You're listening to the Naval podcast. This is Nivvi. There's no set topic for this episode. It will be a

Popuri. Nival, how are you using AI at Impossible, your current company, to change how you manage

the business? Or are you guys just too small and a bunch of brilliant independent contributors

where it's not having an effect on how you actually run the company? It's more the latter.

We're a hub and spoke architecture. My co-founder is the CEO and not having an effect on how you actually run the company? It's more the latter.

We're a hub and spoke architecture.

My co-founder is the CEO and everyone kinds of reports into him.

He's just kind of the one product manager who runs around with everything in his head to try to bring this whole impossible task together.

And everybody interface through him.

And people are pretty smart. We keep a very

flat structure. We try to push people to communicate with each other directly. We don't even use

Slack if that gives you a sense. So we're not using AI as a communication method explicitly

inside, but implicitly, AI is still very helpful. So we're not like square. I know Jack Dorsey is reorganized a square around AI and maybe Toby at Shopify is doing that. You know, there's some guys who are very good at organizational management. They do these kinds of experiments. I've never been good at organizational management. I actually hate organizational management because I hate organizations. I hate large groups. I think it's just so hard to get

things done and you're not dealing with the best and the brightest and there's always politics. So I just prefer keeping groups small. And we count on people to just operate independently and communicate with each other's needed. Like I said, we don't even use Slack. We don't use any project management software. I think it's just GitHub.

And then when people want to talk to each other,

they just text each other.

Literally, they talk one-on-one. And sometimes it's chaotic and they have to figure out who to navigate their way towards, but that's part of the skill set. It's sort of like in computer networks, how do you organize a network for efficiency? Because at some point, the communication overhead gets very high. The traditional answer

is hierarchy. It's a tree system. It's like there's one person at the top, the CEO, then they have

a bunch of VPs or SVPs reporting to them, then you have a bunch of VPs below that, and the middle

managers and so on. And that keeps things organized and marching in one direction, but it's stifling.

There's a lot of politics. You can't talk to people two or three levels below you unless you go founder mode like Elon or Brian Chesky and it's celebrated some wonderful achievement that all of a sudden the CEO is a lot to talk to an engineer. You can tell I'm being sarcastic there. Like I just think that's a terrible way to operate, but it's a requirement of size. And we're just not at that size. So I don't like it. Instead, I like the fully interconnected graph. And that's insane. Fully interconnected graph is everyone talking to anyone with a light hub and spoke, with one person in the middle who's trying to keep everything in their heads. The thing about a fully interconnected graph in networking is that every node has to be highly

intelligent. So that's what you do. You hire highly intelligent people who can operate in a fully

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