The Five-Element A-Player Scorecard
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Mateo runs a five-element measurement of the people at Eight Sleep, sitting alongside Alexandra's single leading indicator of rate of change. The five are clarity of thinking, managerial efficiency, velocity, obsession for talent, and bar raising. Each is deliberately observable rather than a personality judgement: clarity of thinking is about priority ordering, managerial efficiency about doing more with less, velocity about compressing timelines, obsession for talent about finding and developing people, and bar raising about demonstrating measurable growth quarter over quarter. Alexandra's complementary signal for early-career people is that a genuine A-player looks like a different person every six to twelve months, and that a cohort hired together separates visibly by growth rate rather than by output at any single moment.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Score clarity of thinking
Assess the quality of setting priorities and their order — what to do, and in what sequence. This is the ability to look at a messy set of possible work and produce a correctly ordered list, which Mateo places first among the five.
- 2
Score managerial efficiency
The ability to do more with less. Mateo benchmarks this at company level: Eight Sleep runs revenue in the high tens of millions with a burn rate on roughly a hundred people, which he calls very small, and says the efficiency shows up directly in the bottom line and the burn.
Pro tip Make the benchmark concrete — output per head, burn per unit of revenue — so the score isn't a vibe.
- 3
Score velocity
Mateo describes himself as obsessed with velocity. His operating test: if someone tells him a task takes a month, he asks them to break it into thirty pieces and tell him what they can do tomorrow. The score is how far someone compresses a stated timeline when pushed.
Watch out He is explicit that this is a culture choice, not a universal good — candidates should know before joining that he will always push to halve the time.
- 4
Score obsession for talent
Does this person actively find talent and develop it? The founders treat the quality of talent, and the work of sourcing and growing it, as a core competency of anyone senior rather than a recruiter's job.
- 5
Score bar raising with data points
Growth: what are you doing today that you were not doing last quarter, and can you give measurable data points showing you are better at something. For executives, Mateo demands the same evidence one level down — who on your team is doing something they were not doing before, and how did you grow them.
Pro tip Asking for the data point converts a self-assessment into an auditable claim.
- 6
Cross-check against rate of change
Alexandra's overlay for early-career people: look at the same person every six to twelve months. The real rock star is unrecognisable because their rate of growth and learning is so steep, while a solid peer hired in the same cohort has not changed. Compare within cohorts rather than in isolation.
Watch out This indicator applies to people early in their career; the founders say executives need to be assessed differently.
In the wild
Alexandra describes looking at a group of employees who joined Eight Sleep around the same time. Six to twelve months later one of them is visibly a different person — matured, changed, learning at a rate that outpaces everyone else — while another from the same cohort has not grown at all. Neither is necessarily doing bad work; the second may be performing perfectly well. But the divergence in rate of change is what tells her which one is a genuine rock star versus someone who is simply solid. She calls it the quickest way she has found to tell the difference.
→ A/B separation of early-career talent using growth trajectory rather than a point-in-time output review.
A hypothetical but faithful application of Mateo's velocity test: an engineer scopes a feature at one month. Rather than accepting or rejecting the estimate, Mateo asks for it broken into thirty pieces and for the specific piece that ships tomorrow. The decomposition usually reveals that a third of the month was queued waiting on other teams, that two of the sub-tasks were speculative, and that a usable first slice exists within days. The estimate is not argued down; it is dissolved by forcing the work into daily increments that can each be started immediately.
→ Timelines compress because the unit of commitment becomes a day rather than a month.
Common mistakes
Judging on output snapshots, not growth rate
A point-in-time review rewards the person who is currently competent. The founders' leading indicator is the derivative — how much the person has changed in six to twelve months — which is what separates a future leader from a permanently solid contributor.
Hiring good people who are the wrong fit
Mateo says they never hired bad people in the early days, but hired people who were not the right type for a demanding and supportive, velocity-obsessed culture. Values mismatch is a hiring error even when the individual is excellent.
Running the company like a family
The founders use a sports-team analogy instead: they are in the playoffs, top performance gets rewarded more than anyone else, and the required intensity is stated up front so candidates can self-select out rather than be unhappy later.
From the transcript
“what you notice in in what we have seen at eight sleep is that every six to 12 months this person is different because their…”
“the first one is what is called clavicle thinking so the quality of setting the priorities and the order”
“the third is velocity I'm obsessed with velocity if you tell me that something takes you a month I will ask you to break it…”
From the episode
The World’s First Sleep Fitness Company Founders On Optimising Your Sleep - Eight Sleep
Eight Sleep