Keith Rabois discusses finding your irreplaceable strength and spotting talent with the same eye. He hired Ian Wong after reading his Quora posts, which led to co-founding Opendoor. Rabois learned these principles from PayPal alumni like Peter Thiel and Max Levchin.
Chapters
You have to find what your comparative advantage is in life and then double and triple down on it. Each of the people that worked at PayPal that was talented had different skills and traits. The reason why they went different directions is they figure out how to frame themselves so they're not just the best, they're the only Peter. Not many substitutes for Peter. Max. Not many substitutes for Max. David Sachs I think has found his own roll off.
You are a part of PayPal mafia. I have to ask, do you guys have a group chat?
No.
One of the two best parts of being a VC is you get to work with the most talented entrepreneurs in the world and you get to watch them. I have actually given a whole speech on lessons I've learned from Vinod, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin. But I try to absorb from everybody.
What traits do you look for in talented young individuals?
What you want to find is someone has a non zero chance of changing an industry of the world. That's it.
You are also very active on X. But I have noticed since joining coastla again your contrarian takes have. I mean I'm not going to say they dulled down but like you have gotten a little bit more mellow.
Oh my God, I'm getting old. Damn it. My thesis is I ran out of contrarian takes because they've all been proven to be true.
Have you thought about writing a book?
I've started to play around with ChatGPT to write a book for me. The outline it came up with is actually pretty damn good. The title was very non intuitive and kind of edgy which I like. It's called.
One of the common themes that I've noticed around you and your circles. And in doge the new admin is embracing young talent. So in DOGE hired really young. Teal Fellowship hired really young. There's different mafias around this too. But for you I asked Delian, like what should I ask Keith and and Delian? He said he's. He told me to ask you what do you see in certain young folks that convinces you to spend so much time mentoring?
It's the same thing as investing. Truthfully, it's the same formula. What you want to find is someone has a non zero chance of changing an industry of the world. That's it. It's really that simple. And it's the same. You're scouting for professional sports, you're scouting for music labels. It's the same basic concept is most people are in the middle of the bell curve and either don't have the skill or ambition to be two standard deviations away. Investing is all about finding those people and giving them either capital or advice or both. The same thing, whether you individually mentor someone is the exact same formulation as someone who has super high potential and has a shot of transforming the world. So try to find them. It gets harder. The assessment part actually I think gets easier. The identification part is harder. It's not like you get to meet all 4 billion people on the planet. I've yet to find a way to do that. My friends Daniel Gross and actually back in the day tried Pioneer, which is a way of scaling the identification of these people. And it has some success I think, but I've found that you need to do it in person, which really reduces the scalability of it and the disadvantages. As you age, your natural social, professional, personal networks are more distant from up and coming people. So you have to find alternatives to that. For a while now I'm even too probably dated to use this for a while. I use my soccer team as a way, as a way to find up and coming talent. It worked pretty well. Hired two, at least two people off my soccer team that worked at Square. They started a company that's a very good company called Fair so but was a good magnet for people. You can, you can try to find new alternatives but it gets difficult. You can rely upon friends of friends and there's some truth to that. You know, the adage that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with is basically true. So if you find one node, one person who's a node, the five people that that person spends the most time with, there's probably some pretty other talented people in that group. So you can try that. But the technique of identification, you can reach social media people who are exceptional sometimes publish stuff. My other co founder at Opendoor, Ian Wong, I'd actually read his Quora posts and didn't no idea who he was. Just read some of his Quora posts back in the day and I bumped into him at a professional event in San Francisco and he introduced himself and asked for career advice. And I said your only career advice is I have a job for you starting on Monday at Square. And he was like absolutely blown away. Like I was like, nope, you don't have a choice. Like I've got a job for you. And he's like, don't I have to interview? I'm like nope. And the reason why is I'd already read all his content and I could see from his content and like his education that he had a confluence of interesting ideas and backgrounds. And I was like, if I can't figure out how to make you useful, like it's square in my problem, not the other way around. He had, he had electrical engineering and a CS background and a data science background. Like we do all of those things. There must be something for you to do here. We only have like 30 people. Like I've got. It's unusual that someone like with that background walks into my lab. Please start Monday. And he did. And you know, he wound up then later co founding Opendoor with me, stayed nine years as CTO and now he's running a really cool company in Seattle.
You're gonna bring him back?
Sorry?
You gonna bring him back?
No. His company is doing very well. Like it's not announced yet, so I won't talk too much about it, but it's got very high potential from what I can tell.
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So what traits do you look for in talented young individuals?
I think it's really easy to describe conceptually which is there's only. There's two formulations. One is you are in the top. Call it 1 to 10 basis points on some specific trait and.
