How to Stop a Bozo Explosion
What's the biggest challenge a company faces as it scales?
Running out of cash?
Getting crushed by a competitor?
Finding out your strategy was flawed?
Those are all dangers, but there's something much more common, more insidious, less recognizable:
The Bozo Explosion.
Steve Jobs coined this term to describe how talent degrades as a company grows. Typically, a successful startup is full of highly intelligent, highly driven A-players. But then those A-players need to start hiring a lot of people.
A-players tend to hire other A-players, but with hiring happening fast, a few B-players slip in. And those B-players are more prone to hiring fellow B-players and C-players.
Soon you've got a cascading decline in talent—i.e., bozos around every corner of your company.
What Is a Bozo?
A bozo isn't just someone who performs poorly. Those people are usually easy to weed out as candidates or dismiss if they’re hired.
What I think Jobs means when he talks about “bozos” is something a little different. A classic bozo is a person who combines poor performance with a bit of showboating and a lack of self-awareness. Bozos often interview very well. They’re attracted to hot, growing companies and can use the right buzzwords.
But at the end of the day, they can't actually deliver results. They’re all flash and no substance. And if you’re scaling fast enough, by the time you realize they can't actually do the work, they've already hired more bozos.
The Real Source of the Bozo Problem
The core of the bozo problem lies with your managers.
Every manager in your organization has two critical responsibilities when it comes to talent:
Setting a consistently high bar during the recruiting process (preventing the bozos from getting in)
Maintaining constant vigilance for performance issues once people are on the team (getting the bozos out when they slip through)
Most managers have never been trained to do either of these things well. They don't know how to interview effectively. They can't spot red flags. They don't have systematic ways to evaluate their team's performance over time. That’s exactly when bozos multiply.
Why Management Performance Determines Everything
The Bozo Explosion connects directly to one of my fundamental laws of business:
At scale, the performance of your management team determines the performance of your company.
What do I mean by this?
In a small company, the founder can interview every hire and work closely with every employee. But once you hit 50, 100, or 500 employees, the founder's direct influence dilutes rapidly. The company's performance becomes a direct reflection of how well your managers can hire, develop, and retain talent.
Nowhere is this law more critical than in preventing talent decay. Your managers are your first and last line of defense against bozos. If they can't consistently hire A-players and quickly identify when someone isn't performing, your entire company will drift toward mediocrity, regardless of your strategy, funding, or market position.
I've seen companies with brilliant business models fail because they couldn't maintain talent standards at scale. I've also seen companies with valuable but easy-to-replicate products dominate their markets because they built management systems that consistently attracted and retained exceptional people.
A Systematic Approach to Preventing the Bozo Explosion
Here are some steps CEOs should take to prevent (or reverse) a Bozo Explosion.
1. The CEO Must Set the Hiring Bar
Many CEOs, especially in larger companies, are not involved in the hiring process. Even if a CEO cannot meet every interviewee, they should find a way to be involved in the hiring process to ensure that the standards they have established are being applied.
As CEO, you should personally interview as many candidates as possible, even those several levels down from you. Yes, this takes time. Yes, it doesn't scale forever. But early in your scaling journey, your direct involvement sends a powerful message about how seriously you take talent standards. More importantly, it allows you to calibrate what "A-player" means across your organization.
2. Train Every Manager in Recruiting Excellence
Don't assume your managers know how to hire. Most get promoted because they were good individual contributors, not because they could hire. Invest in training that covers:
How to write job descriptions that attract A-players
Behavioral interviewing techniques
Reference check best practices
How to assess cultural fit without introducing bias
Red flags to watch for during the interview process
This isn't a one-time training. Make interviewing skills a core competency you develop regularly.
3. Shift from Reactive to Proactive Talent Acquisition
Train your managers to build talent pipelines before they need to fill roles. A-players rarely respond to job postings because they're usually happy where they are. The best managers are constantly networking, building relationships with potential future hires, and staying connected to talent in their industry.
When you hire reactively (as when you desperately need to fill a role quickly) you're much more likely to compromise your standards. When you hire proactively, you can wait for the right person.
4. Implement Systematic Performance Evaluation
Every quarter, require all managers to confidentially rate each of their direct reports as A, B, or C players. This isn't about performance reviews or compensation—it's about maintaining a clear-eyed view of your talent bench.
As CEO, you should review these ratings holistically with your CHRO. Look for patterns: Are certain managers consistently rating their teams as all A-players while missing their goals? Are there pockets of the organization where performance is declining? Are high-performing teams hiring more A-players?
5. Create Accountability for Talent Standards
Finally, make talent standards part of every manager's performance evaluation. Managers who consistently hire well get promoted. Managers who let standards slip need coaching or replacement.
The Bozo Explosion is preventable, but only if you treat talent management as seriously as you treat financial management or product development.