Hard truths about building in the AI era | Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures)

Keith Rabois explains his exclusive use of iPads for over a decade, inspired by Jack Dorsey.

Keith Rabois revealed he has not used a traditional computer since September 2010, conducting all his work from his phone, watch, or iPad. This decision was directly influenced by Jack Dorsey, who was operating Square exclusively from an iPad when Rabois joined the company.

Rabois adopted the iPad for its superior flexibility and light weight, finding no functional reason to use a heavier, less versatile machine for his responsibilities. He emphasizes the convenience of carrying his iPad everywhere, noting it facilitates all necessary tasks unless one is engaged in heavy-duty engineering.

This early embrace of a mobile-first workflow by Rabois aligns with a current trend where engineers, such as Boris Cherny and Simon Wilson, are increasingly coding from their phones and integrating AI tools. Rabois believes he has been anticipating this shift for a considerable time.

Jack Dorsey's foresight played a significant role in Rabois's initial switch, as Dorsey was recognized for being ahead of emerging technological curves.

My life is either done for my phone, my watch, or my iPad.

Talent Density Drives Company Success

Vinod Khosla distilled a core business truth: having the right people makes everything easy, while the wrong people make everything difficult. Keith Rabois witnessed this principle in action during his PayPal days. The company's profound success in the early 2000s and its subsequent generation of successful ventures over 25 years stemmed from Peter Thiel and Max Levchin's ability to marshal an incredible density of talent.

This high concentration of skilled individuals enabled PayPal to thrive and those same people later built epic companies across various industries. From the start of his technology career, Rabois has focused on the critical importance of talent density: how to identify, retain, and promote such individuals.

PayPal's unique recruiting model relied heavily on Peter and Max's networks, making it difficult to join without a first or second-degree connection. Rabois notes that while he was initially only mediocre at hiring, achieving about a 50-50 success rate, this experience highlighted that interviews alone are not a perfect substitute for strong network-based talent acquisition.

If you have the right people Everything else will be easy, and you have the wrong people, everything else is gonna be difficult.

Early Lessons in Identifying Talent at PayPal

Keith Rabois initially struggled to demonstrate 'leadership leverage' at PayPal, which was defined as generating disproportionate returns for every person hired. His difficulty in hiring external candidates effectively meant he wasn't achieving the nonlinear returns expected for promotion.

To overcome this, Rabois shifted his strategy. He identified talented individuals already within PayPal who were not being fully utilized and recruited them to his team. This approach proved highly successful, as these internal hires quickly got up to speed and delivered significant results, leading to his rapid promotion.

The core lesson Rabois learned was that he could accurately identify talent among people he knew through regular interaction, such as lunches or runs around campus. However, he struggled to do so during short, traditional interviews with strangers. This realization prompted him to initially double down on leveraging his network.

This experience highlighted a crucial skill for career advancement: the ability to ruthlessly and accurately assess talent. While leveraging existing relationships was a good start, Rabois recognized the necessity of developing methods to assess external candidates to scale an organization or succeed as a venture capitalist, a skill he developed over subsequent years.

I actually could identify talent, I just couldn't identify strangers with talent.

Employ Ruthless Referencing to Improve Senior Hiring Outcomes

While identifying truly extraordinary talent often requires deviating from standard playbooks, most individuals can significantly enhance their hiring capabilities by learning and applying specific tactics. Hiring is a skill that improves with practice, observation, and refinement of techniques.

One particularly effective and teachable tactic for improving hiring, especially for senior roles, is 'ruthless referencing.' This approach goes beyond basic reference checks to deeply investigate a candidate's past performance and behavior. It is less applicable for recent college graduates due to limited reference context.

Examples of ruthless referencing include Tony Xu at DoorDash, who reportedly conducts twenty references for every single senior hire. This extensive process demonstrates a dedication to thoroughness that can lead to more accurate assessments. Another example is David Sze, a successful investor at Greylock, who taught that one should not stop referencing a founder until a negative reference is encountered, ensuring all angles and potential red flags are uncovered.

Tony at DoorDash does twenty references on every single senior hire. Twenty.

Effective Questions for Senior Interviews and Reference Checks

Obtaining crucial information from candidates and references depends heavily on asking precisely framed questions. A common misstep in reference checks, as demonstrated with Fair co-founder Max Freed, is asking whether someone was a "good employee." This often leads to ambiguous answers and can cause talented investors to overlook strong candidates.

Instead of general performance queries, reference checks should focus on a candidate's potential. For Max Freed, the more effective question was "Is Max capable of being a world-class entrepreneur?" This strategic reframing helped reveal his true capabilities beyond his previous role, highlighting how precise questioning can avoid missed opportunities.

When interviewing senior leadership candidates, a highly effective question is, "If you were CEO [at your previous company], what would you have done differently?" This prompts candidates to demonstrate their strategic mindset and ability to identify value creation opportunities, offering insight into their potential impact.

For reference calls, two particularly insightful probes are: "What would lead to this person being most successful?" and "If something were not to work out, what would be the primary root cause that you can identify?" These questions are designed to uncover both a candidate's strengths and potential challenges.

Same person, wrong question, wrong result, and many people passed unfair, and they regret it.

Implement a 30-Day Feedback Loop for Hiring

Many companies struggle to learn effectively from their hiring decisions. People often interview and hire, but then fail to systematically analyze the outcomes, missing valuable opportunities to refine their talent acquisition process.

A powerful technique to address this involves implementing a simple 30-day feedback loop after every new hire. This method provides a structured way to assess the quality of hiring decisions quickly.

To execute this, the entire hiring team should collectively ask themselves: 'Would we make the same hiring decision again, 30 days into this person's tenure?' This quick check forces an early evaluation of fit and performance.

Research shows this short 30-day feedback loop is highly effective, yielding insights just as accurate as evaluations conducted after a full year. This tight feedback mechanism allows companies to learn, adapt, and significantly improve their hiring success rate much faster.

If you ask yourself thirty days after any hire, would you make the same decision? That thirty-day loop is pretty useful, and it's as accurate as measuring in a year.

The 'Barrels vs. Ammunition' Framework for Team Scaling

Many CEOs express frustration when their companies hire more people but productivity either stagnates or declines. They invest heavily in headcount, yet fewer or the same number of initiatives get completed, leading to disappointment.

This phenomenon is explained by the 'barrels vs. ammunition' framework. A 'barrel' is an individual capable of independently driving an initiative from its inception to successful completion. 'Ammunition' refers to people who support existing initiatives. The core problem is that the number of 'barrels' in any given company is inherently very limited.

Hiring more 'ammunition' without expanding the number of 'barrels' does not increase the number of parallel initiatives a company can undertake. Instead, it leads to people stacking up behind the same existing projects, significantly increasing the 'collaboration tax' and 'coordination tax,' which ultimately creates drag and reduces overall output.

For instance, PayPal, with 254 people at acquisition, a network considered one of the best talent pools in technology history, had only 12-17 'barrels.' In comparison, a very good company like Lattice had only two. To achieve more and scale effectively, companies must focus on increasing their number of 'barrels,' not just total headcount.

The number of people that can independently drive an initiative from beginning, from inception to success is very limited within any, within any company. And if you hire more people without expanding the number of what I call barrels that can drive from inception to success, all you're doing is stacking people behind the same initiatives.

Defining a 'Barrel' Employee

A "barrel" is an individual who can independently take an idea and transform it into a successful outcome for the company. They are not merely contributors but rather drivers of important initiatives, capable of navigating complexities and overcoming obstacles to achieve a defined goal. The number of simultaneous important initiatives a company can pursue is dictated by the number of barrels it possesses.

These individuals are distinguished by their ability to "make it happen" regardless of initial challenges. A barrel will proactively motivate necessary personnel, accumulate required resources, and establish metrics to measure progress. Their ultimate commitment is to deliver the desired outcome for the CEO or founder, even when the initial path to completion is unclear and they have no line of sight on how to solve it.

While "ammunition" such as designers, engineers, product managers, or data analysts is valuable, a barrel can sometimes succeed with very limited resources, depending on the project type. The crucial aspect is understanding the appropriate ratio of ammunition to the problem, which allows for more intentional team construction around the barrel's driving force. The scope and difficulty of tasks entrusted to a barrel can expand over time, reflecting their consistent ability to deliver results.

Can they take an idea and make it happen? There's a hill over there. That's the hill. Get us over that hill. In one way or the other, they will motivate people if they need to, they will accumulate resources if they need to. They will measure what they need to, and they're gonna get your company across that hill. That's a barrel.

The Smoothie Test Identifies True Agency and Execution

Keith Rabois explains that a "barrel" is someone who takes full ownership of a task, allowing others to "fire and forget" that it will be handled. If problems arise, a barrel proactively communicates issues, attempted solutions, and root causes, asking for help with sufficient time for intervention.

At Square, Rabois wanted cold, healthy smoothies delivered to engineers working late at 9 PM, as he believed junk food was detrimental to brain function. Despite having a substantial office team, including EAs, they consistently failed to deliver the smoothies correctly – they weren't cold, healthy, or on time, leading to frustration.

An intern named Taylor Francis was told about this ongoing frustration. On his second day, Francis successfully delivered the smoothies as required. This demonstrated a critical difference in execution and agency compared to the larger team that repeatedly failed.

The "smoothie test" became a simple yet effective way to identify individuals who truly embody agency and ensure tasks are completed, highlighting that capability isn't always tied to experience or team size.

I'm gonna take this off your plate, you can fire and forget, and this is gonna happen.

Attracting Top Talent by Solving Critical Company Blockers

Attracting "barrels" or top-tier talent is challenging, as these individuals often receive multiple lucrative offers. To stand out, companies must go beyond standard recruitment tactics.

The foundational step is to effectively communicate the company's mission and vision, as this remains an indispensable factor for proven talent considering new opportunities.

A more nuanced and effective strategy is to convince candidates that their specific skills are perfectly aligned with the company's most critical current blockers. This framing allows candidates to perceive joining as an opportunity to "bet on themselves."

For example, if a company's main obstacle is marketing, a world-class marketing professional can be recruited by highlighting how their unique abilities are precisely what's needed to solve this core problem, making their impact immediately evident.

convince them that their particular skill overlaps with the critical blockers to the current company, meaning they're betting on themselves.

How to find undiscovered talent for your startup

Startups face a "salary cap" challenge, akin to sports teams, where they cannot compete with large incumbents offering infinite money for top-tier candidates. This makes finding "undiscovered talent" crucial for scaling an organization. Competing for candidates everyone wants often leads to adverse selection and unaffordable salaries.

The strategy involves identifying individuals who would be misprocessed or overlooked by the homogeneous recruiting systems of larger companies like Meta, Google, or Coinbase. Think about what these "black box" systems would miss in a candidate and why. This approach helps startups find exceptional individuals before they become widely recognized.

One reason this strategy often leads to hiring younger individuals is the lack of extensive data points. Just as FICO scores rely on data, larger organizations' hiring processes heavily weigh past performance. Younger candidates, by definition, have less historical data, making it harder for a standardized system to evaluate them accurately and thus creating an "alpha" opportunity for companies willing to look beyond conventional metrics.

If there's no data points, it's very hard for a black box machine that does homogenous evaluation to evaluate you. So there is alpha, so to speak, by definition for people who have, like, no data points.

The CEO's Role: Relentless Application of Force

Keith Rabois shares an insight from Mike Moritz, who identified the 'relentless application of force' as the common denominator among the best CEOs. Rabois explains that as companies become more successful, there's a natural tendency towards complacency within the organization. The CEO's primary role is to actively counteract this complacency and keep the team pushing forward.

This means that the better a company performs, the harder the CEO should push. Most businesses are not built on strong network effects that allow them to run on their own indefinitely. Therefore, continuous effort from leadership is essential to prevent stagnation and ensure long-term viability, even when things appear to be going well.

Rabois applies this philosophy in his role as a VC and board member. When a company is struggling, he finds that a supportive and coaching approach is more effective than being critical, as founders are already aware of their challenges. However, when a company is thriving, it's crucial to be critical and identify potential future problems, even if everyone else is satisfied with current success.

What's the most common denominator of the best CEOs ever? And he said it's the relentless application of force.

Founders must continually raise the bar to prevent complacency and maintain high morale among top performers.

Leaders should proactively elevate standards and intensify efforts even when a company is thriving. Success can breed complacency, much like a championship-winning sports team must reset and refocus for the next season. This continuous drive is also seen in venture capital, where an investor's value is often tied to their most recent success, necessitating a constant search for new, impactful founders.

Allowing a company to coast can paradoxically harm morale, especially among high-performing employees. These individuals often possess an internal drive to create and achieve. Keith Rabois observed this at Airbnb, noting that when Brian Chesky eased off the "pedal to the metal," morale declined because top talent felt less challenged and excited about their work.

You get to a certain threshold, you create this inflection, momentum gets- To certain, you know, valuation and all the, all these like attributes, but it's kind of like winning the Super Bowl. You get-- The last year was great, last four quarters were wonderful, it's like winning the Super Bowl. You gotta come back next year and start your record zero-zero again.

Future-Proofing Careers and the Evolving Product Manager Role in the AI Era

Intellectual curiosity is presented as the primary way for individuals to future-proof their careers in an AI-dominated landscape. Beyond simply working harder, the ability to continuously learn new things is essential for adapting to rapid technological shifts. This mindset allows professionals to embrace and leverage new tools, rather than being left behind.

The impact of AI is already visible in executive roles, particularly among Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). Keith Rabois observes that CMOs are becoming top consumers of AI tokens, directly using these models to generate campaigns, conduct analytics, and create various work products. This direct interaction with AI allows them to bypass layers of deputies and rapidly ship deliverables or provide insights to the CEO.

The discussion also touches on the future of the product triad, specifically product managers (PMs), engineers, and designers. Citing Peter Fenton's perspective, the concept of a PM might become largely obsolete. The traditional PM function of gathering customer inputs and creating year-long sequential roadmaps makes less sense when foundational AI models and related companies are improving at such a rapid rate, making long-term planning incoherent and impractical.

fundamentally, the intellectual curiosity is able to learn new things, and that is how you embrace the future.

The Dying PM Role, Merging Functions, and the 'Chef' CEO

The rapid advancement of AI tools has made tasks that were impossible months ago now easy to achieve, demanding organizations be incredibly adept at changing product roadmaps on the fly. This shift challenges the conventional product manager role, suggesting that traditional intermediaries are less effective than individuals who can quickly notice and exploit new technical possibilities.

As AI streamlines the building process, the critical human skill evolves from execution to determining what to build and aligning teams around that vision. This requires a "CEO-like" mindset, where individuals, whether engineers, designers, or former PMs, must understand the business equation and drive impact by creating value propositions.

Keith Rabois compares this new leadership role to a "chef" at a prime restaurant: their focus isn't on cooking the dish, but on defining the value proposition, market differentiation, branding, and pricing. This emphasizes commercial instincts and strategic thinking over hands-on technical creation, a trait that the most impactful engineers have always possessed.

Furthermore, AI is causing the functions of design and code to merge. It is becoming increasingly unclear whether code will become design or if design will automatically translate into code, but the traditional separation of these fiefdoms is dissolving, pushing for a more integrated skill set.

Being a chef at a famous restaurant is what's our value proposition? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we brand ourselves? What's our segment? What's our pricing? What's our location even? That's what makes a famous chef.

Storytelling is Essential to Cut Through Clutter in the AI Era

In an era where artificial intelligence simplifies product development, the real challenge for designers and entrepreneurs is to discern what to build and, crucially, how to make it stand out amidst immense competition. The ability to articulate a concept with compelling simplicity, much like the iconic phrase 'a thousand songs in your pocket', holds far more value than any advanced development tools.

Keith Rabois emphasizes that cutting through market clutter is paramount, a factor he immediately assesses when evaluating investment opportunities. He views traditional customer feedback from isolated experiments as unreliable because it fails to replicate real-world distractions consumers face, such as being on a subway or walking, which can lead to misleading insights.

New companies like Simile are emerging to tackle this by simulating human responses to marketing and product experiences using AI models of actual people. However, a significant concern remains regarding the quality and relevance of the data used to train these simulations, as inaccurate training data could lead to dangerous or incorrect conclusions about human behavior.

the person who can say "this is the way" to frame it, you know, the proverbial thousand songs in your pocket, is worth like all the tools in the world.

Why Talking to Consumer Customers Is Actively Harmful

Keith Rabois presents a strong contrarian take: founders should avoid talking to consumer customers. He argues that engaging with them is not just unhelpful but actively detrimental to product development, a stance that sharply contrasts with conventional startup wisdom emphasizing customer discovery.

Rabois explains that consumer purchasing decisions are often subconscious. When customers are asked directly why they bought something, they consciously try to articulate reasons, but these explanations are frequently misleading. He cites the example of luxury car owners who will provide many reasons for their purchase, rarely mentioning the true, subconscious drivers.

In contrast, Rabois asserts that talking to enterprise customers is effective. This is because enterprise decisions are typically utilitarian, made by identifiable decision-makers, and driven by organizational needs, allowing for valuable information extraction. However, for consumer products targeting a large audience, obtaining representative feedback is virtually impossible.

The 'harmful' aspect stems from the fact that once misleading customer input is received, it can become ingrained in a founder's mind, irreversibly influencing future product choices and potentially steering the company in the wrong direction. Instead, Rabois suggests relying on intuition, experience, and a deep understanding of human nature to guide product development.

Customers don't know what they want, and they're very bad because it's a subconscious decision, especially for consumers. ... when you're consciously trying to answer a subconscious decision, you actually give misleading information even when you're trying.

Foundational Insights Drive Startup Success, Not Early Customer Feedback

Many successful startups emerge from a founder's deep foundational insight rather than direct customer feedback. Soliciting early customer opinions, particularly for novel concepts, can often lead to negative or unhelpful responses, as people struggle to envision what doesn't yet exist.

DoorDash exemplifies this. Its founders weren't responding to customers asking for a food delivery app. Instead, their insight came from recognizing that 93% of U.S. restaurants didn't offer delivery, combined with the broader idea that mobile devices could serve as an "I'm hungry" button. The challenge then became building an economically viable and scalable solution.

Similarly, Airbnb's initial traction wasn't due to customer surveys. Founder Brian Chesky presented compelling evidence: a significant number of Craigslist listings where people explicitly sought to rent a bedroom. This demonstrated a latent, unaddressed market demand, proving the concept's potential despite what direct surveys might have suggested about perceived risks.

This approach suggests that trusting a well-researched insight or solving one's own problem can be more effective than relying on a small sample of potential users who might reject innovative ideas due to unfamiliarity or perceived risk. It allows founders to iterate and refine their vision before subjecting it to external scrutiny.

If you sampled ten random people for an innovative idea, there's a good chance that ninety plus percent would say, 'No, I would never do that.'

Keith Rabois explains his 'ugly baby' principle for contrarian venture investing

Inspired by the "ugly baby" concept from the book Creativity, Inc. about Pixar, Keith Rabois applies this idea to his venture investing strategy. The principle suggests that every truly great idea often starts as an unpolished, unappealing "ugly baby" that few people initially recognize or want to support.

As an investor, Rabois deliberately seeks out seed or Series A investments that he anticipates half of his venture capitalist friends will laugh at. He views this contrarian reaction as a positive indicator, believing that these initially dismissed "ugly babies" are precisely where the most significant alpha can be found.

Lenny Rachitsky's own research, conducted with Terence Rohan, corroborates this idea. They interviewed early employees of generational companies like OpenAI, Palantir, and Stripe, discovering a common pattern: people often laughed at these ideas initially, thinking they were crazy and wouldn't work. This reinforces the notion that groundbreaking ventures often begin as undervalued or misunderstood concepts.

I want half of my friends who are VCs to laugh at me, like literally laugh, because ugly babies are the ones where there's real alpha.

Evaluating AI Startup Durability and Accumulating Advantages

The rapid progress of foundational AI labs creates an existential question for many startups, as their short-term success might not translate into long-term durability. Investors need to assess whether a company can sustain itself for 8 to 20 years, building a business that endures for decades rather than just momentarily thriving.

A critical aspect for a worthwhile startup, especially in the AI space, is its ability to develop accumulating advantages. These are mechanisms, like network effects, that incrementally strengthen the business over time, creating an unfair advantage and potentially making operations easier in the long run.

For early-stage investments, founders must be able to clearly articulate their conceptual plan for building and leveraging these accumulating advantages. While empirical evidence may not be available yet, the founder's vision for creating long-term unfair advantages is a crucial indicator.

Keith emphasizes his approach as a founder-driven investor. His primary criterion is whether a founder possesses a non-zero chance of fundamentally changing an industry or even the world. If such potential is identified, he commits to seed or Series A investments without further questioning.

Does this founder have a non-zero chance of changing an industry of the world? And if they do, for a seed or Series A investment, I'm in, period.

A company's operating tempo is an early indicator of its success.

A key, subtle signal of a highly successful company in its early stages is its operating tempo or speed of execution. This refers to a consistent, high-velocity rhythm where problems are identified, solutions are developed, and new features or fixes are shipped rapidly and regularly.

Keith Rabois observed this at Square, recounting Roelof Botha's experience on the board. Botha noted that Square consistently identified opportunities or problems at one board meeting and had shipped solutions by the next, a pace he had not witnessed since his early days at PayPal.

Similarly, Delian Asparouhov, then Keith's chief of staff, shadowed a Fair board meeting and was so impressed by the execution pace that he considered leaving venture capital to join the company. He noted that if something was "slightly off," by the next board meeting, the team had identified root causes, shipped solutions, and measured their impact.

This relentless pace of execution, where problems are not just acknowledged but quickly addressed and resolved, creates a compounding effect. Companies that consistently operate with such speed and responsiveness build significant momentum that drives their overall trajectory and long-term success.

At board meeting X, you identify an opportunity or a problem, and by the next board meeting, you've shipped solutions, addressed it, featured, just constantly, consistently.

Three Traits of High-Performing Companies: Speed, Talent Density, and Internal Grooming

High-performing companies often exhibit three key traits that signal their potential and drive success. The first is exceptional operational speed, or "velocity." For instance, Ramp's ability to be on the precipice of shipping a credit card in just three months, compared to an industry norm of nine to twelve months, was a crucial factor in an early investment decision. This kind of rapid execution creates a compounding advantage over time.

The second trait is maintaining a critical density of talent. It's not just about having an excellent team initially; successful companies continuously deepen and improve their existing talent pool. This constant enhancement of the team's quality and depth creates an unfair advantage, where the team consistently gets better over time.

The third trait involves a distinct hiring philosophy: thriving companies often prioritize internally grooming talent over hiring senior, experienced people from outside. This model, seen in companies like Ramp and Trade Republic, focuses on developing employees from within. This approach is particularly effective for value creation roles and can even turn into a competitive strategy, where roles like Chief of Staff are used to train ambitious individuals into future senior leaders.

Oh my God, like I'm just never seen that velocity.

Keith Rabois Advocates Criticizing in Public as a Management Philosophy

Keith Rabois discusses a management philosophy he absorbed from a founder: criticizing individuals in public rather than in private. This approach is rooted in optimizing for the entire organizational system, not just the atomic unit of the individual. When feedback is delivered publicly, it ensures that all colleagues understand that an issue exists and is being actively addressed, transforming it into a collaborative and team-building exercise.

In contrast, giving negative feedback privately means the rest of the team remains unaware that a problem is being tackled. This can lead to suspicion and nervousness about why issues persist, hindering collective understanding and problem-solving. Public criticism, therefore, aims to create transparency and shared accountability within the team.

Rabois also shares a strong stance on "psychological safety," stating he does not believe in it for high-performance machines. He argues that such environments are focused on winning and cites examples like Michael Jordan and the "Jordan Rules" to illustrate that intense, direct feedback, even public criticism, is integral to achieving elite performance. He suggests that a focus on psychological safety is often negatively correlated with success.

High performance machines don't have psychological safety, they're about winning.

Avoid Overemphasizing Failure Retrospectives to Encourage Bold Risk-Taking

Keith Rabois highlights that failures are an inherent part of venture capital, likening it to a top tennis player still losing 40% of their matches. He suggests that one key skill is not getting overly preoccupied with these failures.

He recounted a board meeting experience where, despite the company performing well, some board members proposed conducting retrospectives on past failures. Rabois argued against this approach.

His reasoning was that overemphasizing failures could inadvertently deter employees from taking ambitious shots on goal. He believed such retros might make people fear criticism, thereby stifling the psychological safety needed for bold action.

Instead, Rabois advocated for encouraging a culture where people are eager to tackle difficult problems and take risks. He stressed that this focus on winning and ambitious problem-solving is how true value is created within a company.

I don't want to deter people from taking ambitious shots on goal, and if you overemphasize failures, people think they are going to get criticized.

Keith Rabois details his 'No Days Off' life motto and workout consistency.

Keith Rabois lives by the motto 'No Days Off,' which he views as a direct proxy for not believing in excuses. This philosophy drives his commitment to consistent effort in all aspects of life, particularly his rigorous physical fitness routine.

Rabois illustrates this by revealing he has only missed working out seven days in the past seven years. This includes enduring illness, extensive international travel, and significant personal events like weddings. He often exercises more than once a day, for example, having both a barre class and a lifting session on the same day.

When asked if any member of the PayPal Mafia overperformed beyond his expectations, Rabois stated honestly, 'no.' He believes he had a strong intuition for identifying individuals with 'founder level ambition' who had the potential to build significant ventures.

No days off is a proxy for I don't believe in excuses.