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

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

Keith Rabois

style management needs

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

Keith Rabois

people needs

The team you build is the company you build.

Keith Rabois

company team

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

venture-capitalists office two

Treat customer support as a product.

Keith Rabois

treats support customers

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

Keith Rabois

editors jobs mean

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

Keith Rabois

real-things asks real

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

keys people moving

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

team jobs people

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

Keith Rabois

dashboards everyday keys

Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.

Keith Rabois

delegates mistake people

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 process enough

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

Keith Rabois

metrics simplify needs

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

Keith Rabois

dashboards should firsts

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

scales company want

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

Keith Rabois

ebay months world

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

Keith Rabois

tools decision people

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

Keith Rabois

scales notes way

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

Keith Rabois

behaviour anomalies looks

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

marketing simple character