In this monologue, Keith Rabois explains that as organizations grow, leaders cannot make every decision and must rely on the broader team to act with the same information they have. He argues that most poor decisions stem from a lack of visibility into priorities and data. To fix this, he advocates for radical transparency: sharing dashboards, proactively surfacing problems, and broadcasting meeting notes and board decks to the entire company. He cites Square’s practice of sending full meeting notes and using “glass windows” to let employees see ongoing discussions, and recounts a PayPal episode where legal counsel wanted to suppress revenue data. Rabois and Peter Thiel pushed back, negotiating a compromise that still allowed employees to infer revenue, illustrating the importance of insisting on comprehensive data sharing to enable high‑quality decisions.
Chapters
When you're scaling an organization, you're never going to be able to make, nor do you want to make, all of the decisions. But it becomes usually very frustrating for senior executives and founders and CEOs when people are making decisions that are inconsistent with what they would like to see happen. 99% of the time, the reason why the decisions are inaccurate or unsatisfying is most of the rest of the company doesn't have the same level of visibility. into what's going on and what the prioritization should be as you do. The way you correct for that is to give everybody access to the exact same information you have so that they can learn to make decisions basically with the same information. You have to share data, which is things like dashboards. You have to share problems proactively so that people can account for them. You have to build in this culture where people are willing to communicate about challenges they see and things that aren't working. So the earlier you know something's not working, the earlier your surface problems, the more potential solutions you can apply before you run out of time or money. So one of the things we did well at Square was we had fairly radical transparency. So for example, for every meeting, we would send notes to the entire company about the topic and the discussion in the meeting. We would have, you know, Glass windows, which we also have at Founders Fund, so that people could see, you know, what was going on in every meeting. kind of we'd review the entire board deck with the company after the board meeting. There's a set of initiatives, including, you know, the dashboards and the proverbial, you know, data sharing. Peter was really adamant back in our PayPal days about this. We were going public and our lawyers wanted us to suppress certain information. And Peter correctly pointed out, well, then how the hell were people going to make decisions if they didn't have access to information? So we really negotiated. Fortunately, Peter, having been a securities lawyer for a little while, was able to push back pretty aggressively on our outside counsel. and we eventually compromised where we stripped off the revenue line from the reports we were sending everybody. But of course, you could calculate the revenue if we stated the revenue rate and the payment volume, but we just didn't explicitly declare the revenue. Basically, you really need to insist upon sharing everything if you want people to make high quality, high fidelity decisions.
