Keith Rabois Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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're virtually irreplaceable, cuz they're also culturally very specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company, because one of the ways the definition of a barrel is.. they can take an idea from conception all the way through shipping and bring people with them.

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.

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.

The more you simplify, the better people will perform. People can not understand and keep track of a long complicated set of initiatives. So you have to distill it down to one, two, or three things and use a framework they can repeat, they can repeat without thinking about, they can repeat to their friends, they can repeat at night.

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

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.

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

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

Most people, most great people even are ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels. You can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have, so that's how the velocity of your company improves ... is by adding barrels, and then you stock them with ammunition and then you can do a lot.

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

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

There are three things you need to do as a CEO-founder," Rabois says: "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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Treat customer support as a product.

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.

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

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

Don't accept the excuse of complexity.

If people start going to a desk, some one individual employees desk and they don't report to them ... it's a sign that they believe that person can help them. So if you see that consistently, those are your barrels. Just promote them, give them more opportunity as fast as you can.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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