the most underrated hire right now is a great product person.
when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that.
i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it.
& the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start.
the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled.
before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.
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sports has visible meritocracy… you see the game, you see the shot, you see the score. tech is obscured by org charts, pr layers, & abstraction. so attribution becomes political instead of obvious.
notice how sam altman tags contributors when anything launches, smart & strategic… it’s:
- a trust signal (he knows who did the work),
- a power move (he chooses who gets visibility).
this will become standard because talent wants credit, not just comp. public tagging is a form of narrative equity… your name gets woven into the myth. in a world of infinite resumes, that’s leverage.
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this is a high tier psyop from sam. he’s talking directly to the market. by floating a number like $100m:
- he sets an anchor so absurd that anything meta offers now feels cheap.
- he forces meta to either deny or match, both of which hurt them.
- he gives his own employees a loyalty premium, they feel like they’re sitting on a $100m chip.
- he blurs price discovery for everyone else. no recruiter knows the real going rate anymore.
- & most importantly, he reframes the narrative from “openai is losing people” to “they’re so valuable it takes $100m to steal them”
zero marginal cost, massive narrative leverage. & meta’s cto just confirmed it’s working by responding at all. textbook information asymmetry + narrative warfare.
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