GitHub, Twitter, DropBox, MailChimp, 37Signals

Creativity is Important How different web teams work

GitHub ideologyHours are bullshit; worry about good work

Working 9-5 doesn’t work!

Working long hours isn’t a badge of honor!

Best work from employees when they are happy, fresh & creative

Minimize distractions

Be asynchronous

More ideology...

Alcohol

Creativity means self-direction

Hacks on side projects

Hubot - Github bot

http://hubot.github.com/

unlock the door to the office

deploy GitHub

say an arbitrary strings over the office speakers

find an apartment in the area to rent

and more...

GitHub Stat

Launched - April, 2008

Around 1.6M people and 2.7M repositories

2 first years without office

Employees - 77

Revenue over 1M+ and no VC

GitHub CEO

Chris Wanstrath - GitHub co-founder and CEO

@defunkt

Dropbox “cookies”

Free breakfasts, lunches and dinners daily

Whiskey friday :)

Unlimited Dropbox storage

18 payed vacation days

Starcraft dedicated game rooms, DDR etc.

Dropbox Stat

Over 50M users

Founded in 2007 (Y Combinator Start up)

Written in - Python

Employees - 78

Total VC - 257M; 96% users pay nothing

Valuation around 4B and Revenue in 2011 240M

Dropbox CEO

Drew Houston

@drewhouston

Twitter “cookies”

ZipCar discount

Laundry and cleaning services

Catered breakfast and lunch daily

Weekly in-office yoga and pilates classes

...

Twitter ideology

Friday evening - talk with executives over drinks

Brainstorm everywhere

Breakfast & lunch are free!

Hard work, long hours

Too many good people. Makes you look bad :)

Twitter StatEmployees 900+

Revenue 140M+ annual

Founded 2006

140M+ active users, 340M+ tweets & 1.6B searches daily

Acquisitions - 45,2M

Funding - 1,16B

Twitter Acquisitions

Hotspots.io - 2012

Posterous (2012)

Dasient

Summify

TweetDeck (2011) - 40M

Twitter CEO

Jack Dorsey

@jack

Works 16 hrs daily

CEO of Square as well

Mailchimp fun

Color book - “Love what you do”

Pranks on the web site

Easter eggs ritual -> not really this

Embedded Asteroid game typing “boredom” into search bar

Maichimp rules

1. Avoid rules ;) Avoid order. Create a little bit chaos

2. Give team permission to try, to fail, to make something crazy

3. Hire weird people. Not someone with tattoo in the ass :), but from different area

4. Meetings outside meeting rooms

Mailchimp stat

Employees 35

Founded 2001

825,000 subscribers & sending 1.75B emails/m

Freemium gives +160% payed customers

20% of users has email lists > 10K subscribers

Mailchimp CEO

Ben Chestnut

@benchestnut

37Signals culture

Standing for something isn’t about writing it down. It’s about believing it and living it.

No treating employees like children, no meetings

4 day week, can work remotely

Pay for: flight lessons, cooking lessons etc.

CC from 37Signals for books, go to conference

37Signals “tech”

Basecamp Mobile - CoffeeScript + Cinco: Backbone, Zepto, Eco, Stitch

Web on Ruby; they built RoR

Do not support IE6, its rule :)

Journal screen - shows everyones status

37Signals stat

3M customers

16 employees

Founded in 1999

Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise, Ta-Da, Softfolio

Books: Defensive Design, Getting Real, Rework

37Signals CEO

Jason Fried

@jasonfried