Anthropic’s CEO Has Only 1 Direct Report. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Has 60. Here’s Why

This article by Amaya Nichole was originally published on Inc.com.

While most tech CEOs juggle a dozen or more direct reports, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has only one.

His lone direct report is his chief of staff, Avital Balwit. The rest of the executive team answers to his sister, Daniela Amodei, who oversees much of the company’s day-to-day operations and is accountable to Anthropic’s board.

“It’s incredibly freeing,” [Dario] Amodei told Bloomberg. “It lets me do all the things that I do much more easily than I would otherwise.”

Interestingly, most of today’s tech leaders take the opposite approach: Satya Nadella runs Microsoft with about 16 direct reports, Sundar Pichai oversees 18 employees at Google, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang famously manages 60. 

“When you’re growing this fast, you’re hiring a bunch of people from big tech companies,” Amodei said. “If you don’t tell them how Anthropic operates, they’ll simply recapitulate the only thing they know, which is how to operate at the companies that they came from.”

However, for Huang, the 60-person structure is intentional. It’s part of a system he calls extreme co-design, which, he argues, drives accountability and keeps bureaucratic layers from building up. However, this comes at a cost. In an interview with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Huang said one-on-one conversations are simply impossible with so many people reporting to him. “We present a problem, and all of us attack it,” he said.

Amodei has taken a different approach. Instead of being an operations-focused CEO, he appears to want to position himself as a researcher and outward-facing leader, something that he thinks differentiates Anthropic from its competitors.

He sees the unusual structure as a way to protect his focus. “In many ways, it’s a zoom-in versus zoom-out thing. It’s very hard to pay attention to the strategic picture if there’s, like, a zillion things you have to handle tomorrow,” he said. “And so it often makes a lot of sense to separate those things from each other, so that you can do both of them well.”

This way of operating has defined him for years. During his time in school, one of Amodei’s professors noted that he stood out for his willingness to challenge convention. That disposition still drives him today.

Additionally, having spent time as a senior research scientist at Google and a research director at OpenAI, he remains an inquirer at heart. Still, he told Fortune that as much as 40 percent of his days go toward safeguarding workplace culture rather than building product.

Unconventional as it may be, Amodei’s organizational structure appears to be working exactly as intended.