Was reading Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase email today and a line he wrote kinda stopped me dead. Because the playbook he just announced is one I read a few weeks ago, written by the guy who'd already executed it.
I first read Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha’s essay "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" in the waiting room of my daughter's medical appointment. Block, Dorsey's company, had just cut 4,000 people, 40% of its workforce, in February. The essay was the philosophical case for what they'd already done. I remember thinking "yeah, eventually."
TLDR, their argument orientated around the notion that modern company hierarchy (layers, middle managers, departments) traces back two thousand years to the Roman Army, which solved coordination challenges with a nested hierarchy & a consistent span of control at every level. They built it because they had to. Running an empire across thousands of miles with no comms tech required centralised authority and many layers of delegation. It was a workaround for a world without modern comms tech. But AI now removes the constraint.
Dorsey and Botha's proposal in the essay: the manager's job (relaying information up and down the chain) gets replaced by a "world model" of the company that records every decision, plan, and problem. The remaining humans live on the edge of that model, sensing what it can't pick up. Culture. Trust. The feeling in the room.
Then today per Brian: "We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly."
Hemingway drifts into my mind, "gradually, then suddenly", often misphrased as the more common "slowly, then all at once". At this point I realise we're past the slowly stage.
We are no longer Romans. The communication constraint that built the context and coordination layer in modern corporations is gone, and companies are an extension of how humans coordinate.
If you've ever sat through a 6-person Slack thread trying to schedule one 30-min meeting, you know we've never been particularly good at it. Humans survive because we adjust with the times. Blockbuster didn't. We all know how that ended.
As a business owner reading the Coinbase strategy, I nod and agree with the fundament of the logic. Lean, fast, AI-native. An indicator that Coinbase sees the writing on the wall early and is strategically pivoting.
But as a father of two daughters, I find myself in a moral conflict with this train of thought. Real people behind the 14%. Families, mortgages, school fees. It's hard to contextualise being immersed in both polaric environments at the same time. I'm still trying to wrangle with this.
So a question for anyone else carrying this somewhere in the back of their head: how do we build the next era of work without abandoning the people who built the last one?
Originally published on LinkedIn.
