Forget Founder Mode— MrBeast Mode is Where it's At. | The top 7 highlights from MrBeast's leaked framework.

MrBeast's 36-page framework leaked this week. It's how he built a $1B+ company and became the #1 YouTuber in the world.  His channel is worth over $1B. For the first time ever, we get to see how MrBeast operates. 

We go through the 7 most important things that startup founders can learn from MrBeast. From what maniacal obsession looks like, what it means to be an "A player", to how to teach employees to never take 'no' for an answer. In the leaked document called "How to Succeed at MrBeast Productions, he goes into specific details and share clear examples of what you should do.

MrBeast Mode puts Founder Mode to shame. 

Keywords

MrBeast, onboarding, clear mission, hiring A players, obsession, extreme ownership, consultants, persistence, documentation

Why you should listen

• Have a clear mission that everyone understands.
• Hire A players who are obsessive and coachable.
• Obsession is crucial for success in content creation.
• Extreme ownership leads to better accountability.
• Consultants can save time and provide valuable insights.
• Persistence is key; never take no for an answer.
• Every employee should know the company's expectations.
• A strong culture is built on shared values and principles.
  
  

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:00:42) 1. Have a clear mission
(00:02:05) 2. Hire A players
(00:03:49) 3. Be Obsessed
(00:05:22) 4. Extreme Ownership
(00:07:19) 5. Copy & Steal
(00:09:29) 6. Never take 'no' for an answer
(00:010:49) 7. Write a doc!

Chapters

• 0:42 1. Have a clear mission
• 2:05 2. Hire A players
• 3:49 3. Be Obsessed
• 5:22 4. Extreme Ownership
• 7:19 5. Copy & Steal
• 9:29 6. Never take 'no' for an answer
• 10:49 7. Write a doc!

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00.462)
So Paul Graham puts out like a founder mode, you know, week and a half or so ago. It's like a few paragraphs long. mean, pretty interesting. And Twitter goals, absolutely nuts about it. So this huge document got leaked this week. It's like 36 pages long and it's the Mr. Beast onboarding document that he uses for all of his employees. And honestly, it's so, I mean, it's not well written at all, but it's like so specific and there's so many gold nuggets in there that I thought I'd do an episode, short episode on like the top seven things.

from that document. Honestly, the punchline for me is like, forget founder mode. mean, Mr. Beast mode puts all that stuff to shame. Point one, have a clear mission. Here's the document starts. Your goal here is to make the best YouTube videos possible. That's the number one goal of this production company. It's not to make the best produced videos, not to make the funniest videos, not to make the best looking videos, not the highest quality videos. It's to make the best YouTube videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious, but after six months in the weeds,

A lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here. I think the message here is you need to have a very clear, simple mission. Every single person that you hire follows all the time. And this mission needs to get drilled and re -drilled and re -drilled so that you don't have 10, 20, 30 people all going in their own lanes. You have 10, 20, 30 people all swimming in the exact same direction. And there's good examples of this, like make the best YouTube videos possible. It's simple.

It's clear everybody gets it. Shopify is another good one, which is like, we want to make it easy for people to sell things online. Very simple. You want a bad one? Look at like IBM's to lead in creating, developing and manufacturing the industry's most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices, and microelectronics. I have no idea what that means. And so I think that is a very simple thing that you can do that you can think about. What is it that your company is trying to accomplish? How can you say that in

five, seven, maximum like nine words, very, very simple language and drill, drill, drill. The second thing that he talks about is hiring A players. This is a little bit of a cliche because no one's out there trying to get B players or C players. But I thought that the way that he describes this is exceptionally clear. He says, A players are obsessive, learn from mistakes. They're coachable, intelligent. They don't make excuses. They believe in YouTube. That's in his case, right? They see the value of this company and are the best in the goddamn world at their job.

Pablo Srugo (02:24.258)
B players are new people that need to be trained into A players and C players are just average employees. They don't suck, but they aren't exceptional at what they do. They just exist, do whatever and get a paycheck. They aren't obsessive about learning. C players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different company immediately. I see this all the time, which is that there are people in the organization that founders will effectively make excuses for and say, no, I think this person's actually quite good. We just need to manage him or her. We just need to coach him or her.

And that makes sense if you're operating at a Shopify level, an Uber level, an Amazon level, where you have tens of thousands of employees, you have managers, even then in some cases, you might not want to believe in that philosophy, but when you have 10, 20 people, you can't spend time managing and coaching B players into A players. You have to make sure that every single person on your team is truly that A player. The other way I heard this described is from the founder of Float.

which is like a series B stage startup in Canada. And what he said was it used to be a manager at Uber. So we took this philosophy from there. What he said is that candidates need to be there be heck yeah or heck no. There is no intermediate. If we don't interview candidate and some of us feel like we a hundred percent need to have this person on the team, then don't hire them. Don't settle because ultimately you'll spend so much time managing and coaching that it's going to take away from the best employees you have. One of the words that he was talking about a lot, even when he's talking about a player is obsession.

That's the third thing I took out of reading this document is you have to be obsessive. Here's what he said. He said, I spent basically five years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube. Some days me and my other nerd friends would spend 20 hours straight studying the most minor thing. Like is there a correlation between better lighting at the start of the video and less viewer drop -up? There is. Have good lighting at the start of the video or tiny things like that. And the result of those probably 20 to 30 ,000 hours of studying is I'd say I have a good grasp on what makes it good YouTube videos.

do well. It's funny because on YouTube, like how much of Mr. Beast becoming the best YouTuber, he's literally the number one YouTuber in the world. He's had like over 50 billion views of his videos. He was offered a billion dollars for somebody to buy his entire content library. He turned it down. That's how well he's done on YouTube. Now, obviously there's luck factors and people always look at that. They're like, well, you know, he was there right place, right time, whatever. But here's the other thing. He was maniacally obsessed.

Pablo Srugo (04:43.554)
He drilled down to levels that almost nobody else does and as a result of that, he's able to continually put out incredible content after content after content. And that's another thing that we see clearly in the best founders. Like we all know the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musk, the Jeff Bezos. These people are obsessive and they spend so much time looking at all the details that have to do with their industry, with their product, with their customers, that they're just way above everybody else. And would you have to...

realizes that if you have a startup and you're competing in a dynamic environment and you have other founders that are obsessing at that level and you're not, the odds that you win are pretty close to zero. The fourth thing he talks about, he doesn't use these words, but I remember reading a book by Navy Seal called Extreme Ownership. And you can see that he bakes this philosophy right into what he does in the day to day. He's talking about how do you get somebody else on your team to get something done from them that you need. Like for example, if you're in sales, need somebody in marketing to do something, product, you need an engineer to do something.

In his case, he's obviously talking about producing content, but he says, don't just go to an employee and say, I need a creative, let me know when it's done, or I need a thumbnail. Let me know when it's done. This is what most people do. And it's one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them that they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck. So you both are on the same page. And he has a quote, it says, for example, you would say, Tyler, you are my bottleneck. have 45 days to make this video happen. And I cannot begin to work on it until I know what the contents of this video is.

I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done. Now this person who also has a bunch of other things going on is aware of how important the discussion is and you guys can prioritize it accordingly. Now let's say you and Tyler agree it'll be done in five days. You don't get to set a reminder for five days and not talk to him for five days. Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. That is extreme ownership because the person who's requesting the thing can't

go out and say, I asked Joe to do it and he didn't get it done because then it'd be like, well, buddy, did you check in on Joe every single day? Did you make clear to Joe why this was so important? Does Joe understand that this is a bottleneck for you? And now the person that's asking for something to be done is just as responsible for that thing being done as the person downstream. If you get this type of thinking into every single person in your organization, just imagine how much better you will execute.

Pablo Srugo (07:10.392)
how much more effectively you will get things done, how many fewer excuses you're gonna have on a day -to -day basis. He has this great section, so point number five, it's kind of this like don't reinvent everything, and he has a very compelling way to describe it. He says, consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks of work.

I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube. I can show a brand new creator how to go from a hundred subs to 10 ,000 in a month on their own. would take them years to do it. Think about what he's saying here. He's not talking about consultants like the McKinsey types and know, strategy and all this sort of thing. He's saying if there's a part of the business, if there's something unique to be done that's been done before, find somebody who's done it before and pay them and ask them how to do it.

And this goes for so many things. mean, when you're going from zero to product market fit, there are going to be things that are new because everything is case because so many things are case by case because you're going to have an actual new product. And yet there's so many other things that are not new. How to run product, how to run a roadmap, how to develop great code, what marketing strategies tend to work, how to run a sales team, how to operate a CRM. There's so many different pieces of the puzzle that are actually already solved. But the problem is that

Founders understand that in many cases they need to think from first principles. In many cases they need to do things their own ways and it's true. The problem is when you carry this throughout the entire organization and all of a sudden decide that you need to figure out bottoms up how to do finance, bottoms up how to do sales, when actually there are strategies that are proven to work and others that aren't and you can likely find somebody who's one or two notches ahead of where you are and figure out, pay them, give them options, whatever you need to do to figure out exactly how they did it.

So you can just copy, so you can just steal, so you can worry about the stuff that can't be solved. But this is a common thing, which is that first time founders tend to make not just unavoidable mistakes, they tend to also make the avoidable mistakes. And what Mr. Beast is talking about is you should never be making avoidable mistakes. You should be finding ways to find people who've done the things that you're trying to do before and pay them to do them for you or at the very least tell you how to do them. Number six, and I know all founders are gonna love this.

Pablo Srugo (09:31.384)
don't take no for an answer. It says when dealing with people outside Mr. Beast Productions, never take no at face value. If you need a store to buy everything inside of and you call the local Dollar Tree and the person that answers says, no, you can't film here, that literally doesn't mean shit. Talk to other employees and see if there are fans or if they have kids that are fans. Try talking to their boss, their boss's boss. Have me DM them on Twitter and try their social team. If all these avenues are exhausted and you're left with a no, that doesn't mean don't try the other Dollar Trees.

because the manager of those could be huge fans and willing to bend the rules. Basically what I'm trying to convey is what we call pushing through no. Don't just stop because one person told you no. Stop when all conceivable options are exhausted. This is one of many tools that would combined dramatically improve your probability of success when producing here. Because most founders already think this way, but the challenge is how do you get every person in your organization to think this way? Imagine if you had not just one person, you punching through walls.

10, 20, 30, 40 people and every single one has this mindset inculcated in them, instilled in them so that this is truly how they operate. This is truly how they believe. Imagine just how many more things would get done. How many more walls would get walked through? How many more doors would get pushed down? Because you have a bunch of people who all believe that there's no reason to take no for an answer and to always find another way. And point seven, maybe the most important point is have a written document.

That's the whole thing is it's so hard for you as a founder to go and explain this thing person to person to person. And even if you do, and you find the time to sit down with each person and explain to them all of these different things, they're likely to just forget them. If you have a doc, you can do this once you can alter it over time. can multiply by a hundred and every single employee has no excuses. They can't come to you later and say, I didn't know that that's how things work because they're written down in this doc. So I think it's worth for every single founder to take the time.

to think through what principles really matter. And I would say read the Mr. Beast Productions doc. Like I said, it's not well written, his grammar's all over the place, but the content is absolutely A plus. Read through it and understand how to write a no BS doc that explains to every single person on your team what you expect, what your philosophy is, how you want work to be done in your organization, what your actual cultural values are, which in this case, by the way, they're not a list of platitudes on a wall.

Pablo Srugo (11:51.458)
they come out through the examples that he gives of the sort of behavior that he expects. And honestly, when I was done reading this, I was like, you know, founder mode got all the hype, but screw founder mode operate like Mr. Beast operate on beast mode. If you listened to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. But whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to product market fit show and

leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover the show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. And the reality is if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. So please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing like great podcast or

I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer the better, more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars and you will be helping me. But most importantly, many other founders just like you discover the show. Thank you.