Built to Stay Small: Inside the Org Charts of AI-Native Startups

Amazon.com Inc. spent years hiring its way to dominance — and then hired more people to manage all those people. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy is now trying to tame the bureaucracy this created, arguing the company needs to regain its nimbleness and act more like the startup it used to be.

But what if Amazon were founded today? What if its first 10 hires weren’t just “really smart, motivated, inventive, ambitious people,” as Jassy describes them, but AI power users equipped with tools that could handle customer service, scheduling and product prototyping on their own? Could the company have ...