The Game Has Changed: Go Hire 100 Harvard MBAs
Breaking the resource constraint mindset to accelerate growth for businesses and startups of any size.
I’ve spent my entire professional life in Corporate America. Specifically as an HR leader. I have been in multiple companies across diverse industries and geographies, but the tension was always the same: how can you do more with the limited resources you have?
And when times were really tough, it was simply “you have to do more with less.”
When things were going well, it was “how can we get a bigger return on this investment”. All decisions were made with productivity and ROI in mind. Because it has to be. Resources are finite. Misallocate and waste those resources, and you’re out of business. It is the biggest driver for decision making in companies today.
When I talk about resources, I am really talking about two things: Time and Money. That’s it. Everything comes back to that. And those with more resources, more time and money, have better odds at success. They can take more risks and make more mistakes. If you have a surplus of resources, you can roll the dice. This is the huge advantage well funded startups and highly profitable companies have over bootstrapping entrepreneurs and the mom and pop shops of the world. They can take more chances, or move faster, or bend the market to their advantage. Because they have the resource advantage. They have extra time and money.
An idea in and of itself is not what guarantees success. You can have a better idea than the competition. But there’s one of you. Time is limited. And if you don’t know something, you have a choice: Learn it, or hire someone that knows it. But then that eats away at resources. If you learn it, that’s time allocated to that task instead of something else. If you hire someone, you save on the learning curve time, but you now have spent precious financial resources.
As the company grows, you are faced with more of these decisions. Do it yourself, and that becomes a time allocation problem. Hire other people, and that’s cash. Want to scale? You need materials (money) and what it takes to build it (time). This is where execution, and frankly luck, become critical. Efficient organizations with sound decision making and excellent resource allocation decisions give themselves a chance. But they haven’t changed their resource constraints. They’re just better than the other guy at making the most of it and getting that return.
But for me, AI has fundamentally changed the concept of resource constraints, particularly for small businesses and startups. The constraints aren’t gone…but they are drastically lower if you use the tools to your advantage. And that’s why I opened this with a single statement: Go hire 100 Harvard MBAs.
Let’s look at this from a startup founder’s perspective. You have an idea to create a business. And there are 100 things to do. You’re one person, so you focus on what you know, and what’s most important. If you know it, it’s fast and easy to do. If it’s important, you take the time to learn it. But eventually, you’ll need help and you’ll need to scale.
The next step is deciding where to invest your time and money first. Typically, it comes in the form of people. I’m a lifelong HR professional, so I know all too well how much of a hurdle it is for understaffed teams, whether as a startup or at a Fortune 100 company. Based on 20 years of experience, managers always want more people on the team. And they almost always get denied, or at least have to compromise.
When you decide to make your first hire, it has to be great. The person has to add a ton of value in an exceptionally important area of the business, and typically they bridge a knowledge gap the founder has. Yes there are a lot of important tasks to get done, but money is limited and you invest as wisely as you can.
Everything then becomes sequenced. Some of it has to wait, because you can’t jump ahead. But many times, it’s not a matter of relying on something being built, but rather just deciding where to allocate your people’s time. You focus on highest priority and impact. You defer the little things. Yes you need to get to them eventually. Yes it would be great to run work streams in parallel, but you just don’t have the people for it. There isn’t the time because you can’t afford the brains. So you prioritize and parking lot and push.
That makes things go slower than you wish they could. You don’t want to be hasty and jump ahead. But if you had the money to hire one more person, you’d absolutely find plenty for them to do that adds tangible value to the business. If you could hire 3, even better. 10? Wow.
What about 100? And what if they went to Harvard, got their MBA, and have read every single book in the Library of Congress?
And what if I told you they could work for you for free? I think you’d take that deal.
Now you may say that if you’re being honest, at this particular stage of your company’s lifecycle, there wouldn’t be a lot for all of them to do. It would be a waste of their talent. Some would just be sending emails to potential clients or sorting through spreadsheets and triple checking marketing copy. It doesn’t make business sense.
But remember, you didn’t spend any money. Who cares if they are “wasting” their time and talent. If they are a net positive to the organization, no matter how small, it’s a good thing. Because you didn’t invest resources in them.
So of course you’d ask, “what’s the catch?” No one is going to hand you the money to go hire 100 Harvard MBAs. Fair question. And here’s the catch. Two actually:
They have never had a job a day in their life. All of their experience is theoretical and academic. They’ve read the manuals, read the books, watched the videos. But they’ve never actually done it. Never talked to a customer or created a client-facing piece of work in your industry. They are brand new entry level graduates with zero experience.
You are going to have to take a lot of time teaching them.Not just teaching them how things are done, but investing the time in really articulating every single step of your process. How exactly do you want that template filled out? Where is it worth researching and where is it not? If the customer doesn’t follow the script, what do I do? And beyond that, you have to give them the full context of your business, your vision, and your future. They are great at learning, but you have to know what to teach them.
To me, it’s still worth it to take that deal. You aren’t spending the money, but you are spending the time. And that time likely comes with a very high return (above $0 and you win) if you do it well.
That, to me, is the power of AI. You have to completely reframe how you look at talent and organization building and resource allocation. You need to spend your time on defining the inputs and outputs. The expectations. What great looks like instead of good.
This part will take some of your valuable time, because you really need to learn how to leverage AI. Remember about emails and client handling? You can create AI agents to do that. You could go to Make.com and build an entire team of agents that will do very specific tasks you teach them and work together to hand the baton from one to the next until it’s done. You can have a team of 10 researchers dig into anything and everything you need with Claude. You can have an AI marketing team build content for you to review and approve.
But don’t forget, these agents are still newbies. They don’t have real-life experience. They make mistakes. You need to check their work. But if you explain and test and verify, they get better. Fast. No nights and weekends. No coffee breaks. They just keep going if you ask them to.
This is why I passionately want people to understand that the old way of thinking about resources can be turned on its head. Because things have changed, and I don’t know how long the window will be open. It’s no longer an irresponsible use of resources to ask a highly capable employee to do mindless tactical work if a.) they’re AI and b.) it costs you nothing but time to define and teach what needs to be done.
The game has always been small startups get an idea, work as hard as they possibly can to turn it into a reality, and then spend the resources it needs to scale and succeed. Most small businesses do not fail because of the idea quality. They fail because of a lack of resources. Amazing ideas are sitting on hard drives and Notes apps because the resource barrier is too much to overcome. Only the ultra-resourced can succeed.
It’s simply no longer true. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to build. To figure everything out. To define and articulate and teach. It takes time and energy and risk. Period.
But I hope people don’t keep thinking about resources in the same old way. You have to think boldly. You have to ask yourself questions that never seemed possible because the system wasn’t set up like that.
You have to get creative. You have to get ambitious. Then ask yourself: “Why stop at 100?”
