A few weeks ago I watched a talk by Keith Rabois called, How to Operate. Keith is a venture capitalist with Khosla Ventures, the former COO of Square, and a member of the PayPal Mafia.

The talk was primarily geared towards startups, but much of what he talked about could be applied to any organization where people are managed. So whether you’re an architect, real estate developer, or governmental organization, I bet you’ll find the lessons relevant.

One in particular that stood out for me was the idea of barrels and ammunition.

For a lot of organizations, the thought is often that by adding more people you’ll be able to increase output. More people = greater velocity. But Keith’s reasoning is that most people are actually ammunition. And just like in war, it doesn’t exclusively matter how much ammunition you have. You can only shoot through the number of barrels you have. Output depends on barrels.

So who exactly are barrels?

Barrels are the kind of people who can take something from idea all the way through to completion, while at the same time taking a group of people along with them. They are, in other words, your leaders.

But, they are difficult to find.

There are fewer barrels than ammunition. And, the culture of the organization itself will impact every person’s ability to be a barrel. Here’s how Keith puts it:

Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company.

That’s something for you to think about as you start your workweek.

Image: Flickr

If you’re a regular reader of ATC, you’ll know that I’ve been following the startup Opendoor.com for a few months now. I first wrote about it when it was codenamed Homerun and I just recently wrote about them as preface to a real estate survey I was conducting.

Well, about an hour go it was announced that they’ve just raised $9.95M in venture funding from everyone and their grandmother. Here’s the list of investors (via TechCrunch):

Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, Former YouTube and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Yammer co-founder David Sacks, Angelist’s Naval Ravikant, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Initialized Capital’s Harjeet Taggar, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, Former Twitter vice president Elad Gil, Blippy co-founder David King, Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein, Angel investor Mike Greenfield, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, Path’s Dave Morin, Facebook vice president Dan Rose, Trevor Traina, Resolute Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Caffeinated Capital’s Ray Tonsing, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut, True Ventures’ Om Malik, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington (who disclaimer: founded TechCrunch) and SV Angel.

If you know me at all, then you’ll know that I’m a big proponent of introducing more technology into the real estate space. I think the industry is one that has been incredibly slow to embrace technology, but that it’s only a matter of time before it does.

Two months ago I wrote a post talking about how entrepreneur and venture capitalist Keith Rabois is working on a home buying startup codenamed Homerun — now called Opendoor. Here’s how he recently described the state of affairs:

“My friend [PayPal and Palantir cofounder] Peter Thiel suggested that I come up with an idea to innovate in residential real estate,” Rabois told VentureBeat in April. “It’s the largest part of the economy unaffected by the Internet. And that was definitely true then, and even with things like Trulia and Zillow, it’s fundamentally true today. But the process of [selling a home] hasn’t been transformed by technology.”

What Opendoor is trying to do is really interesting, but I have a different idea. It’s called