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I've been on teams where four people did the work of forty and teams where forty did the work of four.

Similar industries, similar budgets, but wildly different outputs.

For years it was hard to pinpoint exactly why there could be such a large gap.

Was it all just talent? Was it focus, timing, luck?

Welp, before I name it, one quick note.

These days I’m seeing two very different kinds of builders, headed in opposite directions.

One's solo. No employees, agents running the back end, a toolkit doing the work of a small team. Fanatical about staying lean.

The other's still building the more traditional way, with leverage as people; real hires and real payroll.

Neither's right or wrong. But the thing I'm about to explain mostly matters if you're in that second camp, still hiring humans to build something big.

If that's you, Keith Rabois named your core hiring opportunity (or challenge) as good as anyone. He was an early exec at PayPal, ran business development at LinkedIn, and was COO of Square, so he's watched a lot of teams get built, and un-built.

Rabois described ammunition, which makes up most of your team. Talented people who execute inside a scope. You hand them the job, they do it well, and you need a lot of them.

Barrels are rarer. A barrel takes an idea from nothing, carries it all the way to shipped, and pulls people along the way. They don't just sit around to get pointed at a target — they often pick the target themselves.

Here's how Rabois put it:

"The fundamental driver of this is the number of people that can independently drive an initiative from inception to success, which is very limited within most companies. If you hire more people without expanding the number of what I call 'barrels,' that can drive ideas from inception to success, all you're doing is stacking people behind the same initiatives."

That's the trap. You feel behind, so you hire. But add twenty people who aren't barrels and you didn't add twenty barrels of output. You stacked twenty more bodies behind the barrels you already had. Same throughput, higher burn.

And probably more meetings about the throughput.

Barrels aren’t about how senior someone is. In fact, it can be split on two axes: can this person own an outcome, or do they need direction? And are they a specialist or a generalist?

A specialist who owns outcomes is a senior barrel, deep expertise plus real ownership. A generalist who owns outcomes is what you’re hunting for when you’re a startup, a genuine force multiplier. A specialist who needs direction is ammo, and good ammo is worth a lot.

The one to watch is the generalist who needs direction. That's the riskiest person because it feels right and it solves an immediate problem, but, they often stall without someone steering, and they get frustrated sitting there.

The best teams I've ever been on had an unreasonable number of barrels per team. Not more people, but more people who could actually run.

When I think back on a specific distribution team I was on 15 years ago at The Motley Fool, I realize we had more barrels per headcount than I’ve ever seen. Maybe 5-7 barrels per a 40-person team. It was incredible what we accomplished in a short few years.

So next time you're about to hire, figure out if you need a barrel or if you’re just looking for ammo.

Don’t just ask yourself "can this person do the job?"

Follow it up with, "can this person take something from idea to done without me in the room?"

The truth is, most people cannot. It’s not even an insult. It's just rare.

When you find one, give them room, give them equity, and hand them more surface area every quarter until there’s nothing left to give.

Every time you hand a task to someone, check that you gave them three things. If you miss even one, you've set them up to disappoint you.

Is your finance person managing the books, or actually managing the business? A controller and a finance leader are different hires, and most founders under $10M don't need a full-time CFO. Under $2M, it’s a bookkeeper and a lot of gut instinct. From $2-10M, you're probably better off outsourcing to a specialized FP&A team, and if you want a personal intro to the one that ran my forecasting at Hampton, just let me know and I'll connect you.

Your company's best context never made it into a doc. It lived in meetings, and AI just made all of it searchable, which a16z frames as inevitable. Real shift with a real candor problem attached, so read it for the mechanism, not the prophecy.

I never felt a personal connection to Nadal. Admiration, sure, but not the pull I had for Federer, or the obsession I had with Agassi. Part of me thought maybe it was just the language barrier, but who knows. Whatever it was, this four-part series fixed it, and trust me, if you love tennis, or just love watching someone operate at the absolute top of a craft, it's worth your night.

Hit reply and tell me: how many true barrels do you actually have on your team right now? I dare you to say more than 5.

And one more thing.

Next week I'm launching Hiring OS, the system I’ve been building for 20+ years to figure out exactly who to hire, when, and how, barrels included. Sign here to get on the early-bird waitlist.

Keep an eye on your inbox.

— Jordan