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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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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Something
Editors
Metaphor
Generally
Asks
Jobs
Someone
Best
Editor
Writing
Editing

More quotes by 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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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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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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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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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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Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.
Keith Rabois
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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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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
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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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 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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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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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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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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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You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
Keith Rabois
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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.
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