I'm super sick of these articles patting Valve on the back for its super-innovative business structure.
The fact is, you can afford to have a goofy office like this when you've already achieved a comfortable level of success. Valve has been free and clear ever since Steam became the go-to place for digital game distribution, and Github is pretty comfortable in its place as the top source code host.
Emphasizing these companies kooky structure conflates correlation and causation. It's not that they're profitable or interesting because of their management structure: instead, they can afford to play around because they were early movers in a very profitable space.
The fact is, you can afford to have a goofy office like this when you've already achieved a comfortable level of success. Valve has been free and clear ever since Steam became the go-to place for digital game distribution, and Github is pretty comfortable in its place as the top source code host.
Emphasizing these companies kooky structure conflates correlation and causation. It's not that they're profitable or interesting because of their management structure: instead, they can afford to play around because they were early movers in a very profitable space.