Quote

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.

Keith Rabois

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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Better
Complicated
Initiatives
Without
Friends
Simplify
Long
Understand
Framework
Things
Use
Initiative
Thinking
Keep
Repeat
People
Night
Repeats
Three
Perform
Two
Track
Distill

More quotes by Keith Rabois

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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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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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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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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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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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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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You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
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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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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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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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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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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
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If the Martians took over eBay it would take 6 months for the world to notice.
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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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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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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.
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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Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.
Keith Rabois