Keith Rabois
The team you build is the company you build.Collection: Team
Treat customer support as a product.Collection: Support
Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.Collection: Style
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.Collection: Too Much
You really need to spend a lot of your time focussing people.Collection: People
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Jobs
The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.Collection: Keys
You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look for the expected behaviour.Collection: Looks
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.Collection: Night
Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.Collection: Mistake
Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.Collection: Marketing
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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Character
Build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Mean
The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions.Collection: People
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.Collection: Unique
Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.Collection: People
The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.Collection: Real
I'd actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a productCollection: Arguing
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.Collection: Way
Don't accept the excuse of complexity.Collection: Excuse
The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Believe
Ultimately, I don't believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.Collection: Believe
You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Want
The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and send it to the entire company.Collection: Way
The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.Collection: People
The next thing you do is allocate resources.Collection: Next
Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Ideas
What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Everyday
Basically this is what you want - a high performance machine that idiots can run.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Successful
The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed roundsCollection: Long
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.Collection: Metrics
The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.Collection: Agendas
You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.Collection: Should Have
You need to simplify the value proposition in the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard.Collection: Needs
The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.Collection: Dashboards
Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.Collection: Team
Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.Collection: Done
Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.Collection: Opinion
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.Collection: Office Space