Keith RaboisManaging Director, Khosla Ventures

Measure Inputs Not Outputs - Keith Rabois

Name: Measure Inputs Not Outputs - Keith Rabois
Uploaded: 2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00
Duration: 1 min 32 s
Channel: Keith Rabois
Description: In this monologue, Keith Rabois challenges the prevalent Silicon Valley practice of evaluating executives and teams based on output metrics, arguing that…

10 Sept 2020 · 2 min

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1:32

In this monologue, Keith Rabois challenges the prevalent Silicon Valley practice of evaluating executives and teams based on output metrics, arguing that this approach discourages breakthrough innovation. He recounts a lesson from Jeff Bezos, who emphasizes measuring the quality of inputs—thoughtfulness, decisiveness, and comprehensiveness—rather than outcomes. Rabois explains that focusing on inputs enables organizations to assign their top talent to high‑risk, low‑probability projects that can yield transformative results. He reinforces the point with a reference to Bill Walsh’s book The Score Takes Care of Itself, which illustrates how a football team’s success stems from meticulous attention to every detail rather than obsessing over the final score. The overarching message is that by prioritizing thoughtful inputs, companies create the conditions for sustained innovation and winning performance.

Chapters

Most people in Silicon Valley are taught sort of Google style or Facebook style to measure outputs, outputs from executives, output from a team. And I think that's probably mostly wrong. I learned this from listening to Jeff Bezos speak once where he talked about the criteria that you apply at Amazon, which is to always thoughtfully measure the inputs and the thoughtfulness, the decisiveness, the comprehensiveness of the inputs, and not look at the outputs. And as he started to explain why it really resonated with me that the most successful people I know and the people who really drive innovation actually are always focused on the inputs, not the outputs. The reason why is if you look at the outputs, all of these ideas seem crazy and like the most innovative projects seem crazy. And so if people are gauged and they think they're going to be gauged recursively on the output, the best people don't want to bite off a project that has very limited chance of success. But the only way you get through a breakthrough is by taking your best people and forcing them to work on the projects that have 100 XXI but only 1% probability. So for example, there's another book I highly recommend people read called the Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh, which talks about the process of rebuilding a football team from a losing organization to a very successful winning organization and consistently winning organization. And the most important point of the book, although I highly recommend reading the entire book, is that you don't focus on the score of a football game, which is winning. You focus on doing every little detail properly. And the byproduct of doing every little thing perfectly is eventually you win football games.