Keith Rabois Quotes

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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.

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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.

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“Don't accept the excuse of complexity.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“The next thing you do is allocate resources.”

— Keith Rabois

“Treat customer support as a product.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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.

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

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

— Keith Rabois

“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.”

— Keith Rabois