Quote

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.

Keith Rabois

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Keith Rabois
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: March 17
Businessperson
Executive Management
Investor
Edison Township
Tell
Venture
Two
Chairs
Problem
Capitalist
Come
Table
Like
Tables
Office
Problems
Middle
Psychologist

More quotes by 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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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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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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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.
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.
Keith Rabois
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The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
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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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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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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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I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
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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.
Keith Rabois
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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.
Keith Rabois
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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.
Keith Rabois
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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.
Keith Rabois
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Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.
Keith Rabois
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The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
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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The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
Keith Rabois
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The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
Keith Rabois