Quote

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

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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Living
People
Irrational
Basically
Putting
Taking
Building
Least
Company

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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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
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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
Keith Rabois
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Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.
Keith Rabois
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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
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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
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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
Keith Rabois
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You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
Keith Rabois
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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
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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
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Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
Keith Rabois
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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
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Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.
Keith Rabois
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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
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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
Keith Rabois
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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
Keith Rabois
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Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.
Keith Rabois
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
Keith Rabois
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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
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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.
Keith Rabois
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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
Keith Rabois