Keith Rabois Quotes
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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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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 people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.
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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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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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The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
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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.
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I think you must have your own office. I don't believe ever in shared office spaces.
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You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.
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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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Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.
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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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You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.
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The next thing you do is allocate resources.
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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.
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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 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.
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Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.
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You really need to spend a lot of your time focussing people.
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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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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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Treat customer support as a product.
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The team you build is the company you build.
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The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions.
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Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.
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I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I'm gonna invest, as soon as I walk in.
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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.
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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.
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