Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI

**Jack Dorsey** (0:00)
Since last year, I've just had this existential dread and also hope and optimism in the same hour, in the same thought process of, what is even a company going for it? What are these structures going forward? And this is the only durable one structure that I could actually imagine lasting for quite some time. And it was coming from a place of like, wow, is our company just going to be completely irrelevant in the next coming years?

**Brian Halligan** (0:47)
All right, everybody, we had Jack Dorsey on the pod today, founder of Twitter and founder of Block. He's the only founder to have two of his companies end up on the S&P 500 Just learned that today, that's pretty cool. Also Roelof Botha, who's a Sequoia partner and is on Jack's board at Block.
The conversation was super interesting to me. He recently put an article out that you may have seen, called From Hierarchy to Intelligence. And it's a manifesto on how to rethink, basically rethink from the first principles how an organization works, how do you completely eliminate hierarchy, and how do you put AI right in the center and transform how your company works. And I let him go on that. And he was very thoughtful, and he spoke a lot about it. Block is really changing the way it's organized. Before we started, he said, I'd love to get some feedback from you and from other people on this. So if you get comments on it, let it rip. He wants some feedback on it. He's in the early innings of a big transformation over there. That was about half of it. The second half of it, I just asked him for like CEO advice. I work with lots of CEOs, as you folks know. Like, how do you build an amazing board? He's certainly got some scars around board building. How do you build your second act like the Cash App versus the original business of Square? Is it a good idea to be a CEO of two different companies at the same time? Being brave and not giving a flock versus going with the flow. When do you really dig in and when do you go with the flow? He had some really interesting thoughts on the job of a modern CEO. So tune in, I'll be back at the end and give you some further thoughts but I found Jack did a really nice job in Roelof did too. Let's get into it. Jack, I've read your piece. I think it's fantastic from Hierarchy to Intelligence. Before we get into the meat of what it is, can you describe what you think is wrong with the way normal companies, hierarchies work, companies like HubSpot, companies like Block, what led you to this?

**Jack Dorsey** (2:56)
I don't know if there's one thing that's ultimately wrong.
It's just recognizing that what do we see in the pattern? What is the function of the hierarchy? What we wanted to explore is just like, where does it actually come from and why does it exist in the first place? If you look at it from first principles, it's all about information flow to a broad base of people. Being able to communicate over a breadth of people and have that be manageable at a human scale. So we've gotten into structures that we've borrowed and iterated on a little bit over 2,000 years. Yeah. And now we're facing this, I think, a completely foundational moment in being able to question every element of how we work. And the one that I think is questioned the least is probably the hierarchy and probably about how we manage communication flow around the companies. So if we're in a world where we are today, where Block, for instance, is completely remote, or we're remote first, every single thing that we do creates some sort of artifact, whether it be a Slack message, an email, pull requests, code, you know, all these Google document, a meeting that we record, all these things have these artifacts of information about how the company is working, is building, is failing, is making mistakes, all these things. And traditionally, we've been relying upon humans in a management structure, in a hierarchy, to go up and down a chain to relay that information. Instead, we can take all of those artifacts and put an intelligence on top of it, build a model around it, and actually have a conversation with the company about how the company is doing it. And it's not just me as CEO that can do that, but anyone in the company could have that same sort of access to information and same understanding of what the company can do. So you get to a point where you can build these world models for companies, like treat the company as a mini AGI, for instance, an artificial general intelligence. Because it really is, I mean, if you look at the company, it is an intelligence, but it hasn't been structured in the way that's the most efficient or the least lossy in terms of information flow and what people can actually do within the company. So the technology is good enough today that we can actually model the company. We can have everyone in the company put in intent, which would be strategy or these artifacts. And we can also have everyone in the company query it as well. And it really opens the door for what's possible. Roelof and I have a board meeting every quarter where we construct a bunch of board docs, slides, presentations.