Andrej Karpathy says Musk runs tiny, technical teams with almost no middle management, kills bloated meetings on sight, and personally unblocks engineers. He once doubled a GPU cluster after hearing about it directly from an engineer.
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I would say definitely Elon runs his company is an extremely unique style. I don't actually think that people appreciate how unique it is. You sort of like even read about it and so much you don't understand it. I think it's like even hard to describe. I don't even know where to start. But. Well, number one is like. So he likes very small, strong, highly technical teams. I would say at companies by default, the teams grow and they get large. Elon was always like a force against growth. I would have to work and expend efforts to hire people. I would have to like basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that big companies, it's really hard to get rid of low performers. And I think Elon is very friendly to by default getting rid of low performers. So I actually had to fight for people to keep them on the team because he would by default want to remove people. So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management. That is kind of like non technical for sure. So that's number one. Number two is kind of like the vibes of how this is how everything runs and how it feels when he sort of like walks into the office. He wants it to be a vibrant place. People are walking around, they're pacing around, they're working on exciting stuff, they're charting something, they're coding. He doesn't like stagnation. He doesn't like for it to look that way. He doesn't like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they're not being useful. So actually do see this or it's a large meeting and if you're not contributing and you're not learning, just walk out. And this is fully encouraged. And I think this is something that you don't normally see. I think a lot of bigger companies, they pamper employees. I think there's much less of that. The culture of it is you're there to do your best technical work and there's the intensity and so on. And I think maybe the last one that is very unique and very interesting and very strange is just how connected he is to the team. So usually a CEO of a company is like a remote person, five layers up, who talks to their VPs, who talk to their reports and directors, and eventually you talk to your manager. It's not how you ask companies, right? He will come to the office, he will talk to the engineers. Normally people spend like 99% of the time maybe talking to the VPs, he spends maybe 50% of the time and he just wants to talk to the engineers. So if the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth. And so they have the source of truth, not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it. And also, just like his large hammer and his willingness to exercise it within the organization. So maybe if he talks to the engineers and they bring up that what's blocking you? Okay, I don't have enough GPUs to run my thing. And he's like, oh, okay. And if he hears that twice, he's going to be like, okay, this is a problem. So what is our timeline? And when you don't have satisfying answers, he's like, okay, I want to talk to the person in charge of the GPU cluster. And someone dials the phone and he's just like, okay, double the cluster right now. Let's have a meeting tomorrow. From now on, send me daily updates until the cluster is twice the size. And then they kind of push back and they're like, okay, well, we have this procurement set up, we have this timeline, and Nvidia says that we don't have enough GPUs and it will take six months or something. And then you get a rise of an eyebrow. And then he's like, okay, I want to talk to Jensen. And then he just kind of removes bottlenecks. So I think the extent to which he's extremely involved and removes bottlenecks and applies his hammer, I think is also not appreciated. So I think there's a lot of these kinds of aspects that are very unique, I would say, and very interesting. And honestly, going to a normal company outside of that, you definitely miss aspects of that. Maybe that's long rant. I don't think I hit on all the points, but it is very unique thing and it's very interesting.
