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AI Forces Founders to Rethink Org Structures From First Principles

For a long time great advice for founders was “don’t try to innovate on basic organizational practices.” The roles you need, executive jobs, ratios, spend in each area, and operational methods are kind of known in major classes of company. You should just copy these things and not try to go back to first principles in areas that have been tried a 100 times. Now with AI I am not sure about any of that. Does it make sense to separate PMs and engineers? What does the staffing, tech stack, and spend look like along your GTM funnel? What’s a reasonable span of control area and where do you want practitioner-managers vs people managers? We’re seeing in real-time that R&D is completely changed and nobody really knows how to run a great product and engineering org now. But are legal, marketing, early funnel sales development, and HR going to be unaffected? I don’t think so. I think founders in small startups should absolutely go back to first principles and make sure the best practices are still best. This doesn’t mean you don’t want to know how and why current at-scale companies do things, but likely it will require active push as experienced execs come in and import a playbook that may be out of date. Bigger companies are doing the same thing, but it’s harder to rebuild at scale and takes more care (though the payoff is also bigger). I suspect the normal pattern of development will be inverted in the next few years. Instead of startups adding in the structure and components of the best at-scale companies as they grow, the at-scale companies will learn from these more agile orgs. Now is the time to being the annoying founder and question everything.