Shaan and Sam discuss the “bullshit jobs” thesis — the idea that most white-collar jobs are unnecessary — sparked by a book Shaan mentions. Shaan shares a story from the Twitch acquisition process where he asked every interviewer how many people Twitch actually needs, and unpacks the CEO’s counterintuitive defense of redundancy and slow innovation. Sam connects this to Dunbar’s number and the difference between sub-50-person startups, where scrappy “hood rat” energy is a feature, versus large enterprises where that same behavior gets you sent to legal.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
The “Bullshit Jobs” Thesis [00:00:00]
Shaan: So there’s this book I’ve been meaning to read — it’s on my to-read list. It’s called Bullshit Jobs. The premise is from, I think, a professor — some guy from the London School of Economics or something like that. His whole idea, and I didn’t research this much, is that most jobs out there in the world — at least in the white-collar world — are just kind of unnecessary.
To summarize it: take a company like HubSpot, Amazon, Twitter. What would happen if you laid off two-thirds of the people? Would anything change, other than the company would just make more profit? And this guy says in most cases, yeah — it would actually run just fine. Most of the jobs you have are just worthless.
Sam: I kind of agree with him. I agree. We don’t have hard knowledge of it other than personal experience, but it does sound right.
Shaan: It’s hard because there are no counterfactuals. You can’t run the test. You can’t split test both versions and see which one ends up better.
The Twitch Interview Question [00:01:30]
Shaan: I’ve had this inkling for a while. When we were getting acquired by Twitch, as part of it they said, “Your whole team is going to come in for a day of interviews, and that’s going to decide whether we take your whole team or not.” I had to do my interview too.
So I’m going in there, and you know the classic job interview structure — they ask you a bunch of questions for 95% of it, and then in the last five percent it’s, “Do you have any questions for us?” You’re supposed to say something that’s also just you showing off a strength in a different way.
I had one genuine question, and I asked it to every single person. People were kind of taken aback. Some thought I was a jerk. Some reacted well — “Oh, that’s refreshing, I hadn’t really thought about it.” But I could tell others were slightly offended.
My question was: “How many people work at Twitch?” They’d say, “I think we’re at 1,800 or 2,000 people now.” And then I’d say, “How many people do you think Twitch needs to hit its goals? How many people do you think should work here?”
Sam: That’s a great question. I would not be offended.
Shaan: He was not offended either, and I asked the CEO this too. I give him credit — he’s someone who prioritizes getting it right over being right. But he’s also a fierce debater, so he’s not just going to lay down. I would say nine out of ten CEOs would get quite offended by this question because it basically implies you’ve mismanaged the company by bloating it.
He was like, “That’s a good question.” He thought it was around 2,200. So he said, “Yeah, I think we’re a little short of what we need to hit our goals.” His take was basically: “I’m not saying we have all the right people or the most talented people, or that there aren’t people here who are underutilized. My point is I think we can be this ambitious, and to do that we’d need 2,200 awesome people working in unison.”
Shaan’s Follow-Up Questions He Didn’t Ask [00:04:15]
Shaan: I still think he was wrong. I would have followed up with a few questions. First: do you think you need to hire 2,200 people because you know only 10% of them are going to be actually value-add, and you have to hire the rest just to find that 10%?
Second: is it possible you think you need 2,200 because you really only need 20% effort from all those people, and that’s what your expectation is?
And third: how much does redundancy come into play? Are you paying people to just sit on the bench so that when the person next to them quits, they’re ready to roll?
I didn’t follow up that hard about it, but I think those are all valid points.
Sam: Right.
Shaan: One thing I kind of learned from him was: let’s take that redundancy example. It sounds bad — “you’re paying a bunch of people to do nothing, just sit around.” But it’s insurance. That was exactly his take. I was complaining about how slow we were going, and he said, “Going slow is sometimes a feature, not a bug.”
And on innovation — “Oh man, we’re not really innovating.” He didn’t say this outright, but I gathered it from our conversations: there are some things we’re going to innovate on, but actually the optimal strategy is to let a bunch of startups go out and try to innovate. If anything works, either buy them or clone them. That’s actually the best way to innovate — it’s free. You get way more experiments done by super-hungry, motivated startup founders and their teams who are focused on just that one thing. They’ll try radical experiments we would never otherwise do. We don’t have to fund it, we can sit back and watch, and when we’re ready we can acquire them, partner with them, or if they don’t want either of those, just build our own and use our distribution and brand.
Sam: I agree with him — I think that actually is the optimal strategy.
Shaan: By the way, I should say: I’m not putting words in his mouth. This is what I gathered from a bunch of different conversations. I’m sure he’d disagree with 40 or 50% of what I just said.
Sam: That’s your take of his takes.
The 50-Person Threshold [00:07:45]
Shaan: My issue is this: when you’re a small company — under 50 people — you’re all in it. A lot of times you’re in it for a mission, you’re in it to achieve something. But I think you can also get away with just being in it because people like being in the thick of it with their friends. They like the action.
When you get a little bigger, it’s less mission-oriented. It’s just a job. But you still have to put on this face to inspire people, and it kind of sucks. Because the truth is: a lot of you are only working at 40%, and I’ve baked that in. A lot of you aren’t working at all — you’re really just here in case the person next to you quits so you can train the next person. A lot of you want to innovate and try new things, but that’s not really what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep doing the same thing just a little bit better, and then maybe every once in a while I’ll have a team that makes something totally new.
I know all this, but figuring out how to navigate that — how to say what I just said in a really inspiring way — is tough. And unfortunately, you might just have to lie.
Sam: Saying it is actually the best way. You’ve got to just act and pretend and be a politician a little bit.
Shaan: I find that to be incredibly challenging but incredibly necessary.
Sam: You’re spot on. You’re spot on. Do you think you could do it?
Dunbar’s Number and “Dumpar’s Number” [00:10:00]
Shaan: Have you ever heard of Dunbar’s number?
Sam: Yeah. What does it mean again?
Shaan: Dunbar’s number is 150 — that’s the number. It represents how many people one person can actually know: know their name, know their face, be familiar with them. Someone might say “I’ve got 6,000 friends” — well, you don’t really know 6,000 people. In a tribe, you could know up to 150 people. Past 150, you don’t know everybody anymore.
Then tools like social media came along, which are like extensions for the human body — you might be able to keep up with more than 150 people now because Facebook makes it easy with the news feed, photos, names always visible.
I think what you’re saying maps to your version of Dunbar’s number — 50. I’ll call it Dumpar’s number.
Sam: Below 50.
Shaan: Below 50, the people there are down for the cause. Obviously everyone cares about themselves, but one of the top factors — maybe number one or two — can be the cause. Or even just like… you know that kid who said he wants to do hood rat stuff with his friends? That could be the cause. “I just want to—”
There was a viral video years ago. They interviewed this nine-year-old who stole his grandmother’s car and crashed it. The guy asked, “Why did you steal her car? That was really bad of you.” And the kid said, “I try to be good, but sometimes I just like doing hood rat stuff with my friends — like smoking cigarettes and driving cars.”
Sam: Play the video! You’ve got to play that.
[Video clip plays: narrator describes how the kid ran over two mailboxes, hit two parked cars in a Costco parking lot, and struck two moving cars near Walmart. Kid says: “I want to do it because it’s fun. Fun to do bad things.” Interviewer: “But did you know you could perhaps kill somebody?” Kid: “Yes, but I wanted to do hood rat stuff with my friends.”]
Sam: That’s how I feel about startups.
Shaan: The YouTube feature for this podcast just took us to a whole new level. The first one is great. Second — we need to pull this clip. Sometimes I just want to do hood rat stuff with my friends. Ben, that needs to be a sound clip you can play whenever Sam is talking about something dumb we’re doing.
Hood Rat Stuff at Enterprise Scale [00:13:30]
Shaan: That’s the best part about startups. I don’t care if it’s ad tech, I don’t care if I’m selling clothing. When you’re pulling stuff off and you’re kind of fibbing to people — “yeah, we really care about our customers, our team is great” — and it’s like, it’s just three of you. You’re trying to pretend you’re a big deal. That’s hood rat stuff, and I love doing that with my friends.
Sam: Have you struggled to do that now that you’re at a big enterprise SaaS company worth billions of dollars, where that’s frowned upon?
Shaan: I just yanked it. I can’t. And they’re like, “You just yanked it, Sam — we have a process for that.”
Sam: I can think of two or three examples where I was bragging about something scrappy I did, and at Twitch they’d be like… For example, there was a competitor, and I went and talked to the founder. I basically found out a bunch of their numbers — “they’re growing this fast, doing this” — and they said, “How do you know that?” I said, “I told them I was interested in—” And they were like, “We don’t do that. That’s not how we operate.”
The response I thought I was creating was like, “Nice hustle.” But instead it was: “We’re going to need to talk to legal, and corp dev is going to have to be involved — we have a person whose job is to have those conversations. We typically sign a letter of engagement before any of that.”
Shaan: Right, it was like not the exact example but — things that when I was running a startup I would be so proud of my hack. Or like, I remember once I was negotiating a partnership deal and I was really negotiating for every inch. As a startup, I used to love winning a deal, getting a good outcome for ourselves. And they just said, “You know what, we’d rather just use our standard deal — it’s more favorable for you so you’ll be happy, and we don’t have to let you negotiate deal-by-deal. In general, we don’t really want you negotiating directly with the person — we have partnerships people who handle that.”
You’re like, “Yeah, but they weren’t negotiating!” You’re like the Big Lebowski guys: “Dude, you need a toe? I’ll get you a toe. I’ll get you a toe by 3 o’clock this afternoon.”