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Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#111

Gore always gets named in this context: http://www.gore.com/de_de/aboutus/culture/corporate_culture.... Atlassian seem to be doing things differently. Umantis in Switzerland democratically elect their CEO: http://www.umantis.com/en/press/haufe-umantis-ag-employees-e... I'm very interested in this question as well, especially companies in Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Anyone else know of companies doing t…

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Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#112

You didn't specify in your question - what size firm are you thinking of? There are lots of small firms (ie, ~5 people) who use this approach. Arguably, for a team of 2-5 people, it's the most natural strategy anyway. The challenge, of course, comes with scaling this to a team of 50 or 500 people. At that scale, there are far fewer examples (though the comments in this thread point out some exceptions). Assuming you…

thank you. I am not looking for a place to work actually, I am working on a research project and at the moment i am interested in everything that is out there. but of course, I am interersted in companies that actually have to do some thinking about organisation in order to get things done

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#113
post #4

I'm subjective, but I think Spotify uses slightly innovative ways of organising. See: * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult... * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-cult... Happy to answer questions.

thank you for sharing marcus! i use spotify everday and know i like it even more. also: great videos. you've got a talented graphic facilitator there

Great to hear. And yeah, Henrik is teaching wizard. I'm sure he'll be happy to hear though :-)

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#114

At Igalia ( http://www.igalia.com/ ), we are a worker-owned free software consultancy. There's a generic presentation of how we work spread among the various sections of http://www.igalia.com/about-us/ , but one of us also wrote a series of blog posts that explains us pretty well: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/13/but-that-would-be-an... http://wingolog.org/arch…

igalia sounds amazing. congrats on your company. can you tell me how many people are worker-owners? are there also freelancers working yor you?

Thanks! Basically, everybody who's been here for more than 3 years is a co-owner. I just did a quick count (I might be off by one or two), and I think we're 36 owners out of 41 people. Our explicit goal when we hire someone is to keep them long term and have them become co-owner. Our workers (including owners) who live outside of Spain (where the company is based) typically have an official status of freelancers, though they have only one client and are as involved in the company as the ones who have a status of employee in Spain.

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#115
Not sure how we compare to those but here @ VAGAS.com we have a radically horizontal management model.

Everything, from strategic planning to everyday decisions, are open to anyone participate, but well... our founder can explain this way better than me, so here it goes: http://www.managementexchange.com/story/horizontal-managemen...

Re: Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?

#116

At Buffer we've started to move in this direction. I can highly recommend watching this video if you're interested in self-management and the idea of a new management paradigm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk . Frederic's book by the same name also goes into further details and shares several example companies: Buurtzorg, AES, Morning Star, FAVI, RHD and others.

This is the most eye-opening talk, I've listened to since a long time.

It is sad that it was published in August this year and was only viewed 8k times. I don't think this is a big number for the applicability this has.

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