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"Most great people are ammunition, but what you need in your company are barrels. You can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have. That's how the velocity of your company improves: by adding barrels and [stocking] them with ammunition. If you go from a one-barrel company to a two-barrel company, suddenly you get twice as many things done per day, per week, per quarter."

— Lecture 14: How to Operate (Keith Rabois), at 15:03

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Most people — even talented people — are ammunition: they do great work when loaded and aimed.

Keith Rabois, Partner at Khosla Ventures and former COO of Square, says fast-growing companies need barrels: people who take an idea from conception all the way through shipping, all while bringing others along without being asked. "You can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have. That's how the velocity of your company improves."

• The ratio of barrels to ammunition matters. Adding ammunition without adding barrels often means less gets done. Rabois's rough heuristic: one barrel for every ten to twenty engineers. If you only have one barrel for fifty engineers, you might have ten working well, while the other forty are waiting for the barrel's approval, sign-off, or edits.
• Barrels are culturally specific. Shipping something requires navigating a specific set of people, politics, and process. Someone exceptional at one company may not transfer well to another; this makes hiring barrels from the outside hard. You often have to discover them internally by giving people more responsibility and watching what happens.

How to spot barrels:

• Start small, then escalate. See who actually completes assignments end-to-end without hand-holding, then give them more. Load them with heavier ammunition until they hit their ceiling.
• Watch who gets approached across organizational lines. Consistent and informal cross-reporting is a reliable signal of trusted judgment.

When you do find a barrel: "give them equity, promote them, take them to dinner every week." Do what you can to retain them. Rabois considers them *"virtually irreplaceable"—treat them accordingly.

See also: Barrels and Ammunition by Conor Dewey.