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
Least
Company
Living
People
Irrational
Basically
Putting
Taking
Building

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
Keith Rabois
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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
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The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
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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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You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.
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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 job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
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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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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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
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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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What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.
Keith Rabois
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Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
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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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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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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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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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
Keith Rabois