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Err the Blog had about 10,000 readers when GitHub launched and Chris and PJ already had a ton of users of their popular Rails plugins.
This was a huge audience to launch to. What advice would you give to people who want to dive in to their own company without trying to build up such a huge following before hand? Is it madness to try to bootstrap without establishing an audience beforehand? ----- |
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I started Gravatar when I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It grew quite rapidly. The single most important lesson you can learn from GitHub and Gravatar is that virality and community can help turn any good idea into a huge success. Make something that people can use to show others how great they are. Kathy Sierra talks a lot about this concept. People love interacting with other people. Figure out how to make that work for your idea. |
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GitHub does a lot of amazing work, and you guys are all fabulous coders. However, when I've spoken to colleagues in person, there's a definite feeling that GitHub have a tendency to have some Not-Invented-Here syndrome: see CI Joe when Hudson was already mature and widely used. It seems like a lot of brain-cycles could have been saved and put elsewhere.
Do you think that's a fair comment? Is it something you think is necessarily negative? ----- |
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We don't put up with any bullshit. If the existing software out there displeases us, no matter how mature it is, we'll be tempted to build something better. This is how progress is made. It's possible that we're duplicating effort somewhere, but we all cherish the act of creation, and if we think we can improve upon the situation, we will. Sometimes just for the sheer joy of it.
I'd wager that pretty much everything you use today was considered an act of NIH by someone at some point in the past. |
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ivankirigin 579 days ago | link The smartest people I know want to do their own startups. It is getting easier, so more people are doing it. How do you hire in the face of this issue? ----- |
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You do it by building a company so compelling that those people would rather join your company than start their own. You do this by optimizing for happiness and creating a culture that can't be ignored. |
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How do you decide what features to add or not add to Github? How much thinking, discussion, planning, design, research, etc go into each feature before coding begins? ----- |
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We look for features that we want to use ourselves. It's usually quite apparent what areas of the site need some love or where entire features are missing. The things that get implemented are the things that are important enough for someone on the team to actually sit down and start working on. If you want a feature badly enough, you'll go build it. It turns out that this is a great filter for what is worthwhile.
Some features (like Pull Requests 2.0) spend many months in development before they're launched. PRs took about 8 months of off and on work before they were ready. Pressure from other team members will often serve as a catalyst for the implementors to finish what they started. More strategic decisions often bubble up to the founders and we'll make a final decision on whether we need to hire additional people to make things happen faster. |
I found my cofounders via local Ruby meetups. I was by myself when I was doing Gravatar and it sucked. Having two cofounders with GitHub has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. They provided additional manpower in the early days when velocity of development matters most, and they acted as a safeguard against bad decisions. It's extremely motivating to have other people that are depending on you to produce great work. I would highly recommend against single founder startups for all of these reasons and a thousand more.
Gravatar did become hard to run towards the end. I was spending a few hundred dollars a month on servers and there was no good way to make money with it. It seemed a bit hopeless. I never gave up though. I put in the hours to make it work and eventually sold it to Automattic. To me, that was a success. I created something of value and sold it to someone that had the resources to take it to the next level.
It's hard to explain how I judge my startup ideas. It's a lot of intuition based on years of experience with the internet and with a lot of examples of things that I love and ton of examples of things that I hate. All this adds up to a feeling that something will work out. Once I have that feeling about an idea, I jump in 100%.