The way I read it, he's referring to communication channels needed for everyone to be on the same page (see Metcalfe's law, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org

The way I read it, he's referring to communication channels needed for everyone to be on the same page (see Metcalfe's law, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law). Traditionally, with a homogeneous group of people, the count of communication channels will be O(n^2), as you can see in the images at the top of the wikipedia article, because everyone needs to talk to everyone else. In this case, it's not homogeneous; there are n startups and m partners, but if every partner needs to know what's going on with every startup, you still have O(mn) communication channels. If, for example, you assigned n/m startups to each partner, the total communication channels needed would reduce to O(m+n). I believe pg is referring to something along those lines when he says he'd like to make it unnecessary for each partner to know what each startup is doing.