Quote

The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.

Keith Rabois

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Mean
Important
Omitting
Things
Simplify
Editor
Editors
Usually
Means
Jobs

More quotes by Keith Rabois

Image
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
Image
The next thing you do is allocate resources.
Keith Rabois
Image
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
Image
I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
Keith Rabois
Image
You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
Keith Rabois
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.
Keith Rabois
Image
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
Image
If the Martians took over eBay it would take 6 months for the world to notice.
Keith Rabois
Image
Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
Keith Rabois
Image
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
Image
Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.
Keith Rabois
Image
Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.
Keith Rabois
Image
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
Image
Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
Keith Rabois
Image
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
Image
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