Point Blank is Nothing Without its People

In an age of rampant consumerism, little of what you see and read matters. Most content is the same recycled slop. Ever so often though, someone says something that really sticks. This is a deeply personal experience, and no two people have the same phrases that they carry as a part of themselves. Its like a personal cultural zeitgeist, if such a thing could be said to exist.

In the winter of 2023, OpenAI was going through a leadership crisis. They cycled between three-four different CEOs in a couple of weeks. This is not important though, what is important is a single tweet that was retweeted by many, many OpenAI employees :

“OpenAI is nothing without its people”

I’ve been thinking about this sentence for almost two years now. At the surface, it seems like a banal, milquetoast tautology. A statement that’s so obviously true that it doesn’t have to be said. But is it? It seems ironic that a statement about the humanity of a group of people would come from a company that is supposed to usher in a technological dystopia.

Most modern organizations treat people as replaceable ‘resources’. People aren’t allocated to projects, ‘resources’ are. It’s a quietly dehumanizing word that shifts the focus away from the people and onto the work being done. It treats people as inputs – quantifiable and replaceable. Coming from OpenAI, a company literally building artificial systems to replace humans, it seems like a rich statement to make. The statement becomes a paradox:

“Even in a company creating artificial intelligence, our most irreplaceable intelligence remains human.”

In a quiet way, the statement is a cultural anchor. It reclaims the narrative by asserting that the people, not the product, are the soul of the organization. It asserts that the main capital is not the GPUs, buildings, computers or AI models – it is the people that make up the organization.

As ChatGPT quotes : “We are not fungible units. The company’s mission, credibility, and output exist because we choose to stay aligned.”

At Point Blank, we have our own, much shorter version of this phrase. We have been using it for years now – as a hashtag. But ultimately anything that is not written down is lost to time, so I am writing it down explicitly below:

“We are Point Blank”

This phrase is all about ownership. Point Blank is not its achievements, legacy, its not a physical location, its not anything that we have built. It is us. Every single person who has been here has contributed to one long, unbroken chain of a shared human experience.

From time to time, just like any other organization, we have had disagreements on how to run the team. Not once have the offending parties ever accused the other of acting out of malice. To paraphrase a discussion:

“He doesn’t mean bad for the club you know, its just that his idea of doing things is different”.

“When did I say that? Ofcourse he wants what’s best for the club. All of us do.”

Its not a surprise that we’ve never had anyone leave the team over a disagreement. Because no matter how badly two members may have disagreed, they never doubted intent. One of my proudest statements to make is that Point Blank has held together over all these years.

The last month (September) was a very harrowing experience for the team in many ways. SIH, IICT, SEGFAULT, IndiaFOSS, Incubate, Internal exams all came together in a short span of a few weeks. Many team members pulled all nighters, spent entire days running errands, entire weeks building solutions and making creatives. They didn’t just do this because I told them to, they did it because they felt like it was their club. That they were personally responsible for its success, and would be responsible for its failure. And that is the only reason we successfully pulled through. Despite being a very individualistic club where everyone is on a different journey, and no two paths are alike. Its all about a shared sense of identity and ownership.

As we move forward into the next chapter for the graduating batch, and welcome newbies into the club, its worth remembering:

Point Blank is nothing without its people.

#WeArePointBlank.