- The speaker discusses the importance of people in a company and how they make decisions.
- They talk about the early days of GitHub and how they hired people with complementary skills.
- The speaker emphasizes the value of not having preconceived notions and being open to new ideas.
- They mention the importance of learning from past experiences and mistakes.
- The speaker highlights the significance of hiring the right people and being willing to let go of those who don't fit the company culture.
- They discuss how roles and responsibilities change as a company grows.
- The speaker criticizes the importance placed on job titles, especially in the early stages of a company.

- Titles are not important in the beginning stages of a company
- The right mix of personality types is important in a team
- People are the most important aspect of a company
- Design is crucial for a successful product
- Focus on the features that matter, don't dilute the product
- Mission should be concise and clear
- Start with a small problem that can be solved and expand from there
- Choose whether to be a lifestyle business or aim to change the world
- Don't squander opportunities, go for it
- Most products in the market are terrible, strive for excellence.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of product, philosophy, and people in creating a successful company.
- Apple's success with the iPad is used as an example of a good product winning in the market.
- The speaker discusses the five core values of GitHub: optimizing for happiness, best argument wins, working from first principles, creating super fans, and being awesome and changing the world.
- A strong culture and philosophy can be used as a hiring tool to attract the right people.
- The speaker concludes that people, product, and philosophy are inseparable and all matter in building a successful company.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of people, product, and philosophy in building a successful company. They discuss the early days of GitHub, the value of open-mindedness, learning from past experiences, and hiring the right people. They highlight the significance of design, focusing on important features, and having a clear mission. The speaker also discusses the importance of not being obsessed with job titles and the need for a strong culture and philosophy to attract the right people. Overall, they stress that people, product, and philosophy are all crucial aspects of building a successful company.

Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, at Y Combinator Startup School on October 20, 2012.

Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

I'm actually going to put this on the ground.

You see, part of being a founder of a company is solving your own problems.

So I was thinking about this talk and what I would talk about, what the big questions would be for me about GitHub, where we've been, where we're going, what does it mean to start a company today?

And I figured most of you, and especially after watching Ben's talk, might be asking how do I, as a budding entrepreneur, raise $100 million just like GitHub did?

Maybe that's the question that you're wondering.

Pretty much anywhere I go now, everyone says, Hey, Tom, how's it going?

What are you going to spend that $100 million on?

But this, I think, is the wrong question.

I'm not actually going to tell you how to do that.

And I think that's because, at the end of the day, money isn't actually what matters.

Money is just a number in some bank's computer that says how many slides you can buy for your office.

Right, but that's not what we care about.

We're not trying to just make more slides happen in the world.

I think what matters is not the money, it's other things.

This is going to be less impactful if I don't have my thing.

A company is nothing except the decisions that it makes.

So the only thing that matters are people.

And those people, then, had better be the right people.

So let me tell you about GitHub in the very early days.

GitHub was started by myself and my cofounder, Chris Wannstroth.

What I did was the design, the front end, the very just the visual and the UX.

I also did the very back end, which is how Rails code accesses Git repositories on disks.

So I'm kind of this weird creature in that I do the front end stuff and I do the back end stuff, but I'd been doing Rails for a long time before that, and I didn't really like it.

And so I was, you know, being in the Ruby community and going to Ruby meetups, This is how I found my co-founders.

And Chris Wanstroth was very big into Rails.

He had a blog post that outlined everything about how to be the best Rails developer you can be.

I said, this is a guy that I can start a company with because We have complementary skills.

I'll do the front and back end, he'll do the middle part, and together we have the whole thing.

We just started hacking on it, on the side, side project.

But then shortly thereafter, and here's a little tidbit about how can you tell whether your startup idea is actually gaining traction?

1 thing that was really effective for us was when people came to us, this is in the private beta phase, and they asked, can I pay for this?

We had no billing system and yet they wanted to pay for it.

They wanted to make sure that it would continue to exist so that it would continue to solve their problems.

So if you have customers asking you to pay for your company's product before you can even sell it to them, that's a good sign.

So in order to accomplish this, in order to get this company to a place where people could actually buy it, we hired our third cofounder.

It was just a few months after we had started.

And he, as his first thing, built the billing system.

So now we had 2 Rails guys, essentially, and me still doing front and back end.

We're building out a better mix of people and skills to accomplish what we need to get done.

Our first employee that we hired, named Scott Chacon, he is a Git expert.

So we reached a level in the company where we kind of maxed out our Git knowledge.

None of us were really Git experts, and yet we're building this site, GitHub, which is for hosting Git repositories.

So again, through meetups, we met Scott, we talked to him, we talked to him about product, about how he would go about building things, and he was the 1 that built Gist, which is the snippet sharing site.

He built that from scratch as his first task.

Bringing his Git knowledge into the equation.

And so you can see we're assembling a broader diversity of people who can accomplish more things.

We max out our Git knowledge, let's bring someone in that can augment that.

And you'll notice that none of these people, none of the 4 of us were business people.

None of us had ever really gone into business all that much.

I'd done some consulting, but that doesn't really count.

None of us had an MBA background or a business background like that.

None of us had this really broad experience in creating a company that you might, as a person starting out, think, well, how are we gonna solve this problem?

Well, let's hire an executive because they know what they're doing.

There are executives and they're awesome, great people, but they know so much, they know so much, that it can be detrimental, I think, to a startup, where you're really trying to solve a new problem in a different way.

You have to come to problems with beginner's mind, right?

Not knowing something can be a very powerful tool into accomplishing it, because you don't know that it's not possible.

That's what doing a startup is, not realizing that something is impossible and doing it anyway.

Something else that was a commonality between us, the people in GitHub in the earliest days, was having worked for bad companies before, having worked in places where they did things wrong.

Examples of how not to do something are just as good as examples of how to do something.

And I think this is what companies are for.

And if you haven't ever experienced problems, then how can you know what are the right ones to solve?

So you're all here to do startups, to join startups, to create startups.

I think that if your options are create a startup or try to go work for another company, going and working for other companies is not so bad, because it gives you this really excellent perspective on things to not do, actually.

So getting experience elsewhere, not so bad.

A lot of great people that start startups had a bunch of full-time jobs before that.

I had 5 full-time jobs before starting GitHub.

So suffering can sometimes lead to a better product for having that information.

Something that's great with people is getting together.

We would meet for beers all the time, and we'd talk over the problems that we had.

We'd go to a bar called O'Reilly's up in North Beach, San Francisco, and we'd just talk through the big problems.

Having the same ideas for the product direction is important.

Getting on the same page for that stuff is what's going to allow you to push forward.

If you find yourself in a situation where you're not getting along with your cofounders or the very small team that you've created to begin with, really step back and evaluate that problem.

Because I don't think you can push forward effectively if you're fighting each other.

Right, look at that, you should be getting along.

If you're not, really, really think about what that means.

Hiring the right people is incredibly hard.

We hired a salesperson in the very early days and we had to let him go because he wasn't the culture fit.

It was because we hadn't had experience with that kind of hiring before.

And that's okay, you're gonna screw up hiring.

You have to be in a place mentally where you can fix that later on by letting someone go.

But if you're gonna start a company, you have to be the kind of person that can do that when it needs to get done.

And as your company matures, and you go through these different phases, things are going to change.

Your role is going to drastically change over time.

In the beginning, I described myself as the janitor.

I was always cleaning things up and fixing things, documenting things.

Things were going so fast that someone has to come back and fix things up every once in a while.

And this I think is why titles are bullshit, especially in the beginning of a company.

Don't think about who's going to be the CEO or the CTO or the CFO.

There's way too much to be done to specialize that early on.

Things change a little bit when you get bigger.

You start to specialize a little bit more.

And then it's really important to think from the early days, do you have the right mix of personality types?

So for us, I, if I look at the different people who are in the company in the early days and why we've been able to stay together as a team, all 4 of us are still there today, 5 years later, I'm sort of the logical, pragmatic 1 of the group.

Chris is more of the product, visionary 1.

PJ is kind of a business operations-minded person.

And Scott guards the culture and creates as much happiness as possible.

And in having a discussion, in all our decisions we would make by sitting down over beers and coming to a conclusion that was sort of in the middle.

We would all check and balance each other.

So think about when you're collecting the right people, do they have the right kind of mix to be effective in the long term, because that's what you're going for.

So, always think about how every person can effectively push the company forward.

If you're going to hire someone, how are they going to push the company forward?

And that's why people are all that matters.

And so I'm gonna have the audience help me for this real quick.

I want everyone from here over to, on the count of 3, so 123, and then go, read this off, say people are the only thing that matters.

123, people are the only thing that matters.

But wait, customers don't interact with people not when you're building a product.

So how can they be the most important thing?

Product is actually the only thing that matters.

I think when you're thinking about your product, you need to start with design.

It's how your customers interact with your products.

We all understand cars and trucks and things, right?

You're creating something that is like a vehicle.

They've been refined year over year for a large part of the last century.

A product that feels so natural that it's like a car.

You can just get in, you can drive it off, the steering wheel's here, this pedal makes you go, and this pedal makes you stop.

And what you exclude from your product is just as important as what you include in your product.

Take for instance, Volkswagen, the bug that had the little flower vase, right?

Now every time you get in your car, it smells like dead organic matter, and you wonder if Volkswagen, the company, is just the same thing, this dying company that's including these crazy things into their product.

Everything that you add makes everything else less important.

So if you've got your awesome car, right, and you put that big spoiler on the back, then your neon ground effects aren't going to be as awesome, because people are distracted by the spoiler.

Everything that you add dilutes the entire product.

Our designer, our first dedicated designer that we hired, Kyle Neath, has a very nice way of putting this.

And I think that's a very important thing to remember, especially when you're early.

So the things that you do had better be awesome.

And don't dilute it by just tacking on every possible thing that you can think of, thinking that users want just as many features as possible.

People want great products, not as many features as they want.

If you screw up your design, then you screw up your product.

So make sure that 1 of your cofounders is design-minded.

If you're going to do a startup and you're thinking about, okay, I'm a technical guy and I'll hire my technical friends and we'll start a company together.

Go find a designer, someone who's going to make your product something that customers want to use instead of stuff like the administrative screens of open source projects that we see today.

The big problem with open source is that there's not a lot of designers involved.

That's not what you want your company to be like.

Another thing is to think very much about your mission.

And I think that you should be able to say your mission in 1 sentence.

And in fact, probably in less than 10 words.

So for us, when GitHub started, our mission was very simple.

In fact, it was on the website, some of you might remember, it said, Git hosting, No longer a pain in the ass.

Because that was the core problem that we were trying to solve.

Make Git hosting really easy so you can share code with your friends.

Over time, once we got further down the road of accomplishing that, we started thinking more about developers as a whole.

What do they need to do to be effective at creating software?

It's more than just getting repositories online, now it's about collaboration, it's about them working together.

We stated it as make developers' lives better every day.

So we expanded the scope of what we were trying to solve.

Then we started building internal tools for ourselves, things that are beneficial to creating a software business.

And we started thinking about things a little bit differently still.

We started saying we use GitHub to build GitHub because it's more products than just GitHub.com.

Things like some things that you have seen, like the jobs site, jobs.github.com, things like Gist, a bigger suite of products that can help you solve more problems.

And now the final vision that we have now is what we call making it easier to work together than to work alone.

You'll see that it's completely divorced from software altogether.

And so I will actually answer your question, what are we gonna do with that $100 million?

There's a lot more room to fix collaboration than just software.

We didn't start with this idea of fixing collaboration for the world.

We started with the idea of getting a repository from your computer onto the internet.

So remember that when you're solving a problem, pick something that you can solve.

Hopefully, there's a direction that you can go that becomes bigger.

But choose something small in the beginning that you can actually solve.

If you bootstrap like we did, and your product becomes popular, then you'll also be faced with a choice which is, are we going to do this as a lifestyle business?

Is our product going to be a lifestyle, very niche kind of thing?

And yeah, it'll make your lives really good.

But you'll also be faced with a choice which is, do we wanna blow this out?

If people like your product, you've got a bunch of users, that's a choice that you will have to make.

I like to think about it like the TV show Lost.

I think the saddest thing in the world is a squandered opportunity.

When you're faced with that choice, think about what do you want to do with your life?

I think you're all here today to solve big problems.

So maybe you've already made that choice, but you might have to make it for real down the road.

For us, it was the decision to reinvest everything that we made in the company into the company instead of banking it out, putting it on our bank accounts.

Don't worry too much about when you enter a market.

Almost every product in the world is terrible.

Look at the list of products, the things they use every day.

If you know this, and this is something that Apple knows very well with devices like the iPad, right?

How many tablet computers were there before the iPad?

Apple comes along, and through making a good product, they won.

And that is why product is all that matters.

So you, center section, on the count of 3, Please help me in saying this phrase.

Products only come into being when people make decisions, like we started with.

And the best decisions are made according to a consistent philosophy.

At GitHub, we never set out to create a specific culture.

The people that we hired created the culture.

At some point, you might want to codify this culture that is inherently created through the people that you hire so that you can communicate it well.

Let me briefly explain what to me the 5 core values of GitHub are.

If you want to learn more about that, watch my talk from 2 years ago.

Optimizing for happiness means think about what you're doing and how it's going to create more happiness in the world for your customers, for your team members, and for your shareholders.

If you do options like most startups do, then your team members are also your shareholders.

If you raise money, then your shareholders are part of that equation as well.

If you do those things, if you optimize for happiness, my theory is that profits will result naturally.

And it puts you on the right path to do things that matter.

It's not about who you are or where you came from.

It's about making good arguments, backing them up, and being open to other people's arguments.

This is critical to avoiding politics within a company.

If you can argue about something that matters and the argument is the thing and not the people behind it, then you can have good results, you can create good product, and you can avoid politics.

Everything that we do, we do from scratch.

You might think this is very inefficient.

But we think through every problem that way, because GitHub is a unique company, just like every company is unique.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Tom Preston Werner at Startup School 2012