When Ninja left Twitch for a $20 million Microsoft deal, the speaker stopped everything to write a data-driven memo on the crisis and sent it to the CEO. The CEO added them to three executive chats handling the issue, showing how focusing on the most critical problem can get you into high-level strategy.
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 go over there. 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. But 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. And he put me in 3 group chats right away, which were like the exec teams that were working on that. And he's like, hey, Sean's in on this. And they're like, why? He's supposed to be doing this other thing. It's like, he has good Thoughts on this. 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.
