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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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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Took
Months
Take
Would
World
Martians
Ebay
Notice

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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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The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
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.
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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.
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Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
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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.
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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
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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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Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
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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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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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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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