Speed predicts startup survival. That is the opening claim from Jack Dorsey and Sequoia's Roelof Botha in a March 31, 2026 essay arguing that most companies are using AI wrong. They are optimizing individual productivity. Block, Dorsey's company, is doing something structurally different: rebuilding the organization itself around AI to eliminate the information routing bottlenecks that have governed every large institution since the Roman Army.
The historical argument is the backbone of this piece and worth reading in full. The authors trace a direct line from the Roman contubernium structure (8 to 80 to 480 to 5,000) through Prussia's General Staff after Jena in 1806, through Daniel McCallum's 1850s org chart for the 500-mile Erie Railroad, through Frederick Taylor's scientific management, through the Manhattan Project's forced cross-functional model, and into the matrix structures McKinsey sold to Shell and GE in 1959. Every reform was a patch on the same constraint: a human leader can manage three to eight people, so you add layers, and layers create latency and distortion.
The modern experiments, Spotify's squads, Zappos' Holacracy, Valve's flat structure, all collapsed or retreated at scale for the same reason. No alternative information routing mechanism was powerful enough. The essay's argument is that AI finally is. If you care about how organizations actually function and why they fail, the mechanism the authors propose for replacing hierarchical coordination is what you need to read.
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