Hi everyone, Happy Monday!
Let me give a brief about today’s Titan, Keith Rabois before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about, and 3 short lessons from him for you to read this week.
Keith Rabois (@rabois) is a General Partner at Founders Fund. At Khosla, Keith focuses on the consumer internet, education, enterprise, financial services, and digital health. He is considered a member of the PayPal Mafia. He’s had five bosses in his career: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Jack Dorsey, and Vinod Khosla.
1 STORY FOR YOU
Hiring Philosophy
Peter Theil taught me this in my first week. In November of 2000 we went for a jog around the Stanford campus, And Peter really asked me sort of in a classic CEO orientation, perspective, what do you think has company going? What are your perspectives? You know, any insights we might have, we had a long conversation though about hiring people.
And he gave me his complete philosophy of building a company, which is that you had to find undiscovered talent that as a startup you'd never be able to compete with the powers that be in terms of cash compensation, safety and various other, you know, sort of comfort factors, perks and that the only way to build a company from scratch, so it was going to be sustainable, was to find people that the large companies didn't know how to process or didn't want to process effectively.
Basically what he said was, look, after the age of 30 there's enough data points on anybody's resume and these days, LinkedIn profile that all companies can roughly assess you equally and so that you can't build a competitive advantage by assessing people who've been in the business world for a while. You have to go really young when there's less data, so less proven evidence in the larger companies don't know how to process.
The spectacular successes come from finding people before they're sort of well known. So it's a little bit more like drafting a high school basketball player,
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“Rather than focus on the score, focus on the process in everything you do, day in and day out”
“You want to aim to build a business that’s so strong that over time, a bunch of people who are clearly only B- B+ can run the company with continued success”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Read and consume content that has stood the test of time
Most content people consume was produced in the last 24 hours. What if you instead aimed to consume more content that’s stood the test of time?
“Grappling with longer form written content tends to force your brain to build new neurons in a way that short doses of content don’t”
Almost everybody I know who’s successful is a voracious reader. In addition to that, Almost every great writer is a voracious, voracious reader
It’s sometimes better to be naive
“People who are naive about markets, do better than those who know about them”
Examples:
At Paypal, only 3 people knew anything about financial services
The Collison brothers started Stripe, and they knew very little about payments
Elon Musk knew nothing about cars before starting Tesla
Keith knew nothing about real estate when he started Opendoor
“If you have a lot of industry experience, you tend to take things for granted, and you don’t ask a lot of, ‘Why?’ questions”
It’s harder to disassociate yourself from the rules that you’ve learned
Manage people on inputs not outputs.
“If you judge people based on outputs, nobody on your team will take on the more difficult tasks”
So, to incentivize employees to complete these extremely ambitious tasks, gauge the quality of their work based on how it effective it was at getting you towards an ambitious goal
In a sense, you’re judging the creativity and thoughtfulness that goes into their initiatives
Reading Links -
https://www.perell.com/podcast/keith-rabois
Book recommendations - https://www.mostrecommendedbooks.com/keith-rabois-books
https://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec14/
https://firstround.com/review/Keith-Rabois-on-the-role-of-a-COO-how-to-hire-and-why-transparency-matters/
That’s it from me, until next Monday! Be safe and stay indoors :)
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