Jack Dorsey's "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" got me thinking about a spectrum. On one end, organizations still layered around human information routing. On the other, organizations moving at the speed AI now allows. Block is rebuilding around an AI intelligence layer. Ramp is discovering it organically. But the company furthest to the right didn't need AI to get there.
That's NVIDIA. Jensen Huang runs it with 60 direct reports and virtually no one-on-one meetings.
For 2,000 years, every large organization has been shaped by one constraint: a single leader can effectively manage 3 to 8 people. From Roman legions to Frederick Taylor's scientific management, that bottleneck persisted.
The easy read is that Huang is just a high-bandwidth CEO. The more interesting read starts with a phrase he used on Lex Fridman's podcast: "The speed of light is my shorthand for what's the limit of what physics can do." He was talking about information flow, not chip design.
In a traditional hierarchy, every management layer is an information routing node. A signal travels through a manager, a director, a VP, each compressing and reinterpreting. By the time it reaches the top, it has passed through four or five human translators. Slow and lossy.
Huang removes the relay chain. Everyone hears the same information at the same time. He builds what amounts to a belief system architecture: values and context embedded in how the organization communicates, so decisions don't require escalation. The mission is the boss.
Span of control has always been treated as a law of human cognition. What if the real constraint was information transmission speed? Managers exist to summarize, filter, and relay. Solve the relay problem, and the span constraint loosens.
AI is solving it. When a model can surface the three things that matter this week and route context to the right person, the management layer becomes infrastructure that software can handle.
The pace compounds it. Capabilities change weekly. At Ramp, internal tools shipped in January were already obsolete by April. A signal that passes through four management layers doesn't just arrive late. It arrives obsolete.
I see this at Typeface. We have rewired our product multiple times in the past year as the foundation shifts underneath us. What we shipped in Q1 looked different by Q3. The org flattens as a side effect. The layers don't get removed. They just stop being necessary.
Huang got there first, without AI, through sheer communication design. The companies that restructure around information velocity will outperform those still optimizing for control.
Are we designing our orgs for control, or for speed of light?
I lead R&D at Typeface, where org design and AI infrastructure intersect daily. These views are my own.
Dorsey and Botha: https://block.xyz/inside/from-hierarchy-to-intelligence