Keith Rabois – 3 Most Important Lessons He Learned from Peter Thiel

“I’ve been working with Peter professionally for 23 years… The most important lesson I learned in building a company is the value of finding undiscovered talent. Back then, we were competing with Yahoo and Microsoft for talent, but you can’t compete on talent by targeting the same people that companies with infinite profits will overpay for. Peter’s lesson was that you should hire people under 30. The point wasn’t to be ageist. Instead, he realized that by the time you’re 30, everyone using a hiring algorithm should come to similar conclusions. It’s a bit like sports: when you draft NBA athletes straight out of high school, there’s more untapped potential compared to signing a free agent who’s been in the league for 10 years.”

The second most important lesson Keith learned from Peter was the value of time:

“People systematically — in Peter’s words — undervalue their time.”

Being disciplined with your time is essential, as it ties directly into the third lesson: the value of focus:

“Peter can be extreme when he has a viewpoint — he takes it all the way to the extreme. At PayPal, he had a rule about focus: everyone in the organization — when we had 300 people in the Bay Area — was allowed to focus on exactly one thing. Peter would refuse to talk to you about anything that wasn’t that one thing, period. But fundamentally, the discipline of only focusing on one thing led to significant breakthroughs.”

Keith explains:

“What happens in a startup is that there are always difficult challenges, and it’s easy to divert attention to the problems you already know how to solve. But those aren’t the breakthroughs or the 10x ideas. When Peter would say to me, ‘I need you to fix this, and I literally won’t talk to you for the next month or two until you do,’ it forced me to bang my head against the wall every single day. And once in a while, I’d have a ‘holy cow’ moment — ‘We can do this.’ Now imagine this across an organization of 300 people — 5 or 10 ideas that probably wouldn’t have happened were a direct result of Peter’s management philosophy.”