Peter Thiel is one of the sharpest entrepreneurs and investors of his generation, and he has an interesting heuristic on deciding how to promote employees. Keith Rabois, a longtime Thiel collaborator who served as COO at PayPal and went on to become a prominent venture capitalist and executive at Square, LinkedIn, and Khosla Ventures, recently shared a lesson he learned from Thiel about organizational design. Image source – www.forbes.com“I actually learned from Peter Thiel back at PayPal that you only really want to promote someone when there’s a significant delta between that person’s performance and the next best person,” Rabois explained. “The bigger the delta, the easier it is to promote somebody. Otherwise, you’re better off as an executive leading an organization to leave things flat until the gap is just unmistakable.

Source: Forbes December 28, 2025 07:35 UTC