Speed predicts startup success. Jack Dorsey and Sequoia's Roelof Botha published this piece on March 31, 2026, arguing that most companies treat AI as a productivity tool while missing its structural implication: AI can replace the information-routing function that has forced every large organization into hierarchy since the Roman Army invented the contubernium in 8-soldier units, scaling to legions of 5,000 through rigid span-of-control logic.
The piece traces that constraint across 2,000 years with unusual specificity. The Prussian General Staff after Jena in 1806, Daniel McCallum's 1850s org chart for the New York and Erie Railroad spanning 500 miles, Frederick Taylor's functional pyramid, the Manhattan Project's cross-functional workaround under Oppenheimer in 1944, McKinsey's 1959 matrix framework, Spotify's squads, Zappos's failed Holacracy experiment. Each iteration tried to break the same tradeoff: narrower span of control adds management layers, and more layers slow information flow. None solved it. All large organizations eventually reverted to hierarchy because no alternative routing mechanism was powerful enough.
The article cuts off as it reaches Block's current organizational experiment, which is the actual reason to read it in full. The historical scaffold is unusually rigorous for a founder op-ed, and the argument it builds, that AI is the first mechanism in history capable of replacing middle management as an information layer rather than merely augmenting it, is the thesis Dorsey and Botha are stress-testing in a live company. What Block is doing with that thesis is what the piece does not yet reveal here.
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