7.

Build A-Teams

Don’t Hire Just A-Players

In Silicon Valley, a kind of mythology permeates stories about founders.

Jobs and Wozniak’s fight against IBM to invent the personal computer has become as much legend as history. Elon Musk’s personal crusade to rid the world of fossil fuel dependence through SolarCity and Tesla, populate Mars via SpaceX, and solve metropolitan congestion with Boring approaches the fantastical in scope and vision. The story of Mark Zuckerberg and his friends building Facebook is immortalized in The Social Network, a film that grossed over $200 million.¹

These singular founders are the legends on which Silicon Valley is built.

But in their pioneering efforts, they were never truly alone. Each led a small army. Apple now has eighty thousand employees, Tesla thirty-eight thousand, SpaceX six thousand, and Facebook twenty-five thousand.² Talent, perhaps even more than capital, is the critical resource for a startup’s success—even the ones associated with legendary founders.

So crucial is this resource that Silicon Valley startups don’t have “human resources.” Instead, they have “human capital.” Leading Silicon Valley thinkers run the gamut on best-in-class approaches to building and growing teams. Accepted strategies have coalesced into a kind of science, and books, articles, workshops, and class sessions continue to cover the topic ad nauseam.

A central idea is now engrained as dogma: hire only A-players. Every young founder in the Valley knows that hiring the most experienced and most qualified players—those who have already demonstrated excellence in a particular function at a startup in a similar stage of development—increases the odds of success. For example, for any direct-to-consumer retail brand, there are plenty of professionals who have developed an SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, which entails ensuring a particular website has the most favorable ranking on Google and other search engines, or who have figured out optimal marketing spending, through to a successful exit and billions of dollars in sales. According to Silicon Valley best practices, founders must recruit these immensely qualified specialized candidates for their roles and, in so doing, create a culture of performance—ultimately unlocking a self-perpetuating cycle whereby the company will attract more high performers over time.

This idea is predicated on the richness of Silicon Valley’s talent pool. Every year, Stanford and Berkeley graduate 1,500 engineering students apiece, and they refill and expand the ranks of the more than 150,000 computer scientists and software developers working in California.³ Silicon Valley companies also have unparalleled access to graduates having expertise on the business side. Stanford alone has 130 classes on entrepreneurship, many of which focus specifically on tech innovation.⁴

Career paths and roles are well defined at startups: engineering specializations—along with particular job categories spanning project management, product marketing, product design, and business operations—have solidified. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Yahoo all have dedicated product manager training and rotational programs.⁵ Product managers have their own organization: the Silicon Valley Product Management Association reaches more than five thousand Silicon Valley–based members of the product management community.⁶

But here’s the rub: in Silicon Valley, companies and employees see their relationships as short-term affairs. Retention rates are among the lowest in the United States. More than 13 percent of staff turn over every year, and in certain job categories like user design, the rate is well above 20 percent, which translates to short employee tenure.⁷ Employees are taught that career development is self-directed. They rotate through a range of companies, seeing best practices and bringing them into their next firms—growing as leaders all the while.

To keep employees engaged, Silicon Valley’s primary retention tool is economic: stock options. Through these widely distributed and well-understood instruments, employees can participate in the growth of the company by owning the right to purchase stock at a predetermined price and see it increase in value as the company grows. This perk can create substantial wealth. Famously, Google’s part-time masseuse—who was also an early recruit making $450 per week—became a millionaire from her stock options.⁸ However, the value of a stock option is predicated on growth. If companies don’t grow, they don’t have value. Since there are so many job opportunities in the Valley, if a particular company doesn’t appear to be a rocket ship, the allure of another great idea will win over a talented player.

Because the candidate pool is plentiful in Silicon Valley, high employee turnover is seen as a nuisance but built in to the business model. In their book The Alliance, Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh suggest that Silicon Valley startups should think of employees as being on “tours of duty.” Employees and startups are in a temporary “alliance.” The company aligns its needs with employees’ current career motivations. In the authors’ conception, only a few tours are “foundational”; longer-term roles that provide continuity are reserved mostly for senior employees.⁹

This situation creates a model of human capital focused on constantly replenishing the ranks of an elite mercenary team.

At the Frontier, however, hiring Silicon Valley’s version of A-players—those “been there, done that” candidates—is not a realistic goal. There just aren’t enough of them. Therefore, Frontier Innovators adopt unique strategies to build A-teams in emerging ecosystems and offer their recruits compelling, longer-term careers.

The A-Team of One Great City

A band of my youth, the Weakerthans, once wrote a tongue-in-cheek song about our shared hometown, called “One Great City.” Its refrain? “I hate Winnipeg.”

That’s where we are headed.

Joshua Simair is CEO of SkipTheDishes, a Winnipeg-based startup in the food delivery space. Joshua grew up in Prince Albert, a working-class city of thirty-five thousand in northern Saskatchewan, the Canadian province adjacent to Manitoba. Joshua attended the University of Saskatchewan in the “big city” of Saskatoon (population: three hundred thousand), where he graduated at the top of his class.

In a weirdly small world, Joshua, like me, left his Canadian prairie alma mater to pursue an undergraduate exchange program in Rouen, France. Subsequently, we both moved to actual big cities to work in investment banking at the Royal Bank of Canada (he to London, and I to Toronto). Joshua recalls feeling out of place for most of his career: “When I was an investment banker, I was struck by how polished, how smart, and how confident my peers were. They were such high performers, and I was intimidated. In my high school, if you didn’t do drugs you were the good kid. When I moved to London, I sold my car to buy my suit.”¹⁰

In 2011, Joshua decided to apply his learning from metropolitan innovation to create a meaningful business for the Canadian prairies. “Working in the big cities like London and Toronto, I saw people who saved time everywhere,” he said. “In dense city environments, they ordered food, picked it up, or had it delivered, and went home to spend more time with their families or work on their businesses. The same options were not available in small Canadian cities.”¹¹ Joshua decided to build out those options. With his brother and a few other co-founders, he launched Skip-TheDishes and headquartered it in Winnipeg, Manitoba. SkipTheDishes’ mission was to partner with restaurants to offer home delivery in smaller cities in the United States and Canada.

From the outset, Joshua knew that finding human capital would be one of his biggest challenges.

On the one hand, although there is abundant talent in Winnipeg, there have been few scaled startups in the city. Thus, there is a limited trove of experienced professionals who have already scaled startups like SkipTheDishes. New hires would all need to be trained. The talent limitations are compounded by the constant risk of brain drain to the larger economic centers.

The Frontier Talent Challenge

Winnipeg is like many parts of the Frontier: the prospect of hiring only Silicon Valley–style, experienced technologists is a distant dream.

This dearth of expertise does not reflect a lack of inherent ability, intelligence, or drive on the part of people at the Frontier. Indeed, some of the most talented individuals I know are from my hometown. Capacity and merit are evenly distributed across the world. Unfortunately, opportunity is not.

Availability of trained and experienced talent is a near-universal pain point for Frontier Innovators. In a survey, more than half of Frontier Innovators reported that recruiting and retaining talent represent their most acute challenges—twice as many as those who selected availability of capital.¹² In a similar study of more than six hundred entrepreneurs in emerging ecosystems, more than 60 percent responded that their inability to access the right level of talent would critically impact their businesses. Significantly, 75 percent of those with rapidly scaling startups (which need new talent at a faster pace) categorized lack of available talent as the single most important barrier to their businesses. The research indicates that this is the only challenge that becomes more acute over time as team size grows.¹³

Startups live and die by the quality of their talent. In many markets there is a massive undersupply. Consider computer engineers: currently, the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg has a total of two hundred undergraduate students in computer engineering, far fewer than what Joshua estimates is required for the ecosystem.¹⁴ In developing markets, the need can be more dire.

Finding engineering talent is not the only human capital challenge that Frontier Innovators face. Shortages across key operational roles—like finance and sales—often result in companywide unmet needs.¹⁵ This is compounded by the fact that without a culture of startups, the best candidates look to work at more-stable employers (that also pay more).

In emerging markets, it can also be a reflection of a limited job-training ecosystem. In Kenya, while universities pump out an enviable 800,000 graduates each year, only about 70,000 readily find jobs in the formal economy; opportunities to receive the kind of on-the-job training and apprenticeship available in more-developed markets are slim.¹⁶ The remaining 730,000 often take years to find jobs, working in the informal economy in the meantime. The same dynamic applies in emerging innovation ecosystems around the world: there are simply far fewer experienced product managers, marketing executives, or supply chain or operations analysts.

One solution is having candidates relocate from somewhere else. This can also be a challenge. As Amanda Lannert, CEO of Chicago-based Jellyvision, reflects, “Candidates that consider moving for startup roles look around at the ecosystem. If there are few local alternatives if things don’t work out, that increases the candidate’s perception of risk.”¹⁷ Of course, Winnipeg-based startups, like those in Chicago, have an additional barrier in recruiting outsiders: winter. It is frequently colder in Winnipeg than at the North Pole or even on the surface of Mars.¹⁸

No wonder Joshua considers Winnipeg “one of the hardest places to recruit from and to recruit to.”¹⁹ Yet he overcame these challenges and occasionally turned them into advantages. SkipTheDishes now has food orders exceeding $1 billion per year and has become one of the largest employers in Winnipeg, with three thousand employees in five offices in the city (and this excludes the much larger delivery force). The majority of Joshua’s original employees grew alongside the company and stayed through to the company’s exit, a remarkable feat for startups. The company was recently purchased for $200 million by Just Eat.²⁰

Strategies to Build and Scale Top Teams

Frontier Innovators like Joshua use five key strategies to build and scale top teams. They test candidates for behavior and capabilities, develop a proprietary talent pipeline, leverage global distributed options, take a growth mindset to retention and training, and think critically about compensation and perks.

Moneyball: Testing Candidates at the Frontier

The 2002 Oakland Athletics (A’s) professional baseball team is famous for its innovative player sourcing strategy. With a limited salary budget of only $44 million (about 40 percent of the budget of the New York Yankees), the California club was at a considerable recruiting disadvantage. However, instead of relying on a network of scouts, as was customary at the time, the A’s relied on impartial statistics. On-base percentage and slugging percentage (a weighted batting average) were the metrics most correlated with players scoring runs. The A’s rooted their decision criteria in these two metrics, thereby discovering undervalued and occasionally ignored talent. Ultimately, the team made it to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003 and inspired an entirely new method of player recruitment which has become an industry standard.²¹

Philosophically, Frontier Innovators take a similar approach. They look beyond traditional recruiting and assessment approaches to find diamonds in the rough.

This is in part a reflection of practical reality. At the Frontier, traditional résumé filtering and interview-based recruiting techniques can be exercises in frustration and futility. Where startup ecosystems are nascent and there are fewer trained candidates, hiring someone with the perfect résumé is simply not a practical goal. In developing markets with high unemployment, job postings are overwhelmed with applications. In Tanzania, for instance, Zola’s job postings consistently receive hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, although few candidates have directly applicable experience. Where large informal markets exist, résumés are typically laden with professional experience that is difficult to compare or calibrate.

At the Frontier, innovators focus on character, behavior, and demonstrated skills rather than the perfect résumé. Joshua explains, “We focused on high-performance people, people that won competitions in athletics, maths, public speaking, chess, or things like that. We tried to uncover the hidden gems.”²²

At the extreme, some Frontier Innovators institutionalize large-scale, automated recruiting strategies based on demonstrated capabilities and skills.

Meet Mark Essien, founder of Hotels.ng, a prominent Nigerian startup that offers the country’s leading online booking platform. Mark’s biggest barrier was not sourcing hotels for the platform but finding teammates. Historically, Mark’s human capital team had the impossible task of sifting through unending piles of résumés. Candidates without shiny résumés never had a chance to prove their worth. Many of the best candidates in Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, had already been discovered and were working with leading startups or large companies. At the same time, the best candidates in the smaller towns around Nigeria did not have the right networks, connections, or pedigrees to be discovered.

So Mark launched the HNG Internship, an online internship that serves as a digital filtering mechanism that can reach far beyond Nigeria’s capital. The company screens candidates without meeting them, through a multiple-round, task-based, impartial recruiting process.

The process starts when Hotels.ng posts a job in the internship task manager. The recruiter assigns prospective recruits a series of computer science problems via Slack (a digital chat program). Candidates who pass one round of testing go on to the next phase. Those who fail are eliminated. Over time the problems get more difficult, and thus the list is winnowed. When 95 percent of candidates have been eliminated, the final few are interviewed and a subset are hired.

The program is evenings only and not meant to be all consuming for candidates, who likely have other full-time responsibilities to manage. Hotels.ng also wants to make sure no one drops out for financial reasons. They pay everyone in the pool a stipend as they progress.

Mark has forged partnerships to fund his program at greater scale, including with state governments in Nigeria as well as various corporations. He thinks that, over time, this structured candidate-testing platform could become an industry standard. The first internship class had seven hundred applicants. The last batch increased nearly sixfold, to four thousand. Hotels.ng hired the best twenty-five, predominantly from outside Lagos. Given the demand for workers at Hotels.ng, these numbers will likely only continue to increase.

For technical roles, like computer scientists or accountants, a skills-based testing approach like this one works well. However, assessing potential job performance is more challenging and nuanced for team-based roles that involve creativity, relationships, and strategy.

Here again Frontier Innovators have a solution. They are pioneering the implementation of behavior-based models to understand a candidate’s character, aptitude, competence, and projected performance.

Paul Breloff and Simon Desjardins, both formerly investors in Frontier enterprises, observed that, universally, hiring represented the most important bottleneck across their portfolio.

They founded Shortlist to solve this challenge. Shortlist is a recruiting platform focused on competency-based hiring. The company has created more than a thousand digital modules to evaluate how candidates perform in simulated real-life work environments. When a candidate applies for a job, they encounter a customized scenario based on the company, industry, and role they are applying for, and they perform tasks that shed light on their capabilities and motivation levels.

Shortlist is in high demand among startups at the Frontier. It now has more than six hundred clients in Africa and India. And that’s after a mere $3 million in funding.²³

Building the Candidate Pipeline

Hiring based on capabilities and behavior assumes local talent is readily available. Sometimes, either because they operate in nascent ecosystems or have already exhausted available sources of talent, Frontier Innovators go one step further and actively build and train their pipeline.

Executives at Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce enabler based in Ottawa, realized the company had maxed out its traditional recruiting channels. CTO Jean-Michel Lemieux wanted to increase the pipeline of candidates, so in 2016, Shopify launched the Dev Degree. In partnership with Carleton University in Ottawa, the company created a de novo work-integrated academic degree. Reflecting Benjamin Franklin’s words, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn,” the Dev Degree marries traditional education with on-the-job practical experience.²⁴ Over four years, students complete an honors degree in computer science and gain more than forty-five hundred hours in practical work experience—double a typical co-op or internship-based program—at one of Canada’s most successful technology companies. Each semester, students take three classes and work directly at Shopify for twenty-five hours a week. Students receive academic credit for the work experience, as long as they complete a practicum report reflecting on what they learned after every term. What’s more, Shopify covers the four-year tuition cost and pays the students a salary for the time they work.²⁵

Shopify’s new program serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, Shopify is able to create a proprietary talent pool pipeline—finding, testing, and attracting the best of the class organically. On the other, this program benefits all participating students and the startup ecosystem more broadly by offering accessible and affordable practical lessons on the front lines of a world-class technology company.

Although still in its infancy, the program seems to be working. The first cohort of the program (itself a small pilot of eight students) will graduate in 2020 (subsequent cohorts are twenty-five each and will soon be much larger). All graduating students receive an offer to work at Shopify full-time. Impressively, gender diversity in the program is much more balanced than in traditional engineering programs. In recent cohorts, 50 percent of candidates are women, compared with fewer than 20 percent in computer science degrees on average.²⁶

Shopify predicts that among candidates it recruits from the program, onboarding will be more rapid, since the students already know the role and the company.²⁷ As Jean-Michel explains it, “The technology industry is upending other industries, yet university programs have remained virtually unchanged. When we hire computer engineers, who have spent four years learning in school, we have to invest another full year training them to real-world applications. In this program, students have already been working in lockstep with us, and will hit the ground running.”²⁸

Other universities are already looking to implement similar programs. In late 2018, Shopify expanded the program to a second university: the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University.²⁹

For Shopify in Ottawa, the major talent bottleneck was a lack of programmers. Elsewhere, the bottleneck may be different, but a similar pipeline creation approach is possible.

For Bridge International Academies, a startup that operates a network of more than five hundred ultra-low-cost private schools in multiple emerging markets, serving more than one hundred thousand pupils, its bottleneck was a shortage of teachers. Its unique “school in a box” model offers centralized lessons, technologically enabled school operations, and back-office support. To increase its teacher pipeline, it created a teacher’s academy, the Bridge International Training Institute. The eight-week curriculum trains recruits on a combination of theoretical aspects of teaching, hands-on experience in classrooms, and instruction on how to work within the Bridge model. Bridge also implemented a similar model for other roles in the organization such as recruiting managers.³⁰

Similarly, for Zola, the availability of trained sales and service people in rural Africa served as an early human capital bottleneck for its rapidly growing operation. Zola created a similar academy, offering a boot camp in business, sales, and service best practices in Tanzania, where the company recruited the best graduates.

Building the pipeline is often yet another manifestation of having to build the full stack, as you explored in chapter 2.

Looking to the World for Talent

Frontier Innovators must leverage the best talent from wherever it arises. This often means looking beyond the current location for talent.

Immigration (both in-country and international) is a powerful tool. For SkipTheDishes’ Joshua Simair, sudden shifts in the political landscape transformed Winnipeg into a strategic recruitment location. After the US Trump administration nixed the Obama-era entrepreneur visa program (and adopted an aggressively anti-immigrant foreign policy), many countries around the world created new accelerated visa programs, sensing an opportunity to recruit talent that might otherwise have landed in the States. SkipTheDishes was able to leverage a Canadian immigration program designed to attract immigrants to smaller provinces: quotas are allocated by province, and Manitoba had many available slots. Joshua aggressively recruited prospective immigrants and brought them to Manitoba through this program.

SkipTheDishes’ approach is certainly not unique. Shopify sourced top engineering talent it discovered in competitions around the world. Idriss Al Rifai from Fetchr built an entire immigration team to increase the size of its pipeline for drivers, recruiting drivers from Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and Nepal and bringing them to Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

In parallel, and as discussed in chapter 6, Frontier Innovators can leverage a distributed strategy to build teams in multiple geographies. Companies like Basecamp, InVision, and Zapier have gone to the extreme and become fully remote.

Taking a global lens to talent, whether one relocates candidates or builds a distributed model, is an effective way to increase the available talent pool.

Don’t Churn and Burn: Retain and Grow

Silicon Valley accepts high employee turnover as a necessary by-product of its strategy of hiring only A-players. Perhaps because Frontier Innovators invest so much more in finding and training candidates, they take a longer-term view of the relationship. Brittany Forsyth, Shopify’s senior vice president of human resources, explains: “Unlike companies in San Francisco, where there is a plentiful supply of talent, and as a result people move around from company to company, for us, our strategy is to work with employees over the long term. We want them to know that they can do their life’s work here. We want them to know: if you invest in us, we can invest in you.”³¹

In many Frontier ecosystems, employees are more loyal than those in the Valley. Chris Gladwin is founder of Cleversafe, which was sold to IBM in 2015 for $1.3 billion.³² Chris reflected on the Chicago ecosystem, saying, “One of our key advantages was much higher employee retention. It is certainly different than in the Bay Area. We’ve experienced median retention of ten years.”³³

Some of this retention is structural. Because Frontier Innovators operate in nascent ecosystems, employees (like innovators themselves) have fewer options, so mutual dependence and mutual alignment for a longterm relationship is more likely.

Creators and the Multi-Mission Athletes you will meet in chapter 8 can harness their powerful visions to find and hire mission-aligned employees. These employees stay 50 percent longer than at other companies and are more likely to become high performers.³⁴ In interviews with leaders of hundreds of startups, the one unanimous sentiment was the importance of passion. Giving employees an opportunity to channel their passion drives retention. This trend will become increasingly important as millennials come to represent a larger part of the workforce. A recent study of three thousand professionals in the United States discovered that more than 85 percent of millennials would take a pay cut to work for a mission-aligned company (versus only 7 percent among baby boomers).³⁵

Frontier Innovators also take a proactive approach to retaining and promoting employees over the long term. David Levine is CEO of Mr Beams, a Cleveland, Ohio–based startup that was acquired by Ring, which later was sold to Amazon for $1 billion. David incorporated candidates’ personal development in the recruiting process for key hires.³⁶ He recalls that for an early product leader hire, Ryan Hruska, he developed a Power Point presentation, explaining the vision of the company, changes it would make over time, and ways his role would evolve. The pitch had Ryan start as a product engineer. Over time, he would lead and launch a few products and evolve into a director-level product manager. As David explains it, “Ryan achieved everything in that PowerPoint presentation, and much more. We mapped it out early.”³⁷ Ryan has been with the company (now Ring) for nearly five years and now is director of product. David sees him as one of the company’s future leaders.

To help their employees grow, Frontier Innovators look to institutionalize training grounds and connect their employees with mentors. Adalberto Flores, CEO of Kueski, a leading financial inclusion lender in Mexico, travels to San Francisco to meet investors and other companies on a regular basis. On every visit, he invites his high performers to join him. Through his network, Adalberto helps them meet peers at Silicon Valley startups.

Brittany Forsyth herself is a characteristic example. When she joined Shopify in 2010, she was the twenty-first employee; at the time the company was an early-stage startup in Ottawa that had yet to raise a Series A. She was hired as the office manager. She had a background in human capital, so she started helping out on the side. As soon as the company raised its Series A and started hiring fast, Brittany’s role shifted to human capital. To help Brittany grow, Shopify encouraged her to take courses, seek mentors, and travel to other ecosystems. Now, as the SVP of human capital, Brittany is responsible for Shopify’s entire four-thousand-person workforce. Shopify is now a $30 billion company that is traded on the Nasdaq.

Reward Employees with What Matters

To attract candidates, it can be tempting to look at Silicon Valley and try to replicate the superficial perks of its startup culture—free lunches, afternoon yoga classes, unlimited vacation policies—or its stock options’ potential financial incentives. But these often miss the point.

The best Frontier Innovators look to offer perks and financial compensation that reflect their unique strategy, organization, and location. As you saw in chapter 6, Branch supports interoffice mobility, sponsoring travel for its employees to work from any of its many global offices. The travel perks support a global culture. Employees self-select to work at companies with these kinds of benefits.

At the Frontier, it can be challenging to replicate stock options, Silicon Valley’s de facto financial retention tool. Employees are less likely to understand them or seek them out. Joshua witnessed this firsthand. He wanted to give SkipTheDishes equity to a number of his employees before the acquisition so that they could benefit from the windfall. He offered it to more than seventy of his ninety-three employees, many of whom had no equity before the deal. “It was rushed when we were giving it out,” he said. “Many of our employees were scared they were getting screwed. They had seen The Social Network and saw how Zuckerberg had treated his co-founder. So many people turned [the stock options] down. They didn’t understand the model.”³⁸ To complicate things, in certain countries stock options aren’t legally allowed, either for tax reasons or structurally.

A preference for cash over stock options is perhaps not an irrational position for employees at the Frontier; after all, exits are less proven and take longer. For the moment, stock option usage is low in Frontier ecosystems. This dynamic manifests itself even in more-developed European ecosystems. A study that surveyed more than seventy companies across European startup ecosystems and analyzed more than four thousand option grants determined that expectations for stock options were much lower across Europe than in the United States, with tremendous variety by country. On average, European employees owned half the options of their Silicon Valley counterparts.³⁹ The statistics are even more striking in emerging ecosystems.

Of course, offering fewer stock options does not obviate the need and desire of Frontier Innovators to offer their employees a stake in the business (or of their employees to have such a stake). In interviews, innovators consistently profess a desire to offer ownership—often universally—to their employees.

To do so, many Frontier Innovators are experimenting with new models of employee ownership that are better aligned with their growth profile. Lyndsay Handler, CEO of Fenix International, an energy startup based in Uganda, built phantom shares (code-named “Fenix Flames”). Part of her motivation was channeling the level of commitment and dedication many of her employees were demonstrating. As she explains it, “Many of our staff in Africa were not rich by any standards, yet were asking to invest their savings into the company.”⁴⁰ Fenix Flames resemble direct stock ownership more than options, which means they are easier to understand and, importantly, benefit employees even if the company doesn’t have exponential growth. Lyndsay granted Fenix Flames to every employee, all the way to the installers in remote Ugandan villages. This was a transformative financial investment for many of her staff during the company’s subsequent sale to ENGIE, the French energy giant.⁴¹

It is far too early to tell what emerging best practices of employee ownership will ultimately look like, and various models are bound to continue evolving. Frontier Innovators continue to experiment with perks and compensation that align with their startup’s strategy and look to retain employees over the longer term.

A-Teams, Not Just A-Players

For growing startups, strong teams are both their most important asset and their biggest challenge. Silicon Valley has created a rich science of recruiting and retaining top players. It focuses on identifying and recruiting top talent (A-players) and replacing them as they churn rapidly. But few human capital markets have either Silicon Valley’s breadth of talent or depth in any field.

What works there rarely translates elsewhere. Places like Singapore or Toronto have the strength of Silicon Valley’s talent but, given their countries’ smaller sizes, lack its depth. Emerging ecosystems in Latin America or Africa have a more restricted pool of experienced talent.

It is hard to overstate how much of a barrier finding, training, growing, and retaining top talent at scale can be for startups anywhere, but particularly at the Frontier.

Slowly, though, progress is being made.

What leading Frontier Innovators have in common is a philosophically distinct approach to managing their human capital. Frontier Innovators look to build A-teams, recruiting based on capabilities and behavior rather than résumé experiences. These entrepreneurs actively build out a talent pipeline when one does not exist. They look to the world for resources, through either promoting immigration or building distributed models. And, of course, they look to retain and grow their teams over the long term, providing them with a set of aligned incentives and compensation.

In Silicon Valley, there is increased talk about expanding to more-affordable places, increasing diversity by looking beyond traditional sourcing methods, managing decentralized teams across geographies, and increasing retention over a longer term.

The newest and best approaches in this field will not be invented in Silicon Valley. They are already under way at the Frontier.