Speed predicts startup survival. That is the core claim in a March 31, 2026 essay by Jack Dorsey and Sequoia's Roelof Botha, published on the Sequoia Capital site. The piece argues that most companies treat AI as a productivity tool. Block is using it to dismantle the organizational logic that has governed every large institution since the Roman Army's contubernium structure scaled 8 soldiers to 5,000 through nested command layers.
The essay is a compressed history of management architecture: the Prussian General Staff born from Napoleon's 1806 destruction of Prussian forces at Jena, 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 forced cross-functional reorganization in 1944, and McKinsey's 1959 matrix model. Every structure, across two millennia, was a workaround for one hard constraint: a human leader can manage three to eight people, so scale requires layers, and layers slow information.
The essay stops mid-sentence at Block's current experiment, which is the reason to read it in full. Dorsey and Botha are not summarizing a completed transformation. They are describing one in progress, and the argument they are building toward is that AI breaks the span-of-control constraint entirely, making organizational hierarchy a choice rather than a necessity. The historical scaffolding is worth reading because it makes the stakes of that claim concrete.
[READ ORIGINAL →]