I'm curious how you think it's possible for a structure like this to emerge after some level of success? You think that any company sets up a traditional management structure, accomplishes success and then fires all the managers and tells everyone to work differently? Or do you think it might be more likely that thinking differently early on about how to treat employees and how to focus creative energy somehow helps to achieve that success?
GitHub has always run this way, since it was 4 people. When we tell people how we operate, they have always responded that it will never scale - people have told us that since we were 4. We're now at nearly 100 employees and it's still working great. Valve is 300 and Gore has several thousand, so we're pretty sure we can keep going this way. We are slightly different than Valve, but their handbook really resonated with the way we do things. The main difference between companies like Valve or GitHub and many other companies is that we don't look at other places and ask ourselves how we can copy their structures, how we can cargo cult their success, instead we look at our problems and ask ourselves how we can address them in the best way possible. It appears that Valve has done the same thing and we've come to some similar conclusions.
I think this is a big reason why we've been successful - that we ask ourselves this when approaching product too. You say we're sitting pretty at the top, but when we started there were tons of source hosts. Valve was just as bad - starting in another industry that was totally saturated. The reason we were able to break through I believe was largely due to the fact that we thought about problem solving differently than the industry leaders that we started up against.
The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different way and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you read in an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're missing everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read the article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to copy us you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly copying the least important of the many symptoms of this approach.
Approach problems from first principles. Figure out what the best possible experience would be for the person using your product (not just the person buying it). Make that experience a reality. Don't copy anyone. Do that same thing internally. Now what does your company and your product look like? That should be what you take from this article.
> The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different way and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you read in an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're missing everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read the article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to copy us you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly copying the least important of the many symptoms of this approach.
Well said, sir. Reminded me of this article on cargo cult management [1]
GitHub has always run this way, since it was 4 people. When we tell people how we operate, they have always responded that it will never scale - people have told us that since we were 4. We're now at nearly 100 employees and it's still working great. Valve is 300 and Gore has several thousand, so we're pretty sure we can keep going this way. We are slightly different than Valve, but their handbook really resonated with the way we do things. The main difference between companies like Valve or GitHub and many other companies is that we don't look at other places and ask ourselves how we can copy their structures, how we can cargo cult their success, instead we look at our problems and ask ourselves how we can address them in the best way possible. It appears that Valve has done the same thing and we've come to some similar conclusions.
I think this is a big reason why we've been successful - that we ask ourselves this when approaching product too. You say we're sitting pretty at the top, but when we started there were tons of source hosts. Valve was just as bad - starting in another industry that was totally saturated. The reason we were able to break through I believe was largely due to the fact that we thought about problem solving differently than the industry leaders that we started up against.
The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different way and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you read in an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're missing everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read the article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to copy us you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly copying the least important of the many symptoms of this approach.
Approach problems from first principles. Figure out what the best possible experience would be for the person using your product (not just the person buying it). Make that experience a reality. Don't copy anyone. Do that same thing internally. Now what does your company and your product look like? That should be what you take from this article.