Quote

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
Metaphor
Generally
Asks
Jobs
Someone
Best
Editor
Writing
Editing
Something
Editors

More quotes by 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.
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The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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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.
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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.
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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
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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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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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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.
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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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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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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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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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
Keith Rabois