Cool, he gives no good reasons why we should be hiring any of these people. My company already has the first two (and for our business, they are very worthwhile and valued employees) but it doesn't have the third. I am skeptical of drawing on outside talent to get things done because it inevitably leads to a situation where two parties are deeply invested in the product but have no understanding of one anothers' systems. From personal experience, this led to a product that was inefficient and hard to maintain for no good reason other than that it was spread across several organizations that could not directly manage one other.
Seth should be at least enumerating situations where these roles will shine.
I was hoping he'd say hire 3 amazing programmers. In general any company that works online right now would benefit more from the order of magnitude increases in productivity that great programmers bring. The jobs he describes are all managerial (the stats guy less so), and as such require communication - which means that at best, they're going to bring incremental improvements. Obviously those get magnified by the staff that reports to them. Which means that you're actually hiring 3 amazing people and multiple more "staff" to magnify their effect.
In my opinion, you're better off hiring 3 amazing programmers.
Seth should be at least enumerating situations where these roles will shine.