Brendan Coady

I volunteer with a charity called Venture for Canada. They do a lot of amazing work in the New Grad space, primarily by connecting startups (and high growth companies) with recent graduates looking for world-class experience. It’s a seemingly perfect marriage of hungry talent looking for meaningful, challenging work, and blooming industry looking for underrated, agile team members.

So far, the program is thriving and serving both sides of the market.

Full disclosure: I went through the VFC program and it radically altered my career path (for the better).

I’ve been doing phone interviews as part of their recruitment and filtering process leading up to Fellow Selection Day.

One of the interview questions has to do with team work, and how the applicant has managed themselves in a team environment.

According to the documentation, one of the key traits VFC is looking for is a willingness to collaborate. One of the staff mentioned that they hear from partner startups frequently that they need people who can work well within a team to solve a problem.

Collaboration, and the ability to cohesively function within the team unit, is lauded as one of the most important traits for new Fellows.

I passionately disagree.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast, he does an episode called 12 Rules for Life, poking fun at Jordan Peterson’s book of the same title.

The premise of the episode (and the book) is that each person should have a series of rules that help govern their lives; a set of principles by which to conduct themselves.

Gladwell points out that he only consumes 5 liquids ever: water, wine, tea, and a combination of espresso and milk.

But this rule is simply semantic; it doesn’t seek to serve a greater purpose.

His only rule, but his account, is simple: pull the goalie.

He is referring to this paper, by quantitative finance gurus Clifford S. Asness and Aaron Brown. It describes a mathematical model for when a coach in hockey should pull their goalie (withdraw the goalie from defending the net and replace them with an additional player). The practice is common, and simple to understand, when time is running low in the 3rd period. You’re going to lose by 1 anyways, so losing by 2 doesn’t matter, right? You should go for the tie (add an extra player to try to score) instead of accepting defeat.

The insightful and wondrous part of this paper is not that they recommend to pull the goalie — that’s simply hockey wisdom (and rather obvious) — but when they recommend pulling the goalie:

If you’re down by 1: Pull them with 5 minutes remaining.

If you’re down by 2: 11 minutes.

That’s enough to make any hockey coach roll their eyes and walk away.

No coach in their right mind would pull the goalie with 5 minutes remaining. That’s career suicide. More recently coaches have been pulling with 2 to 3 minutes left, and that’s viewed as rather liberal, and only makes sense if you have a strong power line, great puck handlers, and momentum on your side.

But 5 Minutes!? Imagine the backlash when you lose.

But what Asness and Brown are ultimately suggesting is to do the unexpected, unconventional, and otherwise disagreeable action. They aren’t saying you should recklessly go for the win, they are saying the math supports you. It’s difficult to argue with their assumptions, and from what I can tell (as an armchair academic), they have done an excellent job building a model to not just represent the real world, but actually be useful.

That can’t be said of all models (or academics).

(Frankly, Asness and Brown aren’t academics, which is perhaps why this paper is so good.)

Ultimately Gladwell points out that being disagreeable, doing the thing that no one else believes is right, but which logic or intuition or gut feeling is telling you is right, is very difficult.

Pulling your goalie with 5 minutes left in the game is ballsy to say the least.

Until you tie it up. Or come back and win. Or make the playoffs.

The math suggests you’ll end up somewhere close to 4 points ahead over the course of the season following the 5-minute rule. That is more than enough to edge opponents with less disagreeable methods.

Most coaches would happily hire a different trainer or make the team do yoga or ban Fortnite or invest in a New Age dietary supplement to gain an extra 4 points per season.

But what about losing big sometimes? Is that worth it? What about your reputation? Are you willing to risk that for 4 points?

By pulling the goalie early — 5 minutes early — you have an even larger likelihood of getting blown out quite a few games.

The odds your opponents, who were beating you by 1, beat you by 3 or 4 or 10, is realistically high.

So as a coach, you must decide whether getting the tie is worth the morale hit (and reputation) of losing by a lot.

That’s what being disagreeable is all about.

Gladwell’s entire thesis to this episode is that to be our best selves — to live life on our own terms and make our way in the world — we should strive to be more disagreeable: to do the things we know are right but go against convention.

I agree with him.

But please don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here.

Collaboration is important. If you can’t work with your coworkers, the machine of a startup — which relies so heavily on the team at the beginning of its life — is going to grind to a halt and struggle to outpace the market. You must learn to gel, to become more than the sum of your parts.

But in my experience, you also need to be disagreeable. Perhaps far more so.

It takes guts to tell the CEO they are wrong, or stand against the entire team because you have contradicting data. It’s easy to just go with the conventional wisdom or follow the herd mentality or choose to accept the presented conclusions as fact. It’s difficult to dig deeper, have your own opinion, and contest the majority.

That’s why I want people who are disagreeable.

I want someone who doesn’t care much for the status quo, and is willing to tell the entire team they are wrong because they’ve done the work themselves.

I want the spirit of Asness and Brown in every meeting and major decision at my company.

The whole ethos of a startup begins with acknowledging that the status quo, the way things are usually done, is inefficient, incomplete, or just plain stupid.

Startups have to be disagreeable, by nature.

To have team members that simply agree with what their bosses dictate goes against this entire spirit of innovation. That isn’t to say it doesn’t happen — I know lots of companies for which “innovation” roughly translates to “the big boss’s next idea”. Innovation doesn’t have to be a team sport, but it does have the potential to come from everyone.

But every startup (and big company, frankly) wants to be more innovative. That’s how they adapt, grow, and ultimately, survive. Every CEO of every company I’ve ever interacted with will tell you they want to be more innovative. But at what cost? Are they actually willing to do something uncommon, unconventional, and with consequences, in order to be more innovative? My premise is no, they aren’t. That’s exactly why startups stand a fighting chance.

If you want to be innovative, you need to stop following and start leading. You need to be willing to go against the momentum and accept the consequences.

Being disagreeable is the prerequisite for true innovation.

By the time a startup is a functioning business, and no longer in the scrappy, ideation product-market-fit phase, hiring for disagreeableness is probably less important.

Ultimately, building a factory where every machine questions their role, the vision of the company, and why it is doing what it is doing, isn’t going to be efficient or productive.

I’m not saying to be disagreeable in general.

What I am saying, and what I believe Gladwell is getting at in this episode, is to be disagreeable when you believe you are right.

To do the uncommon, unexpected, and otherwise unconventional action, despite the momentum of the commonplace, takes courage. It takes will and effort and a willingness to stand up for yourself. It also often takes evidence, data, forethought, analysis, and a lot of questioning.

In the case of the hockey coach, it comes with consequences.

It’s easy to lose 1–0 and say that the bounces just didn’t go your way. Hockey has a great deal of randomness in it, and despite your best efforts, no team is going to win every game on skill alone.

But it takes disagreeableness to lose 5–1, conceding 3 goals on an empty net in the last 2 minutes, because you decided to listen to a mathematical model from some quantitative finance guys you heard about in a podcast.

A loss is a loss, according to the standings, but in the media, a 5–1 loss you bring upon yourself is much worse than a 1–0 loss you can’t control.

That takes guts.

When I look to hire my next coworker, there are plenty of traits I’m looking for: work ethic, past experience, initiative, passion, working style, fit.

But being collaborative isn’t high on my list. I view that as a prerequisite.

I want someone who can work within our team, but my bar for that is pretty low compared to other requirements.

I care far more that when the time comes and they have a strong opinion backed by evidence and forethought, they speak up against the room. I care they stand their ground, and challenge the status quo, no matter who they are up against. I care that they are disagreeable enough to do the uncommon thing, even if there are consequences.

To me, that’s the most important character trait for an employee at a startup.

But go ahead, disagree with me. I’d love it if you did.

Interested in taking your career to the next level? A recent grad that’s not sure what your next move is? Generally a well-rounded, humble, thoughtful person?

Check out Venture for Canada here.