Square

Square shipped fixes to problems between one board meeting and the next. Keith Rabois left Google after two weeks in 2010 to join Square as COO. Roelof Botha said Square's pace, a shipped fix by each next board meeting, was one he hadn't seen since PayPal.

Rabois now uses this tempo as a signal for judging early startups: problems found at one board meeting are root-caused, shipped and measured by the next. He asks how fast a team ships against how long its category normally takes. He applied it to Ramp, which was close to shipping cards in about 3 months when 9 to 12 months is the best case, and that led him to preempt the Series A. His words: "That speed really does compound."

App Masters

Hand someone a narrow outcome to find out if they are a barrel. At Square, an intern solved the 9 p.m. cold smoothie delivery that the office team kept failing. Rabois's test is to give a person a narrow outcome and see whether they deliver it come what may, or come back early with the issues, what they tried and the root causes.

The intern did this on his second day and was later given almost everything to do. Once someone proves reliable, expand the scope and difficulty of what you entrust to them. A barrel lets you fire and forget: "Come hell or high water, this person is going to deliver that outcome."

App Masters▶ 4:35