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Every founder audits a bad quarter. Nobody audits a good one. When the numbers are up, we assume it's us, and that assumption is one of the most expensive things most of us are carrying around.
Brian Samson found out the hard way. He took about two thousand dollars and built a staffing business past ten million dollars in revenue, running sixty recruiters and placing Latin American talent inside fast-growing U.S. tech companies.
He figured he was exceptional at sales. He wasn't. VC money was pouring into tech hiring, and he happened to be standing right in front of it. When that money stopped moving, the business went with it.
Months before the crash, he'd done the thing that feels safest and is usually the most dangerous: hiring ten expensive people because things were going well. The only reason he came out the other side is that he'd quietly set aside part of the surplus to start something new. That something is Plug Technologies, now around one hundred people across Latin America.
What's worth sitting with is what he did after. He didn't rebuild the same company with better discipline. He changed who he hires and why, and his filter now has almost nothing to do with cost. It's whether someone can move when nobody hands them instructions, which is the same thing quietly deciding which roles survive AI and which ones don't.
Most of us are still screening for the wrong thing while telling ourselves we're being careful with money. Brian's conversation with Jennifer is a good place to check that.
🎧 Listen now to hear how Brian is turning chaos into clarity about who's actually worth hiring.
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