The Team You Build Is The Company You Build - Keith Rabois

Vinod Khosla was on my board at Square and he coined this adage at one board meeting where he said, the team you build is the company you build. It distilled a lot of wisdom that had been circulating in my brain for the last 10 years before that, but I never really distilled it into a pithy adage because a lot of people get distracted in Silicon Valley. They focus on the technology, on the product, on the users and everything except the people. It turns out that the most important thing by far is the people. and that 100% of your problems get solved with the right people and about none of them get solved with the wrong people. We learned this lesson originally back at PayPal where Peter Thiel and Max Levchin were exceptional at recruiting extraordinary people. Through the heroic efforts of probably about 25 people in the company, we were able to turn a company that in many ways should have failed into a company that was pretty important and successful. This was a great way to transmit that advice to other people to get them to think about the the counterintuitive implications of the team you build is the company you build. It's obviously something we employ all the time. As venture capitalists, we're always evaluating the team and that's a critical and indispensable element of our investment decisions. I have never personally invested in a team that I thought was mediocre, but I have had watched partners of mine who are more either market-based or technology-based investors at different funds invest where the team was more questionable and debatable. I personally am a founder-driven investor. and really the number one priority, the number two priority, number three priority for me is the team. And so I will almost never invest or offer to invest in a company where I don't have conviction around the founding team.