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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
Notice
Took
Months
Take
Would
World
Martians
Ebay

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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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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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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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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.
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The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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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.
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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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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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You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
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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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Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
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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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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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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
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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 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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