“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” Thomas Reid, 1786
Last week Pat Grady from Sequoia put out a set of slides on the big AI trends he is seeing. It’s worth tracking down if you haven’t seen it yet; the deck is pretty riveting.
He said something in passing towards the tail end of the preso that I can’t stop thinking about.
In the age of AI, your company’s productivity goes from being limited by your weakest links to becoming a strongest-link game.
What does that mean? It means that because these tools allow the curious, motivated builder types to move so quickly, it becomes both an obligation and an advantage for a company to find these people, equip them with unlimited tokens, and get out of their way.
It sounds simple, but it’s actually a pretty radical way to think about managing people and allocating resources.
The old conventional wisdom was the inverse, driven by the “only as strong as its weakest link” thinking. The best companies would regularly part ways with their bottom-performing 10% because the thinking was that a team can only move as fast as its slowest members. The best companies managed their floor.
What Pat is describing flips this on its head. Stop shackling your best people with the same budgets and limitations you set for everybody else. The ceiling is what matters now.
AI superpowers are available to anyone motivated enough to pick them up. The companies that figure out how to find those people early, give them room, and let them build are going to look very different from the ones still managing to the average.
Find the builders. Equip them. Get out the way and let them go nuts.