Adam Staab
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2016–2023
4:16 · 6.5M views · Aug 13, 2014
A scene from Moneyball in which Brad Pitt's character argues with scouts who pick players on intangible impressions instead of performance data. It is a four-minute clip.
Invoked as shorthand for hiring and investing by gut feel and appearances instead of what actually predicts results.
3 comments from Hacker News
People with families can certainly be successful entrepreneurs and create companies with "explosive growth that maybe change the world". (It kinda came across like you were implying that founders with families were mostly only interested in "lifestyle businesses".) There are so many factors that contribute to success, and they are never all equal, so any sort of up-front filtering based on some factor you think is correlated with success is going to miss out on people. And besides, I would strongly dispute any arguments that having a family is like some sort of handicap that must be overcome. In a lot of ways, I think having a family is a BETTER situation for starting a company! My impression from reading YC's stuff is more that folks feel the value of the program comes to a large degree from the in-person interactions people have, so it makes sense to require people to be there in person. Related, there's this scene from Moneyball, [1] that I love. They're all sitting around, discussing all this stuff that is at best tangentially related to _the actual things that matter_ for success of the team. It's very tempting and natural bias to latch on to this or that factor which you've become convinced makes a difference "all else being equal". But all else is never equal, and the question that is actually important is more the one Billy Beane keeps asking: "Yeah, but can he hit?" [1]: this video
OP here. I guess rather than "smarter" I meant to convey: less gullible, less vulnerable to being influenced by silly signals like someone's mannerisms and confidence, less reliant on unexplainable gut feels. I guess when I think of professional investors picking some of these dogs, my mind imagines that scene in Moneyball[1] where the old timers are trying to pick baseball players by who "looks good," "has a good jaw," "how the ball sounds when it pops off his bat, and "what the player's girlfriend looks like." 1: this video
What is a talent acquisition team and why did twitter need one? Is it like the Scouts in Moneyball? this video " Jane has a good looking typing motion, has a git checkin rate of .324, and scored a 465 on their leetcode " " She has an ugly husband though, suggests a lack of confidence " " I like Jim, good coders body, lean cut, good face. Good looking keystroke, the code just explodes off his keyboard with a real pop. You can hear it all the way over at the kombucha tap. " " If he codes so good, where are the git checkins? He's checking in at a .154 "