Quote

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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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Enough
Creatively
Feel
Mess
Feels
Fast
Going
Probably
Much
Company
Really
Start
Like
Process
Innovating
Everything
Predictability

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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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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The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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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.
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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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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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You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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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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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 most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
Keith Rabois