Salim Ismail is a co-founder & partner at Exponential Venture Capital, founder of OpenExO, founding Executive Director at Singularity University, and an author. His latest work is, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it).

Greg and Salim discuss Salim’s shift from focusing on exponential technologies to organizational design as the main bottleneck to organizations adopting disruption. He traces the idea to his experience leading innovation at Yahoo, where disruptive ideas were rejected by a corporate “immune system,” and to building Singularity University with a tiny team, which led him to study fast-scaling unicorns and develop the Exponential Organizations (ExO) model.

They also talk about how legacy firms optimize for predictability and efficiency, making them hostile to disruption, and why change must often happen at the edge via spin-outs (e.g., Nespresso, Google X, Apple teams). Salim argues that AI agents will replace much middle management coordination (60–80% in 5–7 years), making judgment and accountability scarce, reshaping universities and expertise, and accelerating permissionless, low-cost innovation and startups.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Is the end of middle management coming?

30:59: Middle management does two things: it takes decisions from above and cascades them down, and it takes information from down and feeds it up. Okay? It's all coordination, and AI can do all that coordination at a hundred X faster, cheaper, more accurately than a human being can do it. Erik Brynjolfsson, I think, has the best frame for it. He calls it white-collar drudgery, right? Nobody needs to be assembling sales report from five regions and then passing it up just to the chief sales officer. Nobody really wants to be doing that, but somebody's got to do it. And there's that whole human hierarchy and coordination function in Cosian thinking. AI replaces most of that, so we think middle management evaporates by about a sixty to eighty percent level over the next five to seven years.

The world is driven by disruption, not efficiency

13:39: Today the world is not driven by efficiency and predictability, it is driven by disruption... Human hierarchical structure does not work in a world that's changing quickly. And as AI comes along, it breaks it completely.

Innovation has to happen at the edge

19:40: You've got to spin off. That's the only thing to do it. So the only solution to this, and I've looked at the innovation process of probably, I've been in the boardroom of probably two hundred of the Fortune five hundred over the last decade. There's only one path, which is you do disruptive things at the edge away from the mothership and let that become the new gravity center. That's it. That's the only way you can make it work.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Coase Theorem
Manu Chandaria
John Seely Brown
Valve Corporation
Geoffrey Hinton
Moore's Law
Vitalik Buterin
Byzantine Fault

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678. Exploring Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail

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678. Exploring Exponential Organizations with Salim Ismail