EP 62: Keith Rabois (Partner, Founders Fund) Lessons from Peter Thiel & Reid Hoffman, and Why He'd Never Invest in a Remote-First Company

**Logan Bartlett** (0:05)
Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and on this episode, you're gonna hear a conversation that I had with Keith Rabois. Keith is most known as a investor at Founders Fund, which was founded by Peter Thiel.
The firm has made a number of investments, including in companies like Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, Facebook, New Bank, Andoril, among a bunch of others.
Before that, Keith was at Coastal Ventures, and prior to that, he was the COO of Square, alongside Jack Dorsey, and a part of what the so-called PayPal Mafia with Reid Hoffman, Max Lebskin, founders of YouTube, Peter Thiel, among a bunch of others. Most recently, Keith has also stepped in as the CEO of OpenStore. In this interview, we touched on a bunch of different things, including why he hates OKRs, why he'd never invest in a remote first company, lessons he learned from working under Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and Reid Hoffman. One minor disclaimer, in the second half of the episode, the audio quality cuts out due to some production issues. Really disappointing because it's a really good conversation, but we've done our best to impact it using a bunch of different tools so that hopefully it's palatable to actually listen to. The quality is good throughout, so trust you'll enjoy this episode with Keith Rabois. Keith, thanks for doing this.

**Keith Rabois** (1:23)
Pleasure to be back.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:24)
I want to do stuff different than what you normally do. I feel like in listening to some of your other podcasts, you get a lot of politics questions these days, like woke-ism and all that.

**Keith Rabois** (1:34)
I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole too much.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:36)
What I want to know is, so you created a bunch of interesting, concise, thoughtful frameworks. I would like to listen to your YC, which everyone should just, hot outbreak, how the hell was it rated in 2013?
Three of them that stood out to me, Inundations of Barrels, two by two matrix of delegating versus consequences, and then Grove Freight of an employer versus Grove Freight of a business. I thought those were, you've been in the CEO seat now at OpenShore for how long?

**Keith Rabois** (2:02)
Two years.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:03)
Have you changed any of those or any other frameworks that you've had in the past, if you've been back in the Albrittas?

**Keith Rabois** (2:09)
No, I get this. Two frameworks were designed to answer like three, very common, very common questions I always see from founders. So I'm in tight count. Why aren't things not accelerating? Why is our funding velocity slowing down in fact?
First framework, set the framework. How do I know when to make a decision, when to delegate? Cost of question for a CEO, to a board member, to advisor, mentor, concealer. Third question, around how do I know which place I want, how do I upgrade myself, when do I want to upgrade, when do I want to hire, so the leavers can shortly promote. So I basically try to address all the three common questions I get from founders and CEOs. So I don't really have a third or fourth. The fourth question, and I don't know what the current fourth question is, but when I get called a question, I try to find something that I can write as a baseline.
And then use that with CEOs so they can be a lot of pre-digesting versus constant advice at a physical client.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:01)
Delian also did a really concise post of his blog about a bunch of things related to this updated graph. I started it. I recommend everyone go look.

**Keith Rabois** (3:09)
Lessons from Keith.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:10)
It's version free.
And being a people-centric investor, I've rich talked about wanting people that spike in some regard, but they need to be the hero for the story or whatever it is. Are there questions that you actually are able to ask to assess this or is it a total intuitive thing? How do you think about fitting the founder to the story that in that case? How do you know what they need?

**Keith Rabois** (3:31)
So there's two different comments. One is I think I'm looking for an extraordinary trait. The reason why is the chance, if you think about what's the likelihood that someone starts a company and reinvents the world or an industry in the proverbial garage with like their college roommate.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:46)
Sure.

**Keith Rabois** (3:46)
Rounds to basically zero. So unless you have a trait that is so extraordinary that the probability shift off rounding to zero, you should not invest.