Business school professors call this insane. Jensen Huang calls it math.
The Calculation
Every management layer you add between a decision-maker and the work is a layer of distortion. Information gets filtered going up. Instructions get interpreted going down. By the time a strategy reaches execution, it's been processed through four or five different people's assumptions and priorities.
When a CEO directly manages 60 people, seven layers of management effectively disappear.
The tradeoff: you lose the intimacy of one-on-one relationships. What you gain: radical information fidelity. Huang hears directly from the people closest to the work. They hear directly from him.
What Replaces One-on-Ones
The mechanism Huang uses instead: public accountability.
When someone on his team makes a mistake, it gets addressed in front of all 60 people. Not as humiliation — as a learning system. When a postmortem happens in public, every person in the room benefits from it, not just the one person who made the error.
Private feedback is efficient for the recipient. Public postmortems are efficient for the organization.
Why This Matters for Smaller Operators
Most people reading this don't manage 60 people. But the underlying principle applies at any scale:
Fewer intermediary layers = faster, cleaner decisions.
Solo founders already operate at the extreme end of this. No management layers, no filters. You make decisions at direct contact with reality.
The risk when you start growing: the first hires you make are often generalists who become the intermediary layer. Information starts filtering. The thing that made you fast starts slowing down.
Huang's approach is a reminder that organizational structure is a choice, not an inevitability. The default corporate pyramid exists because it's familiar, not because it's optimal.
NVIDIA went from near-bankruptcy in 2008 to a $3T company. The management structure isn't incidental to that. It's load-bearing.