Love of the game
Building a company of builders
I noticed something interesting about Owner at 10:30pm last Tuesday night.
Someone on our Biz Ops team requested to install a Slack app for a side project he was working on. The thing that stood out is that it was 1:30am his time. He was up late cooking but not because of a deadline. Not because someone was breathing down their neck. Just because he was excited to build.
I was up late too, deep in Claude Code working on a project I couldn’t put down. And when I looked at Slack, there were a bunch of other people online for the same reason. I’ve certainly been accused of it but this isn’t workaholism. It’s something fundamentally different imo.
Psychologist Robert Vallerand’s research on passion draws exactly this distinction. He found two types of passion for work: harmonious passion (where the activity remains under your control, integrated with your life) and obsessive passion (where the activity controls you through anxiety and compulsion). Both drive long hours. Only one is sustainable and actually improves performance.
I recently asked one of our senior product leaders (a true 10X engineer himself) what really separates the 10X engineers from the rest. I never understood it as a non-technical person. I assumed he’d say decision-making, grit, or resourcefulness etc.
His answer: “Love of the game.”
He explained that some people just can’t stop thinking about their work. When they hit a gnarly engineering problem, they ruminate on it for days (in the shower, on walks, at 2am) until they arrive at some epiphany that solves it in an elegant or novel way.
That’s not something you can train. It’s not something you can incentivize with comp plans or stock. It’s intrinsic. That same mutant bailed our on typical Monday morning workout because he was up until 1:30am building.
Elena Verna (who is an absolute legend in the Growth world) once said that her job is her hobby on a podcast and that always stuck with me. I think we’ve accidentally built a company of people whose jobs are their hobbies at Owner and I’m realizing this might be one of our biggest competitive advantages.
A few examples:
My VP of RevOps, Steve Dinner, spent a good chunk of the holiday break texting me about a Claude-based RevOps agent he was building. Not assigned. Not requested. He just couldn’t help himself. That agent can now do the work of multiple business analysts in minutes and is going to let us ship a bunch of Q1 roadmap items that wouldn’t have made the prioritization cut otherwise.
One of our applied AI leaders said this to his boss: “I used to tell everyone my role at <redacted> was my dream job when I was working there. But this is the real dream job. My Mom is gonna kill me but I’m gonna start working on <redacted> during my vacation hahahaha.” That’s love of the game in action.
His boss said this to me: “I feel like there's a certain persona that finds the stuff we do so fulfilling that it doesn't feel like work / does it in their free time, and I just need to spend all my recruiting energy just finding that.”
We’ve never explicitly screened for this in our hiring process. But I’m making the implicit explicit moving forward because I think it’s a superpower.
How to Screen for This in Interviews
Here are some questions that seem to surface this trait even though it wasn’t intentional:
“What are you building or learning outside of work hours right now?”
“What are you doing with AI right now? What have you build for yourself?”
“What content do you consume about your craft? Podcasts, books, newsletters?”
The answers reveal whether someone is pulled toward the work or just pushing through it.
Workaholics grind because of anxiety, obligation, or external pressure. People with love of the game build because they genuinely can’t help themselves. The energy is completely different—and so is the output. I think this is one of the reasons that we have so many former founders in our EPD organization.
The research backs this up. A meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology found that work engagement (characterized by enjoyment without compulsion) actually protects against depression and burnout. Workaholism, despite the long hours, predicts worse mental health and doesn’t improve performance. The energy source matters more than the hours logged.
How to Attract These People
Your job postings, culture content, and interview process either signal “this is a place for builders” or they don’t.
A few things that I think work:
Be explicit about the pace and intensity of your environment
Talk about what you’re actually building and why it matters
Let your current builders be visible (podcasts, LinkedIn, conference talks)
Don’t oversell work-life balance if you’re a high-growth startup—the right people want the intensity
The wrong people will self-select out. That’s the point.
How to Keep Them
Attracting builders is one thing. Keeping them is another. Here’s what I’ve learned:
1. Let builders build. “Let them cook,” as we say at Owner. Give them room to experiment and tinker. Throw them big, ambiguous projects. If you hire someone with this energy and then saddle them with process and approvals, you’ll kill exactly what made them special.
2. Stay out of their way. These people are allergic to bureaucracy. When they have ideas that seem a bit out there, let them rip. The ROI on letting a builder follow their intuition is enormous.
3. Keep the bar extremely high. Builders want to be around other top talent. If you tolerate mediocrity, your best people will leave. Full stop. You have to performance manage out the folks who aren’t keeping up—not because you’re ruthless, but because your top performers deserve to work alongside other top performers.
These three principles map directly to the three psychological needs that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy (let builders build, stay out of their way), competence (keep the bar extremely high), and relatedness (being surrounded by other top performers). A meta-analysis showed intrinsic motivation accounts for 45% of variance in work engagement and performance, which is nearly triple the impact of extrinsic motivators.
The Compounding Effect
Once you become an environment for builders, they attract builders.
When you hit critical mass of people who treat their work as a craft, it becomes self-reinforcing. They refer their friends. They raise the bar in interviews. They create an environment where that energy is the norm, not the exception.
And then you end up with a Slack that’s active at 1:30am. Not because anyone has to be there, but because they just want to cook.
Perfection
What a beautiful post