If people start going to a desk, some one individual employees desk and they don't report to them... it's a sign that they believe that person can help them. So if you see that consistently, those are your barrels. Just promote them, give them more opportunity as fast as you can.

You should have a 1-on-1 roughly every 2 weeks.

Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.

When you start a company everything is going to feel like a mess. And it really should. If you have too much process, too much predictability, you are probably not innovating fast enough and creatively enough.

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. One of the ways, the definition of a barrel is, they can take an idea from conception and take it all the way to shipping and bring people with them.

It's easy to shortcut when you get busy explaining the why's of the world, but it's very important to try.

Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.