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
Problem
Firsts
Everything
Fundamentally
First
Mess
Feel
Gonna
Feels
Everyday
Really
Company
Like
Start

More quotes by 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.
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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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It's easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why's of the world, but it's very important to try.
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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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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.
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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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Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.
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Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
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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.
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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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.
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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.
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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
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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.
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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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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
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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.
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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
Keith Rabois