Johnny Quach

But it makes sense if you believe one thing: most work inside most companies does not matter.

I do not mean people are lazy. I do not mean teams are useless. I mean that if you look at any company over a multi-year period, you can usually point to two or three decisions, breakthroughs, product moves, distribution wins, or technical discoveries that changed everything. Not fifty. Not one hundred. Two or three.

The strange part is that companies still have to do all the other work. Meetings, planning, tickets, brainstorms, designs, code reviews, emails, roadmap debates, A/B tests, invites, follow-ups, all of it. A million small actions create enough surface area to find the thing that matters. If we already knew which thing mattered, we would only do that thing. But we do not, so organizations spend most of their time searching.

This is why $100M for one AI researcher is not as crazy as it looks. If one person finds one breakthrough that changes Meta’s position in the AI race, the math is not even close. Their stock price changes. Their valuation changes. Their trajectory changes. Their ability to recruit changes. Their signal to investors changes. Their entire story changes.

One person can move the line.

I have had 100+ PMs show me A/B test graphs. 30% lift in CTR. 0.5% bump in conversion. That 0.5% might be worth $1M, and still, most of the debate around it was a waste of time. Companies love to spend 100 meetings on things that technically moved a metric but did not change the company.

Companies are not built on hundreds of small wins. They are kept alive by a few big ones.

Most CEO speeches about how “everyone contributed” are either kindness, spin, or ignorance. The truth is harsher and more useful: CAC falls, LTV rises, retention changes, growth unlocks, or a company avoids bankruptcy because a tiny number of things finally worked. Yes, many people may have contributed. Yes, the small tests and analyses may have helped find the path. But the value still comes from the few things that actually changed the slope.

Any product leader who has scaled a product or saved a company knows this. After all the hard work, all the decks, all the standups, all the dashboards, there are usually only a few things that truly mattered.

Most organizations are too big. Most companies have too many product managers. Most companies have too many meetings. Most companies spend too much time on too many things.

And that is the point.

Meta is not paying $100M because every AI researcher will create $100M of value. They are paying it because one of them might create $100B of value. In that world, the rational thing is not to optimize the salary band. The rational thing is to maximize your chance of finding the one person, the one idea, the one breakthrough that changes everything.