With our dispersed decision-making model, if you pick the very best people and they pick the very best people (and so on down the line) great things will happen. Ted calls this the “hierarchy of picking” and it’s what a workforce built on high talent density is all about.

A professional sports team is a good metaphor for high talent density because athletes on professional teams:

• Demand excellence, counting on the manager to make sure every position is filled by the best person at any given time.

• Train to win, expecting to receive candid and continuous feedback about how to up their game from the coach and from one another.

• Know effort isn’t enough, recognizing that, if they put in a B performance despite an A for effort, they will be thanked and respectfully swapped out for another player.

On a high-performing team, collaboration and trust work well because all the members are exceptionally skilled both at what they do and at working well with others. For an individual to be deemed excellent she can’t just be amazing at the game; she has to be selfless and put the team before her own ego. She has to know when to pass the ball, how to help her teammates thrive, and recognize that the only way to win is for the team to win together. This is exactly the type of culture we were going for at Netflix. This is when we started saying that at Netflix: WE ARE A TEAM, NOT A FAMILY.

It’s important to hire the best A Player you can find for each position in your company based on four criteria (in this order!):

• Will — a desire to excel, act with courage, persevere, learn, and innovate

• Values — the test for culture fit – do they align with your core values

• Results — in the end can they deliver on your KPIs/outcomes

• Skills — the least important since most skill-sets need updating every 5 years

Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasn’t that experience wasn’t important, but they “bet on brains,” as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.

At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means you must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn’t willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.