Quote

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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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Like
Start
Problem
Firsts
Everything
Fundamentally
First
Mess
Feel
Gonna
Feels
Everyday
Really
Company

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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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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 people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
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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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
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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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
Keith Rabois
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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
Keith Rabois
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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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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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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Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
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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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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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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