I'm not a huge sports fan. The extent of my sports identity is winning or getting close to winning my March Madness bracket every year. Because really, you just need to guess who is going to have those upsets.

But someone sent me a blog post last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. The original piece referenced a basketball player named Shane Battier, who, if you’re like me, you’ve probably never heard of. An NBA player without the kind of stats or recognition you’d expect from someone on winning teams. And yet every team he played on mysteriously started winning.

His general manager called him “the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he had ever seen,” someone who helped the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that didn’t always serve his own personal interests.

I had to ask my sports-fanatic husband who Shane Battier was. But the concept? I didn’t need anyone to explain that.

The author's observation is that startups have the same person. And they almost always show up in operations.

The "Everything Else" Role

Chiefs of Staff. Directors of Operations. COOs. The person whose job description is defined by responsibility for “everything else.” The work that doesn’t show up in a board deck but keeps the company from falling apart.

The list of clues for spotting them is painfully accurate:

• They tend to last longer than most people at early-stage companies
• When they leave, the people who know what they’re worth don’t stay far behind
• Their role looks vague on paper, but anyone who’s worked with them will tell you they held everything together
• They’ll go from building a board deck to fixing a broken process to restocking snacks in the same afternoon without thinking twice
• When something is broken and no one owns it, they already do

If you've worked at an early-stage company, you know this person. In fact, you might be this person.

Why They're Undervalued

The problem with the no-stats all-star is that their impact is felt most clearly in their absence. When they’re doing their job well, the team is aligned, decisions move faster, nothing falls through the cracks, and the founder has space to focus on the work only they can do. It just looks like the company is running smoothly.

When something breaks, that’s when everyone notices. This is what typically creates a valuation problem. Founders can point to the engineer who shipped the feature, the sales rep who closed the deal, the marketer who drove pipeline.

The person who built the system that allowed all of those things to happen on time and in coordination? Their contribution is harder to put on a slide.

It also creates a retention problem. No-stats all-stars eventually realize that the market doesn’t always see their value the way their team does. They get overlooked for promotions because their wins don’t come with a number attached. They watch people with flashier titles and narrower roles advance faster. And then they leave. And the company feels it immediately.

What Founders Can Do About It

Basketball stats have since evolved to better capture what players like Battier actually contribute. The best teams were the first to adopt these new metrics. The worst teams were the last. The same applies to startups. The founders and CEOs who build great teams are the ones who learn to see and value the no-stats all-star before someone else does. A few things that help:

Name the contribution.
If someone on your team is the reason things run smoothly, say it out loud. In team meetings, in board updates, in their performance review. The work being invisible doesn’t mean the recognition should be.

Compensate for impact, not visibility.
If your comp philosophy rewards people based on measurable outputs alone, you're systematically undervaluing the people who make those outputs possible.

Give them a seat at the table.
No-stats all-stars often have the best pattern recognition on the team because they see across functions. If they’re not in the room when strategic decisions are being made, you're leaving insight on the table.

Don’t wait until they’re gone.
This is the most common version of the story. The person leaves, and within weeks the founder is drowning in things they didn’t realize anyone was managing. By then, it’s too late.

The Quiet Ones Build the Loudest Things

Early-stage companies are defined by the people willing to do the unglamorous work. The ones who figure it out, whatever “it” is that day, without needing to be told, without needing credit, and without needing a title that reflects the scope of what they actually do. Every team has them, or should. If you have one, make sure they know you see them. Because eventually someone else will.

Sara Eshelman's original publication: Who's your no-stats all-star?