Because in the beginning you’re not going to have HR to help you find and hire a world-class team. You won’t even have a recruiter. For the first twenty-five or so employees it’ll all come down to you and your cofounder—your vision, your network, your ability to convince people that you know what you’re doing. You can lean on your mentors and board (and hopefully early investors), you can put them to work to prop up your reputation, but ultimately you’re selling yourself and your vision for success.

You need a story people can get behind. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] People you respect. People who will help you create something great. Your team is your company. And your first hires are crucial—they’ll help you architect what your business and culture will become.

But more often the real shock of growth is that over time you’ll bring on people who are just okay. Relative to the amazing people you brought in early, they’ll seem unimpressive. Mostly fine, good team players, get the job done.

And that’s not the end of the world. As the company expands, you need all kinds of people at all kinds of levels.

You can’t wait for the perfect A+ candidate to appear for every single empty slot. You need to hire. The best of the best don’t always want to join a big team, or they’re tied up in another job, or you can’t afford them or give them the titles or responsibilities they want.

And sometimes the people you don’t expect to be amazing—the ones you thought were Bs and B+s—turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They’re modest and kind and just quietly do good work. They’re a different type of “rock star.”

By far the hardest part of growth is finding the best people—in all their different incarnations—trusting your team to hire them, then making sure they’re happy and thriving.

Your team’s culture is like its personality. It exists whether or not you think about it. If you’re not satisfied with how your team works together—maybe the vibe feels hostile instead of helpful, maybe it takes a long time to get things done, or maybe there’s constant drama—it’s worth examining why this might be and what you can do about it.

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.

Last, when it comes to the key people who absolutely drive performance, great managers/coaches simply do whatever it takes to keep them on board, including offering a customized compensation package. If one person wants less base and more incentive-based pay, so be it. If another wants more time off, let it happen. “Fairness” does not mean “sameness.” You need to be creative and flexible in order to keep your top talent happy, from a compensation-package perspective.

Wages are one of your biggest expenses and should be used strategically to differentiate your firm from the competition.