#1423 Keith Rabois & Mike Shebat | How To Build A Successful Business

Keith Rabois is the Managing Director at Khosla Ventures & CEO at OpenStore. Mike Shebat is the Co-Founder & CEO at Traba. This conversation was recorded at the BUILD Summit in New York. In this conversation, we discuss how elite entrepreneurs stand out, the importance of an ambitious culture, how to build a great team, utilizing AI, their current investing themes, and more. ======================= Buy book: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Extraordinary-Life-Anthony-Pompliano/dp/0857199927/ ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 0:54Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Next up, we have Keith Raboy, who is the Managing Director at KV Coastal Ventures. And then we have Mike Shabat, who owns a company called Traba, which is the fastest-growing company in multiple-tier-one venture capitalist portfolio. I'm very excited that you are here. Do you have a microphone? No, is it underneath you?

• 2:17Speaker 03

  There we go, that'll help.

• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't scare me like that. Let's start with you, Keith. You are famous for finding many of the best investments over the last 20 years and investing in them really early. I think your claim to fame is that you have never met with a founder who then went on to build a multi-billion-dollar company and not invest. So you've never missed in terms of meeting the founder?

• 2:37Speaker 03

  There's now one, I don't want to distract you. At the low end of the spectrum, $1.8 billion acquisition, but it would have been a Series B, so not that much money.

• 2:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk just quickly, you've honed this like human algorithm of meeting people, understanding who's a winner, who's not. What do you look for in a 15- to 30-minute meeting with a founder that really allows you to make a decision?

• 2:59Speaker 03

  At a conceptual level, it's pretty straightforward. If you think about it, when you start a company, you're irrational completely. Like, the idea that you're going to reinvent an entire industry from scratch, financial services, staffing, supply chain, whatever it is, is like borderline irrational to crazy. So the only people who have a non-zero chance of changing the world are people who have an unfair advantage that you never see, which is, you have to be in the top 10 basis points on some trait. You could call it a superpower, if you like, it's a little buzzy, but fundamentally, unless you have some trait, the chance rounds to zero, which means it's a very bad investment. There's another version of that, which is, you have an unusual combination of two skills that you never see in tandem, that also is basically a top 10 basis points kind of, you know, sort of situation.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  So unless I feel that, and usually you can't miss it, it's like, three minutes or less, you either have this superpower or you don't, there's no reason to invest.

• 3:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What's an example where people would have two different skills you usually don't see together?

• 3:56Speaker 03

  So Max Levchin, now, you know, from PayPal days, a firm, etc., is a first-rate business strategist and a truly first-rate technologist. Those usually don't go together. And this isn't even with the benefits of hindsight. I remember January of 2001, dating myself, when I was at PayPal, Reid Hoffman came up to me, and I was preparing for my first meeting with Max Levchin, and he said, you know, Max is a first-rate business strategist and a first-rate technologist, and there's less than five of those people in Silicon Valley. Turned out to be, Reed, as usual, pretty brilliant.

• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty cool. We're gonna really crank on the ambition here. Mike, you tell every single person that joins your company that you're gonna build a trillion dollar company. I heard that the first time I started, I was ambitious. Literally, every single person in the organization repeats it over and over and over again. How are you gonna do that? And why do you harp on such a big audacious goal?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Good question. So I believe that when you start a company, you wanna really set the frame of what the ambition of the company's gonna be. Kind of like athletics, where say you're in middle school or high school, and you have a favorite sport. Say you're a figure skater. If you want to go to the Olympics for figure skating, you're just gonna operate on a different cadence than everyone else, especially people that say, you know what, I'm gonna do figure skating, but I'm gonna do all this other stuff in life, too. So anything that is massively ambitious, you're just on a different frame, like different cadence. And that feeds into every micro decision you make every single day. So if you're building a trillion dollar business, that's way different than building a billion dollar business, or

• 5:32Speaker 04

  a million dollar business. And that feeds into the targets that you set, it feeds into the people you have to hire, it feeds into the investors that you seek to give you your first check. And trillion, like, it is actually possible. So there's seven trillion dollar companies today. If you were to wake up two decades from now, and you look around, how many trillion dollar companies you think there'll be? There's probably a lot more than seven. So the fact that it is possible, there's no reason why one of those many trillion dollar companies in the future wouldn't be any of you all, or us. So we wanna hire a group of people that don't see that as impossible, and actually wanna push for something big. And the reason why it's a trillion dollar market cap is because we actually do have

• 6:16Speaker 04

  a goal as a venture-backed company to IPO, and have a real market cap. So that feeds into the impact that you're making, and the decisions that you're making. Also, you have to care about revenue, unit economics, all the things that matter when you're a publicly traded company as well. So that's why everyone that signs up doesn't see that as impossible. They're actually stoked by the ambition of the company. And they want to learn a lot through that process.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  So we could take your question and when I met Mike, I could tell you like what immediately sparked. So Mike's the most persistent person I've ever met, maybe the most persistent person on the planet. It was pretty obvious like from day one, he told me this anecdote of when he was thinking, had this bad idea of going to business school, that he took the GMAT eight times. So I actually didn't think there's like legally possible to even get anywhere near eight. I probably would have guessed like you could take it two or three times, but like eight times and then not even going. Another classic illustration is when Mike was working at Uber, you know, some of his colleagues were competing or you know, joining this triathlon for the weekend and with no training whatsoever on Thursday, Mike decided to do it. Not that he finished it, but he didn't have a bike at the time. So he just borrowed a city bike.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  So that's like the kind of mentality that leads to an unfair advantage in building a company from scratch.

• 7:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Now to recruit talent, you also do what I'm going to call kind of a filter right up front. You tell them, hey, we're going to work nine, nine, six, which is nine AM to nine PM, six days a week. You sweat all of the details and culture and the attitude of people. Some would say from external, oh, you're micromanaging. I think people who know how to build very large companies say you care enough about all these details to hold people to a standard. Talk a little bit about the filter and then also how you continue to kind of keep that bar of excellence once they join the company.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a good question. So it all starts with the goal, remember? So if you want to build a trillion dollar business, you look at the actual trillion dollar businesses out there like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. And then you look back into the first 100 employees there and all of them were just like really, really pushing very hard. And they all have a lot of challenges, like every single day there's challenges with company building. It's never up and to the right. So you want to have a team of people around you that are going to be really building the company with you, being world-class and not clocking out at six or not thinking that startups are easy because they're definitely not. So the best way to do that is just to be upfront with the team that you're about to hire. Like, look, we're signing up to do something really bold and ambitious.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  You can pull multiple examples of any, anyone, including. Including outside of building a tech company that is like chewing glass to get through all the hard times. So we just anti sell people and we're like, we started the company right after the vaccines were distributed where everyone was remote. And startups, there's interest rates were super low. So people were just like hiring people that didn't hold them accountable. And no one like really was rowing in the same direction. And then you look at all the big giants of our time and they're like in the trenches together, late nights at the office, solving problems. And when everyone buys into that, it unlocks something awesome. Like if you, if only part of the team buys into that, it's like a 20% cohort that's like pushing, pulling the weight for everyone else. And because with company building, you literally are up against the clock.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  You have to make a certain amount of revenue and then the investors like Keith will be like, okay, you made that much revenue. How much did you spend to get there? And that needs to like move in the right direction. So the number one line item to spend is human capital, like how many, what the salaries are. So with every single person on the team, you actually just have to break it down. Okay. Salaries this much a year, divide that by 12. This is how much I'm, is coming out of the company bank account every single month. Is like that much, would I pay that much to get the value that this person is contributing, including ourselves, like as the founder? So that's why we do anti selling like crazy before someone joins and it's completely fine. Like if you don't wanna, if you're not at a phase of your life to give it all you got to a startup, then don't join.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  In the same way that if you were in high school and there was like some crazy varsity coach. That was like, we're going to do two days on Saturday, but we're going to win the championship. People will self select out of that. They're like, no way. Like I have things to do on Saturday. So that's just what we've done from the beginning and it's really paid dividends with all the decisions that are being made at the company.

• 10:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you explain a little bit PayPal, Square? I mean, you worked at so many of these companies. What were the things that were true then that are still true today around company culture and kind of getting these people? Not just the best people into the company, but things that you guys did to get them motivated and working hard every single day?

• 10:44Speaker 03

  So there are two key ingredients and they're very similar to Trava. People worked really hard and we had a critical density of talent and then we had no excuses. So for example, at PayPal, we held executive. Meetings at 10 a.m. on Saturday, every Saturday. And so if you wanted to be an executive, you were there on Saturday and everybody who aspired to be influential was there on Saturday. And it was just like a 24/7 culture. We had our headquarters in Palo Alto and later Mountain View. And it was so intense that even though all of us were in our twenties and early thirties, there's only three people in the company that lived in San Francisco, even though that's at that time more attractive. It was just, there wasn't any free moments to commute back and forth.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Same thing at Square, you know, I worked every Sunday. I did most of my interviewing of candidates on Sundays. Anybody who wanted to be influential was in the office every Sunday. We started actually, this is pretty rare for Silicon Valley. We started all of our meetings at 8 a.m., which was actually an interesting reawakening for me. I wasn't used to starting meetings, but all the engineers, the first 17 engineers, stand up 8 a.m. every day.

• 11:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Mike, when you hire people, we're talking about a density of talent. They have to be smart, obviously. But if given the choice between do they buy into the mission versus are they smart? How do you evaluate kind of which end of that spectrum they end up on?

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we operate in a unsexy market. So we do staffing, our first product is for staffing for the global supply chain. So I believe that people resonate with problems that they actually experienced themselves. Like, for example, if someone really gets fired up to become a therapist someday, maybe they actually experienced something in high school that really sparked that. So I don't think anyone comes out of the womb being like, I know exactly what I'm doing. But I do think that we, you can hire people that are passionate about solving very big problems that drive a ton of impact. So I was at Blackstone here in New York and I got a call from a company called McMaster Car, which is an engineering supplier. And I didn't also resonate with the problem until I took that job. And I was in this management rotation program there and I saw all the crazy inefficiencies.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  And I became like, wow, there's so much we can do to drive a ton of impact. I mean, all of us feel the impact from the global supply chain being constrained by labor inefficiencies. Like, this came through the global supply chain. You buy something online, it takes a little bit longer. Like, all of that is because labor inefficiencies are constrained. Training that. So what we do is we hire smart people that want to go do something big and create a lot of impact. Then they fall in love with the problem by actually meeting our customers, seeing how much impact we have on this huge, huge space. Like, we have customers now on Trava where you go get tomatoes at Whole Foods, like they came through. They're using Trava to make sure that those can get delivered at a cheaper price faster.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Or we also have another customer that they produce building materials that probably like apartments that are coming up in New York are using. So you can actually see the ripple effects of the changes we're making at Trava. But I don't expect anyone to tell me the complete truth if they're, oh my gosh, I'm so obsessed with the global supply chain when they're first interviewing for a job at Trava.

• 13:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about barrels. It was something that I think a lot of people have learned from you. What is a barrel? How do you evaluate whether someone is a barrel? And then if somebody is not performing up to a standard inside of one of these companies, how do you think about kind of performance improvements without having to go replace them?

• 14:05Speaker 03

  So I came up, I sort of derived this metaphor to answer a common question that CEOs ask and get frustrated by, which is, I'm hiring more and more people, especially as Mike talked about during the, alluded to the zero interest days. People would just hire, hire, hire, and they'd get less done. Or they certainly wouldn't get any more done and not like exponentially more done. And it'd be incredibly frustrating, like the burn rate would go from a hundred K a month to a million a month and less would get done. And they'd say, like, why is that happening? And all these people on paper would be fine candidates. One of the fundamental reasons are like most people you hire, even if they're pretty talented, are what I call ammunitions. And very few people are barrels. And you can only do, an organization can only do as sequentially, non-sequentially, in parallel, can only do as many things as you have barrels.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And so a barrel is someone who could take an idea, a conceptual idea, and bring it across the finish line to success. And they will marshal the resources, they will motivate people, they will jump through hoops and hurdles to make that happen. Typically, you have very few barrels. So a ratio, let's say at PayPal, which was, you know, famous for its critical density of talent, we probably had plus or minus fifteen barrels out of two hundred fifty-four people. A normal two Billion dollar company might have two or three. So they're really scarce. The way you can tell, you usually can't tell unless you've worked with them before, until they're actually in your building, they're in your office, and you see them working with your colleagues. And you can tell who basically develops this soft kind of influential ability, where people come to their desk and ask for advice.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Not people who report to them, but just generally people are like, oh, this person can help me solve problems. And that's what you're looking for. And then you keep expanding their set of responsibilities, the degrees of complexity of challenges that you allow them, you know, to DRI. Most people are not going to be barrels. So you're not really performance managing the rest. I'll let Mike actually talk about performance managing because it's another one of his superpowers. But fundamentally, you're just embracing the barrels you find and challenging them to take it to another step and another step and another step. So like, for example, I run a company, a CEO. The president of the CEO started as the, one of the two most junior people in the company. He's been promoted six times. Maybe one day he has a seventh promotion, but that's pretty good in three years.

• 16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you get a barrel to create other barrels? Or are they just like kind of born?

• 16:24Speaker 03

  I think you can. It takes time. It's like learning by osmosis. So maybe if you have a barrel and you pair them with a high potential, you know, high potential person a year or two later.

• 16:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Mike, talk about kind of performance management and how you can get more out of people.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so for one, when we have barrels at Trava, we call them force multipliers. Because remember, we're an in-person company, so we're all here in New York and Soho. I think that sending a message to the organization that you're giving this person a lot more room to grow and a lot more authority at the organization. Then people are like, oh, actually I want to be a lot more like her or him. And then they start embodying those behaviors. So I think that force multipliers, you want to like really give them a ton more rope because then people are like, okay, so that's the standard of this company. But then with that comes a huge responsibility, which is why we do sweat the details with performance as well. So we have a value at Trava. Then we have values, then we have tenants underneath the values. One of the tenants of Olympian's work ethic is lead by doing.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  So if you just imagine like a sports team and there's like a captain on the team, like people do look to that captain and start to like, okay, is that captain able to rally the organization in the same way the coach can?

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What about people who want to do side projects outside of Trava?

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't do side projects and the reason for that, it just goes back to like, if you're doing something so ambitious, like going to the Olympics, for example, like you just can't really balance all this other stuff. And when you're in, when you're at home, you're like showering for a hard day, you want your whole team to be like really thinking about the problems that they're going to go solve. And if they have their mind all over the place with a bunch of other things that they're trying to do outside of work, then they're, they're compartmentalizing what your company is doing, which is not, it's not good. It doesn't drive to like that true success that you need as an organization.

• 18:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Keith, you're seeing all kinds of technology all the time. You're seeing founders, all kinds of different geographies. What are like the key themes right now that you've noticed in your own investing that may surprise people?

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Well, personally, I don't really do thematic investing. I do founder, you know, founder evaluation, founder assessment, and that's really all I care about. But as a fund, across the fund, 40% of all our investments are AI driven. Another maybe 20% are healthcare oriented stuff and then a fair amount of financial services innovation, especially in New York. So those are the things that we're investing in. But to me, I'd invest in anything with the right founder or the right team.

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  What about geography? You moved to Miami. So did Mike.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  I, five of my last, or four of my last five investments have been in New York, one in Miami. I think we just invested yesterday. I'm still trying to figure out where the company is based. Hopefully it's New York or Miami. But fundamentally, you know, I have a very important investment in Berlin, which I never would have guessed. We have seen fragmentation of all the best companies are all over the place. Like the best, maybe the best run private company on the planet is Ramp, based in New York, but with a major office and co-founder in Miami. Traba started in Miami, is now in New York. So we have, you know, examples everywhere. I haven't made a material investment in the Bay Area since 2019, though.

• 19:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel like being outside of the Bay Area gives some of these companies an advantage? Like, obviously, New York.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Oh, definitely. For three reasons. First of all, the Bay Area is atypical. So your target audience probably is not people who live in the Bay Area. So being infused with people who are probably going to use your products and customers is an advantage. Secondly, the Bay Area is culturally like a disaster. Nobody goes to work in the office in the Bay Area. Rippling is the only company in the Bay Area at scale where every employee goes into the office. I am involved in several really good Bay Area companies. It's not true anywhere in the Bay Area except Rippling. And so we don't believe you can build a really iconic company unless you're working in person constantly. And so the Bay Area, you know, just disqualified there. Third thing is you're going to get assaulted all the time in the Bay Area. People are going to steal your car, break into your home, assault you on the street, or step on a syringe.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  And talk about distractions, like let alone have a side project. If one of your colleagues is being shot every day, like, it's really hard to get work done. I literally had colleagues at Square that were shot. And that doesn't happen in Miami. None of my colleagues at Miami have been assaulted.

• 20:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Keith just warming up.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Favorite topic.

• 20:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Mike, you guys are using AI. You're not an AI company, but you're using AI internally. The one product that I've seen is the robo-calling, which I think is really fascinating. Talk about maybe that product and then also how you're using AI.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so since we're a marketplace, there's a lot of interesting use cases for AI that our engineers have been able to build out. Essentially, taking all the manual things that are happening and then scaling it out. So there's a few different examples. One, like Paul mentioned, we do AI robo-calling. So if you can imagine, if you don't have any data on a worker to bring them to a certain shift, you basically need to have conversations with that worker and pick up on subtle cues. Like, have you worked in a warehouse before? Have you driven a forklift? Where's the emergency switch on the forklift? Oh, the answer was wrong. They probably haven't been on a forklift. So as a human, you're actually like figuring out the likelihood that this worker will actually go to the shift on time and be the right worker for that shift. So we have built out AI robo-calling that interviews and vets hundreds of thousands of workers at scale,

• 21:37Speaker 04

  which has been great for unit economics. We also have an AI co-pilot that actually we have. Live, live operations agents that see, okay, here's all the workers on the travel platform. We're monitoring their location tracking to get to the shift. Are they going to be there on time? Are we going to send them another AI robot call to ask them if they're going to be on time? Are we going to replace them with someone else? And then, once they get to the shift, are they have to clock in, clock out, all these kind of things? So today, we've built something called Sentinel, which tells our operations agents, hey, here's all these different tasks. Here's flagging what's happening on the shift. Here's tasks that you could do. And then, we're building out a big database of all the different things that they actually do when the shift is taking place. If you can imagine this data model we're building out at scale, it just like,

• 22:22Speaker 04

  you can just automate the entire function. And today, remember staffing, there's like 55,000 brick and mortar offices. There's call centers all across the country. And they're still profitable. They're like publicly traded staffing firms are 6% even profitable. So you can really scale that out. There's machine learning that we've done in terms of fraud detection, because you can imagine people are walking into facilities. They're signing in on paper timesheet. People are leaving, like the person doesn't know who they are. So there's, so they get paid two weeks later with a lot of like inaccuracies. So we built a machine learning classifier that picks up on not only past behaviors, but geo-fencing, when did they walk in? Did they leave with other workers? And then, with that, we can instant pay the worker because we know with very low risk that we're not going to lose money on that,

• 23:06Speaker 04

  which just makes workers flood to our platform because they're all, like a lot of our workers live paycheck to paycheck. So two weeks, really, they feel it. And then, there's all sorts of other things. We've done computer vision with timesheets, like you just think about, like going into a time machine into a warehouse and like a lot of these innovations just have, they're, they just haven't been disrupted. So our engineers use a lot of AI, machine learning, computer vision to like really create tons of impact beyond just getting workers to the shift.

• 23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Keith, you're one of the most sought after board members. Every person I know that you're on their board, they tell me two things. Keith gave me really good ideas. I fucking hate talking to Keith when things aren't going well because he holds me accountable. What is the thing founders should do with their board to get the most value? Everyone always talks about like who you take money from, whatever, but like, how should a founder work with that board to get maximum value?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Well, first is selection of board members. I think, you know, my colleague Vinod Khosla says 95% of VCs aren't worth listening to, and maybe he's being charitable. So I think being wise about who you pair and partner with, like, you should take, as founders, you have a license to spend as much time with an investor as you want. Like, this is a very irreversible decision, who you take money from, especially if you confer a board seat. So not only due diligence, but spend time and make sure you're making the right decision. So that's the first thing. Once, if you get that right, most other things will take care of themselves. Secondly, I think transparency is pretty critical. Like, if founders aren't transparent with me, this just applies to me, my advice may be wrong. Like, the higher the quality and the higher fidelity data, signal, anecdotes, exposure to the team, I

• 24:41Speaker 03

  get, the more my brain can train on reality. If you're worried about your investor grading you and you distort information, even with the best intent, their advice is going to be miscalibrated and sometimes directionally wrong, which is incredibly dangerous.

• 24:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You two are very good friends. I have immense respect for both of you. Keith, can you tell us what Mike's greatest strengths are? And then be careful, because he's going to get to do the same to you back.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Well, I mentioned, you know, obviously, the persistency and tenacity. The performance management is off the charts. He underestimated, he under, like, sold it. Mike doesn't let anything slip. Like, the first time an employee is slightly off, he corrects it, which most CEOs know they should do, but they don't. Like, every CEO knows in the back of their brain that this person is not doing the way, the job the way they should be doing. But for a variety of reasons, they don't correct things, and then things compound. And Mike builds a system, and every piece of the system has to be perfectly aligned, or he'll fix it, like, right away. And that's incredibly rare. Basically, one out of every thousand founders, maybe, is kind of in that zone. So I think those are the two.

• 25:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So you can take that as qualities of a very strong founder who's got momentum. It's working. What about Keith?

• 25:55Speaker 04

  So Keith is a world-class operator. Like you mentioned, a lot of board members may actually unfortunately give you bad advice. They've never actually been in the founder's shoes before. So Keith's track record speaks for itself. He was at PayPal Mafia. He was the first investor into Airbnb, DoorDash, several companies that are massive, awesome companies now. So he's actually seen what Tony Hsu and Brian Chesky have actually been through with building a marketplace at scale. So everyone that I talk to in tech, the number one thing is like Keith is a world-class operator. And he actually understands that this is just part of the company building journey. And I think he also just like remembers he has an insane memory for all of your numbers. He like just really sweats and understands like all the nuances of your company.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  So it's just like really helpful when you ask like a question. It's like he has all the context. So he gets close to his portfolio companies and really helps them in ways that most startups don't get to go through.

• 26:51Anthony Pompliano?

  As a quick anecdote, right before we came on stage, I asked Keith, I said, hey, what's the fastest growing revenue company in history? And what did you say to me?

• 26:57Speaker 03

  It's unfortunately, I think it's OpenAI.

• 26:59Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no, the qualification you said, well, it depends on. And then what did you say?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, it depends on whether you're using like revenue, GMV, you know, contribution. I tend to like contribution dollars. I don't like revenue and GMV. So I've tried to get, you know, talk about advice to founders for like 20 odd years. I've been on this crusade of don't look at revenue. It's now more in vogue. You know, four years ago, I was probably this outlier and everybody's like, who's that weird conservative, you know, person who like wants to look at actual metrics? Other than my partner, David Widen at KV, who also is this way. But anyway, it's now cool and popular to talk about gross profit and contribution dollars. But that's how I've always sort of oriented the answer.

• 27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the details, which is a big takeaway from this. I appreciate both you guys doing this. Thank you so much.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up guys? I hope you're enjoying this episode, but I got a quick message for you. I just released my very first book. It's called How to Live an Extraordinary Life. In this book, there are 65 life lessons that I've picked up over the years. These lessons will teach you about money, investing, relationships, work, health, happiness, and much more. In this book, I wrote letters to each one of my children, and I tried to share those life lessons with them. If you pick up this book, there's three things that I can promise you. The first is that it is very concise. The audiobook is only three hours. You can listen to it on a long drive or on a rainy afternoon. The second thing is that you're gonna learn something. It's worth the price of admission just for the lessons themselves. And then the third thing is, it will make you think more deeply about your life and how you try to live it.

• 28:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So go pick up How to Live an Extraordinary Life today. It's a quick read. It's very impactful. It's very concise. And it would mean the world to me for the support. Go check it out today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you buy your books. Hardcover, audiobook, it all works. Thank you so much for the support, and I'd love to hear what you think about the new book.