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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.

Keith Rabois

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

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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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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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Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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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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Being a venture capitalist to me is like being more of a psychologist. So if you come to my office we have two chairs with a table in the middle. And we sit down and it's like, Tell me your problems.
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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
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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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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
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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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You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
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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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