Saturday Morning Chai: Are We Bootstrapping People for 10x?

From Supree Periasamy, Head of Charlie Builder

 In 1991, I sat through a job interview group discussion and barely said a word. ⠀

It wasn’t that I had nothing to say. I couldn’t say it in English. ⠀

I had come to Bombay from a small village in Tamil Nadu. Tamil was my first language; English was for exams. I had passed the technical test, since I’d read Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language so many times I knew most answers by heart. But in the group discussion, my ability to demonstrate what I knew depended on my ability to express it. ⠀

I didn’t get the job. It took me two more years of learning to express my ideas in English before I became a programmer. ⠀

I’ve been thinking about that this week, because every new hire faces a version of it. ⠀

When someone joins a team, what often stands between what they know and the value they can create is knowledge of the organization: the platform, customers, architecture, and the decisions and mistakes behind them. Much of it lives in people’s heads. You have to know whom to ask and wait for them. Sometimes you don’t know enough to know what to ask. ⠀

AI is starting to take that barrier down. When organizational knowledge becomes something anyone can ask directly, we can stop ramping people up and start bootstrapping them. ⠀

That changes more than onboarding. When knowledge and context become accessible to everyone, some of the dependencies on who knows what — and who has to be asked — begin to disappear. That creates more room for people to contribute at their full potential. ⠀

But bootstrap them into what? ⠀

If onboarding only teaches people to operate inside the box we’ve built, we risk training out the very thing they brought with them: an outside perspective. “Why do we do it this way?” may be one of the most valuable questions a new team member can ask, especially when something is slowing them down or blocking them. ⠀

So onboarding in an AI-first organization can’t simply be “Here’s your box.” It has to be: ⠀

Here’s why the box exists. Understand it. Challenge it. Improve it. And when it’s time, help us redraw it. ⠀

That’s how I think about 10x. It isn’t ten times more work. It’s shorter time to value: how quickly what we build becomes something customers actually experience. ⠀

AI is helping remove the knowledge barrier. The barriers left are increasingly ours to remove: approvals, handoffs, role boundaries, and “this is how we’ve always done it.” ⠀

10x isn’t only about unlocking the potential of AI. It’s about using AI to unlock the potential of people. ⠀

Are we onboarding people into our constraints — or bootstrapping them to challenge those constraints and unlock the potential they brought with them?