Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on creating an "Olympian" culture

On that. What does the Olympians work ethic mean in terms of expectations, in office, in hours, in attitude? What does that mean?

Yeah, so it's a mindset. If you were to be in high school and telling everybody around you, I want to go to the Olympics, there is a certain commitment with that. You're waking up early, you're going to practice, you're showing up with other people that are also trying to vie to go to the Olympics together. Uh, so what it means in practice at Traba is we're all committed to at least 12 hour days, Monday through Thursday, Friday we're working late. But people do tend to go out on on Friday night. But it's an in office culture. Just like how you could technically become an amazing baseball player by hitting balls in the batting cage alone. But the real magic happens is when you're practicing with the other teammates to prepare for the big game.

Keith, I have to turn to you here. You've bat astonishing. You've either founded or invested. I heard this the other day. Are unicorn a year for something like 20 years. Ridiculous stat. But my question to you is like, when you look back at those that you have founded or invested in with similar trajectories, was this Olympian work ethic the same across all of them? Is this anything new?

I wouldn't say it's necessarily all of them universally, but more than 80%. It's a very common characteristic of successful companies. I actually feel this is successful or I observed that successful characteristic of almost anybody successful in any field. I think like effort and input is what dictates results. And I think there's never been a substitute for, you know, effort and dedication to your craft. If you want to be top 1% in any field. And if you interview people in athletics, like as Mike pointed out, Olympian work ethic, you interview people in music that succeed. If you interview people in technology that have been successful, and it's in law, management, consulting, investment banking, politics, it's always the people that work the hardest that have the most opportunities. And if you have the most opportunities, you tend to have the opportunity to thrive. And so this is kind of basically how every technology company was built for decades. Only heroic people really, who had incredible ambition and almost irrational ambition entered the field of starting a company with their friends. Like it was basically borderline irrational to say I'm going to reinvent the world and society or an industry from scratch with my best friend from college. And the only people who did that had traits that were unique and had a work ethic. That was unique because that's how you shift the probabilities from literally zero to something that approaches, you know, a couple digit percentage points. And so, you know, when we worked at PayPal, I actually joke with Mike all the time that he's actually top maybe one basis point in work ethic, and I was probably only top 10 basis points, but my absolute number of work hours is probably higher because the standards were so much higher at PayPal. The idea of having a day off was inconceivable. Literally inconceivable. There was three people out of 254 people in the company that when we sold the company that could live in San Francisco because the company was based in Palo Alto, there was no extra time to commute between Palo Alto and San Francisco. So it was an insane idea to try to live in San Francisco, even though we were all in our 20s and early 30s, because you just didn't have an extra 20 minutes to commute. And so this is how we built companies. And Mike is really refreshing because it's kind of like the traditional way of building a company, which has been proven to work. One of the reasons why I introduced him to his board member, Samir Koil from Coastal Ventures, is Samir was attending a board meeting with me about Open Store, and he was complaining about the new generation of entrepreneurs, that none of them want to work that hard, they're all in title, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, oh, my God, I've got the perfect entrepreneur for you. Because Mike has none of those traits. He's not entitled. He sweats the inputs, and he's built a very intentional culture with his co founder that really does replicate the best of, let's say, PayPal or how Apple or Amazon were actually built.