56 Quotes from Keith Rabois on How to Operate
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 14
Published in
5 min readNov 7, 2014
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 14
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
- “I’d actually argue forging a company is far more harder than forging a product”
- 1/“Building a company is basically taking all the irrational people you know…”
- 2/“Putting them in one building and then living with them 12 hrs a day at least.”
- “Basically this is what you want — a high performance machine that idiots can run.”
- 1/“At first when you start a company, everything’s gonna feel like a mess and it really should.”
- 2/“It should feel like everyday there’s a new problem, and what you’re doing is fundamentally triaging.”
- 1/“You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing?”
- 2/”The editor is the best metaphor for your job.”
- “The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.”
- “So that’s your job too, to clarify and simplify for everybody on your team. The more you simplify the better people will perform.”
- “Don’t accept the excuse of complexity.”
- “Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do.”
- “The real thing you do is you ask a lot of questions.”
- “The next thing you do is allocate resources.”
- “The people that work with you should generally come up with their own initiatives.”
- “Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.”
- “The job of an editor is to ensure a consistent voice.”
- “You want to start with the objective of everything should feel exactly the same.”
- 1/“You are not going to do most of the work. You shouldn’t be doing most of the work…”
- 2/“…and the way you get out of doing most of the work, is you delegate.”
- “Any executive, any CEO should not have 1 management style. Your management style needs to be dictated by your employee.”
- “Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.”
- “Delegate completely. Let people make mistakes and learn.”
- “It’s easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why’s of the world, but it’s very important to try.”
- “Possibly the most important thing you do is actually edit the team.”
- “Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don’t get that much more done, you actually sometimes get less done.”
- 1/“Most people, most great people even are ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels.”
- 2/”You can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have, so that’s how the velocity of your company improves…”
- 3/“…is by adding barrels, and then you stock them with ammunition and then you can do a lot.”
- 1/“Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity, promote them, take them to dinner every week…”
- 2/“…because they’re virtually irreplaceable, cuz they’re also culturally very specific.”
- 3/”So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company, because one of the ways the definition of a barrel is..”
- 4/”…they can take an idea from conception all the way through shipping and bring people with them.”
- “What you actually want to do with every single employee, every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks.”
- 1/“If people start going to a desk, some one individual employees desk and they don’t report to them…”
- 2/“…it’s a sign that they believe that person can help them. So if you see that consistently, those are your barrels.”
- 3/”Just promote them, give them more opportunity as fast as you can.”
- 1/“Most people will solve the problems they know how to solve. Roughly speaking they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems.”
- 2/”A+ problems are high impact problems for your company but they’re difficult problems.”
- “You really need to spend a lot of your time focussing people.”
- “Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.”
- “The construct of a dashboard, first of all should be drafted by the founder.”
- “You need to simplify the value proposition in the company’s metrics for success on a whiteboard.”
- “The key metric of whether you’ve succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday.”
- “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.”
- “The way you scale that is you create notes for every meeting and send it to the entire company.”
- “You kinda want to look for the anomalies. You don’t actually want to look for the expected behaviour.”
- “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.”
- “The office environment that people live in and work in, dictates your culture and how people make decisions.”
- “Ultimately, I don’t believe that you can build a company without a lot of effort, and that you need to lead by example.”
- 1/“I don’t believe ever in shared office spaces.”
- 2/”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.”
- “I walk into a company office and I can tell often whether I’m gonna invest, as soon as I walk in.”
- “Treat customer support as a product.”
- “You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.”
- “The agenda should be crafted by the employee who reports to the manager not the manager.”
You can watch the entire lecture for yourself here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec14/
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