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 More Quotes by Keith Rabois More Quotes From Keith Rabois The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions. Keith Rabois officedecisionpeople 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 metricsusedpersons The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds Keith Rabois companytermlong 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 technologysuccessfulthinking The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager. Keith Rabois employeeagendasshould You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks. Keith Rabois weekshouldshould-have I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I'm gonna invest, as soon as I walk in. Keith Rabois companywalksoffice 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-spacebelievepeople 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 challengescharacterpeople 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 effortexamplebelieve 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 impactproblempeople 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 opportunitybelievepeople 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 nighttwothinking 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 breakresponsibilitywant The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives. Keith Rabois initiativeshouldpeople The next thing you do is allocate resources. Keith Rabois resourcesnext 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 rededitorsmean Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. Keith Rabois initiativeforcemarketing Don't accept the excuse of complexity. Keith Rabois complexityexcuseaccepting I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product Keith Rabois hardercompanyarguing
