Keith Rabois

• A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighbouring organizations under his influence
• Square - learnt the concept of “Editing”. How to think about your job. Are you “Editing” or “Writing”
• The most important job of an “Editor” is to clarify and simplify, delete unnecessarily and distil it down. Simplify every initiative in everything you do and start eliminating stuff.
• Don’t accept the excuse of “Complexity”
• Editors next need to do is Allocate Resources. It could be top-down or bottom-up
• The goal is to use less red ink every day to strike out, measure yourself in your efficiency of editing
• Ensure a consistent voice, everything should feel the same. Apple Steve’s regime is very strict about this and makes sure that everything feels like an Apple product
• Writers do most of the work, you need to delegate and be responsible for everything
• Task-relevant maturity concept - the more they have done before and are good at it, the more rope you are giving them, and the less the more advice and guidance you give.
• Low confidence, Low impact > delegate it, high conviction, high impact > step in, decide, overrule
• Edit the team - Barrels & Ammunition concept. The mistake is to over-expand and increase horsepower and velocity, the more the less gets done, and most people are ammunition. You need to find barrels to promote them, they are hard to find. Accumulate ammunition when there’s a barrel.
• How to tell barrel vs ammunition, start with something trivial with some rewards. Expand the scope of responsibility until they break, keep expanding until you see where it breaks and that’s where the role and sophistication there are, keep testing and pushing the envelope.
• Every company has its own growth rate and every individual has their own growth rate. Linkedin was always a very linear company, 27th employee and 57th after 2 years. Contrast he is the 20th employee and 200+ after that.
• Track individual slope of growth rate vs company growth rate.
• Insist on focus, Focus on people. Peter Theil insists that everyone in the company only does 1 singular task. He enforces this strictly and only wants to hear what u are doing in that task.
• Most people would only solve problem B+ and not high-impact problems, so they procrastinate, overall the entire company does that and they just can’t get the breakthrough.
• Metrics & Transparency, create a dashboard. Founder should do that find everything and draw out what does business success looks like to us, Must be very intuitive for everyone. The key success is also how many people use that dashboard
• Measure outputs, not inputs
• Pairing indicators: measure effect & counter effect. E.g. number of hires vs quality hires, number of loss rate vs false positives