Keith Rabois
117 statements across 14 episodes · 28 bullish · 20 bearish · 8 people on the record · first statement May 15, 2017 by Keith Rabois · said 174 times in 61 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Keith Rabois's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (97), Matteo Franceschetti (16), Jason Lemkin (9), Delian Asparouhov (8), Max Rhodes (7), Kevin Hartz (5), Winston Weinberg (4), Samir Vasavada (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 12 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg: How to Make Mega Deals | Lessons from Rabois, Halligan & Grady · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Labour, Engineering, Social Media, GrokBots, Cybercabs: 7 Predictions for How AI Changes the World
- Gokul Rajaram: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? | Only 10% of Neo-labs survive
- Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio & Why VCs Can Be Sharks | Josh Browder · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 20 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price & Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster
- Benchmark's GP, Everett Randle on Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund with Immad Akhund · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Opendoor CEO, Kaz Nejatian: OpenAI and Oracle, How Can Either Afford to Do This · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Index Ventures Partner, Martin Mignot: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index’s Decacorn Factory · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How Do All Providers Deal with Anthropic Dependency Risk & Figma IPO Breakdown: Where Does it Price? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Benchmark GP, Victor Lazarte: The 3 Traits All the Best Founders Have · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 80 mentions in 17 episodes 5 per episode
- Delian Asparouhov: Inside the Walls of Founders Fund: What the World Does Not See | E1183 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Reid Hoffman: The Future of TikTok and The Inflection AI Deal | E1163 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kevin Hartz: "How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet" | E1180 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Tisch & Terrence Rohan: Biggest Misconceptions & Hardest Truths About Seed Investing | E1112 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Samir Vasavada: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires | E1171 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Clark: Lessons from 32 Years of Fund Investing - Why Exits Will Be Larger | E1131 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 23 mentions in 7 episodes 3 per episode
- Matteo Franceschetti: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | E1084 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Every VC has a FRAUD in their portfolio; The IPO market is about to EXPLODE | E1046 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sam Corcos: Why Founders Should Take as Many VC Meetings as Possible | E1093 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Roundtable #5 with Jack Altman, Auren Hoffman, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings | E1077 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Ed Sim: Why Seed Has Never Been More Competitive & Why Pricing Has Never Been Higher | E1076 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Harry debates Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: "Should startups target niche markets?" · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Matthew Prince: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes | E1072 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 22 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference
- Jason Lemkin: Cold Email Tips; Why Only 15% of Founders Listen to their VCs | 20VC #954 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Brian Singerman: How I Became a Partner at Founders Fund, Why We Put $400M into Anduril | 20VC #943 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jeffrey Katzenberg & Sujay Jaswa: Takeaways from Dreamworks; What happened with Quibi? | 20VC #952 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: WTF Is Going On? 3 Outcomes for What Could Happen From Here; What Needs to Happen To Avoid Recession? Why Stagnation is Most Likely and What This Means for Startups and Venture & Why Catastrophe is More Likely Than Ever and Switzerland Could Be a "H
- Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kyle Harrison: Why 75% of Active Investors Will Disappear in the Next Few Years | 20VC #940 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Fabrice Grinda: The First Person to Predict the Collapse of Credit Suisse? | 20VC #886 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 10 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: The Two Largest Changes in the Investing Market Today, Why The Scarce Resource in Venture is Access & Why Investors Are Acting Mostly Rational and Upside Scenario Planning Needs To Change with Anton Levy, Co-President @ General Atlantic
- 20VC: The Rise of Quick Commerce and Why CPGs ARe Misaligned Being Powered By Ad Spend, The 5 Core Components Consumers Care About When Ordering Today & Why Amazon and Alibaba Will Not Be The Big Players in 10 Years with Ralf Wenzel, Founder & CEO @ JOKR
- 20VC: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on The Art of Great Leadership Today, Why The Best Give All of the Credit and Take All of the Blame & How DoorDash Have Won The Best Talent Against the Toughest Competition
- 20VC: Ramp's Eric Glyman on Why You Should Never Take The Highest Price, Working With Venture Funds vs Crossover Funds and How To Determine What To Buy vs Build as a Founder Today?
- 20VC: NEA's Scott Sandell on SPACS and Why Liquidity is One of the Challenges of our Time, Why We Are At An Inflection Point For Secondaries & Why There Is Nothing To Suggest The Boom Will Not Continue
- 20VC Special: The Real Estate Fintech OGs on Why This Is Not The End For The Bay Area and What Can Be Done To Solve It, The Pros and Cons of Working with Corporate Investors and How Leading Their Teams Has Fundamentally Changed in a COVID World
- 20VC: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg on Why Generalists Over Specialists, Why Boutique Smaller Firms Over Multi-Stage Firms, Portfolio Construction Theory, Capital Concentration Limits and How To Think Through Reserve Allocations with Market Cycles in Mind?
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: The Chainsmokers on Raising Their First $35M Fund and Entering The World of Venture, Dealing with Vulnerability and Insecurity Today & How Music and Venture Compare; The Similarities and Differences
- 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor
- 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Haystack's Semil Shah on Whether Founders Are Bypassing Seed Funds in Favour Of Less Dilutive Multi-Stage Funds, How Fund Strategy Changes With Fund Scaling & Why The Hardest Challenge is Price Discipline
- 20VC: Why Lead Lime's Series D Funding Round, Why Engineers Are Underpaid & Why 74% of US Venture Firms Still Do Not Have Female GPs
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Keith Rabois, oldest first
May 15, 2017
May 15, 2017 positive
Rabois: Startups with product-market fit should maximize growth speed
“Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the term sustained growth. I think you should take growth right away. When you have product market fit, you want to take advantage of that and really capture the value as much and as fast as you can. It's a very tumultuous world. Thi…”
May 15, 2017
May 15, 2017 positive
Rabois prefers backing startups at the pitch deck stage
“I decided to invest based upon a keynote deck, really, that these guys were going to reinvent healthcare, which sounds like ridiculous, but I like to invest in keynote decks, like Opendoor reinvested when it was just a keynote deck and a team, Ever Album, whic…”
May 15, 2017 negative
Rabois: Startups should avoid general managers in favor of functional experts
“Some management lessons about avoiding general managers. We didn't really subscribe to the view that someone was a quote unquote good manager versus someone who was excellent in a particular discipline. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.”
May 15, 2017
Rabois: Board members should not express opinions on every topic
“I don't think it's productive to have an opinion on everything. I think deciding where you have a competitive advantage based upon your experiences and skills and have a specific and unique insight where it's worth bringing to bear that skill to a Is a lot of …”
May 15, 2017
May 15, 2017
Rabois: Top executives plan six months ahead of company needs
“When an executive is really performing, he or she is about six months ahead of the curve in terms of their plans, their initiatives, their thinking. When they're barely hanging on, they're delivering just in time, and obviously if they're not delivering, you c…”
May 15, 2017
Rabois: Success is learned from winning teams, not analyzing failure
“I think you can learn from failure what not to do again, and that's probably worth learning, like repeating the same mistakes makes no sense, but you can't learn how to be successful just by avoiding mistakes. The way you learn how to be successful is just You…”
May 15, 2017
May 15, 2017
Rabois: Dot-com bubble forced startups to hire non-tech talent
“I think there was so much hype and so much interest in technology and internet innovation that, and so many companies were being funded that the companies were desperate for talent. So they were willing to hire like people like me who might've had some skills,…”
May 15, 2017
May 15, 2017 negative
Rabois: VCs cannot succeed by focusing solely on winning investments
“I don't think you can do the just focus on your winners strategy. I think that causes real problems for you in the future as an investor, because by definition, the number of like non super successful companies you're going to invest in is greater than the num…”
Sep 30, 2021 negative
Rabois: Opendoor still executes its pricing model incorrectly eight years later
“The one that I still make fun of JD about is how we did our pricing model, which we still basically don't do correctly. You know, eight years later, we'll eventually fix this, but there's a lot of debate about whether we should have consumers name their own pr…”
Sep 30, 2021 positive
Sep 30, 2021
Thiel offered $5M in 2003 to fund Opendoor's predecessor
“Peter was willing to fund the company with about five million dollars, but fundamentally, to buy enough homes and prove that you could accurately price the homes, five million was at the very low end of what would be feasibly, statistically, to prove that we c…”
Sep 30, 2021
Sep 30, 2021 neutral
Rabois: Opendoor pursued a SPAC under the misconception it was faster
“The real reason for choosing to go down the SPAC model was I wanted us to be a public company as fast as humanly possible. I had some reasons to believe we could do it a little bit more rapidly through a SPAC. The truth is that's not really true, but it was ea…”
May 30, 2022 negative
Rabois: Passing on an early Coinbase meeting was a massive mistake
“Is this the, you know, whatever, let's say Coinbase that I, you know, was introduced to very, very early by Gary, who really, Gary Tan, who really wanted me to invest. And, you know, I basically wrote back. I really didn't want to meet them, even though I actu…”
May 30, 2022
May 30, 2022
May 30, 2022 negative
May 30, 2022 neutral
May 30, 2022 negative
May 30, 2022 positive
Rabois: Founders Fund never replaces founders or forces management changes
“Founders fund, there's only one real answer because we don't replace founders. Most VCs would probably try to change the management team, including the CEO. We, you know, ideologically, philosophically, and effectively, legally just don't do that.”
May 30, 2022 bearish
May 30, 2022
May 30, 2022
May 30, 2022 bullish
Rabois will now exclusively invest in in-person startups
“I really want to invest in only companies that are in person. So I think there's a lot of alpha there. I think in-person companies will be the successful startups. I only want to find founders who are working in person and that's my new investment filter.”
May 30, 2022 neutral
Rabois has only led three late-stage investment rounds in nine years
“I've only led in nine years of investing three late stage rounds later stage rounds, series C co-led with Stripe fares series C. I led a founder's fund. And then I invest a lot of money in two late-stage rounds in a company called Ultima”
May 30, 2022 negative
Rabois: Compressed benchmark comps break mid-stage venture valuation math
“I think you do need to think through the market comps. So I think one of the mistakes people have been making over the last shoot, three years is let's say if Shopify is trading at one hundred sixty billion, let's say, then the upside case for things that coul…”
May 30, 2022
May 30, 2022 neutral
Rabois: Founders Fund gives years of warning before stopping follow-on funding
“I think we'll, we'll be clear that like, look, I wouldn't count on us for additional capital. If there's things we can do to be helpful, you know, we'll, we'll try, but like, we'll give them, you know, a significant advance warning. Let's call it measured in y…”
May 30, 2022 negative
May 30, 2022 neutral
Jun 29, 2022
Aug 9, 2023 positive
Nov 20, 2023 positive
Franceschetti: Everything at Eight Sleep is public internally except compensation
“Everything is, everything, this is another rule from Keith, I think, from the, his time at Square, where, so essentially everything is public in our company except comp. Usually comp, you don't want to share it, but everything else is shared.”
Nov 20, 2023 positive
Franceschetti: Paul Graham and Keith Rabois excel at explaining complex ideas simply
“You see people like Paul Graham or Keith or Boyce, right? They are some of the greatest at expressing a very complicated concept with few words in something that I call it the grammar rule by something that my grandma could understand.”
Nov 20, 2023
Franceschetti: A company's project capacity equals its number of 'barrel' leaders
“Output usually is a function of how many barrels you have. Barrels are people in your company that can get everything done from zero to completion, right? And you have barrels and ammunition. Barrels can lead anything from zero to completion. Ammunition suppor…”
Nov 27, 2023 negative
Nov 27, 2023 bullish
Nov 27, 2023
Rabois: Startups must reset to zero-and-zero after every success
“You know, one metaphor I like to use for this is like, imagine you're playing in a like football, let's say in America, you win the Superbowl. But your own, you have to go back preseason, start all over in training camp, and your record's zero and zero again, …”
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023 positive
Rabois: Intellectual preparation during downtime drives breakthrough workplace success
“You don't just go to the field and practice all day, 24 seven. You might study film, and like, you might go home and spend four hours watching video of your opponent, and that makes you more successful. So your body is recovering, your, like, your brain is tra…”
Nov 27, 2023
Rabois: Taking eight years off operating caused severe executive skill atrophy
“Like I took eight years between square and taking over, you know, CEO of open store. It's like muscle atrophy, you know, kind of going with the same metaphor. And it took me the first year at least to get back to be decent as a CEO.”
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023
Rabois: Having Kids Forces Time Discipline and Amplifies Professional Success
“So you can be very successful if you have kids. You know, there's touring artists and music that have kids. It requires you to be more disciplined, like about your time allocation. It tends to amplify things if you're really disciplined, maybe even do better w…”
Nov 27, 2023 bearish
Rabois: There are currently very few great startups worth investing in
“Well, I'm optimistic. I just don't believe there's a lot of great startups to invest in as a VC. Those are two different things. Like generally you have to be a technology optimist is, you know, Mark adjacent pointed out to be a successful investor. You always…”
Nov 27, 2023 bearish
Nov 27, 2023 neutral
Rabois: Open-source companies are rare exceptions for remote work success
“I think you can build an open source company predicated on open source software in a distributor way and distribute away because you have thousands of contributors or hundreds of contributors all around the globe to open source software and you're managing and…”
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023 negative
Nov 27, 2023 positive
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023 neutral
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023 neutral
Rabois: World-class Series A venture capitalists are only right 40% of the time
“If you're world-class, you're right, 40% of the time. And I define venture as heat stage investing, series A investing. 40%, Hall of Fame, Ted Williams, tech category. So, my definition, 40% right is going to lead to 60% not being right.”
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023
Rabois: Founders should operate like Navy SEALs, not the Army
“He actually did give a metaphor of like, I'm operating more like the army where the army is like very much like operational efficient across everything. No, no mistakes. Whereas what I should be doing as a founder is being more like a Navy seal, like going all…”
Nov 27, 2023 bearish
Rabois: Structural inflation will keep interest rates high for a decade
“They're not going much down. I mean, I think we have sustained inflation for structural reasons for a decade. Yeah. Plus or minus, they might be slightly alleviated, but there's a lot of very strong reasons why this zero interest rate or low interest rate envi…”
Nov 27, 2023
Keith Rabois Billed 360 Hours in One Month as Law Associate
“So I remember when I was a lawyer, the last month I was a litigator at Sullivan and Commonwealth in New York. I billed 360 hours. I bet you almost nobody works in the startups, works 300 or 60 hours. That's billed, by the way, not worked.”
Nov 27, 2023
Nov 27, 2023 negative
Jan 12, 2024 positive
Rabois: Most technology startups are better off going public early
“I'm going to get, I believe that most companies, you know, and I have a chapter in Eli Gill's high growth handbook on the topic in a fairly lengthy core answer as well on, I believe most companies are better Off going public early period.”
Jan 12, 2024 negative
Jan 12, 2024
Roelof Botha: Deciding which first meetings to take is VC's hardest part
“Roloff mentioned this to me. I remember talking to him a year after he joined Sequoia. It was probably like 2004 and we had coffee and I said, what's the hardest part of the job? And he said, deciding which first meetings to take.”
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Passed on Robinhood seed after Khosla banned seed board seats
“I had already, like, locked in a turn sheet to lead the series seat for Robin Hood chilling at 20 post, which was pretty expensive, but they came back and Really wanted me to join the board in the seed round, and this was in maybe my second year at KB, so I as…”
Jan 12, 2024 positive
Rabois: I have never passed on a multi-billion dollar founder
“Once you get me in the room with founders, I've made those calls really, really well. Like I was mentioning the other day that I'm not sure I've ever passed on somebody that's turned out to be building a multi-billion dollar company, but I have definitely decl…”
Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Lost two-thirds of missed deals to the same competitors
“In about 11 years doing this, I think there's somewhere between five or six or so term sheets I've extended where I didn't close them, like I lost to somebody, and the reality is that four of the sticks, or two thirds of them, are the same, are to the same peo…”
Jan 12, 2024 neutral
Jan 12, 2024 neutral
Jan 12, 2024 bullish
Rabois: Venture funds should make ad hoc follow-on decisions, not reserve
“You're probably better off not reserving, and then making ad hoc decisions based upon the quality of that particular opportunity, which includes who's the investor, what's the traction of the company, what do we believe about the founder, what have we learned …”
Jan 12, 2024 bearish
Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024 positive
Jan 12, 2024 positive
Rabois: Board members should probe founders with questions, not prescribe answers
“As a board member, one of the best ways is to ask things in terms of questions, not in terms of answers. So you probe by questions, because then you're never leading. You may be leading a little bit, but you're never prescribing, and it's a very big difference…”
Jan 12, 2024 positive
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Startups solidify like concrete post-Series B, making changes painful
“So, early stage companies, it's kind of like liquid concrete. It's very valuable. And then it solidifies. Post Series B, it's totally solidified. And if you want to change something, you know, that's concrete, you have to mold this jackhammer, which is incredi…”
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Lost Rippling seed to Gary Tan over $10M valuation gap
“Rickling came in, Parker came in and we gave a term sheet. It was, you know, obviously controversial at the time, for the seed, and Gary Tan, initialized, also gave a term sheet. And at the time, there was about a ten million dollar gap. I probably offered fiv…”
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Avoided launching a solo fund due to administrative drag coefficient
“Over the years, and I'd say over the fifteen-year time horizon, the last 15 years of my life, I have occasionally thought about, should I start a fund? There's definitely a lot of drag coefficient associated with that that I was not particularly excited with, …”
Jan 12, 2024 neutral
Rabois: Venture funding rounds act like poker cards providing priced information
“It's like playing poker, and every round is like a card you're being dealt, and there's different informational content, and there's a different price point for that round, so what's the information you get from that new card, and then what's the price?”
Jan 12, 2024 bullish
Rabois: Opendoor required a $10M seed round to prove unit economics
“We raised 10 of the seed for Opendoor. That was actually the correct dose. Buying homes, you really can't prove that you can buy cohorts of homes accurately, like priced accurately and resold properly in less, for less than about ten million.”
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Hid Faire seed board seat from Khosla partners for a year
“Fair came back and said, Max said to me, you know, we chatted, I chatted with my co-founders, and, you know, we'll say yes, but you have to join the board, and having learned and been burned by the Robinhood experience, I never really told my partners that I w…”
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Founders Fund partners operated like independent PMs without collective debate
“Founders Fund, especially when I joined, was very much people running their own investment strategies. Think of it as like a PM running their own investment strategies, and there's a way of syncing and getting a certain number of critical mass and votes to sup…”
Jan 12, 2024
Rabois: Sponsoring non-standard venture deals consumes internal social capital
“If I want to do something that's very not standard or very controversial or not expected, I'm kind of burning and consuming some social capital. Now, if I make the right call that That gets paid back with interest, and you know, the next time I want to make a …”
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024 positive
Rabois: Ramp's 2018 pitch notes match its current board discussions
“And if you read the notes today, it is literally just like the board meeting we just finished with the exception of AI. We didn't really talk about it at AI, but everything else in the board meeting today is like, Right on target from this first note in maybe …”
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024 positive
Glyman: Mapping business equations creates operational focus and enables rapid scaling
“He talks about this concept of, can you really articulate cleanly your business equations? What are the outputs you're trying to drive? What are the inputs in your business? Can you list that very clearly and map that? And that exercise of mapping, how does ou…”
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024
Rabois: Executive capacity for direct reports depends heavily on domain expertise
“Actually, as an executive, when you know certain content areas, subject matters, and, like, you have some ability in that craft, it's a hell of a lot easier to have a direct report there, because you're diving in really quickly to what's key. When you have to …”
May 3, 2024
Rabois: Leaders must vary micromanagement based on task maturity and risk
“You actually want to be inconsistent on this, whether you're like quote unquote micromanaging or you're giving a lot of rope because it depends on the task relevant maturity of the person and the project and the consequences to the business.”
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024 positive
Rabois: Ramp launched card issuing in 50 days versus typical 6-12 months
“So there's a lot of complexity in setting up issuing cards, just the very basic fundamentals usually take an infinite amount of time. Usually six to 12 months is pretty good as someone who's been involved in companies like this for like 20 years. I think Eric …”
May 3, 2024 neutral
Rabois: Founders must invert inertia to manually create startup momentum
“A lot of company building is you want to tap into a vein. Like inertia is not your friend. When you start a company, Everything. Time's not your friend. The world doesn't care about you. You have to invert, literally invert inertia. So you have to create momen…”
May 3, 2024
Rabois: Artificial startup momentum works initially but cannot scale forever
“I think you can sort of pseudo hack your way into momentum. You can't scale it forever. If you're really hacking it, you're going to have to make the train tracks real, and you're going to have to make the engine that propels things pretty real at some point.”
May 3, 2024 positive
May 3, 2024 negative
May 3, 2024
May 3, 2024 negative
Rabois: Startups with under 50% internal executive promotions are irresponsible
“Usually you're dealing with a ratio of, you know, 70% internal promotions, and 30%, you're selectively adding new capabilities, so you're always playing around with some ratio. I don't think a hundred percent works, but I also think if you're below fifty-fifty…”
May 3, 2024 bullish
May 3, 2024 neutral
May 3, 2024
Rabois: Executives must plan six months ahead to adjust operational levers
“Six months is about where you want someone thinking ahead because not every lever can be tuned in a week. Most can't. Not every lever can be even tuned in a month. So if you think six months ahead though, if you're really consistently six months ahead, most le…”
May 3, 2024 positive
Glyman: Rabois's 'How to Operate' lecture enabled Ramp to scale rapidly
“Change my ability to operate and helped, you know, ramp reach the scale that we're doing quickly is, is this talk he gave a decade ago called how to operate. It's on YouTube. It's free. It is worth a lot more than that. And I recommend everyone watch it.”
May 3, 2024
Jun 28, 2024 neutral
Jul 22, 2024 negative
Hartz dismissed and missed an early investment opportunity in YouTube
“I think of when I was stepping down as CEO of Zoom, Keith and Roloff held a lunch for me in the city, in San Francisco. What was the name of that place? And Keith was talking about this YouTube thing. I was just kind of Burnout of like, you know, it was like a…”
Jul 22, 2024
Aug 14, 2024 positive
Nejatian: Keith Rabois and Max Levchin are exceptionally aggressive in execution
“And I think it may come out of how they grew in tech, is that they are, I see this with admiration, more aggressive than anyone you can imagine being. They're incredibly kind, but very aggressive, ah, in their execution, in their ambition.”
Sep 18, 2025 positive
Sep 12, 2026 positive
Franceschetti: Keith Rabois and Delian Asparouhov did not realize Eight Sleep co-founders were married
“To the point where I think Delian and Keith, when they invested for the first year, they, I, I'm not sure that they were not even, they didn't even know we were married. Obviously, you disclose it when you do a round, so it has been disclosed in every round, b…”
Sep 12, 2026 positive