Ben Bleikamp is a designer at GitHub.

Say Yes

I posted this quote from Chris Dixon a couple of months ago and it’s been lingering in my head since then:

You could tweet and blog predictions that every new startup will fail and how the ideas are derivative and you’d be right 95% of the time. The hard part – and what matters for founders and investors – is figuring out the right mix of timing and execution to finally get it right.

A brief story:

In 2008 I had coffee with Ben Silberman and he showed me a very unpolished iPhone application that had something to do with shopping. He had just left Google, him and someone else were looking for funding or something. They were also looking for some design help. Eventually I emailed Ben and said something along the lines of, “Not for me.”

(It’s worth noting I didn’t have a job offer or anything, I just wasn’t interested in helping or talking more about the project.)

But Ben’s idea ended up turning into Pinterest.

I am not writing this out of regret. I love building things at GitHub and had I said yes to Ben I might not have had this opportunity. I would not trade where I am right now for anything, even a $1.5 billion valuation.

My point is: It’s really easy to tell people their ideas are bad and have no chance of succeeding. The people who look for a way to say yes are the ones who end up with great opportunities.

We should stop saying “no” so much. Not every idea is brilliant from the start.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the quality of shots on Dribbble.

God, I hope that’s not true. People should be talking about something way more interesting.

via Jeff Broderick

Culture

I enjoyed Peter Thiel’s essay on culture. We take culture really seriously at GitHub and it’s a hard thing to define. Saying someone is a culture fit doesn’t mean they like good beer or that they’re a Ruby fanboy. It’s much bigger and much deeper than that.

Part of Thiel’s definition of company culture is:

Good company culture is more nuanced than simple homogeneity or heterogeneity. On the homogeneity side, everyone being alike isn’t enough. A robust company culture is one in which people have something in common that distinguishes them quite sharply from rest of the world. If everybody likes ice cream, that probably doesn’t matter. If the core people share a relevant and unique philosophy about something important, you’re onto something.

A lot of people assume culture fit means that someone is more like than them than other people. Strong companies have people with diverse opinions and diverse backgrounds that all share a common goal.