Rabois: Companies should skip failure retrospectives to encourage risk-taking
Keith Rabois · Hard truths about building in the AI era | Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures) · Apr 12, 2026 · at 1:16:53
Keith Rabois discusses why he advises high-performing companies against conducting retrospectives on failed experiments.
0:00 / 0:34exact quote · 34.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I don't want to deter people from taking ambitious shots on goal. And if you overemphasize failures and, you know, really people think they're going to get criticized. This is where the psychological safety maybe has some validity, which is be ambitious, be bold. Don't worry about the failing part, unless there's things you missed that, you know, could have been factored in, but you want people to take risk and you want people to be excited about raising their hands for very difficult problems and challenges, because that's how you create value. And so I was like, no, let's, let's really not do these retros. Let's just focus on winning.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Keith Rabois
Rabois: I refuse to let colleagues talk to consumer customers
“I refuse to allow colleagues of mine to talk to customers.”
Rabois: Criticizing employees publicly optimizes for the system over the individual
“When you give people feedback negative individually, you're optimizing for the atomic unit, not the system. The reason why to do it in public is it's more important for all the colleagues to understand that there's an issue it's being addressed.”
Rabois: High-performance teams do not have psychological safety
“No, no, I don't believe in that at all. Like high performance machines don't have psychological safety. They're about winning.”
Rabois: Lack of corporate data creates recruiting alpha in younger talent
“Like one of the reasons why, you know, sometimes it's controversial to say this, but one of the reasons why the net impact of by higher undiscovered talent is you wind up skewing younger. It's not because you need young people. It's that younger people have by…”
Rabois: Conventional PM roles make no sense in the AI era
“Well, I saw this podcast, or listen to this podcast that Peter Fenn did, and he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense, basically, in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic, is what does a PM usually do? They take these inputs from cus…”
Rabois: Consumer interviews give misleading data due to subconscious buying decisions
“Customers don't know what They want, and they're very bad because it's a subconscious decision, especially for consumers. Like what I purchased, what I wear is not a conscious decision. And when you're consciously trying to answer a subconscious decision, you …”