Q: How do you build effective teams?
Keith Rabois, Founders Fund Partner and former COO of Square, has a great framework for building effective teams that he calls: “Barrels and Ammunition.”
When most companies begin scaling, they just hire a lot of people. Naively, they expect that—as they add people—their velocity of shipping will increase. But startups don’t work that way, and in fact you sometimes get less done when you add more people.
Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in your company—even great people—are what he calls “ammunition.” But what you need in your company are “barrels”. He defines barrels as extremely talented people who can take ideas from inception all the way through to fully shipped product.
To increase company velocity, you need to add “barrels” and then stock them with “ammunition.” Most companies start with one barrel (the founder) and then double their throughput when they add another one.
In the clip below, he explains this framework and some specific tactics for identifying and managing barrels: