Jack Dorsey’s Employees Don’t Bring Slide Decks to Meetings

A few months ago, meetings at fintech company Block consisted of a group of employees going through a slide deck or a document together. 

Now, Block CEO Jack Dorsey says AI has changed the game. Instead of slide decks, employees are showing up to meetings with AI-created prototypes of concepts they previously would have illustrated on slides, signaling a shift towards real-world applications. Prototypes include sketches, diagrams and fully working tools. 

“Now everyone is bringing a prototype that they built, which is pretty amazing,” Dorsey said on a recent episode of Sequoia’s Long Strange Trip podcast. 

Dorsey, who co-founded Block in 2009, said the prototypes, which employees develop using either simulated or real data, offer “far greater depth and realism” than any traditional slide deck. He added that they can be updated in real time.

Block recently underwent layoffs

Last month, Block laid off 40% of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees. Dorsey explicitly framed the layoffs as a consequence of AI-powered “intelligence tools” changing how the company operates, not as a response to financial trouble. He said these tools, combined with “smaller and flatter teams,” are enabling a new way of working that “fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

Dorsey also said at the time that Block’s “gross profit continues to grow,” arguing the company is acting from a position of strength and predicting that other firms will make similar AI-driven cuts over the next year. 

Other CEOs are also against slide decks

Dorsey is far from the first CEO to move away from slide decks. In June 2004, Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon, arguing in an email to staff that slide decks “give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.” He asked staff to write “a good four-page memo” instead, with “well-structured, narrative text.”

Instead of slide decks, the company created the Amazon Six-Pager, which is a detailed memo that outlines the issues and conversations that led to the meeting. Staff members read the six-pager before and come prepared to discuss it. 

Steve Ballmer criticized slide decks while he was CEO of Microsoft. In 2009, he said that he didn’t think slide decks were “efficient.” 

“Most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance,” he told The New York Times. “And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’”

More recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke at a summit in 2020 and encouraged CEOs to spend “less time on PowerPoint” and more time “trying to make your product as amazing as possible.”

“Are CEOs in corporate America focused enough on product improvement?” Musk said. “I think the answer is no.” 

A few months ago, meetings at fintech company Block consisted of a group of employees going through a slide deck or a document together. 

Now, Block CEO Jack Dorsey says AI has changed the game. Instead of slide decks, employees are showing up to meetings with AI-created prototypes of concepts they previously would have illustrated on slides, signaling a shift towards real-world applications. Prototypes include sketches, diagrams and fully working tools. 

“Now everyone is bringing a prototype that they built, which is pretty amazing,” Dorsey said on a recent episode of Sequoia’s Long Strange Trip podcast.