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Keith Rabois on when to grow an employee into a leadership role

Name: Keith Rabois on when to grow an employee into a leadership role
Uploaded: 2023-12-13T20:34:01+00:00
Duration: 51 s
Channel: Lorenzo
Description: Keith Rabois explains how to decide whether to promote, mentor, or replace an employee: compare their learning rate to your company's growth velocity. At…

13 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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0:51

Keith Rabois explains how to decide whether to promote, mentor, or replace an employee: compare their learning rate to your company's growth velocity. At LinkedIn he was the 27th employee and left when it hit 57 people. At Square, the 20th employee, the company grew to 250-300 in the same timeframe. Track both slopes when making talent calls.

Questions this video answers

18 months after launch

1.5 million users

27th employee

57 employees

20th employee

Chapters

The other question everybody asks about people is when do you hire somebody above somebody and when do you sort of mentor somebody or when do you need to replace somebody? And the way to think about this is every company has its own growth rate and every individual has their own growth rate. So some companies that are very successful, let's say LinkedIn. LinkedIn was always a very linear company. It never went like this. So, for example, I joined LinkedIn 18 months after we launched and we had only 1.5 million users, which in a social product is a very small number. And when I joined, I was the 27th employee. When I left two and a half years later, we only had 57 employees. In contrast, when I joined Square as the 20th employee two and a half years later, we had like 250, 300 employees. So each company has its own velocity on this curve. And if the company's going like this, you can only keep people in the roles that their own personal learning curve is going like this. On the other hand, if the company's growing like this, anybody whose learning curve is faster than that, you can keep giving them the same role to do so, always track the individual slope of an employee and the company's growth rate.