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
Building
Least
Company
Living
People
Irrational
Basically
Putting
Taking

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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.
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You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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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.
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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
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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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
Keith Rabois
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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
Keith Rabois
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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
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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
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Don't accept the excuse of complexity. A lot of people will tell you, this is too challenging, this is too complicated, yeah well I know other people simplify but that's not for me, this is a complicated business. They're wrong. You can change the world in 140 characters.
Keith Rabois
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You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.
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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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
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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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If the Martians took over eBay it would take 6 months for the world to notice.
Keith Rabois
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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
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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
Keith Rabois