We want A-Players

There is only room at Ajaia for A-Players. A-Players are obsessive, coachable, and intelligent. They learn from every mistake and do not make excuses. They can take a vague problem, figure out what actually matters, and drive it to done without being chased. They make everyone around them better, and they deliver results clients can see.

B-Players are new people on their way to becoming A-Players, and we will invest in getting you there. Average is different. Average people just exist, do the minimum, and collect a paycheck. On a team this size, average is poison. Everything that follows in this handbook is a description of how A-Players operate.

Educate yourself, constantly

You need to be continuously upskilling. If you are a marketer, know what is going on with AI tools in your space. Know what is going on in your space, period. Part of your job is staying current on your domain and even beyond it. The people who do best here treat learning as part of the work, not something that happens around it.

Be hyper-curious

This is a startup, which means you get to be involved in things that would be siloed off anywhere else. We have developers generating our media and website content. We have business-oriented people building products. If you are interested in something and want to learn it and help out with it, we are very open to that. Raise your hand.

Bring the same curiosity to client work. You will get to deep dive into industries, workflows, and problems most people never get near. You will do better work if you approach it from curiosity instead of obligation, and curiosity is one of the main things we look for in people.

Know enough to do your job

People will not always give you enough context. It is your job to go get it. If you are on the branding team, you need to understand the product you are branding, so go ask the developers. If you are building something for a client, understand how their business actually works first. Work done without context misses, and “nobody told me” is not a defense here. Ask.

AI moves fast. We move faster.

Part of why people hire us is that even though they could do this internally, it would be slower. Speed is the product. That means we bust down walls. If you cannot get access to something, figure out a workaround. Nag. Be annoying. Part of being good at this job is figuring out how to get things from people when it might not be in their interest to give them to you. That goes for clients and it goes for us internally too.

Prioritize, and communicate your priorities

A lot may be asked of you. Part of your job is knowing what to prioritize, and if you do not know, ask. Then communicate that prioritization. Just because someone asked you to do something first does not mean it is the thing that should be done first.

When in doubt: in Indian culture, according to Ari, they say the client is God. Maybe not God at Ajaia, but the client means a lot. They are the ones paying the bills. Do what it takes to make them happy.

BE SELFISH

No hand holding

If you need to be handheld, this probably will not work out for you. You will often be asked to navigate and solve in gray space. We would all love to make decisions with 100 percent of the information. That is not always possible. Leaders typically have to decide with something like 50 to 80 percent of the information available. Get comfortable making good calls without the full picture, and flag your assumptions as you go.

Have a hacker mindset

Most people see a wall in a video game and think: there is no door, so I cannot get through. Speedrunners finish 30-hour games in 20 minutes because they see the game differently. They know the walls and villages are not real. The game is just code and memory, and once you understand the underlying system you can do things that look impossible to anyone watching the surface. (Credit to Gwern’s essay On Seeing Through and Unseeing for this framing.)

Almost every system works this way. A bureaucracy pretends to be a machine with fixed rules. It is actually just people and file systems, and a call to the right person often beats the official process. Hiring pretends to be job boards and qualifications. It is actually finding someone with a problem and proving you can solve it. Be the person who sees the underlying system. There is no shortcut to this: you earn it by getting your hands dirty in the actual nuts and bolts of the work, not by memorizing the conventional wisdom about how it is supposed to be done.

Have agency

Agency is the belief that you can shape your circumstances and achieve your goals through your own actions rather than waiting for ideal conditions. The belief matters. The ability to follow through on it matters more.

Be coachable

Nobody is perfect. Everyone here is learning every day. Feedback is a gift. Someone taking time out of their day to give you feedback when they have plenty else going on is a gift. Use it, do not waste it. Give it well and receive it well.

We all come to the table with different strengths. Learn how to turn your strengths into a superpower and work on your weaknesses. I am not a coder by nature. I took three computer science classes in college and had barely written a line of code in five years. Now I work at an AI startup in a leadership role. I figured out how to ask for help with my weaknesses, I learn more about AI every day, I build things and learn from our engineers at the same time, and I play to my strengths. There is a lesson there.

No AI slop

AI makes it very easy to create large quantities of output with very little thought. If you do this, your time here will be short. Things that used to signal effort, like length or a well-formatted deliverable, are now automatable and signal nothing. What cannot be automated is judgment. Put real thought behind your work, every time.

AI is a tool. You are accountable.

Know what you know and what you do not know when you are using AI. If you blindly ship AI output you do not understand, you can cause real problems: security breaches, wrong claims in front of a client, broken work you cannot explain. As a rule, you should be able to do the thing you are asking AI to do yourself. If you cannot, that is a real problem, because you will not know what to look for when the output is wrong.

And when it is wrong, that is on you. If a handyman swings a hammer into the wrong spot, we blame the handyman, not the hammer. AI is a tool, not a decision-maker. Everything you send out is your work, not the AI’s. Own it like it is yours, because it is.

Be a doer / Integrity

Trust is earned over years and can be lost in an afternoon. Do the things you say you are going to do. If an issue comes up, communicate about it as quickly as possible. Things come up, we understand that. Just over-communicate when they do.

Make it easy to work with you

This is the meta skill underneath half of this handbook. The people who succeed here make working with them frictionless. When you want something from someone, do the work for them: send the link, say exactly which parts you are unsure about, show your sources, propose a deadline. When you owe someone an update, do not make them chase you. Over-communicate. Nobody here has ever been annoyed by too much context, but plenty of projects have died from too little.

And be a storyteller. Do not dump raw facts on people and make them assemble the picture themselves. When you give an update, tell the story: here is where we started, here is what changed, here is where we are now, here is what happens next, and here is what I need from you. The same information, told as a story, gets decisions made faster and makes you the person people want on their projects.

Be good at selling

How to ask for a decision

The fastest way to look amateur hour is to ask a decision-maker a naked question. “Should we use this vendor?” forces them to do your job before they can do theirs. The fastest way to look senior is to bring the decision gift-wrapped: here is the problem, here is the context, here is the budget, here are the three options I already vetted, and here is the one I recommend and why. Which do you want?

Asked the first way, you wait days for an answer. Asked the second way, you get one in two minutes, and you have shown the decision-maker they can trust you with bigger things. This applies to me, to clients, and to anyone whose call you need. Do the research, narrow the options, make a recommendation, and make saying yes easy.

GO THE EXTRA MILE SECTION

Take people’s work off of their plate (people may take weeks to do something - make a deck) vs we can just do it for them - makes them love you / human psychology / giving something makes people owe you reciprocity

Ownership and an entrepreneurial mindset

We do not just execute tasks. We think like founders, we own our results, and we drive outcomes. That means we do not believe in task-oriented work, where you press a button and wait for the next instruction. Understand the work you are doing in its larger context, and if you do not, ask.

And do not just sit around. If you are waiting for tasks to be handed to you, your time here will be short. Part of your job is being smart about what to do next. Provide feedback on things that could be better. Make stuff. Build stuff. Learn fast, fail fast.

Collaboration

We operate as a team. We share, we communicate, and we lift each other up. Help people out and make everyone look good, especially in front of clients. We are all working toward the same goal.

Results driven

The work you do is directly tied to your success. Your growth, your impact, and your compensation are tied to the results you deliver.

Stay curious and keep learning

We are at the forefront of AI. Staying there requires relentless curiosity about what is working, what is changing, and what is next.

Growth

This is a place where you will learn a lot. We push each other to be better every day. Have a growth mindset, work hard, and have fun doing it.

Work hard, have fun

We are building something real in a frontier moment. There is a wave happening right now and we are trying to ride it, which is no joke. That said, why surf if you are not going to have fun catching the wave? Bring energy and good vibes.

Reputation and integrity

How you show up and how you handle mistakes is who you are. Do not try to hide mistakes. The cover-up is often worse than the crime. Be honest, we will figure it out together, and we will support you.

A lot will be expected of you

This is more than an average job. You will have more ownership, accountability, and responsibility than most roles. In return, you get insane opportunities. You will do work that few people in the world are doing right now, get access to tools most people do not have, and grow fast.

It is going to be hard

You will be pushed beyond your comfort zone. You will be asked to deliver things above your pay grade. Be smart, work hard, and rise to the moment. We have got you: we will give you the support, resources, and knowledge you need. Do not be afraid to ask for help. There is no such thing as a stupid question.

It is going to be fun

And if it is not, something is wrong. Sure, there are moments of stress and pressure, but ultimately we want you to enjoy working here, and we will give you the support to do that.

Flexibility

We offer a lot of flexibility. We do not want you to miss your mom’s birthday dinner. Communicate and get stuff done. Exercise, take care of yourself, and figure out a way to make it all happen. I dictated part of this document to Granola while on a run, which makes me seem psychotic, but it works for me.

Yes, AI helped me write this, put it together, and format it nicely. That said, the ideas are my own and those of our founder and CEO, Ari. Plenty of it is also stolen, or let’s say friendly borrowed, from Substack posts, books, friends, and clients we have learned from. That is the standard here: AI as a tool, with real thought behind the work. Hold everything you make to the same bar.

This is a living document and we are continually updating it. If you have an idea for something we should add, let me know.

Written by Jordan Miller, Head of Strategy, and Ari, Founder and CEO