Keith Rabois Quotes

The team you build is the company you build.

Treat customer support as a product.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Don't accept the excuse of complexity.