TNE with Louisa Nicola: Keith Rabois Episode

People who had the most stress in their life live the longest. The more stress you embrace, the better you perform. If you only have one signal about a human and you want to project how long they're going to live, it's your VO2 max that you want to know and improve every day. Infallibly, I have at least 10 grams of creatine. I do red light therapy. I do cryotherapy every day.

Well, the president of the United States has time to read an hour a day. I have time to read an hour a day. One of my heroes growing up was Margaret Thatcher. She says I could assess any minister in like 30 seconds and she can do it. Why can't I?

I'm excited to be here.

I probably favored a bunch of your tweets.

Who's this random guy favoriting...

Yeah. I try to find people who are at the edge, the cutting edge of research but very credible. And you know, see what I can learn and it's intellectual curiosity applied to basically your body and brain and life. So I follow people on Twitter. I read their stuff. I read studies and then if I find someone who has a program that I can participate in, I'm likely to opt into it.

Um, they did do old school VO2 maxing. Um, they didn't know, you know, it was more for athletic purposes than now. You know, one of the things I've learned in the last two years and really started to appreciate is how if you only have one signal about a human and you want to project how long they're going to live, it's your VO2 max that you want to know and improve. And so, but back then when we started doing the VO2 max, it was more for improving performance, let's say, on a soccer field or basketball court than it was for life. Now, it's more about health.

You've got your graph memorized.

For high performance people that have goals in life that they want to achieve in a competitive field, you're talking about performance. So, it's like performance optimization versus illness. And they almost like drew a spectrum. Performance optimization is like one tail and then when you're sick and unfortunately if you're very ill, you're on the other tail. And so the medical profession is great at dealing with this tail and almost nobody in the medical profession is really expert at how do you optimize your performance. Eventually I think those will get synced together but that's why I wind up going to almost two different like professions actually and unfortunately they'll share some blood tests but they usually want their own panels too.

Yes. Based on your age, sex and goals, you and I right now are optimizing for something completely different.

It's probably 60 which for my age is actually pretty good.

It's probably even a little higher because actually like many people I hate the test. And so I kind of give up a little early knowing I have a little bit more bandwidth, but I know I'm already like past whatever threshold they want me at.

I was like a kid like that in school. Like when I was young, I have this problem. If you give me a goal, once I hit the goal, I get a little lazy. So like when I get an A on a test, I would just turn it in and like just want to be done with it versus trying to get a better grade.

If you do it once a year, it's great. And the reality is you can probably get a pretty good proxy in about 6 minutes.

To change it. So here's the debate is what are the best ways to train it because depending upon, this is where it gets interesting, is depending on what your baseline is. So if you're out of shape you can make massive gains really fast. You know, go to a Barry's boot camp class, you know, do sprints outside your house or something and you'll see gains. Now, the issue for a lot of my friends is their results are mediocre, but they're actually training a fair amount.

I don't wear a, I wear this infallibly. Like I actually have this other quirk that if I don't wear my watch and I do a workout, I have this mental block that the workout doesn't count.

But once I wake up until when I go to bed, this is definitely on me. And anytime I go to the gym, do anything athletic, even if I'm like dancing, I probably have it on and it picks up as a workout.

Most of the supplements I take actually would probably surprise you how vanilla they are. Like it's omega-3, you know, it's like standard multivitamin. I do take NAD+ supplementation, which we could talk about. Very almost nothing I take is what I would call exotic. The closest to exotic would be two things. Tally Health, that is a product produced by David Sinclair, has a couple of different versions of supplements. I do take some of his stuff and I have a couple little quirky things that Dr. Galpin added to my regimen but they're pretty boring actually. Honestly, I don't take like peptides or anything like I don't do anything that would seem unusual. I take green tea which is, there's a lot of good evidence actually, benefits of green tea, omega-3, like this stuff is very...

I take vitamin D. When I was living mostly in Miami it was easier to get vitamin D naturally. New York it's a little harder and more difficult but I take vitamin D supplementation. I've got pretty convinced that turmeric is magic. Cinnamon and turmeric but again they're pretty vanilla. Turmeric. I actually did injure my back once a few years ago. And I had the benefit of seeing two very very good specialists, one in SF and one in New York. And the New York one convinced me that rather than do all these crazy things, I should just take turmeric. And so I've been addicted to it since.

Yeah. I've seen some recent research about that. It's not effective.

I have red light panels at home.

Which it makes it easier. You know, like a lot of things in life, if you want to do it regularly, you want to make it so convenient that there's no excuses. So I have red light at home. I don't have cryo at home. Fortunately, there's cryo within walking distance, you know, at least in New York. And so I try to do that almost every day, too.

Mhm.

By the way, I've never smoked.

So, here's where it gets a little bit complicated. I could take it at a high level, then try to build it up bottom up. One of the things that's challenging about being a VC as you get older is many things about being a VC do not age gracefully. Building companies is kind of a young person's game in many ways. You can debate exactly how young. It's a little bit like professional sports. And staying relevant as decades go by, technologies change, founders, you know, grew up in different generations using different technologies, different techniques, different cultural norms. Even staying relevant is really difficult. So, I think one way you do that is you just keep your body and brain to be very young, very intellectually curious, very sharp. I actually have some fun now. I get occasionally spend time with professional athletes who've been able to perform at a high level at more like an advanced age like 40 or like DJs is a good example where DJ being a professional DJ at the high end of the profession it's typically a very young person's game for lots of reasons but there's a few. Tiësto is basically my age, Armin van Buuren is basically my age and so when I get to meet up with them I'm more curious not about their music, but about how they stay at the top of their game at roughly my age. Because if they can do it against the up and coming 21-year-old DJ, then I should be able to do it against the up and coming VC and stay relevant to the up and coming founder.

You know the funny thing is 80% of the stuff is basic common sense. They optimize their sleep. It's like they take their sleep seriously. They try to avoid alcohol. Like some of the people I name completely off alcohol, but it's like sleep and alcohol are just inversely correlated in many ways. Quality of sleep, depth of sleep, all that stuff. That stuff is fundamental. Like I saw Brian Johnson's on this crusade where it's, he's right. You know, 80% of what you can do is like get high quality sleep consistently and then yes you can tune other things but the fundamentals trump a lot of the advanced stuff. So just start. So like back in the day one of the first investments I made when I became a VC was Eight Sleep. It was intuitively obvious to me that the best way to improve people's life, health, professional performance was better sleep. And in 2013, was there any product on the market that would improve your sleep? Blackout shades, you know, air conditioning, but not really. And then I met these founders and they talked about how if they showed me studies that if you lowered your core body temperature, you'd induce more deep sleep. I was like, 'Perfect. Now you have to build a product that does that.' But connecting the dots seemed easy. Interestingly enough, the way I met the founders is kind of an interesting story. So, I had a friend that was a successful tech person in the Bay Area and he was terrible with his sleep. He was very smart and very successful, but he would like not sleep, go out all night, like whatever. But I would always be yelling at him, admonishing him that he has to sleep more and stop going out and stop doing these crazy things. Anyway, about eight years go by and he emails me and said I found the perfect company for you. It's about improving your sleep. And so it was all because I'd been admonishing him while we were working out about his need to sleep that he remembered me. And then as soon as I found it and they showed me the study, I was like great, we can connect the dots and productize it and that became Eight Sleep. So I led the seed round and then led the A for that company, you know, I proselytize about it all the time. I probably purchase more than many like every place I stay has an Eight Sleep. Like I go stir crazy if I have to travel and can't get my hands on an Eight Sleep. It is really effective.

See, they're really good. They obviously have taste. They believed in me and I believed in them. I'm up to the Pod 5 now. So, I love my Eight Sleeps.

Look, well, let's put it this way. There's things that clearly have some potential upside and that have no downside. So, sleeping better, all upside. Hard to measure exactly how much it improves things, how much it expands your lifespan, but it clearly has no downside and the lack of sleep definitely has significant downsides that are very empirical and to validate. Same thing is a little bit like creatine. I started taking creatine three years ago. There's clear evidence that it improves cognitive function. I used to resist it for like aesthetic goals for a variety of reasons we can talk about. I got comfortable that that was no longer a major concern. But as soon as I started reading the cognitive research, every day, infallibly I have at least 10 grams of creatine. Some of the research on the cognitive stuff is actually maybe you should be even pushing the dose of that up. But right now I'm on the 10 to 15 grams program.

Well, so for aesthetic purposes, five grams is probably the right amount. But if you look at the cognitive studies, you could argue it's 20 to 25, but that feels like a lot. Because there is processing with your liver and stuff. And I don't think you want to push the envelope there. But the cognitive studies are very compelling. Now, there's like 3 to 5 years worth of them. You know, this was three or four years ago. There's only one or two, I think. So it's pretty novel, but I'm completely convinced that it's a good idea for almost anybody to be on creatine.

I actually don't. Although I do. There are some research studies about if you have poor sleep, that if you take 15 grams, you can suppress some of the symptoms for at least that day. It's not a good idea to rely upon creatine to avoid sleep. But on, you know, like anybody, I have days I don't sleep perfectly. I wake up in the middle of the night, have to travel across time zones. On those days, I will take another incremental five grams. And I do think it has some impact.

Well, so I do that too. Again, I'm going to do the high-intensity exercise anyway, but if I have had poor sleep, the first thing I will do is go right to the most high-intensity exercise I can tolerate. The first eight minutes is usually very painful mentally and physically. If you can get past that, endorphins, adrenaline kick in and you know the rest of the class or whatever is easy, but it does have an adrenaline sort of power refresh, you know, sensation that does avoid or mitigate some of the effects of poor sleep.

Yeah. It's not particularly fun.

I kind of split into two worlds. So I do this with like my physician and medical team and they're looking for mostly different things than like someone like Dr. Galpin would. There's some overlap. So I do both.

Well I guess you know I started at four reading the World Book Encyclopedia cover to cover. I don't think it's changed much since then. It's probably a good predictor of who'd be a good venture capitalist because basically the job is to learn new things every hour every day. I like to joke that venture capital is the only job where you get paid to learn new things. Journalists are supposed to learn new things, but they don't get paid. But we actually get paid for learning new things. So, I've always been that way. You have to be a little bit ADD, too. Like intellectually curious is the more pleasant way to say it. Add a little bit more reality, too.

Voracious readers. I've noticed that it's not the only signal that predicts success, but many if not most, if not virtually all of the most successful people in fields I've worked in, politics, law, tech, are voracious readers. Patrick Collison's a voracious reader. And as you probe into people's history, you know, my parents incentivized it, too. I grew up in like a middle-class household and you know, we definitely had scarce resources. We couldn't just spend money frivolously, but I had an infinite budget for books. As long as I read the book, I could buy as many books as I wanted. And so, what did I do? Since I had limited budget for clothing and limited budget for other things, I substituted into reading and it worked magically. So I would just take a trip to the bookstore and then I'd go to the, we fortunately had a library that was a public library with well two public libraries that were pretty approximate and very nice and so I would show up at the public library and probably check out 40 books. And then actually read them all and then go back a week later and get a new 20.

Oh yeah. I love to read. I started, you know, maybe interestingly enough I didn't start with non-fiction. And I actually started with fiction for the most part. I used to read these classic spy novels like thrillers like John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth and later Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and that made me a proficient reader. I enjoyed reading. So I just read more and then over time read more and more non-fiction and substituted now to be 90% non-fiction actionable things that you know sort of are productive and that I can leverage versus fiction I rarely read now. I try to occasionally when I go book shopping find a new piece of fiction but it's I sort of have to force myself. It's like eating your vegetables.

Well, you sort of force it. So, one of the books I read when I was growing up in high school or maybe junior high school was one of the books Richard Nixon authored, which is one of my favorite books of all time. It's called Leaders and it's a profile of like the most important 10 people like that like different countries in his career. The two chapters though that are most fascinating are the introduction and the whatever epilogue or something. The introduction he talks about when he was in the White House as president of the United States he forced himself to read an hour a day and I just woke up and said well the president of the United States has time to read an hour a day I have time to read an hour a day period.

Well, it's sad the way if you learn, I have a simple philosophy in life. If you learn to read, write, and basically perform math at a high level, you can do anything you want. Like you have the raw ingredients to teach yourself to succeed. And so I'm adamant about you must learn to read, must learn to write, and must learn to do math, period. Everything else is optional.

No. Unfortunately, you know, I get asked this question a lot about how do you get better at this? I'd say for founders, other investors, even politicians, they're hiring staff and people like that. And as far as I can tell, there isn't any great book on this topic that's very actionable. I'd say the best book is there's a book called Who? and it's got some subtitle that's pretty good, but it's not awesome. And given how important this is, like building a team, hiring, assessing people, you would think that there should be some library somewhere of insights that you can read. And I have not found it. I've tried. I keep trying. Every time I go to the bookstore, I look for something. I scan books. I've read many. Nothing that I find exciting, interesting, actionable, unfortunately. Maybe one day I'll have to write it myself. But so the way I've had to learn this is like many other skills in life, trial and error. It's like a muscle. You kind of have to interview people, assess people, hire people, learn from your mistakes and learn from your successes, what worked, what didn't. You learn hacks and techniques of shortcutting. Right now, I'm very proficient at like I can look at like a LinkedIn profile and immediately sort into yes, no, maybe. And just being able to sort that fast. The may take study, but the yeses and nos are pretty quick. And so that allows you to move very rapidly. I also learned this another one of my heroes growing up was Margaret Thatcher, and also in high school, I read her first volume of her autobiography was amazing. And I remember reading it and in there there's a sentence where she says, 'I could assess any minister in like 30 seconds.' She might have said 3 minutes. It's either 30 seconds, 3 minutes. And I was like, boom. That's my goal is I need to be able to learn to assess people in 3 minutes or 30 seconds. And if she can do it, why can't I? And so that was always the goal. I think I actually can do it now most of the time pretty damn well. And it's very relevant and very useful as an early stage investor, but it took, you know, years to practice that craft, devise insights, edit the insights. It's still fraught with error. Like there's definitely a high variability there, but being able to know when someone has very high potential very quickly is extremely valuable as a VC.

So, there's several things. One is like you're looking for and you know some of this will be let's say mundane and but it's worth restating, you know, sometimes restating the obvious is useful and then there's some things a little more subtle. So one is just simply like is there a trajectory of success like have you broadened yourself? Do you get increasingly asked to take on more difficult challenges? What kinds of challenges are you usually assigned or what do you gravitate to? There's a lot of signal in those. A little bit more subtle is depending upon the pool of people that you were working with at various places on your LinkedIn profile. There are things about that pool that probably apply to you. So for example, let's say you know in my generation you worked at some prestigious high-profile investment bank, you probably have the capability for pretty high work ethic. Like young investment bankers, you know, in my era easily work 80 hours a week. Easily. And so if you thrived at Goldman Sachs plus or minus 20 years from like when I grew up, there's no way that you don't have the ability to work hard if you want to. Period. Just there's no way you could have survived two years even as an associate there or like you know there's places that are notorious for IQ. Like there's just no way to get a role and succeed for years and get promoted without pretty high intellectual horsepower. So if you know something about the pool, the hardest thing about LinkedIn is when there's some role and responsibilities that you don't have any familiarity with. So I see a company I've never heard of. I don't know how to sort of triangulate or normalize against that. But for companies that I've worked with, for companies I know, people I've worked at, companies, you know, that I understand their hiring process, it's fairly easy to detect a lot of things. And then what I do with that is when I do interview a candidate, I skip over the things that I already pretty confident that the candidate will be good at. So if I think you have strong work ethic, I won't ask any questions about it. I'll only ask questions about things that I'd be more concerned about. Like so I might be concerned about creativity. So I'll just probe on that. It makes the interview that scarce time that 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 60 minutes, two hours whatever it is be highly productive, high leverage because I'm only trying to learn things that I can't learn from paper.

Oh of course.

Well so he was an intern at Square so it was actually pretty easy. So I had a lot of experience. I remember the day when I first met him when there was a VP PA named Alyssa at Square who wanted to hire him as...

an intern. And I had never approved a business intern before. I only believed really in design interns and engineering interns. And so she knew I'd be somewhat critical of the idea. So she's like, 'You need to meet this guy.' And his profile was actually even back then pretty interesting. While he was so first of all, he did really well in math at Berkeley like 4.0, which Berkeley back then did not have great inflation. Certainly not in math. So that was impressive. Secondly, he had um while he was working managed to navigate an internship at a V internship or maybe even a high a more formal title, I think maybe associate at a pretty good VC fund. Those are not easy roles to get your hands on. And then he had worked with Alyssa at eBay PayPal. So I remember meeting him in the conference room. I remember exactly what conference room we were in. Um and he basically talked me into the role. But then by the time he was leaving to start a company, um he went to GSB. I tried to convince him not leave to go to business school. He didn't listen. But when he finally found, you know, what he wanted to do, he used the time at GSB to network actually with CS grads and CS students. So he had co-founders, which he actually wound up working with two that he met who were undergrad CS students. And then by the time they had an idea, specific idea, he came by my office and I was pretty sure I wanted to invest. But that was easy because of the prior like history. The hard assessing. So actually this is a good point. I found the first thing to learn and get really proficient at is assessing people you know well.

People you've worked with, people you've grown up with, people you went to school with. Lots of data points. The most difficult thing about assessing is random stranger X where you have no context other than maybe a LinkedIn profile and you meet them for the first time and you have to make a judgment call. Should I hire this person? Should I fund this person? That's a, you know, order of magnitude more difficult than assessing people you worked with. I actually sort of point out, you know, to my colleagues all the time that anybody who I worked with, I need to make that call as a VC 90% 99% correctly. Like there's no excuse for being wrong about that because I have enough data points that I just need to be able to draw the line of this person's potential and, you know, really shoot myself if I'm wrong. random strangers. If you're really good at early stage investing, if you get those calls right 30, 40, 50% of the time, that's like hall of fame level because you just have so few data points. You geomet since you were math. Um geometric point, you can draw an one data point you can draw an infinite number of lines through. You have two data points, there's only one line you can draw.

Barrels.