Keith Rabois Quotes

The team you build is the company you build.

Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.

Treat customer support as a product.

You really need to spend a lot of your time focussing people.

The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.

Being a venture capitalist to me is like being more of a psychologist. So if you come to my office we have two chairs with a table in the middle. And we sit down and it's like, Tell me your problems.

So that's your job too, to clarify and simplify for everybody on your team. The more you simplify the better people will perform.

The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.

Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.

The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.

You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.

Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.

The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and send it to the entire company.

The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds

Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.

You need to simplify the value proposition in the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard.

The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.

It's easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why's of the world, but it's very important to try.

Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.

If the Martians took over eBay it would take 6 months for the world to notice.

Most people would agree that the details matter when it faces the user. But where the real debate is on things that don't face the user.

What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.

The next thing you do is allocate resources.

As the company scales, everybody is not going to get invited to every single meeting, but they're gonna want to go to every meeting.

Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.

Transparency people talk a lot about, it's a goal everybody ascribes to but when push comes to shove, very few people actually adhere to it.

The office environment that people work in everyday dictates the culture that you are going to be in.

I think you must have your own office. I don't believe ever in shared office spaces.

Some people can't learn to play the guitar by reading a book. You have to actually try to manage a bit and you won't do well at first.

I don't believe ever in shared office spaces. Peter talks a little bit about this, every good startup is a cult. It's very hard to create a cult if you're sharing space with people.

Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.

You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.

Building a company is basically taking all the irrational people you know... Putting them in one building and then living with them 12 hrs a day at least.

Build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will.

Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.

You are not going to do most of the work. You shouldn't be doing most of the work... and the way you get out of doing most of the work, is you delegate.

Don't accept the excuse of complexity.

I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product

Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.

The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions.

I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I'm gonna invest, as soon as I walk in.

The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.

You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.

The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.

Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.

The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.

At first when you start a company, everything's gonna feel like a mess and it really should. It should feel like everyday there's a new problem, and what you're doing is fundamentally triaging.

You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.

It's never a metric, it's where the person is going or not. Metrics are used to make things work better, but don't necessarily make a business better.