Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
53.5K posts

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
@ashkan
Tehran-born | 🇨🇦 Citizen | Via 🇪🇸 | 🇫🇷 Taught | Married 🇬🇷 | Live ⚜️ | Founder @WatchMojo | Compete 🇺🇸 https://t.co/YIfYab8c2r

.@tobi says most companies think about recruiting backwards: “My job is to make a company worthy for the best and brightest to work for. This is the part everyone skips. Everyone is like “We need a better recruiting team.” When you just need to be worthy of the kind of talent you would like to have. Talent eventually takes care of itself. There are not that many good companies to work for. There are not many companies that deserve the attention of people who are the most capable people, because those people have the option to start their own companies.”





Many leaders set impossibly high standards for themselves. The problem is: once you operate at that level long enough, people stop seeing the effort and start treating the output as normal. Early in your career, you aim absurdly high and move at a velocity most people either can’t or won’t sustain. But as you get older, you become more selective. You pick your spots more carefully. And you tolerate far less bullshit. This isn’t a vague post. It applies to WatchMojo, the Expos effort, the Free Iran movement, even family dynamics. If you think I am talking about you, yeah, I probably am. But not just you, all of you. In Farsi, the term that comes to mind is "talabkâr." For 20 years, much of the media had an obsession with covering our peers while largely ignoring us. One CEO they glorified openly bragged: “I’d be at the party and just want to get wasted, do coke, and hook up with girls in the bathroom.” Another became a darling of the business press while arguably destroying more shareholder value than 99% of CEOs. I suspect part of the issue was that I wrote publicly — on my own blog, TechCrunch, MediaPost, and elsewhere — which made me look like “competition” instead of a founder who built one of the most successful startups and media companies ever. It's fine. I don't care about press, I care about results. But honestly, it’s shocking how many industry publications spent two decades covering noise while ignoring signal. Then there’s the @Montreal_Expos In a very short period of time, we’ve helped bring Montreal into serious contention — arguably ahead of several markets pursuing expansion. The overwhelming majority of people aware of the effort have been supportive and appreciative. Yet you still have this class of sycophantic gatekeepers clinging to conservative, born-on-third-base figureheads who easily could have pursued this themselves years ago but chose not to. Which is fine. My statement of purpose is Here to Serve. I mean it. But this isn't about me, but you. Don’t pretend to care now while simultaneously attacking the people actually doing the work. And I can just imagine how it infuriates some of them most is when I say: “I don’t need or even particularly want the job unless MLB asks me.” As for my own team @WatchMojo — I love them, and I don’t doubt the mutual respect — but sometimes I think we’ve built a mirage of a company and culture. A Xanadu. An incredibly positive environment. Yet instead of using that foundation to swing bigger, people sometimes become too comfortable, too soft. You run a media company FFS. Take some risks. No one is gonna crash out if you mess up. Heck, if you don't mess up as a publisher, are you even in business? I’ve done the endlessly motivational leader thing. Sometimes what’s needed is the hard-edged coach. Fear is a motivator, make no doubt it. Unpredictability is an asset. Don't kid yourself. People used to take advantage of my diplomacy, now they don't know how I will react. Good. Yes, as a parent or leader you want to protect people from unnecessary hardship. But if we accept the idea that “a company is not a family but a team,” then perpetual coddling becomes counterproductive. I’ll spare my kids from the rest of this analogy… but you get the idea.






Dana White on entrepreneurship: “When you’re an entrepreneur you get up and go to war everyday. There's always something wrong and always something that needs to be fixed every minute of every day.”












