The Players Nobody Saw

This is the audio narration of a chapter from my book, We Are Not a Family. The book is inspired by the 2009 Netflix Culture Deck. A slide in the document says, we're a team, not a family. We're like a pro sports team, not a kids recreational team.

Inspired by this, I set out to learn from professional sports and see what I can apply to business. I am using an AI voice clone for this narration. Chapter 2.1 The players nobody saw It's April 16, 2000 Tom Brady is at home watching the draft on TV It's the second day, the late rounds Six quarterbacks have already come off the board Pennington, Carmazzi, Redman, Martin, Bulger, Wynn as he waits He is finally picked 199th overall in the sixth round by the New England Patriots, the seventh quarterback taken in his draft class.

Weeks earlier, he had attended the NFL Scouting Combine, a four-day event considered the league's annual talent fair where scouts evaluate the best college players for NFL teams. They're weighed, measured, and timed in front of everyone. The scouts from the various teams do a diligent job, and what they saw in this young quarterback wasn't very inspiring. An unathletic showing, an unflattering physique photo, and a relatively slow 40-yard dash.

They measured what was measurable. That year, there were 31 teams and 254 picks. Every one of those teams looked at the same young man and saw a sixth-round flyer. What would it have taken to see something else?

In the 1988 Major League Baseball draft, another player is evaluated by many, Mike Piazza. They look at him closely, and no one picks him. Not in the first round, not the 10th, not the 40th. He goes 1,391st overall in the 62nd round, and even then, only as a favor.

The Dodgers manager, Tommy Lasorda, had grown up with Mike's father. The system wasn't ignoring him. It was looking for the wrong things. He would go on to become a Hall of Famer, 427 home runs a record 396 of them as a catcher the lowest drafted player ever to reach the Hall of Fame Ningo Locante who stands at 5 feet 7 inches was rejected by a string of French clubs as a teenager for being too small While playing in the lower leagues, unsure whether football would work out, he studied for an accounting diploma.

A natural backup plan for a football player. But then the climb began. he was signed by boulogne then caen then leicester where he won the two thousand fifteen to sixteen premier league title and then the world cup with france in two thousand eighteen he was simply too small to be considered Between 2001 and 2003, a young man named Mahendra Singh Dhoni was a traveling ticket examiner, TTE, for the Indian Railways. While others were looked at and misjudged, Dhoni, who grew up in Ranchi, a small city in eastern India, simply wasn't seen by the selectors sitting in the country's cricketing capitals.

He would go on to Captain India and become the only man to win all three major ICC limited overs titles. These misses are not just about sport. Sport is where they become a little easier to spot and measure. The same talent blindness can run through every field.

One example dates to 1912, when a young man sits at a clerk's desk in a port office in southern India, earning 20 pounds a year, while India is still under British rule. He's never had a university education. He fills page after page with mathematical theorems, mostly without proofs, in the unschooled, unsystematic style of a self-taught man. In November 1912, through a professor in Madras, India, his work reached MJM Hill, a professor of mathematics at University College London.

Hill reviews it, recognizes talent, but more than that, finds it riddled with holes and gaps and recommends that the young man read a textbook. The work has been looked at and misjudged, undervalued by the field's own criteria. Ramanujan then writes directly to two eminent Cambridge mathematicians, E. W.

Hobson and H. F. Baker. Neither replies.

Here, the work is not misjudged but simply missed It author too far from the centers where mathematical talent is expected to appear and so never really examined at all On January 16 1913 Ramanujan writes to G H Hardy at Trinity College Cambridge and sends him a few pages with dozens of theorems and no proofs. His first thought is that it may be a fraud or the work of a crank, but then he and J. E. Littlewood sit down, look through the work, and realize that no one would have had the imagination to invent these theorems.

Finally, Ramanujan is seen. Neither the pro sports scouts and selectors nor the Cambridge dons were lazy or lacking in diligence. They often relied on pattern matching, reading individuals against a template built on past successes. We look for individuals and resumes that look just right, people we can relate to, who come from the right schools and who speak and look the part, a phenomenon often referred to as homophily.

This is the pull toward people in our own image. It is why the people inside elite institutions can look so alike, generation after generation. Each intake selects the next in its own likeness. The sociologist Lauren Rivera spent months observing the hiring at elite investment banks law firms, and consultancies interviewing the people who made the decisions.

Her finding was that the decisive question was rarely, who could do the work best? It was, who feels familiar? Same sport, same schools, the same way of carrying themselves, a background the interviewer could relate to. Rivera had set out to study gender.

What she found instead was a whole bundle of unspoken signals that decided who belonged. They called it FIT. The same instinct that decides who gets hired also decides who gets backed by banks and venture capitalists. They even have a name for it, pattern matching.

They bet on founders and ideas that resemble past successes and on founders who have succeeded. Generally, this works. but occasionally the instinct misses something unusual. In 2008, the founders of Airbnb were introduced to seven prominent Silicon Valley venture investors.

They were trying to raise $150,000 at a million valuation Five of the firms sent rejections and two didn respond They were just doing their job pattern matching against what a fundable company looked like in 2008 The following year in 2009 Sequoia led a $600,000 seed round for the company. As Chesky later put it, the investors that rejected us were smart people, and I am sure we didn't look very impressive at the time. 20 years earlier, in 1985, after a trip to Italy, Howard Schultz wanted to open an Italian style coffee bar called Il Giornale.

He needed $400,000 to start and far more to grow. He approached 242 investors. 217 of them said no, believing an Italian style coffee bar would never work in America. Eventually, Schultz bought Starbucks, then a small company of six stores for $3.

8 million, merged it into Il Giornale, and kept the Starbucks name and brand. Why do scouts and systems searching hard for talent and ideas to back still miss some of the very best? Because the selection systems and methods used score based on a template that has led to success in the past. The NFL Combine uses physical measurements.

Venture capital firms use pattern matching against past successes. The hiring panel tries to gauge fit. Each has assembled a set of criteria based on past winners. And this is the trap.

A proxy built from the past is easy to use, but by its nature, it finds more of the past. It rewards candidates and ideas that resemble the last success, predicting tomorrow from what already worked yesterday. The talent that changes a sport or an industry, by definition, can only be judged by looking forward. Brady did not test like a franchise quarterback.

Ramanujan did not write like a trained mathematician, but like a magician. Howard Schultz wanted to build coffee shops with baristas, unlike anything that existed in America. What set the Patriots apart, or Hardy, or the few investors who said yes, was the willingness to set the template aside and look at the thing itself. They were able to weigh the work, not the wrapper.

The future cannot be built on the models of the past.