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Keith Rabois on the 3 most important lessons he learned from Peter Thiel

February 25, 2025

“I’ve been working with Peter professionally for 23 years… The most important [lesson] in building a company is the importance of finding undiscovered talent… Back then we were competing with Yahoo and Microsoft for talent, but fundamentally you can’t compete on talent by going after the exact same people that companies with infinite profits will pay and overpay for. So Peter had a lesson that you basically had to hire people under 30 — and the point was not to be agist. Instead he realized that by the time you’re 30, everyone who runs a hiring algorithm should be able to roughly come to the same conclusions… It’s a little bit like sports where when you draft athletes for the NBA out of high school — there’s more alpha there than in signing a free agent who’s been playing in the league for 10 years.”

The second most important lesson Keith learned from Peter was the value of time:

“People systematically — in Peter’s words — undervalue their time.”

You have to be extremely disciplined about where you’re allocating your time because it goes hand in hand with the third lesson, which is the value of focus:

“Peter can be extreme when he has a view — he takes it all the way to the polar extreme. He had this mandate at PayPal about focus that every single person in the organization — when we had 300 people in the Bay Area — was allowed to do exactly one thing. And Peter would refuse to talk to you about any topic that was not that one thing, period… But fundamentally, the discipline of only being allowed to do one thing led to significant breakthroughs.”

Keith explains:

“What basically happens is there are really hard challenges at any startup and it’s easy to divert your attention to the problems you know how to solve. But those are not the breakthroughs or 10x ideas. And when Peter would say to me, ‘I need you to fix this and I literally won’t talk to you for the next month or two until you fix it,’ it would force me to bang my head against the wall every single day, and once in a while it would lead to a, ‘holy cow there’s an answer — we can do this.’ Now imagine that across an organization of 300 people — 5 or 10 ideas that probably wouldn’t have happened are a direct result of Peter’s managing philosophy.”