Washington Post interviews Gabe Newell

I spotted this awesome interview by the Washington Post with Gabe Newell over on Polygon. Valve is a fascinating company with a bizarre, almost totally flat corporate structure. Newell gives a little insight in the interview as to why and how this works so well:

"There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. So the key thing was that people bear the consequences of their own choices, so if I spend my time on it the only persons time I'm wasting is mine. Over time, I think people sort of recognize how useful it is for people to vote with their time. There is a huge amount of wisdom in people's decisions about what they personally want to work on next."

He also spells out what his company values when it's looking at possible recruits, which reflects perfectly what I've seen and experienced in the film industry:

"You can give ten people the same set of forum posts and only one of them will actually take it in a productive direction. So the fact that somebody has been able to build something and ship it and not get sort of bogged down and give up and then deal with the gush of responses you get, filter through that in a useful and productive way and iterate is really the core of product design and development in our world."

On that note, I got my break by spending a couple of years on a feature film I wrote, directed and co-produced, and I learned more from that experience than I think I ever would in film school. You eventually realise that the technical information is the easy side. The difficult things to learn are how to motivate yourself and fifteen other people on the side of a hill (or dozing under desks) at four in the morning after shooting (or coding) for the last fourteen hours, and not just getting it done, but doing a good job, and being able to look at yourself in the mirror the next day.

If you can do that, you can do anything.

The creative act is both selfish and generous, and it requires discipline. A truly creative company thrives on people who can be self-motivated and co-operative, a difficult thing to find and a delicate balance when it does exist. When you hear someone like Newell or Doug Lombardi talking about how Valve works, it's no surprise they're as successful as they are.