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.

When you start a company everything is going to feel like a mess. And it really should. If you have too much process, too much predictability, you are probably not innovating fast enough and creatively enough.

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.

The key to culture is it's a framework for making decisions. And if it's baked into your culture, people learn how to make decisions across that culture without you ever saying anything. You never have to really do anything except watch and promote and move people around.

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.

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.

Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company. One of the ways, the definition of a barrel is, they can take an idea from conception and take it all the way to shipping and bring people with them.

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.

The first thing that editor does is they take out a red pen, or nowadays you go online, and they start striking things. Basically eliminating things, the biggest task of an editor is to simplify, simplify, simplify and that usually means omitting things.

It's actually a good thing if you do reference checks on somebody and half the people you call say they are a micromanager and the other half say they actually give me a lot of responsibility. That's a feature not a bug.

You can build the most important companies in history with a very simple to describe concept. You can market products in less than 50 characters. There is no reason why you can't build your company the same way. So force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. Basically take out that red and start eliminating stuff.

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

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

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.

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.

There are three things you need to do as a CEO-founder. Think strategically, drive design, and drive technology. Some people who are really good at one can build a pretty foundational company. Most people who are very successful are good at two. But Jack is the only person in the Valley I've met who's all three. He's a first-rate strategist, a first-rate designer, and a first-rate technologist.

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.

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

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

Most people will solve the problems they know how to solve. Roughly speaking they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high impact problems for your company but they're difficult problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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