Keith Rabois on the 3 lessons he learned from Max Levchin

There's a few key lessons for Max. One is you have to model behavior you want your employees to emulate. So even to this day, I've been on the board of a firm since we invested at KV in 2013. I think there was a problem about three or four years ago and it was really difficult to figure out empirically what was driving what. Max literally slept in the office with the team for three days until they figured out the problem. What was driving it. It was like related to fraud. It's obviously very important in a payments company. But still, after all his success, he still is willing to sleep the office when there's a problem. And that of course, cascades the entire company. So first is lead by example. Second, Max actually was pretty important and instrumental to me that even when I'm very busy, I should be training. Max every day at PayPal would go for a run and so I would try to actually shadow him on runs. The problem is he actually can run a 4 minute 30. He could run the sub 5 minute mile and I definitely can't. No one expects that from you, Keith. No, no, thank God. But in any event, it was like, even when you're the CTO of the company, even when everything is breaking loose, you still need time to keep in shape and it affects your brain, it affects your decision making. So that was important. And then third, the classic lesson from Max is, and he was famous for this in 2001, even he was on the COVID of wired magazine in 2001 or 2002, is How do you use machines and people in an interactive loop? This is now common. Probably half this room uses some version of this today at least, but it was actually pioneering. It was basically an invention. And so Max taught me, how do you construct when you're starting a company? Maybe 99% humans or 90% humans or 80% humans, and very little data, because you don't have data. And then how do you switch the equation over time? So that's been indispensable to lots of companies, including glossed over the one we did at KV Opendoor as well. So we worked on that together and a lot of lessons there. Got it.