Keith Rabois & Mike Shebat: Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic| E1087

If you could change one thing about Founders Fund, what would it be? (electronic music)

I think we need to... I don't think you should practice your pitch with mediocre investors because really good investors are gonna ask completely different questions. There's usually two or three things that matter and when you talk to a really good investor, it's so consistent how they dial into the same two or three things.

I do believe strongly that everyone should be joining a company more like a Olympic sports team. You need that level of commitment. You need that level of being all in. When you're an athlete that's not pulling your weight, you get pushed off the team.

I am excited for this. My word. I mean, I saw this email where you outlined the culture at Traba before, and I thought this was gonna be a really special show. So first off, I wanna say thank you both for coming. Now second, I wanna start with some intros. Let's start with you, Keith. For those that don't know, which I think at this point is probably no one, who are you and what do you do?

So I'm primarily a general partner at Founders Fund. I've been to DC for about 10 years after being a fairly entrepreneurial executive at companies like PayPal, LinkedIn, Square, co-founded a company called Opendoor as a side project, um, also CEO of 130-person company based in Miami.

(laughs) Um, love that side project. Mike, same for you. What do you do? What does the company do? And then additional one there, but how did you get to know Keith, and what's the relationship?

Yeah. So I'm Mike. I'm the CEO of a company called Traba, and we're a labor marketplace that connects workers with open shifts in the light industrial industry, and our mission is to empower both businesses and workers to reach their full productivity and potential. So what that looks like at scale is the AWS of labor across the global supply chain, things are moving faster, people are finding the right jobs at the right time, they're upskilling, and everything is just getting better around the world in the global economy.

Now, I did actually have, like, quite a neatly defined schedule and then you sent over the culture doc and I just thought, "Oh, fuck this. This is gonna be so much better if we have an honest conversation." So can you talk to me about the culture doc that you sent over to me? And start with what you expect in your approach, Mike. And Keith, I'd love for you to chime in with lessons that you have, observations that you have from seeing this from slightly afar.

Yeah. So when my co-founder Akshay and I started the company, we were thinking big. Just like how I mentioned to you, we plan on having a global impact, building a once-in-a-generation company. And when you go back and you look at any of those once-in-a-generation companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, it was a group of people that were committed and they were working really hard doing something that doesn't happen oft-, uh, is very, very hard to make work. So our first value, dream big, that correlates very closely to our second value, which is Olympians' work ethic. So, eh, we were just like, "What we're gonna do is we're gonna work really hard together towards a common goal," and we only hire and promote people that are bought into that mission.