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by tracerbulletx 899 days ago
Every successful athletic team makes player scouting and development a core function, not only the elite levels. In the US that means minor league baseball teams, university teams from volleyball and fencing, to football and basketball. Pro cycling teams that pay almost nothing and aren't competitive world wide.. It's not just the elite teams that make this top priority. They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win.
1 comments
philwelch 899 days ago
Most of your examples are talent pipelines for the top leagues. Regardless I think you made my point for me at the end:

> They ALL know that the most driven talented players they can get at their level is what will make them win.

This is not how normal employment works. Sports are competitive by nature so the difference between a 60th percentile player and the best player is the difference between winning and losing. But for most businesses, the difference between the best frontend developer and the 60th percentile frontend developer is close to zero.

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tracerbulletx 899 days ago
The difference is being Stripe where part of the reason they won was that they are considered extremely excellent at developer experience and technical execution. Or Netflix where they beat all of the legacy companies to a great platform doing something no one had done before, and retained the advantage to the point where they seem like they're going to make it through the die off of streaming platforms.
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philwelch 899 days ago
Neither of those examples is particularly convincing. Stripe succeeded because it tackled a famously difficult and annoying set of business problems; the technology is important and they're reputed to be top rate, but that's not why they've succeeded as a business. Netflix has no technical moat either; there are half a dozen streaming services that, on a technical level, are completely interchangeable with Netflix. The only difference between them is their respective content catalogues, and while Netflix probably has some advantage in being able to drive content decisions with customer data, that only gets you so far.
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