WORTH WATCHING:
Make Yourself Replaceable, Twice
The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Kat Schneider · ~61 min
Kat Schneider came to Brooklyn at four years old, a refugee from the former Soviet Union, and grew up in a welfare hotel. Her parents arrived with fifty dollars and a suitcase. She went on to invest at Troy Carter's AF Square, across a portfolio that included Spotify, Uber and Warby Parker. Then she left, four months pregnant, to start a vitamin company a lot of investors did not want to touch. Ritual announced $250M in sales in 2024. The rule she gives at the end is the reason to watch.
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:
The best thing in here is a lesson she had to learn twice. A decade in, Kat hired a CEO coach for the first time. What he gave her was not new information. It was a reminder of something she knew on day one and stopped doing. Make yourself replaceable. Hire the person who is better than you at the thing, then get out of the way. When the business shifted from high growth to growth and profitability, she took the jobs back. CMO. COO. Head of HR. All at once. No single person is good at all of those, and the one least suited to try is the CEO.
My hiring bar is that I would not clear it. Everyone I bring in should be better than me at their role, and their first duty is to hire people better than them. What Kat names is the reflex I have watched in myself and never called out. When something starts going wrong, the instinct is to step back in. That instinct feels like leadership and it is the opposite.
Then she runs the same rule at home. Her non-negotiables are specific. Breakfast, school drop-off, pickup, bedtime. Everything else gets real help, and she says accepting the help was the hardest part.
THE LINE THAT STUCK
"You can either start a business or a family, but there's no way in hell that you're gonna do both."
One of the leading investors in LA told her that while she was pregnant and pitching. She has three kids and a nine figure company. Watch her tell it (30 seconds) →
MY 20-SECOND RECAP
if you do not have the full 61 minutes
→Your missing expertise is not the problem. She had no supplement or science background and says that is why Ritual looks the way it does. You can hire the scientist. Nobody can supply the reason you started.
→Sell one thing until customers trust you. Ritual sold a single multivitamin, one price, subscription only, for two years. The prenatal came in 2018, and she says people had been asking for it the whole time.
→Waiting for a co-founder is a way of not starting. She calls it a cop out. Her husband, who has started several companies, told her a co-founder had never been the thing that saved one.
PRO MOVE
Write down every job you did last week that has a real title attached to it. Marketing, ops, finance, recruiting. Circle the two you are worst at. Hire the first one.
