This is a short YouTube monologue (speaker: Kasim) arguing that entrepreneurs commonly treat hiring like buying commodities—seeking the cheapest candidate within a pay range. Kasim recommends paying at least ~10% above the market/high-water mark to attract top talent, claiming such hires can deliver multiplicative returns far exceeding the extra salary (e.g., 5x, 100x, 1000x).
We're taught to hire people like commodities. Well, how do you buy a commodity? You pay the least and you get the most. So if you're buying petrol or corn or insert commodity here, I want to pay the least amount of money and get the most amount of commodities. And that's how entrepreneurs are taught to hire people. So if the window is 80 to 100 shekels or 80 to 100 rubies, then an entrepreneur is taught to pay 79.9 rubies and get the best, most adept person they can for 79.9. And what they don't realize is you are, you are automatically repelling top talent because top talent wants to win. And I tell people you have to pay 10% more than the high water mark. And then they go, oh, God, Kasim, you don't understand my margins and my, my business model and my. And I'm like, no, you don't understand math. Yeah, because when you get this top performer, you don't get 10% more output or 50% or 100%. You get five times, 100 times, a thousand times.
