Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

"Teams will always optimize for local comfort"

29 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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Keith Rabois warns that the founder CEO typically supplies the highest level of ambition and energy, and each layer of management risks sharply reducing that intensity. He advises executives to mirror the CEO’s intensity rather than buffer teams from it, because teams naturally optimize for local comfort and leaders must fight that entropy to achieve extraordinary outcomes.

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One of the messages that I delivered recently at our top 75 manager offsite was a reminder that the purest form of ambition and most intense source of energy in the business is the founder CEO. That every next concentric circle of management beyond the founder CEO has the potential to be an order of magnitude drop off in intensity. And that is fucking dangerous. It's not that you need to buffer people from the intensity of the CEO, it's that you need to absolutely mirror that intensity. There is an infinite supply of people under you who will buffer other team members from the intensity of the demands. Your job is not to be one of those buffers. If you want to achieve greatness, if you want an extraordinary outcome, then you have to relentlessly inject energy at every single step. Teams will always optimize for local comfort over company outcomes. Your job as an executive, as a leader, is to fight that entropy tooth and nail every single day.