I'm really curious if github's culture is the cause of their success or a result of it. I'm doubly curious if their bootstrapping was critical to this. My suspicion is that when outside investment arrives, the clock starts ticking, the pressure mounts on the founders, and this may result in a greater motivation to "manage" people's time, for fear of "wasting" time.
> I'm really curious if github's culture is the cause of their success or a result of it.
If I had to bet on one of those choices, I'd say the culture is the cause, not the result. But, if I had another choice, I'd say probably neither. Because "success" is a complex formula containing many components, one of which is no doubt culture.
Github has an awesome culture because they want to have an awesome culture. It is not the cause nor the result of their success. I think the core value from which all other things stem is simply, to build. IMO that's a value, more than a characteristic, of their culture.
The fact that their company is also successful was no doubt helped by these things (and certainly validates their approach to running a company), but, as Holman hints at in the slides, there is no recipe for building great products -- your best bet is to just build, and keep building.
"There were, so far, no agreements of any kind regarding how things would proceed. Just two guys that decided to hack together on something that sounded cool."
Thanks for the link to Tom Preston-Werner's blog post about the founding of GitHub, it's a very good read.
He has another blog post, "Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year" [1]. Two of the ten points suggest that culture was important even in those early days:
> Have Fun... Fostering a playful and creative environment
> is critical to maintaining both your personal health,
> and the health (and idea output) of the company.
>
> Trust your Team... In a startup, you can drastically reduce
> momentum by applying micromanagement, or you can boost
> momentum by giving trust.
Although I agree completely with your point that "[i]t'd be hard to argue that the first few months of hacking was 'culture'"... It sure doesn't feel like they had to put a conscious effort into building a culture at this early stage, rather that their culture was already embodied in their personal beliefs, and the company now reflects those beliefs.
Culture is not a secret sauce added by management after the company is established. It starts with the personality and practices of the founders and then evolves and solidifies over time as the company grows. Nothing could be more relevant to the culture than those first few months as they planted the seed that grew into what we see today.
