that with a prompt. The B player doesn’t just become less valuable. They become a drag. The same way I once looked at C players — people who clearly cost more than they contributed — is how I now see B players in an AI-native company.

This gets me backlash. People say it’s cruel, that society failed to prepare workers for this. I disagree. I estimate 80% of jobs have been mostly execution — following instructions, filling templates, moving information from A to B. Only 20% have required genuine thinking. But the people in that 80% weren’t victims. They optimized for comfort. They chose the path of doing over the path of thinking. That was always a choice. The difference now is that the consequences of that choice have arrived.

So: learn to think.

Here’s what I mean concretely. Most people think linearly — they say A, which leads them to B, then C, then D, then E. You’re watching them process in real time. A better thinker says C, then fills in A and B as supporting context. Then jumps to F, backfilling D and E. They’ve already done the traversal privately and are giving you the compressed, high-signal output.

This isn’t natural for most people. My solution: write. Then revise. Then write again. Writing forces you to confront the gaps in your thinking before you inflict them on someone else. It’s the cheapest way to train yourself to compress, prioritize, and lead with the conclusion rather than the process.

I’ll be honest — I don’t know if this advice scales to everyone. But foundationally, it tracks. In my own work, I’m constantly asked to generate new initiatives or convince clients to part with their money. The skill that matters most isn’t knowledge or effort. It’s the ability to think clearly and communicate the result — fast.

That’s what an A player does. And increasingly, it’s the only thing that justifies a seat at the table.

Interesting tweet that outlines this concept.

https://x.com/milesdeutscher/status/2022556923955155362I