Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Hire barrels, not ammunition

16 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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After fundraising, companies often hire people without hiring people who can own projects end-to-end. A barrel is someone who drives initiatives independently. Stacking non-barrels behind the same work just raises costs and overhead without adding output.

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Most companies raise money and then they hire a lot of people infallibly. And then the CEO, almost without exception, gets frustrated because they've hired a lot of people. The burn rate has increased a lot and they don't feel like more is getting accomplished per unit of time. The fundamental driver of this is the number of people that can independently drive an initiative from inception to success is very limited within any company. And if you hire more people without expanding the number of what I call barrels that can drive from inception to success, all you're doing is stacking working people behind the same initiatives. You're wasting time, energy, and increasing your collaboration tax. What helps you understand if someone's truly a barrel? Can they take an idea and make it happen? One way or the other, they're going to get your company across that hill. That's a barrel. Anything less than that is not a barrel. If you want to do more or need to do more, your market requires you to do more, VCs require you to do more, you need to get more barrels.