Sam Parr's company was acquired by Twitch right before Ninja left for Microsoft's $20 million deal. Parr stopped his current work, wrote a data-driven memo on the crisis, and sent it to the CEO, who immediately put him in three executive chats. He argues that identifying and attacking your organization's biggest problem, whatever it is, is how you create real impact.
When we got acquired by Twitch, the top streamer on Twitch was this guy named Ninja. He got sponsored by Red Bull. He was on TV all the time. And then Microsoft came and paid Ninja like $20 million to leave Twitch. And we lost our biggest streamer overnight. And I said, well, that's probably the A+ problem right now. So what did I do? I dropped everything I was doing and I started working on that. I wrote a memo. I said, hey, it looks like he left. Here's some data analysis on how big of a problem that is. Here's my strategy recommendation on what we should do. And I just sent it to the CEO. He put me in 3 group chats right away, which were like the team, the exec teams that were working on that. He's like, hey, Sean's in on this. And they're like, why? He's supposed to be doing this other thing. And it's like, he has good thoughts on that. And so there is a way to work on the A+ problem, even if you're in a big company, or if you're an entrepreneur, by definition, you should always be working on the A+ problem. It's forced.
