GitHub's 5-person backbone group: How early startups get the right people

Transferred from: http://news.cnblogs.com/n/190924/

The first 5 years are crucial for startups, with about 1/4 of startups closing in the first year, according to the US SME development agency, and less than half of the companies can survive the 5th year. For GitHub, founded in 2008, this year is a milestone.

GitHub believes in the strength of the team, especially the top 5 veterans who remain in the company so far. "Be sure to find someone who is stronger than you," said GitHub CEO Tom Preston-werner. "When and the other founders were doing their job for the company, he quickly discovered that many things were not within their capabilities. It's time to find new skills for the tasks that must be done.

Instead of blindly recruiting some of the best developers for heavy programming work, Gibhub is very careful to set up a 5-person backbone group for the company in a number of areas, from a strategic and future perspective. The skills of these 5 people include design, customer support, and human resources.

Ace Scott Chacon

If you suspect that social media can bring you a dream job, then Scott Chacon's case must be a little less worrying. Chacon and Preston-werner meet at a party called Ruby on Rails, Brief Encounter.

Preston-werner said: "I decided at the time that Git has the opportunity to become a very popular cool product." He also knows that for most people, Git is still quite complex and needs to be easy to use.

Through this meeting, Preston-werner discovered that Chacon not only knows git well, the first book about Git is Chacon, and Chacon's insights are legendary in the developer community. Such a person is of course a wish. Unfortunately as a start-up start-up company, Preston-werner has not immediately hired full-time Chacon capacity and resources, so Chacon initially just as the contractor's identity for the Gist project work.

Chacon is now the chief information officer for GitHub.

No. 2 "The Customer whisperer" Tekkub

As the company grew, Preston-werner found that the initial 4-person squad was drowned out by the user's request for help. When Preston-werner did his best to help people solve the problem, he found out that one person was working on N open source programs while still having time to solve problems for other people.

Preston-werner personally contacted the user named Tekkub (his/her real name was known only by a few founders). Tekkub agreed to help GitHub on a part-time basis. After that, Tekkub in Colorado kept in touch with the company and discussed the details of the work via e-mail and Web tools. Tekkub was the first githubber to separate the two places from the company. The company now employs 70% of its employees working remotely. After a year of part-time, Tekkub met with several founders in person, and went on to GitHub full-time.

No. 3 Administrative expert Melissa Severini

As development and customer support work on track, administrative pressures ensue. Preston-werner recalled that the team at that time on the administration of the matter is said to be ignorant, "basically are now learning to use, as long as not bad things on the line."

The company's needs have risen from the bottom up to higher-level things like law, business travel, and daily office management. Melissa Severini at that moment. She is also preston-werner through the insiders know, at that time she has a considerable work experience. But let Preston-werner is tempted by Severini "know how to keep a company in good order" ability, and she "very confident, always do things."

Severini's management has also made this small team for the first time a tense atmosphere, when she asked everyone to save the receipt. Preston-werner was reluctant to accept it at first because he thought it would run counter to the company's "Basics" philosophy. But in Severini's insistence, we still made concessions to each other.

No.4 Design Master Kyle Neath

Preston-werner is the first designer of GitHub, but since his interest and focus shifted back to the end, product design has become crappy. So he started looking for people who could "think about the design, use and appearance of a product every day," because "if you develop a technology that doesn't have practicality, you end up with a bad product." ”

This time, Preston-werner or the re-application, through their own circle to find designers. Kyle Neath, a consulting and incubation company ENTP, has admired them for a long time, and GitHub is a customer of a support tool designed by Neath. "If you are a user of a product designed by TA, it will be a good indication of the problem," he said. ”

No.5 Sharp engineer Ryan Tomayko

Tomayko's name is unknown in the open source community, where he has called GitHub "Myspace for Hackers", which has made it even more popular at a time when it is still in beta and has no income.

Preston-werner is still in awe of Tomayko's technology, "he is a bull X, and the technical attainments are what I have always dreamed of." "But Tomayko has been employed by cloud application platform Heroku and has a relationship with Salesforce. Perston-werner later admitted: "It's a little risky for him." I guess he decided that GitHub would be very good. ”

GitHub's 5-person backbone group: How early startups get the right people