AI is already threatening developers, but it could be equally disruptive for their managers.
Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-founder of a16z, has a sweeping theory about how AI could upend not just individual jobs, but the entire organisational model that has governed big business for the past century. His argument begins with a largely forgotten 20th century thinker — and ends with a prediction that could reshape how companies are built and run.
Andreessen traces the story to James Burnham, a political theorist writing in the 1940s and 50s, who argued that capitalism had passed through two distinct phases. The first, which Burnham called bourgeois capitalism, was the “name on the door” model:
Henry Ford runs the company. It’s a dictatorial model — Henry Ford just tells everybody what to do. The problem with bourgeois capitalism is it doesn’t scale, because Henry Ford can only tell so many people to do so many things before he runs out of time in the day.
The second phase was Burnham’s answer to that problem: managerial capitalism — the creation of a professional class trained not in any particular domain, but in management itself.
That led to the importance of business schools, management consulting firms, and all these things. Today, most executives at most Fortune 500 companies are not domain experts in whatever the company does, and they’re certainly not the founders. They’re professional managers. In the course of their careers, they’ll manage many different kinds of businesses — healthcare for a while, then financial services, then tech.
Burnham’s argument, as Andreessen tells it, was that this transition was not just inevitable but necessary:
The professional management class has downsides — they’re not necessarily experts at doing the thing, they’re not as inventive, they’re not going to create the next breakthrough. But whether you think that’s good or bad, it’s what’s going to be required to run capitalist enterprises with millions to billions of customers, operating at a level of scale and complexity that demands this professional class.
Over the next 50 years after Burnham wrote his book, Andreessen says, that’s exactly what happened. Managerialism took over everything — big companies, governments, large-scale nonprofits.
This is the backdrop against which Andreessen frames the entire venture capital project:
What venture capital does is we’re basically a rump protest movement against that — trying to find the next Henry Ford. We start companies in the old model, with a founder-CEO, and we bet that the startup is going to be able to innovate in ways that the big incumbents are not going to, because the incumbent is being run by managers. We’re like raging against the dying of the light — constantly trying to fight off managerialism swamping everything and making everything boring and gray.
And then he gets to the twist. AI, he argues, might make this a false choice:
AI is the thing that would lead you to think: wow, maybe there’s a third model. Maybe it’s a combination of the two. Maybe the new Henry Ford, the new Elon or the new Steve Jobs, plus AI — is the best of both. The spark of genius of the name-on-the-door model, but with AI superpowers to do all the managerial work. That may be the actual secret formula, and we’ve never even known we wanted it because we never thought it was possible.
His reasoning is grounded in what AI is actually good at:
What are these bots really good at? They’re really good at doing paperwork. Filling out forms, writing reports, reading — all the managerial work. They’re amazing at it.
He closes with a challenge for both sides. Innovators will need to figure out how to genuinely leverage AI to do this. And for the incumbents — the large, managerially-run enterprises — the question is harder:
They’re going to be facing a different kind of insurgent competitor that has a different set of capabilities than they’re used to. This is going to force a lot of big companies to figure out innovation — either figure out innovation, or die trying.
Andreessen’s framing lands at a moment when the data is starting to back him up. Gartner predicts that through 2026, 20% of organisations will use AI to flatten their organisational structures, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions. The tasks that have long defined middle management — reporting, forecasting, scheduling, performance monitoring — are precisely the ones AI handles well.
The trend is already visible in how companies are restructuring. Duolingo has said it will gradually stop using contractors for work AI can handle, and will only grant additional human headcount to teams that cannot automate their work. Shopify made a similar move, requiring teams to demonstrate they cannot automate before requesting more people. These aren’t just cost-cutting decisions — they’re structural bets on a leaner, founder-driven model where AI absorbs the administrative layer.
Not everyone agrees that the managerial class will simply vanish. Scale AI’s CEO Alexandr Wang has argued the opposite — that AI will cause everyone to be promoted to manager, overseeing pods of AI agents rather than doing the work themselves. The two views aren’t entirely incompatible: what’s being disrupted is not management as a concept, but the large professional class hired specifically to perform it.
Andreessen’s framing suggests the more consequential disruption is structural. If a founder armed with AI can do what once required layers of professional managers, the incumbents running on the Burnham model face a genuine competitive threat — not just from more efficient startups, but from a fundamentally different organisational logic. The managerial playbook was built for a world where scale required delegation. AI may be dismantling that assumption entirely.