Since last year, I've just had this existential dread and also like hope and optimism in the same hour, in the same thought process of like, what is even a company going forward? Like, what are these structures going forward? And this is the only durable 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?
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, Rolof 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 from 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 and when do you really dig in and when do you kind of go with the flow? And 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 thought Jack did a really nice job in real time too. Let's get into it. Jack, I 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, like what kind of led you to this?
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? And what we wanted to explore is just like, where does it actually come from and why does it exist in the first place? And if you look at it from first principles, it's all about information flow to a broad base of people. So 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, you know, we've borrowed and iterated on a little bit over 2,000 years. 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, a pull request, code, you know, all these Google documents, 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. 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 like what the company can do. So you get to a point where you can build these world models for a company, like treat the company as a mini AGI for instance, an artificial general intelligence because it really is. I mean if you look at a 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 just really opens the door for what's possible. Like, you know, Rolof and I have a board meeting every quarter where we construct a bunch of board docs, slides, presentations. We get only so much time for them to have questions but imagine if every single board member can just query the company and have a conversation with the company's intelligence in real time and we can make that meeting time that we have every quarter really focused on more of the creative or bigger existential decisions and issues than the day-to-day. The same can be said for like our earnings call and analysts like giving them like fully RAG-able information that is on their timeline with their questioning. But you can scale this to any position or any role in the company, which is pretty phenomenal. And look, we've just never had that ability before. And now we do. And you know, I think the architecture and the structure of the company is ultimately going to determine its velocity and how well its roadmap for customers.
Correct. And just kind of drilling down on it, can you describe sort of what the organization looked like before? And granted, you're very early in this, but what's it look like now? Which roles have been eliminated? What are the new roles? Just kind of drill down a little bit into what Block looks like today and kind of where it's going.
Yeah, we are early in it. I mean, just from a measurement of how far along we are would be the depth from me to any other individual in the company. And I would say our max depth right now is probably five. Folks between me and anyone in the company, I would want to get that down to two to three this year. And in the most ideal case, you know, there is no layer. Everyone in the company reports to me and that would be, you know, all 6,000 of the company. And that feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure, but when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it's a lot more manageable. And that goes into the roles going forward. We want to normalize down to just three roles. The first is an IC, which is a builder or an operator. This is a salesperson, it's an engineer, it's a designer, a product person, like, you know, whatever it is, they're actually working with the tools to build or to operate the company. They're augmented because they have access to agents. So, you know, one person can potentially do the work or explore the breadth that, you know, it would take a team or, you know, 10 people to do in the past. So, that's number one. And I think there's a durable human skill that lasts there, which is judgment and taste and creativity. So that's probably the largest part of the population is the builder and the operators, the ICs. The second role is the DRI and that's someone who can own the customer outcomes. They're putting a strategy together. They're understanding what roadmap allows us to solve customer needs and problems and they're assembling a team of these ICs to get something done. But the durable human skill there is ownership and accountability. You know, they're really owning the outcomes and whether something is failing or not. And then the last role would be what we consider managers today, which we're calling a player coach. This is someone who is building the capability and the capacity of other humans and their craft, but instead of telling them how to do it, they're showing them how to do it by doing the work. So, these are people who might be ICs or they might be DRI, but they're also really good at giving coaching skills to help the people around them get better and better and master their craft. And today that's a management structure where ICs and even DRI report to a player coach, but I think in the future it's an assignment. It's not a reporting structure but I'm assigned to ICs or I'm assigned to DRIs to help them master their craft. And obviously the durable human skill there is building human capacity and coaching. And there's a lot of empathy there and all the soft skills that we recognize great managers are known for. But not making it a requirement that they have to be strategic necessarily. They have to build because they need to show off the skill and teach in that way but they don't necessarily need to be a DRI. Now in very rare cases one person can take on all three of those roles. I think I can take on all three of those roles. My leadership team is expected to take on all three of those roles. They're expected to build as an IC or operate the company. They're expected to be strategic and actually think about roadmaps and customer outcomes and they're expected to coach and help raise the skill level around them with the people that they work with, with their direct team.
Just a little kind of before and after and you're mid on this and let's pretend like it's working great and it's New York now and it's extremely flat like what is the role of the CEO before and after? How's that? Most of the listeners by the way are CEOs. What does like planning look like before and after? What happens to all those people who are directors and managers or they kind of glue people like what are kind of the before and afters in your role?
I think my job as CEO in the past I've thought about in three ways. Number one is to ensure that we have the right principles and the right team dynamic and that's like hiring and firing and setting values and setting the culture and setting the tone. The second is to ensure that decisions are being made in context of our customers and industry trends and competition. And the third would be to raise the bar on our execution like to constantly increase our capability and to push ourselves and to doing things that are uncomfortable so that we're growing all the time. So that's how I thought about my job up until this point. I think in the future you have those elements certainly but I think it's more about like the architecture of how the company as an intelligence works and like if we're building the company as an intelligence our job as humans and my job as CEO is to constantly align it to where we think the right outcome is. And I see like visually I see the intelligence, the world model for the company in the center and then on the edge are the humans who are just constantly aligning this towards customer outcomes. But even that changes I believe because I think a company's ultimate limiting factor is its own roadmap. And I think what these technologies point to are that our customers are going to have the expectation that they can ask for a feature that doesn't exist on our roadmap and that it just is served to them. And that's where you really get into the layers of like okay so what do we actually build? We build up capabilities which are effectively our tools like we can issue cards, card acceptance, peer-to-peer lending, all these things we do as a financial technology company. We have these interfaces like Square which has a register and a dashboard, we have Cash App, we have TIDAL, we have Bitkey, we have Proto, these are interfaces, these actually touch the real world, touch humans and we can deliver our capabilities in these interfaces. Today, they're built with like these very specific navigations that are our roadmap and our understanding of what our customers want. When you move to the third layer, you have proactive intelligence. We have all this understanding of our customers. We're moving money. Money is the most honest signal in the world. You can lie about literally everything, but when a transaction occurs, like that's something that really tells the truth about your life or your business's life. And based on that we can actually prompt our customers instead of waiting for them to prompt us or having the right question asked. So we can do the very simple but very valuable thing of like how do we protect our customers' cash flow? Like we have people using us as a bank account. How do we make sure that they can pay the rent and they can pay their Spotify bill and they can pay their kids' allowance and this is all sequenced in a way that allows them to never go to zero, never go negative and have some cushion that allows them to even think about getting to saving or building wealth and that peace of mind I think is the most critical aspect here. So if we're enabling a customer, if we're able to prompt a customer and also they can ask like as a business, hey, I have this inventory thing that I've been using, but it's missing this feature. Can I have this feature? We should just be able to build that and compose it in real time based on our capabilities. If we can't and it points to a deficiency in capabilities or a gap, that's our roadmap. So our customers just by using and talking with our systems are telling us what our roadmap should be and then it's up to us to give the judgment. And then the final layer is the world model. It's the customer world model. It's a company world model, our deep understanding of ourselves and also our customers. But I think like if I had to say one thing that myself or anyone in the company has to do it's I guess it's this overused phrase of judgment. But it is judgment against like what we intend to build in the world and is it aligned with that judgment? Is it aligned with the values? Is it aligned with the taste that we have and is it unique or is it not? And I guess for my part I'm the extra checkpoint on like is the alignment circle of humans, the edge of humans actually working correctly.
And I see how this works exceptionally well for Block. You have a lot of signal. How does this work for, I don't know, Sierra, Workday, somebody who doesn't have the quality signal, the frequency of signal, does it apply or it doesn't work as well?
I think it probably does. I think it goes down to like are you building a business that understands something of human nature deeply and it gets deeper every single time and that's a real tangible signal that just doesn't go away. And if you are then I think you can build your company as an intelligence. If you're not then it's probably an add-on to something else. And I think most of the industry is thinking about AI as like a co-pilot, as something that is augmented onto rather than like how do you just rebuild our whole company with this as the core. And if it doesn't make sense for your business to do that and you end up being or looking very similar or rhyming too closely with the frontier labs, then I think it's going to be very, very challenging to differentiate and survive. And that's kind of what's been leading me to all this is like I just, you know, since January of 2024 which is when these tools really came to bear, like we Goose, which is an agent coding harness, was one month before Claude Code in January of 2024. And Claude Code came out that following month and then was really put out of beta in May of that year. And you know, that whole year I just spent every single day for three hours every morning just pushing myself like can I get it to do something that I didn't think it was capable of or I didn't think I was capable of. And every single day it worked. Like every single day I was surprised and it's, you know, I'm sorry it wasn't 2024, it's 2025. It's only been a year of those tools, like one year. The compounding nature of this is pretty incredible. So, you know, being able to see that, understand it, and then shift your company to be ahead of it, I think is absolutely critical right now. And I don't think people are feeling it enough. They're just living in this abstraction of like, oh yeah, these tools will make everyone in our company 10x more productive. I don't think this is a productivity thing. I think it's a structural thing that needs to shift.
I think you're right. I think people are thinking of as co-pilots and individual productivity versus your, I think your idea is complete business transformation. And I think it's super interesting and compelling.
Can I add one thought I've had as I've listened to this so far? You know, one of my favorite pieces of writing ever is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. And this idea that if you have the right signals, you can rely on the self-interested behavior of many small participants in the system to actually lead to optimal outcomes. But you just need to have the right framework and the right system. I think the way that many companies work today is a little bit more command and control. Very much. And you have hierarchies and you have political actions and people, you know, jockeying for position and it's not always clear what is actually true. And I think part of what we're envisioning here is you have a system that's just ground truth and you do away with all the layers. You get back to the kind of productivity that founders often long for. They long for the days when they were 100 people and not 500 people because they were so much more productive. Why? Because you had, you know, lots of transparency, limited hierarchy. And so I think the possibility here as Jack was saying is instead of just focusing on individual productivity, you reimagine how we work together as humans. And you can do it with a far smaller number of people that are far more productive. Yes. But there's a different way of working together where you get the right signals. And it's much more similar to a capitalist system where the signals tell you what to build. It's not somebody who pounds the table harder who gets their product approved. It's just listen, more customers want this than that. That's how we're going to decide what to build next. So for me, there's something quite magical in that realization.
Yeah. About four years into building HubSpot, I eliminated no org charts, no titles, and everyone lost their mind. They didn't like the idea. And we ran that for about nine months and I got worn down and I brought it back. The thing we didn't have was an intelligent system that had all those signals that could help us make decisions. So, it's exciting to see this year. I have a theory I want to run by you, Rolof. Like I sort of think of like there's manager mode. It's a pyramid. The VPs make most of the decisions. Then there's founder mode, kind of flat. The founder makes a lot of decisions. And then there's I'm just going to call it Dorsey mode. It's a circle and the AI makes most of the decisions. Do you buy that?
Oh, I don't think the AI makes most of the decisions. I think that, and Jack should correct me here. I think the AI helps with communicating the alignment and the management team or the inner core helps set the framework. What is the objective function? Are we optimizing for growth rate, gross profit per employee, net promoter score? Probably some combination of those variables and the humans at the edges perform an incredibly valuable function of correcting and informing and sort of steering that. And I think one of the phrases that Jack has, which I absolutely love and I've stolen so many times, is companies have multiple founding moments. There's so many smart people in your company that have clever ideas that every day inflect the product, introduce something new. And so this idea that there's just, you know, one person who is the brilliant person who comes up with everything, I just don't think, you know, I don't believe in hero worship or the converse of that where you sort of scapegoat people. I think it's harnessing the best of your team to really advance the company. So I subscribe to the circle idea.
Yeah. I also don't think the AI is making the majority of the decisions. I think it's facilitating a more context-rich decision. I think ultimately like in the most ideal case, our customers are actually making the majority of the decisions because they're just based on their queries and what they're trying to do with the system delineates like where our roadmap should go and then it's up to our judgment as to whether that's consistent with what we want to be and what we think is most strategic or not. But we just, you know, we weren't able to get to that level of data fidelity before because we had to infer it. We had to do customer research. We had to do interviews. We had to look at our customer support, product feedback on Twitter, all these other things. But when your interface is a conversation with your customer instead of like this visual navigation, you suddenly get like this amazing fidelity of like what do our customers actually care about? What do they actually want? And it's up to us then to decide if that's consistent with what we want to be as a company or if they should be going elsewhere to do that. And I think all these things are going to blur. I mean that's the craziest thing is like, you know, again since last year I've just had this existential dread and also like hope and optimism in the same hour, in the same thought process of like what is even a company going forward? Like what are these structures going forward? And this is the only durable 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, you know, in the next coming years or even sooner? Like what do we actually differentiate on? What do we have a moat around and what do we need to be to defend and also to grow that? And all that follows from customer expectation. Like the most amazing thing about OpenClaw to me was that people wanted to take this thing and contain it into a Mac Mini and make it very tangibly theirs and have all this agency around what they did with it. And we're seeing Square sellers do stuff with it like that and interface with the Square APIs. And we're seeing Cash App customers, and these are like not tech people. These are just like people, I want a bot to help me manage my life. That agency, independent of your thoughts on like how good of a system OpenClaw is right now. It'll get better and better. But the intent behind that is agency. I want to tangibly control this intelligence and for it to better what it makes possible for me is incredible and that expectation floor has just risen dramatically and that leads me again to like yeah our limiting factor as a company is our roadmap like we need to remove that from the equation. We need to ensure that our customers are truly building alongside us. And that they, you know, are seeing us as a series of capabilities that makes their desires fast and easy and valuable. So like it really goes back to the capability set that we have and then like the intuition of the interface that we have and then like how intelligent our world models can be to be helpful and to compose UI in real time.
I spent this morning at a company called Rogo here in New York City. I read your article. Let's say you're advising the CEO of a 100 person company. They've already got their hierarchy. What should they do? Should they start with their system? Should they start with data? Should they start with the org? Like how should people go about, you know, running the Dorsey playbook?
I don't know about this Dorsey playbook thing, but well, we don't have it all figured out. I think there's an important dose of humility that we have that we're endeavoring on this path. We believe it's right, but we know there's a lot to figure out. It's more like if you were to at 100 people or even, you know, just starting today if you were to build your company as an AGI, as an intelligence, what would it look like and what would you need to really differentiate? Like if I were starting a company today I would be so excited about how quickly I could build things and how quickly I could prototype and get things out to customers. I would be in this like valley of dread about distribution and attention because there is so much noise out there and it's so hard to get to the actual signal of like who's building something interesting that will actually fundamentally change something and will be around for more than a year. Yeah, it just like I think distribution really becomes a differentiator and I think there's some event horizon where the way we think about distribution today closes off. You know, there's apps for instance and websites and like the traditional retail, there's a number of things that will change and if you don't have the distribution today it's going to be very hard to fight for that but there'll be new areas of distribution that are probably more important and I don't know what those look like but I would say like I would assume that a company of 100 probably is no more than two to three layers deep hopefully. And now would be the time to just really question like do I need a hierarchy? Like Brian, a year into Square I also, we removed titles, we normalized everyone to lead. We did it for like we were talking with all these banks all the time and you would have these EVPs and VPs and they were looking for the same on the business card and there's this whole business card culture. So we ripped up all the business cards. We normalized down to a title of like you're a lead of what and the longer that is behind lead is probably the farther down you are in the organization. And we've kept it like we don't have titles. We have like, you know, what do you lead? Going back to like the DRI thing, what are you ultimately responsible for? And I think it's helped us a lot. But this is another step. If you're starting today or you're 100 today, like what is actually fundamental to solving your customer's problems and where is the hierarchy getting in the way of that? And look at all the tools you're using. Like look at all the information you're generating just by doing your work. Like just putting that into an intelligence and being able to query it will give you an understanding of the company that is two to three times more than you had before ever because you're relying upon people telling you things and, you know, that doesn't always happen for various reasons that Rolof spoke to in terms of agenda or politics or emotions or empathy, all these things. If imagine if your company was entirely legible, like entirely legible, every aspect of it, and we're not far off from that from a data perspective, it's putting the intelligence on top of it and making it useful and then making it proactive. Like that's the hardest bet is like we can determine causal, getting to predictability for these world models around the company and customer is still right now very much a research bet. But like it's one that, you know, it's imminently solvable.
Can you guys just take me behind the scenes? Like Jack, this was a really bold move. You laid off 40% of your employees. Just like for CEOs listening, what was that debate inside like? How big should it be? How bold should it be? You know, Ruth Porat's got this good line, if you're going to eat a shit sandwich, don't nibble. And you seem like you took a big bite. What was that debate behind the scenes? Then Rolof, like how did he pitch it to you guys and what was the board's reaction just like behind the scenes on that?
Yeah. So, it was something, you know, December of last year is when the models really got a noticeable upgrade from being able to be really good at building prototypes and greenfield efforts to like understanding like large code bases and legacy code bases like our own. There was, you know, hallucination wasn't much of a topic in terms of like the coding ability and the tool harnesses we became suddenly very mature like just in that month. And it just like everyone went home for the holidays and everyone played with these tools and they were surprised at how capable they were and what they could do with them. And, you know, we came back and the conversation was like just going around the table, would you build the company this way if you had these tools today? Like what would the company look like? And everyone around the table and my team just said like it would not look like this.
The company would not be this size. It would not be structured this way. And we've been making changes on the edge, like going from a GM structure to a functional structure, to putting a cap on our layers to V+4 and all these small things. But if we were to really reboot and rebuild the company, would we end up where we look today? And the answer was uniformly no.
And then we just did this exercise of, okay, so what is the minimal number of people that we would need to keep the service up 100%? And then next, what is the minimal number of people that we would need to fully be in compliance with our regulators? We're a highly regulated business so that one's extremely important to us and legal obviously. And then third, what is the minimal set of folks that we need in order to grow to fulfill our commitments we've made to the street, but also rebuild the company as an intelligence? And that's roughly the number that we got to. And we built in some buffer in case we made mistakes, which we did. And you know, it's hard not to, especially operating the way we have. I think going forward it'll be much easier because more of the company will be legible and all of our actions will be a lot more legible. So I'd have a lot more confidence going forward than not. But it was that, and that was a span of exploration to execution in under three weeks.
I think generally I wanted to make sure that if we knew that this was what our company was going to be in the future, I didn't want to have to do it with our backs against a wall. We're a public company and there's various challenges there and other companies will probably get to this realization at some point. I don't want to react to that. I want to be ahead of it because then we can do it with a lot more integrity. We can do it with a lot more generosity for the people that we're asking to leave and even for the people that we're asking to stay. And we're not just reacting into something mediocre. We're acting towards excellence. And that's just the tone that we wanted to set. So every day it was just constantly checking, are we doing the right thing? Is this the right set of folks? What are we not thinking about? What are we not talking about? And we kept the group very, very tight. And had a conversation with the board, which was, from my perspective, very open to it and actually more than open, more like, yes, we agree, we should do this. But I'll let Rolof speak to that.
It was a very quick process. I think part of what helps is that Jack had written us a very detailed note laying out the logic. It's principled. It's not reactionary, as Jack was saying. It's very well laid out, very logical. It was clear that the company and the management team was interested in a conversation about how to make this work, as opposed to being dogmatic and saying we have it all figured out. So even in the course of those three weeks, elements of this evolved and it evolved in light of feedback from management team members and board members. You know, some of where we started in the first of those three weeks is different from where we ultimately landed by the time the announcement took place. And also think this is an example of where we've built enormous trust between the board and the management team. You know, we've been through a lot as a team and so we have a lot of shorthand to be able to make crucial decisions like this. We gathered several times in quick succession to make sure we drilled in on the key issues and the board was fully supportive.
You two, you've been on a lot of boards, Jack. You've had your ups and downs with different boards. Any advice for these CEOs listening that should they start bringing at 100 employees, should they start bringing independent? How do you build an amazing board that really serves the company well, the employees well, the investors well, the customers well? What's your advice on that?
I mean, early on I always told myself and my team that your first board is your investors, right? And I would treat that relationship as a hire you can never fire and in fact they can fire you and I've been on the other side of that. So it really puts pressure on finding the right person that you'd actually want to work with at the company knowing that you could never fire them. And again, they can fire you. And for me it was around, I think a lot of young founders kind of go for the brand names, especially around VCs, but I always wanted to go for the person. And that's why Rolof, we were optimizing for him to be on our board and be an investor but it was the fact that he would uplevel our conversation, uplevel our execution more than anything else and challenge us along the way. So even as you think about adding independent board members, the core function of a board is to ensure that the company has the right CEO, that's their one job. They have all these committee responsibilities but the ultimate fiduciary duty is, do we have the right CEO going forward? And I think you have to build a board that has different perspective on that and that is open to wild ideas, the things that are going to just seem like crazy in the moment, which this one might be. But it can be rationalized if we talk through it and we really document it and paint a picture of where this could go and what the opportunity cost is if we don't do something. Because if we didn't do something like this, I just imagine every year it's a 10% riff or 20% riff or whatever it is. And that is just the most demoralizing, crappy, noncreative building of a company ever. And it's all with your backs against a wall and it just feels like losing constantly. And I had a conversation with the board like, I don't want that. That's not, I don't want to be at a company like that. It's just, it doesn't make sense. It's soul crushing, you know, and it's just not inspiring and I don't feel good about it. So here's what I do feel good about and let's go. Let's challenge it.
Rolof, you're on a lot of boards. You're on some really good ones. Advice for CEOs how to build a board.
I think the first financing when you get an investor, if you're getting an investor board member, you should treat it as a recruiting decision, not a financing decision, because they'll have a much bigger bearing on the ultimate outcome of your company. And then I'm generally a fan of getting a very good independent board member within a year or two. Certainly by the time you get product market fit. And I think there's a different relationship that the founder has with the investor board member by virtue of what Jack described that sometimes that person may come to the conclusion that the founder is no longer the right person to run the company. Maybe rightly, maybe wrongly. If you can get an independent board member, there's a different relationship that the founder has with that board member. And especially if that person has previous experience, it can be a fantastic mentor relationship to help the founder on that journey depending obviously on their level of experience. I think boards are often built too late in a rush, especially in the run-up to an IPO where people suddenly realize, oh, I've got a four-person board and I need nine or whatever the case is and you suddenly assemble people who have no context, they have no history and they have no chemistry. Because you will be tested. You're going to have a situation where there's a short seller report or you're dealing with a hostile situation with an activist investor or a tricky financing that really tests the mettle of the team. And you want to understand the dynamic between the board members and just their willingness to go along and their alignment with the core values of the business. And so I just think it's one of those things that requires a lot more care than I think most people apply to it.
Yeah. Jack, you've started a couple great companies here. Your kind of startup founder, scale up CEO. Brian, he was the only person to have founded two companies that made it into the S&P 500. And the only person to have been simultaneously CEO of two public companies. He's CEO of two companies. Is it ever a good idea?
