The Ratio

You raised some real money. Now you can finally hire people who've actually done this before.

The engineer who built infrastructure at scale. The sales leader with zero to $50M on their resume. The award-winning designer. The product person who shipped hits at two unicorns. The marketing exec with a proven playbook.

These people will boost efficiency. Solve the hard problems. Ship faster.

You hire five of them. If each one is truly 10x better than average, simple math says you should get 50x output. That's the theory anyway. Even if you're conservative and they're only 3x better, you should get 15x.

Six months later you're getting maybe 12x. On a good week, 30x.

Where did the other 20x go?

Nobody tells you this when you're hiring. But there's a tax. An invisible one. And it's expensive.

Tax One: The Speed Paradox

Someone on your team ships in a weekend what takes everyone else a month. That person is fast. Really fast. You hired them because of that speed.

Then you realize nobody else can touch what they built.

The project works perfectly. Solves the problem. Clean implementation. But it's a black box. The rest of the team can't modify it. Can't debug it. Can't extend it. Only one person knows how it works.

You just turned speed into a bottleneck.

The handoff attempt. Three-hour meeting to explain a two-hour build. The person receiving it still doesn't get it. They'll ping on Slack. Ask follow-up questions. Schedule another meeting. The speed advantage evaporated in the knowledge transfer.

Fast people skip steps. They don't document. They don't explain their reasoning. They assume context that others don't have. They're three steps ahead while everyone else is still processing step one.

This works when they're working alone. It breaks when they're working with others.

Now multiply this by five. Five people building things only they understand. Five sets of dependencies only they can resolve. Five bottlenecks disguised as productivity.

Worse, you keep picking them for every important project. They're the only ones who can ship fast, so they're the only ones you trust with deadlines. The rest of the team handles maintenance and bug fixes while the fast people take on everything critical.

Now the fast people are overloaded. They're context-switching between projects. They're the bottleneck on five different workstreams. And nobody else is learning the systems because they never get to touch the important work.

The team splits. Fast people on one side doing everything that matters. Everyone else on the other side waiting for the fast people to have time. Nobody's actually fast anymore.

You hire more people to help. They ramp slowly because the systems are sophisticated and the documentation is sparse. The fast people are too busy to explain things properly. The knowledge stays siloed.

Individual speed creates system slowness. That's the paradox.

Tax Two: The Impact Conflict

You probably have a performance review process. People asked for a process and you delivered. And that process almost certainly weights impact heavily. Show the hard problem you solved. Demonstrate the revenue you drove. Prove the thing you built that moved the needle.

This makes sense for evaluating individuals. It creates a problem when you put five high performers in a room.

Everyone needs impact for their next promotion. Needs to point to the thing they drove. They're competing for the same finite set of important problems. Some probably left their last company because all the high-impact work went to someone else. Or they spent six months debating whether a button should be on the left or right.

So the meeting isn't just about what's the right decision. It's about whose solution wins. Whose judgment was correct. Who gets one more item for their brag document. Doesn't happen in every meeting, but it happens.

Nobody says this out loud. But everyone feels it. One person's pushing for technical soundness. Another for user impact. Another for speed to market. All valid. All competing.

They're not being difficult. They're optimizing for what gets rewarded.

This is slow. Much slower than a team where one person decides and everyone else executes.

High performers need visible wins. When you have five of them, they're competing for those wins whether they realize it or not.

That competition shows up everywhere. Including how they approach problems.

Tax Three: Framework Collision

High performers have frameworks. That's how they got good. They've seen the pattern before. They know what worked at the last company. They have a mental model for how these problems get solved.

One framework per team works fine. Five frameworks per team creates a different problem.

The database debate takes three days. One person's framework says build for scale from day one. They've lived through the painful migration. Another person's framework says ship fast and migrate later. They've seen companies over-engineer for growth that never came. Both frameworks are based on real scars. Both people are trying to help you avoid mistakes they've already made.

The ICP debate takes a week. Go deep in one vertical versus serve multiple industries versus follow the revenue. One person's framework says vertical specialization builds expertise and referrals. Another says diversification reduces risk. A third says customer-fit matters more than industry. All three have worked. At different companies. In different contexts. For different markets. Which one applies here? The meeting becomes a comparison of past experiences instead of an evaluation of current reality.

They're not debating the decision. They're debating which past is most relevant to this future.

The infrastructure engineer has patterns from scale. The product person has frameworks from consumer apps. The sales leader has playbooks from enterprise deals. Each toolkit is good. Each one has been proven right. None of them are obviously wrong.

That's the problem. You don't have one way forward. You have five ways forward. And you spend your time deciding which framework to follow instead of just following one.

Five frameworks means you need someone to pick one. Except nobody can. Or rather, nobody can without telling four other high performers their judgment doesn't count. That's the real problem.

Tax Four: The Decider Problem

There's always someone in the room who makes the call. On a normal team, it's obvious who that person is. The senior engineer decides the architecture. The sales director decides the pricing. The person with the most context makes the decision and everyone else executes.

High performers are used to being that person.

They didn't become high performers by deferring. They got here by having good judgment. By being right when it mattered. By seeing the path forward and taking it. That's the skill that got developed. That's what got rewarded.

Now you have five of them in a room. Five people who are used to making the call. Five people whose judgment has been validated by results. Five people who aren't wired to defer.

Nobody wants to override the others. That means telling four people their judgment doesn't matter this time. Nobody wants to defer. That means admitting someone else's judgment is better than yours.

So you seek consensus. Can't pick one person's approach without dismissing the others. Can't ask people to defer when they're all equally senior. The only option is to find something everyone can live with.

Not because you value collaboration. Because it's the only way forward without someone losing.

Here's what this looks like. Product strategy meeting. Five people. Four different approaches on the table. Each one has merit. Each person can articulate why their approach is right and the others are risky.

One person could just decide. But which one? They're all senior. They all have track records. There's no obvious decider.

So you gather more data. Schedule a follow-up. Try to find an approach that works for everyone. Three meetings later you have a decision that's acceptable to all five people and optimal for none of them.

A team with one expert and four people who trust that expert decides in an hour. A team with five experts decides in a week. Same decision. Different cost.

This isn't ego. It's structural. You hired people whose judgment has been proven right. Then you asked them to sit in rooms with other people whose judgment has also been proven right. And you expected them to defer to each other.

They can't. That's not the skill that made them successful.

And while all this is happening, something else breaks down.

Tax Five: The Boring Work Gap

High performers got high-performing by solving hard problems. That's the skill that got developed. That's what got rewarded. That's what led to promotion.

Take a complex problem, go deep, figure it out. Build the thing nobody else could build. Close the deal nobody else could close. Design the experience nobody else thought of. Ship the feature that moved the metric.

Now you have five people who all want to solve the hard problem.

Except you don't have five hard problems. You have maybe two. And a bunch of boring work that nobody wants to do.

Who's updating the roadmap? Who's making sure the three parallel workstreams don't conflict? Who's writing the runbook? Who's doing the stakeholder communication? Who's managing the cross-functional dependencies?

Not the high performers. They're competing for the two interesting problems.

The boring work either doesn't happen or it becomes a resentment tax. Someone does it but they're frustrated because it's not what they were hired for. It's not what they're good at. It's not what gets them promoted. They're a staff engineer writing documentation. They're a principal designer doing redlines. They're overqualified and underutilized.

Or it doesn't happen and things slowly break. Miscommunication. Misalignment. Duplicated work. Conflicting decisions made in parallel.

The high performers are fighting over the two interesting problems. The boring work that makes those solutions actually work together is missing. And nobody wants to do it because it won't get them to the next level.

You end up hiring program managers and chiefs of staff just to do the coordination that nobody else will touch. That's expensive overhead for a structural problem.

Five taxes. Five ways the math breaks down. The overhead is invisible when you're hiring. You're thinking about what each person can do. Not what happens when they all try to do it together.

The Tipping Point

You hired five high performers for a team of five. The overhead hurts, but you're still getting 30x output. Better than average.

Now change the ratio.

Three staff engineers on a team of four. Five principal engineers on a team of six. A leadership team that's all VPs with no directors or managers.

Research on team performance found the optimal mix is around 25% high performers and 75% average performers. Beyond that ratio, too many stars on one team turns their positive impact negative.

You're not paying 20x overhead anymore. You're paying 60x. Maybe 80x. The taxes compound because there's nobody left to absorb them. Nobody to defer. Nobody to do the boring work. Nobody to build the simple version. Nobody to just make the call.

When high performers become the majority, the overhead becomes the work.

This is when companies hire "glue people" just to make the team functional. Program managers. Chiefs of staff. Engineering managers who don't code. People whose entire job is coordination because the high performers won't do it.

That's not scale. That's a broken ratio.

What This Means

Hire great people. They're valuable. One high performer on a team of average people is a force multiplier. Two working together is still good.

Three is where it gets complicated. Five is where the overhead eats your returns.

This isn't about ego or personality conflicts. It's structural. Put multiple people who are used to being right in the same system and they create friction. High performance characteristics that work individually don't combine the way you think.

The taxes are real. The speed paradox. Impact conflict. Framework collision. The decider problem. The boring work gap. They exist whether you believe the math or not.

You can pay these taxes. Sometimes it's worth it. The 30x you get from five high performers beats the 5x you'd get from five average people. But you're paying 20x in overhead for that difference.

That's the deal.

Nobody tells you this when you're hiring. You're thinking about talent density and capability and what these people can do. Not thinking about the ratio. Not about what happens when they're all in the same room trying to work together.

The research says 25% high performers, 75% average. That ratio exists for a reason.

Now you know.