Keith Rabois famous quotes

Treat customer support as a product.
-- Keith Rabois

#Support #Treats #Customers

The team you build is the company you build.
-- Keith Rabois

#Team #Company

Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.
-- Keith Rabois

#Style #Needs #Management

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

#Too Much #Enough #Process

The key to culture is it's a framework for making decisions. And if it's baked into your culture, people learn how to make decisions across that culture without you ever saying anything. You never have to really do anything except watch and promote and move people around.
-- Keith Rabois

#Moving #Keys #People

You really need to spend a lot of your time focussing people.
-- Keith Rabois

#People #Needs

So that's your job too, to clarify and simplify for everybody on your team. The more you simplify the better people will perform.
-- Keith Rabois

#Jobs #Team #People

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

#Night #Thinking #Two

Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.
-- Keith Rabois

#Mistake #People #Delegates

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

#Two #Office #Venture Capitalists

The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.
-- Keith Rabois

#Keys #Everyday #Dashboards

Build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will.
-- Keith Rabois

#Running #Idiot #Company

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

#People #Building #Irrational

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

#Character #People #Challenges

Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.
-- Keith Rabois

#People #Decision #Tools

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

#Way #Delegates

You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.
-- Keith Rabois

#Looks #Behaviour #Anomalies

Don't accept the excuse of complexity.
-- Keith Rabois

#Excuse #Accepting #Complexity

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#Unique #Numbers #People

Every good startup is a cult. And it's really hard to create a cult if you are sharing space with people. Because a cult means you think you are better than every other startup, you have a special way of doing things that's better than anyone else in the world.
-- Keith Rabois

#Mean #Thinking #Space

Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.
-- Keith Rabois

#Marketing #Initiative #Force

The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
-- Keith Rabois

#Jobs #Mean #Editors

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

#Believe #Opportunity #People

I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product
-- Keith Rabois

#Arguing #Harder #Company

Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.
-- Keith Rabois

#Believe #Effort #Example

The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.
-- Keith Rabois

#Real #Asks #Real Things

What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.
-- Keith Rabois

#Responsibility #Want #Break

The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions.
-- Keith Rabois

#People #Office #Decision

Most people would agree that the details matter when it faces the user. But where the real debate is on things that don't face the user.
-- Keith Rabois

#Real #People #Details

You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
-- Keith Rabois

#Want #Should #Feels

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#Jobs #Writing #Editing

Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.
-- Keith Rabois

#Opinion #Lows #Should

You need to simplify the value proposition in the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard.
-- Keith Rabois

#Needs #Metrics #Simplify

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#Everyday #Firsts #Problem

Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
-- Keith Rabois

#Running #Want #Machines

There are three things you need to do as a CEO-founder. Think strategically, drive design, and drive technology. Some people who are really good at one can build a pretty foundational company. Most people who are very successful are good at two. But Jack is the only person in the Valley I've met who's all three. He's a first-rate strategist, a first-rate designer, and a first-rate technologist.
-- Keith Rabois

#Successful #Technology #Thinking

The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds
-- Keith Rabois

#Long #Term #Company

Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.
-- Keith Rabois

#Done #Sometimes #Engineers

Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
-- Keith Rabois

#Goal #Ink #Use

The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
-- Keith Rabois

#People #Initiative #Should

The next thing you do is allocate resources.
-- Keith Rabois

#Next #Resources

Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company. One of the ways, the definition of a barrel is, they can take an idea from conception and take it all the way to shipping and bring people with them.
-- Keith Rabois

#Ideas #People #Giving

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#Metrics #Used #Persons

Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
-- Keith Rabois

#Team #Important #Important Things

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#Want #Scales #Company

The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.
-- Keith Rabois

#Jobs #Editors #Voice

The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.
-- Keith Rabois

#Dashboards #Firsts #Should

I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I'm gonna invest, as soon as I walk in.
-- Keith Rabois

#Office #Walks #Company

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

#Office Space #Believe #People

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

#Important #Trying #World

The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.
-- Keith Rabois

#Agendas #Should #Employee

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

#Impact #People #Problem

You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
-- Keith Rabois

#Should Have #Week #Should

The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and send it to the entire company.
-- Keith Rabois

#Way #Notes #Scales

Some people can't learn to play the guitar by reading a book. You have to actually try to manage a bit and you won't do well at first.
-- Keith Rabois

#Reading #Book #Guitar

I think you must have your own office. I don't believe ever in shared office spaces.
-- Keith Rabois

#Office Space #Believe #Thinking

The office environment that people work in everyday dictates the culture that you are going to be in.
-- Keith Rabois

#People #Office #Everyday

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#People #Goal #Transparency

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.
-- Keith Rabois

#Responsibility #People #Giving

You can build the most important companies in history with a very simple to describe concept. You can market products in less than 50 characters. There is no reason why you can't build your company the same way. So force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. Basically take out that red and start eliminating stuff.
-- Keith Rabois

#Character #Simple #Marketing

The first thing that editor does is they take out a red pen, or nowadays you go online, and they start striking things. Basically eliminating things, the biggest task of an editor is to simplify, simplify, simplify and that usually means omitting things.
-- Keith Rabois

#Mean #Editors #Red

If the Martians took over eBay it would take 6 months for the world to notice.
-- Keith Rabois

#Ebay #World #Months