Keith Rabois on how to improve the velocity of your company

The next and possibly most important thing you do is actually edit the team. So these are the people that you work with. And nobody's going to have a perfect team. And you're certainly not going to start that way. So what I'm going to try to do is maximize the probability for success in editing the team. I like this idea of barrels and ammunition. Most companies, once they get into hiring mode, as Sam pointed out, you should defer that for a while. But once you do, they just hire a lot of people. And you expect that as you add people, throughput your horsepower, your velocity of shipping things is going to increase. Turns out it doesn't work that way. Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don't get that much more done. You actually sometimes get less done, you hire more designers, you definitely don't get more done. You get less done per day. We can talk about why. The reason why is that most people, most great people even are actually ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels. And you can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have. So, so that's how the velocity of your company improves, is by adding barrels and then you stock them with ammunition and then you can do a lot. So if you go from one barrel company, which is mostly how you start, to a two barrel company, suddenly you get twice as many things done per day, per week, per quarter. If you go to three barrels, great. If you go to four barrels, awesome. Barrels are incredibly difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity, promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they're virtually irreplaceable, because they're also very culturally specific. So a barrel at company may not be a barrel at another company. Because one of the ways the definition of a barrel is they can take an idea from conception all the way through shipping and bring people with them. And that's a very culturally specific, opportunity, specific skill set rather than.