Two of our marketing guys quit within a week of each other.

One's last day was Friday, and the other put in his two weeks this morning.

These weren't B-players, they were original Cal AI guys. 

The ones who were there when it was still a scrappy startup, back when we were all doing twenty jobs each. 

I’m really close with both of them, so when they told me they were thinking about leaving, I immediately jumped on a call to figure out why.

The first thing I did was try to keep them 

I told both of them the same thing: 

“Before we go any further, let's make sure I’m clear on one thing…

Are you leaving because of money? Because if it's a money thing, I'll talk to MyFitnessPal and get you paid whatever you need to get paid to stay.”

They both had the same response:

“There's no amount of money that would make me stay.”

The pay and the people weren’t the issue. 

It was that the job had gotten too easy.

One of them told me straight up: 

“It's actually better that I leave now, before you give me the raise. Because the more money I make, the harder it's going to be to ever walk away and build my own thing.”

He was 20 years old and he'd already figured out something most people never learn:

Golden handcuffs are real. 

And they don't get put on you all at once. 

They slowly close down on your wrists one raise at a time, until one day the number is big enough that leaving feels insane, and you spend the rest of your career telling yourself you'll do your own thing "eventually."

He wasn't willing to let that happen to him, so he left while he could still stomach walking away.

And possibly the worst part of this whole ordeal is that it’s mostly my fault

These guys didn't get bored by accident, we backed them into a corner.

At Cal AI now, our systems are so good that a marketing role that used to take a full day takes about 2-3 hours.

We make money whether these guys are inspired or not, because the machine runs either way. 

But it's terrible for hungry killers who finish all their work before noon and aren’t being challenged to learn something new everyday like it was 2 years ago.

Eventually, they're not interested in the easy paycheck anymore and they're going to leave.

We got so good at efficiency that we built a machine that quietly repels the exact people we most wanted to keep.

If you're running a team, keeping your best people isn't about paying them more. 

You need to make sure the work still costs them something. 

A hunter has to hunt. The second the hunt is over, sooner or later the money doesn't matter.

Remember that.

- Jake