LaBossiere Podcast

Key Takeaways 

• World-class founders are the scarce resource: Every investor is chasing after the 5-10-15 founders a year that have a non-zero probability of rearranging the planet to their will
• You either have a superpower, or you don’t; you need to be in the top 1% on some dimension or you have no chance of creating the next Nvidia 
• Identify a crack in the world where things are volatile or in transition, and build solutions that address those opportunistic gaps  
• How to attract talent: Embrace and foster strong cultural principles that can differentiate your company from other companies – and be sure that those principles are authentic 
• The framework for understanding when to promote comes down to whether an employee’s growth rate is outpacing the growth of the company  
• Knowing how much capital to raise: Identify the two or three inflection points that will make the startup successful, then work backward from those and calculate the capital needed to reach each of them 
• The biggest mistake that founders make is that they don’t do reference checks on investors 
• Most MBA-esque wisdom is bad: People default to hiring because they want to manage people; new teams get created but nothing new gets done – this creates complacency and makes it challenging to tell the good employees from the bad ones
• The job of the CEO is to clarify and simplify the company’s initiatives, then strategically allocate resources against those goals – all done in the interest of ensuring a consistent voice 
• It is the CEO’s responsibility to disseminate as much high-signal information as possible so that everybody has the same context; doing this increases the probability that more people will naturally arrive at the correct decision 
• Making the decision and deciding that you are going to be successful is more important than the option value of waiting 
• Focus on inputs not outputs: People within your organization won’t take sufficient risks if the perception is that results are the only thing that matters 
• Challenge yourself: “You either want to write something worth reading, or do something worth writing about.” – Ben Franklin 

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Keith Rabois is a Managing Partner at Khosla Ventures and the CEO of OpenStore, which acquires small direct-to-consumer businesses. Keith co-founded Opendoor and led the first institutional investments in DoorDash and Affirm. He has early stakes in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Wish, and also led investments in Faire, Ramp, Trade Republic, and Stripe. He’s regarded as one of the greatest early stage investors.

Keith began his career in the industry as a senior executive at PayPal and subsequently served in influential roles at LinkedIn and as chief operating officer of Square. As a board member, Keith guided Yelp and Xoom from inception to IPO, and served on the board of Reddit from 2012-2018.

0:00 - Intro1:56 - Great Founders and the Bottleneck to Innovation4:35 - Vertical Integration6:24 - The Hollywood Model of Startups7:41 - The “Why Now?” in Company-Building9:50 - Multi-Product Companies10:58 - Iteration and Pivots12:52 - Picking Co-Founders14:51 - Identifying Mispriced Talent17:20 - Attracting Talent20:57 - Assessing Talent24:02 - Doing References25:56 - Closing Hires28:28 - Thinking 6 Months Ahead31:36 - How Long Should You Interview For?33:28 - Creating a Monopoly on Talent35:44 - Raising Capital37:40 - Screening Investors41:21 - Building a Board44:11 - Triaging and Identifying Problems47:59 - Writing vs Editing and Consistent Voice49:34 - Creating Transparency50:50 - Barrels and Ammunition54:55 - Task-Relevant Maturity56:40 - On Delegating59:21 - Measuring Inputs vs Outputs1:02:58 - Underrated Metrics

1:05:22 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

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