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Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes — not slide decks — to meetings

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Slide decks continue to get a bad rap — and another company is doing away with them.

On an episode of Sequoia’s “Long Strange Trip” podcast released on Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said that employees at his fintech company no longer bring slide decks to meetings.

“Just two months ago every meeting that we would have, you see a presentation or a Google Doc and we go through it,” Dorsey said. “Now everyone is bringing a prototype that they built, which is pretty amazing.”

Dorsey, who cofounded Block in 2009, said the prototypes — built on either simulated or real data — have more “depth and realism” than a slide deck ever could. He also likes that they can be modified in real time.

And making the wrong decision doesn’t cost much, he added.

“The cost of being wrong on that path and going back up the tree and going down another path is getting closer and closer to zero,” he said.

In February, the company laid off over 4,000 employees, about 40% of its workforce. Dorsey cited AI–driven efficiency as one of the reasons for the cuts.

The Twitter cofounder is part of a broader shift among tech leaders moving away from slide decks.

In October, Aravind Srinivas, the cofounder and CEO of Perplexity said that he hasn’t built a pitch deck since the company’s Series A fundraising.

Pitch decks are slide shows that give investors and customers key details about a company’s founders, its product, and its financial performance.

“I just write a memo and I tell them you can do a Q&A and ask whatever you want,” Srinivas said, referring to potential investors. “And anything else that is not internal data, you can ask Perplexity. Like, it already knows everything.”

The pushback against slide decks isn’t new.

In a 2004 email to staff, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos banned “PowerPoint-style presentations” and said people should write a “4-page memo” instead.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs’ meetings were also slide-deck-free.

“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs once said, according to a book published last month by David Pogue. “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.




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Lloyd Lee

Jack Dorsey just laid off 40% of staff. He said he’s still hiring AI engineers.

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Jack Dorsey said he’s still hiring for his fintech company Block — even after he just laid off 40% of its workforce.

The cofounder said during an earnings call on Thursday that he expects to bring in more senior AI engineering talent to the team. The company’s stock was up nearly 23% after trading hours as of 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

On Thursday, Dorsey said in a memo to employees that Block was cutting its head count from 10,000 people to “just under 6,000.” The reason, he said, was because AI is unlocking “a new way of working” with “smaller and flatter teams.”

“We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving,” Dorsey wrote in the memo. “But something has changed.”

Dorsey said in an earnings call on Thursday that AI tools have increased productivity at the company with a 40% increase in production code shipment per engineer since September.

“We’ve seen engineering work that would have taken weeks to complete be done by a small team in a fraction of the time with agentic coding tools,” he said.

Despite the layoffs, Dorsey said during the call that Block expects to invest in hiring.

“We see meaningful opportunity to invest in our people and invest in hiring, invest in retaining a world-class team to deliver for our customers; ultimately, we expect to hire some more senior AI engineering talent who will continue to level up our engineering and product capabilities,” he said.

Dorsey and a spokesperson for Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AI’s impact is being felt across industries and roles, as companies find ways to automate work. One study by Stanford University researchers found that early-career positions in fields such as software engineering and customer service are on the decline.

Some workers have also said that their responsibilities have increased with AI. A software engineer told Business Insider that the simultaneous increase in productivity and workload is leading to “AI fatigue.”




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CEO Jack Dorsey issues a dire warning about AI’s impact as he cuts Block by almost half

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Block CEO Jack Dorsey issued a warning about the impact of AI on employment, particularly for other companies

After announcing he’s cutting about 40% of Block’s 11,000 employees, Dorsey outlined Block’s next phase as a “smaller, faster, intelligence-native company” in his opening remarks during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.

“I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late,” he said.

AI, he said, is dramatically accelerating work inside Block.

“A significantly smaller team using the tools we’re building can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every single week,” Dorsey said

Dorsey pointed to a sharp jump in AI capabilities late last year, surpassing Block’s own internal tool, Goose, which it uses to speed up coding and other repetitive work.

“Something happened in December last year where the models just got an order of magnitude more capable and more intelligent,” he said.

Dorsey predicted more companies will follow suit, using AI to drive efficiency gains. Block, he said, is moving ahead of a trend that “all companies will eventually” embrace.

The Bay Area tech company, which owns Square, Cash App, and Tidal, had “a lot of duplication” that needed to be streamlined, Dorsey said.

Block CFO Amrita Ahuja said that at Block, engineering work that would have taken weeks now takes a fraction of the time thanks to AI coding tools.

Output per engineer is up by more than 40% since September, she added.

Although Block is shedding over 4,000 people from its 10,000-strong workforce, it’s expanding in one area — senior engineering talent focused on AI, Ahuja said.




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