Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

Thoughts on Keeping People

Today, a beautiful and thoughtful slidedeck rose to the top of Hacker News on the topic of “keeping people” by one of the first Github employees. I like everything about the slidedeck except for the use of the word “keeping,” which comes from the perspective of the employer. To me “keeping people” is a byproduct of focusing the company’s perspective on providing rewarding value to employees. It comes from creating a great company culture where everyone involved has opportunities to be excellent today and to be better tomorrow.

Here are my thoughts on the 4 traits of Github’s retention outlined in the slidedeck:

  1. Work is creative
    • Look for opportunities to create a match between what needs to get done and what people want to do (and learn to do)
    • Encourage people to be self-starting
    • Nice parting thoughts in the slides: “automate away the tedious” and “hire people that frustrate easily”
  2. Your product is your product
    • The point is that you want to retain control of your company and your future. Bootstrapping makes that possible. I remember a talk at the 2009 Startup Riot by the Github co-founder Chris Wanstrath, which was one of the strongest cases at the time on the virtures on bootstrapping. The text of that talk is on Github.
    • There is a good sequence in the slides about product management:
      • Most users are idiots. “I’ll use your product if you add my feature.” They won’t. Or they will anyway.
    • Dog-fooding at AccelerEyes is something we do everyday. We build ArrayFire. Then we use ArrayFire to build bigger solutions for our clients. We use ArrayFire to build demos and create marketing. We use ArrayFire to sell people on the productivity of heterogeneous computing. It is recursive happiness and makes it easier for us to recruit.
  3. Attachment to the unique
    • I don’t really agree with this point as strongly. It is important to have unique things that are icing on your startup’s cake. But I think the fundamentals of the culture and a general air of growth (both in the company and for people individually) are much more important to our people.
    • But, there are some nice unique things at AccelerEyes that people enjoy:  1) our Skype watercooler has been a great place for rewarding exchanges, 2) our lunches have been great places to connect and learn more, 3) our adherence to productive development environments is also challenging and attractive.
  4. Really good hiring
    • The slides hit the nail on the head of our first core value to Hire Slow.

Overall, I connected with these slides because they speak to things that Jimi (my co-founder) and I discuss frequently. We want AccelerEyes to be the best place to be an employee and the best place to be a customer.

What thoughts do you have about making your startup the best place to be an employee?

 

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