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

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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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.
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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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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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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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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
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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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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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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You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
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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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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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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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 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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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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