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
Taking
Building
Least
Company
Living
People
Irrational
Basically
Putting

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.
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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
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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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 next thing you do is allocate resources.
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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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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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
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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