Few people in the history of startups have seen more examples of excellence than Keith Rabois. Not surprisingly, Keith is also one of the best investors in Silicon Valley, having achieved great success as an Angel and now at Founders Fund.
Keith Rabois:
When you learn that there's going to be a bit of ups and downs, it's kind of part of the territory, you learn to get excited by that, and the challenges become positive challenges versus challenging.
Mike Maples:
That's Keith Rabois, original member of the PayPal Mafia. Not only that, he was a key player at the startup teams at LinkedIn, Square, and was later a founder of Opendoor. Keith has seen the differences and similarities between some of the greatest founders of our time, and as you will soon see, knows more about startups than just about anybody, anywhere. This is Mike Maples, Jr., and it's go time with Keith Rabois.
Mike Maples:
How many people have built startups with Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Jack Dorsey, while later founding a billion dollar startup while working with Vinod Khosla? It would be hard to find someone with more varied exposure to startup excellence than Keith Rabois. When it comes to leadership methods, Keith has seen many great leaders in action, and synthesized his own leadership philosophies in ways that are incredibly valuable for startup founders. Through it all, he's maintained his contrarian streak, which is a key factor to his success. Now in his current state, is a partner at Founders Fund. Let's talk to him.
Mike Maples:
Keith Rabois, thanks for joining the podcast.
Keith Rabois:
Pleasure to be here with you.
Mike Maples:
Keith, I wanted to start out with your early role on the amazing team for PayPal. You think about all those people who were there, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Stoppelman. Then you've got Elon Musk coming into the mix later on. That's a lot of personalities in one place. Did that ever go off the rails at all?
Keith Rabois:
Yeah, we had three CEOs in six months, so I guess that means going off the rails fairly often. We had a burn rate of $10 million in August of 2000 with less than six weeks of cash left. That would probably qualify as going partially off the rails.
Mike Maples:
I know it was quite a ride with that group, but were there any near-death experiences where you thought to yourself, "I just don't think this is going to work?"
Keith Rabois:
I had a near-death experience almost every day. Literally every day. Partially it was, a huge fraction of my job and responsibility was to keep people from killing us. But we had a lot of enemies back then. Visa and MasterCard hated us, Ebay hated us, the federal government post-9/11 wanted to regulate us. Various states didn't like us. The state of Louisiana tried to shut us down on the precipice of our IPO in February of 2002, for practicing banking without a charter. I was managing these sort of existential threats all day long.
Keith Rabois:
In fact, one of the biggest reasons, perhaps the single biggest driver of our ultimate acquisition by Ebay, even after we had an IPO, was the feeling and fear that most of the executive team shared. That although we'd done an outstanding job juggling all these crises, that eventually one might actually kill us, and that Reid Hoffman also worked on many of these projects as well as our general counsel John Muller. Although Keith, Reid, and John collectively were doing an awesome job of keeping us from being shot, there was a significant fear that at some point, someone might shoot a bullet at us that we didn't correctly deflect.
Keith Rabois:
The Treasury Department post-9/11, which was about as macro event as you'll ever experience in your life, was promulgating regulations that would have significantly impacted and impaired our business. I took on the project of convincing the Treasury Department to rewrite the regulations, which everybody thought was impossible.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
You have to imagine the fervor ... This is one month post-9/11. I actually even wasn't optimistic when I took on the project. But we figured out a set of strategies and tactics that actually did start to resonate, and then I was pleasantly surprised with the traction we got. We got so much traction that the undersecretary of the treasury at one point called me up on the phone and said, "What do I have to do, and what do I have to promise you to make this stop?" Because I had so many people yelling at the Treasury Department that they had literally called and said, "Here's the white flag, what do we need to do to concede?"
Mike Maples:
How do we work this out?
Keith Rabois:
Yeah. That actually possibly saved the company.
Mike Maples:
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up this idea that failure doesn't have to be an option. One of my favorite metaphors comes from car racing, when you're learning how to drive a car fast, the instructor tells you to not look at the pens, but rather look at the path through the pens. To me, entrepreneurship is a lot like that. You realize the problems are there, but you have to realize that every problem has a solution, and there's always a path out of this or through this.
Keith Rabois:
I just learned this yesterday. That Stripe has an adage that every problem is a leadership problem, and I kind of like that. I think that's roughly right. The right people doing the right things tends to produce solutions. And with enough time horizon, because as you wait, your set of options get incredibly reduced, so the earlier you identify that you have potential issues, the menu of options and levers you have under your control and at your disposal are substantially greater than any last-minute development.
Keith Rabois:
I think a lot of solution and problem-solving is being two steps ahead, or ahead of the curve, so that you have the entire gamut of options at your disposal, and then it's choosing wisely.
Mike Maples:
It helps a team's morale too, I think. If something goes wrong, you just tell your employees that you anticipated it might happen, and there are ways around this problem.
Keith Rabois:
Yeah. It also affects who you hire. Paul Graham has a wonderful blog post called Relentlessly Resourceful which I really subscribe to. Basically what you want are to hire in your startup, are people who are relentlessly resourceful. I used to use the term tenacity, or tenacious. But I think relentlessly resourceful is a better metaphor, and basically it's people who when they see an obstacle, like a wall in front of them, will figure out how to go under the wall, over the wall, around the wall, make friends with the wall. They shock you with solutions.
Keith Rabois:
If you have a company that's scaled on people who are relentlessly resourceful, not surprisingly people walk in with answers that work.
Mike Maples:
Going back to PayPal a little bit here. You obviously learned a few things from Peter Thiel. What do you think are the most durable or long-lasting lessons you learned from that experience with him?
Keith Rabois:
Focusing on undiscovered talent, how to scale that, assess that, and then mentor it. Truthfully, I wasn't very good at assessing it back in 2000 when we had this conversation. You must hire people who are undiscovered talents. You cannot recruit people that are already proven. The reason why is, there's always going to be large incumbents. Back then it was more like Yahoo or AOL or Microsoft or-
Mike Maples:
Ebay, or ...
Keith Rabois:
Yeah, Ebay. That would just basically outbid you for proven talent. They would pay more money than what you could afford to prudently spend as a startup. But if you could find people that didn't have these proof points on their resume, and you could assess them accurately, you could compete in building a team that was very differentiated and didn't have to pay these exorbitant cash compensations. In practice, what we actually did was, Peter recruited business people and marketing people, mostly from Stanford. His Stanford network. That's actually how I originally met Peter.
Keith Rabois:
And Max Levchin, the other cofounder of PayPal, recruited all of the engineering talent from the University of Illinois, in his network growing up in Chicago and University Illinois. We married the two together, Stanford plus University of Illinois. Which has actually proven to be the best two possible networks for Silicon Valley.
Mike Maples:
But that's also kind of interesting, because it's not just about recruiting unconventional talent, but part of it is that you know something the market doesn't know yet, who's good. So Peter knew something that the market didn't know about some of his colleagues at Stanford, and I suppose Max did at the University of Illinois.
Keith Rabois:
Yeah, that's one way of hacking the system, is sort of to recruit people that you have a preexisting relationship with, because you have asymmetric ability to assess them. The hardest part afterwards is to manage them. There's a skill and discipline in managing people that you know well and are friends, and it's very different than managing strangers. To be thoughtful and successful at the strategy, you have to be pretty clear-eyed about your friends' strengths and weaknesses, and not everybody can do that well.
Mike Maples:
With PayPal, it sounds like that was more the rule than the exception. How did you guys get stuff done when a lot of you knew each other before PayPal even started?
Keith Rabois:
Peter is a pretty draconian manager. He can be very rational and very non-emotional. He is extremely capable of assessing people around him that he's known well, and identifying their strengths and weaknesses and providing feedback. But this isn't a strategy that would work for everybody. I know people who have tried to replicate the PayPal strategy and it really hasn't worked, because they get confused by their personal relationships, and are unwilling to tease those apart. It can be phenomenally successful, because you do have asymmetric ability, but you have to back that up with a very rational assessment of the people you're working with.
Mike Maples:
This reminds me of something that I've heard you talk about in the past. This notion of thinking about inputs and not just outputs, particularly in the startup phase. That seems pretty important, so I think people would be interested in your take on that.
Keith Rabois:
Yeah, so it's not an original thought, I'm borrowing it explicitly from Jeff Bezos. I was fortunate enough to listen to a lunch speech that he gave, and without revealing things he said off the record, he basically had this philosophy that you need to manage people by inputs, not outputs. The basic rationale is, first of all if you judge people by outputs, nobody on your team is going to take on the higher beta, more difficult tasks. Because they're worried about their professional progression, your assessment of them.
Keith Rabois:
So if you say, "Hey Keith, I want to go to Mars." Everybody who is really talented and worried about their career is not going to raise their hand.
Mike Maples:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Keith Rabois:
But that may be the thing you need to do, is to actually literally go to mars. The way you incentivize people to try to go to Mars, is you gauge the quality of their work in getting close to going to Mars. You can tell how creative they were, how thoughtful they were, how disciplined they were, how fast they were, has nothing to do with whether they actually get to Mars. This is the management philosophy of how you take on the biggest possible ROI projects that may have a lot of risk. I mean, I used to have this philosophy personally at Square, that until we were very large, I used to tell our team, and my team, that the only thing I cared about was adding zeroes to the dashboard. I didn't want projects that could add 10%, because we weren't going to be an important company unless we were 10X and then another 10X, and arguably another 10X.
Keith Rabois:
Basically, we'd go around to our product team, to our marketing team, and say, "I want zeroes, and if this project can't get us a zero, then let's not do this. Let's prioritize something else that might have the potential for a zero." But the way you encourage and excite people to work on those 10X projects is you have to be able to assess them, not based upon whether it actually gets to the zero, but about the creativity and thoughtfulness that went into the initiative.
Mike Maples:
You also worked with another pretty impressive founder in Jack Dorsey, and also pre-launch at Square. What was he like, and how was his approach similar or different from Peter's?
Keith Rabois:
Jack's approach is actually quite different than Peter's. Even though you can argue that PayPal and Square are somewhat comparable businesses.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
Right, similar markets, similar products-
Mike Maples:
Certainly financial services, yeah.
Keith Rabois:
In some ways. It's a good comparison, because other companies like Twitter are so different that I don't know if the management philosophy differences are as stark. At Square, everything was design-driven, not metrics-driven. The best way to win any debate at PayPal was just quantitative. Pure math, pure statistics, pure calculus, and that would be the end-all be-all QED, the meeting would end. At Square, everything was predicated more like Apple, where the question was, "What's the best possible design? What's the simplest possible solution?" Go back to the drawing board until we have a more elegant, better designed product.
Keith Rabois:
Second thing is, Peter back in his management philosophy, really believed that his job was about three or four decisions a year, and that was it. He'd basically enable and delegate to deputies that he trusted to make every other decision. He was basically just deciding who to promote, who to fire, and then about three really difficult decisions a year. Jack at least during my days at Square was a very hands-on executive, and had a really deep understanding or mastery of all parts of the business, and really wanted to have an opinion or perspective on many things. He certainly was excited and enthused when executives could run with energy and proactively decide things, but he wanted to be deeply aware of what was going on.
Keith Rabois:
I understand in the last few years he's been a little bit more of the Peter style. His management philosophy may have evolved as well.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
But it was pretty starkly different during my days.
Mike Maples:
What strikes me as a little bit similar between the two, and I guess it depends on just how you think about the word design. It feels like both founders had the same idea that you design the future. You don't just stumble into markets, instead you have a deterministic view of what the future's going to be like, and you bring the rest of the world along with you into that future.
Keith Rabois:
Oh, yeah. Jack on steroids has a vision of what he wants to see in the world and how the world can be better, and then his products, whether it's Twitter or Square or maybe in the future something else, are always designed to solve that problem. He has a very top-down perspective.
Keith Rabois:
For example, he had coined this adage at Twitter that we weren't, for the most part, allowed to A/B test products and services with users. The way he explained this is, our users are not guinea pigs. So a very very different philosophy than many startups, where you're not allowed to give a subpar experience to anybody, because that's not the job of the company.
Mike Maples:
You're treating them like a guinea pig.
Keith Rabois:
Everything should be perfect.
Mike Maples:
It's a lack of respect.
Keith Rabois:
Treat all of your customers as first-rate customers. That was very very different. Peter has somewhat top-down perspective of what's important in the world and what principles matter, and he can pontificate for hours if you allow him on many of these topics. But not at the practical level of the product, whereas Jack's would be more, go down from 50,000 feet to 10,000 feet, with here specifically what we should do.
Mike Maples:
In a startup team, say the first 10 folks. How entrepreneurial should the average person be, and how do you figure out if you really have what it takes to change the rules instead of just play by the rules?
Keith Rabois:
First thing is, I always teach that what you're always trying to do from the CEO on down to the most individual contributor to even an intern, is look for anomalous data. Anomalous data is the way you discover and have an epiphany about the future. You're always looking for anomalous data. Square ... Actually Jack first noticed, when we first launched the product, we had a very small number of users. Think roughly 20 to 50 users.
Keith Rabois:
We had a beautifully designed, crafted dashboard even before we launched that allowed us to track everything. He noticed that we were suddenly and very consistently though, over a couple of days, growing. When I say growing, I mean we're growing from like 23 users to like 26, to 29, to 32, to 37, to 41.
Mike Maples:
Not huge.
Keith Rabois:
Not explosive growth. But he turned and looked at me, and he said, "So why is this happening?" We hadn't really done anything. We didn't have any money to spend on marketing, so there was no initiatives in the ether that would actually produce this. As I started to stare at the computer, I was running through in my brain all of the things that could cause this. I finally realized that what might be happening is, maybe people were seeing these little Square devices in the real world, and they were sort of virally adopting the product based on encountering this cute little piece of hardware.
Keith Rabois:
Then to test that hypothesis, you could basically build an equation that if this were true, there should be a consistent relationship between the number of Squares that we were distributing and the signups, the next day or the next week. So I had this analyst working with me run this math, because I'm not good enough at math, so I delegated it to Ryan. He came back, and there was a very high correlation, like .9 something, 95, .99, something like that. I'm like, "Ahah, I think I figured this out, Jack."
Keith Rabois:
Actually, not only did we figure it out, but it's actually really good news. Exactly 1% of all the people that were transacting in any given day were actually signing up for Square. For every new Square card reader, or every 100 that we shipped into the world, 1% would adopt Square. You could actually literally break this down by vertical. In a taxi, a taxi would have, I don't know, 10, 15 customers a day. So 1% of them would sign up for Square. A coffee shop might have 110 customers, 1% would sign up for Square. We had a growth, we discovered basically a real world viral growth engine that allowed us to grow from no users to a lot of users without spending a cent on marketing.
Keith Rabois:
That enabled us to grow to enough payment volume and enough scale that we were able to raise a Series B successfully, in January of 2011. Then we were able to invest some energy and some resources into paid marketing and see what the ROI would be.
Mike Maples:
I think you and I probably have always seen eye-to-eye on what makes a market for a startup. I've always been bothered by descriptions of the market as something that you map or discover, almost like you're Lewis and Clark and you're trying to map a preexisting terrain accurately. But what are your thoughts on that?
Keith Rabois:
Yeah, I totally disagree with that philosophy. I think you forge a market or you create a market. You imagine a better future and then you go create it, and then you sell tickets. To me, the best metaphor for creating a startup is like producing a movie. Someone has an idea, and a vision of what this movie could be. Then you write a script that details how will this actually play out, and then you cast the movie, so you need the right people in the right seats. The team, sort of as Vinod Khosla would say, the team you build is the company you build.
Keith Rabois:
Then you have to finance it, just like you do in producing a movie. You need to actually raise the proper capital to produce the movie. Then you need to market and distribute it, so you create a trailer, which is basically a value proposition that's succinct and powerful, and then you distribute the trailer. Then hopefully people buy the tickets.
Keith Rabois:
That's basically my vision, is someone starts with a vision of how to entertain or how to improve people's lives, and then they create it, and then they sell the tickets. If the vision's, not necessarily incorrect but slightly off-
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
Unlike a movie, which is incredibly expensive and difficult to refilm, it's possible to fix or calibrate the vision a bit to sell more tickets. There is some feedback loop that's possible, so that's where the metaphor's a little bit different. But I don't think you're really correcting the macro vision.
Mike Maples:
Let's say I'm a startup founder and I've raised a tiny bit of money. You've been exposed to some of the really great entrepreneurs of all time. Is there some general advice that you'd give to startup founders about how to hire and run their team?
Keith Rabois:
First is from Vinod, the team you build is the company you build. With the right people, your chance of success should be somewhere between 35 and 45%, not 1 to 10%.
Mike Maples:
Yep.
Keith Rabois:
Now, that depends. What the right people are for every business is pretty different. It depends what you're trying to tackle, the challenges you're going to confront, the market you're in. For example, if you were literally trying to go to Mars, you'd recruit somewhat different people than if you were building the next Airbnb or the next photo sharing company. Understanding the key risks to your company, what are the biggest three blockers or three most likely things to go wrong, and do I have world class talent delegated and allocated to solving those problems?
Keith Rabois:
I think that's the most important thing. Marshaling the right talent against the biggest possible problems, and solving them in the order that's most fatal to you. Another thing founders ... Another mistake that's very common is to tackle problems that are easier rather than harder. I think you want to go in the reverse order. What are the three most difficult things that can interfere between now and success? Take the hardest one first, then the second hardest one, then the third hardest one. Then incrementally your company gets a lot easier. But a lot of founders like to defer that problem, and I think you take it on right away.
Mike Maples:
One thing is, as we like to say, hire like your life depends on it. Because it does, right? I mean, what else really matters more? To what extent should founders worry about managing, and how much managing is too much?
Keith Rabois:
In the beginning, let's say the first 20 to 50 employees, I wouldn't spend much time managing. You can manage through informal processes like osmosis. When you have everybody in the same room, and I highly recommend that everybody be working in the same room at this stage, everybody should understand what the prioritization of the company is, what the business equation is, how everything links together, and why things are the most important, material risks. What we're doing to try to solve them, in what order. I wouldn't overcomplicate things with management. I would do a company meeting once a week, every week, without fail, to ensure people are synchronized completely, but osmosis will work. It's only when you basically scale beyond about 50 people that you need to create formal techniques to replace informal processes that work very well.
Mike Maples:
What about one on one meetings? Did you have those from the very beginning in the startups you were involved with or part of?
Keith Rabois:
Once you have people that directly report to you, the technique of a one on one, whether it's weekly or biweekly, is very very valuable. There's a great discussion of this in High Output Management by Andy Grove, which I think is the canonical book on how to run a startup, how to run a Silicon Valley technology company. It was written in 1982 and I don't think anybody's written anything nearly as good since.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
So I highly endorse his philosophy. But you want to have a regular one on one with the people who report to you. The agenda is set by the junior person, not the senior person, and you help solve their problems. That's the fundamental notion of a one on one. He has a concept called task relevant maturity, which dictates the pacing of one on ones. Depending upon how proficient and how experienced someone is at tackling a similar problem, you may change the pacing of your one on one review from once a week to once a month. But ideally it should be no longer than every two weeks in my view.
Mike Maples:
You mentioned High Output Management earlier. What are the things you learned from that book that were really unique?
Keith Rabois:
The most radical ... I mean, actually the book has been so influential that many things that were radical and innovative in the book are now so widespread. Like these one on one meetings. He actually innovated and created the concept of one on one meetings, and now most people take that for granted.
Keith Rabois:
But some things that are still less intuitive than they should be. The concept of what's called a high leverage activity. Basically, you have a finite amount of time in your life, as an executive. Where do you focus your energies? And the way you filter things is what he terms high leverage activities. Basically, the definition of a high leverage activity is something with a small injection of your time, energy, or resources can massively impact a lot of people.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
For example, one of the reasons why I like full company meetings every week is, even though it feels like kind of a distraction for the CEO to prepare for this, you can impact everybody, and improve the performance of everybody all at once, so that's a high leverage activity. Another one is organizational design. This isn't quite as important for the zero to one phase that we're talking about, but later in life, when you're thinking through how to array your resources, how to align the organization, whether you should have a functional organization or a non-functional organization, there's one or two chapters that are the masterpiece on this. How they recommend, like people who are running 100 to 1000 person organizations read and really think deeply about.
Keith Rabois:
Another concept that's very tricky for both CEOs and founders, as well as executives or first time managers, is how to think about delegation or decision making. He has an outstanding framework for, when do you delegate, and when do you not delegate, and how to think through that problem. It's something all of us encounter literally every single day. I have principals here who want to make investment decisions. Should I approve their decisions to invest in a company? Should I overrule them? Having a mental framework for how to think that problem through is something I use literally every single day of my life.
Keith Rabois:
I highly recommend it for just those. There's many many other concepts, but these are the fundamental ones.
Mike Maples:
We've also talked before about that book about Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself. What did you take from that one, and what do you think founders can learn from that book?
Keith Rabois:
This is a very different philosophy than what we used at PayPal. This is more the perfectionist philosophy, that we're talking about Square or Jack Dorsey.
Mike Maples:
More like Square, yeah.
Keith Rabois:
And a little bit Jeff Bezos-like, which is gauge the inputs. The philosophy of the book is that by not focusing on outputs, like winning a football game. That's too abstract a concept. How do we win football games when we're a losing team? The way you fundamentally win football games is by doing everything precisely and perfectly consistently. You start with a philosophy of we're going to measure everything, and we're going to make people accountable for being incredibly disciplined, focused, and their attention to detail and performance.
Keith Rabois:
For example in football, you want your receivers on certain routes to run seven and a half yards. Not seven yards, not eight yards. You're going to measure that. The most interesting part of the book, when Bill Walsh famously, just for those of you who don't really have a lot of football context, took over the 49ers in the late '70s, when they were a miserable franchise.
Mike Maples:
A horrible team.
Keith Rabois:
Horrible, horrible team.
Mike Maples:
A laughingstock.
Keith Rabois:
For several years in a row. Bill was sort of this outsider that finally got hired to take over the team, and he relays this story of one of the first things he did when he did over as general manager and coach was to teach the receptionist how to answer the phone. Basically he created a manual of, here's the proper way to answer the phone when people called the 49ers. You can think that's kind of crazy for a football team that was like 3 and 11 I think, which is a horrible record in football, to focus on the receptionist. But this is how the philosophy of The Score Takes Care of Itself works is, every single person in your organization should do everything precisely and accurately and perfectly all the time.
Keith Rabois:
If everybody does that consistently, ultimately you're going to win games.
Mike Maples:
Yeah.
Keith Rabois:
That's basically what you do. That's a little bit like Jeff Bezos's concept of measuring inputs. Was this done correctly? Was it done perfectly? Was it done with dispatch?
Mike Maples:
And if you have a top down idea of what kind of offense you're running.
Keith Rabois:
I mean, there's a whole other philosophy of, how do you decide the offense that maps to your talent and vice versa? He actually talks a fair amount about that in the book, which is kind of an interesting ... There are preexisting talent bases that could apply a certain strategy very successfully, and there are others where that talent base is not right for that strategy, and matchmaking them. He talks a lot in the book about having sort of a weak-armed quarterback, you have to run a different offense to succeed, versus if you have a strong-armed quarterback.
Keith Rabois:
That's true in life, like if you're managing a team. You can't replace your entire team typically, in a company. You have to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of various parts of the team. You want to run a strategy, or move people's roles around, so that they can execute the strategy that takes advantages of the strengths and masks their weaknesses. Part of the art in editing the team, as Jack would describe it, is figuring out, well this person should play second base not first base. Then I can go get a first baseman who can hit with a lot more power.
Keith Rabois:
Basically you're matchmaking roles against talent, and there's a lot of discussion in The Score Takes Care of Itself that's pretty instructive as well.
Mike Maples:
In closing, then, there are a lot of founders out there, and they're kind of in that lonely place where they're still trying to figure things out. What's the biggest single piece of advice you would give to them as it relates to how to lead?
Keith Rabois:
That's a great question, because it is a very lonely journey, and even when things are going well you're kind of on the sine wave of ups and downs, sometimes hourly. You're on top of the world on Friday, and then Monday all hell breaks loose, and vice versa.
Mike Maples:
Flight or fight, yeah.
Keith Rabois:
It's kind of like a roller coaster ride, and I sometimes joke with people that a startup is a lot like a roller coaster ride. If you think about what a roller coaster is. So we pay money intentionally to have people make us terrified and scream. That's like joining a startup or founding a startup, or Elon Musk has the ED glass metaphor. But it's basically like I'm intentionally deciding to go on this roller coaster ride.
Keith Rabois:
But at some point you learn to embrace the roller coaster ride, and you actually go on dates, and you take your kids to roller coasters. It's a little bit like that, when you learn that there's going to be a bit of ups and downs, and it's kind of part of the territory. You learn to get excited by that, and the challenges become positive challenges versus terrifying.
Mike Maples:
Keith Rabois, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Keith Rabois:
It's been an absolute pleasure.