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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

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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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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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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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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Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
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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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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 kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.
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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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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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 job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
Keith Rabois
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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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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
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Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
Keith Rabois
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You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
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.
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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
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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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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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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
Keith Rabois