Ismail: Valve Software operates with zero management hierarchy or meetings
Salim Ismail · The Rise of the Exponential Organization with Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail · May 25, 2023 · at 32:21
Salim Ismail cites Valve Software as an extreme example of organizational autonomy and decentralization.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like valve software in Seattle that has no CEO or reporting lines, job descriptions, management meetings of any kind.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Salim Ismail
Ismail: Coase's Law is obsolete due to cheap web service transaction costs
“So in the book, we actually declare Coase's Law, which has been, ah, very touted for a hundred years, essentially gone. Because the pay, the need to control a big company makes it too slow to navigate all these massive changes that are happening. And B, the tr…”
Ismail: Generative AI will replace most lawyers
“The best benefit is we'll replace most of the lawyers. Because you could just say, generate me a contract that has these characteristics and it'll throw in the clauses and et cetera.”
Ismail: Amazon penalizes employee bonuses if their experiments do not fail enough
“We saw, for example, an Amazon that every team is measured on how many experiments they ran this quarter, how many succeeded, how many failed. If you're not running enough experiments and not enough for failing, you're actually, your bonus gets dinged, right?”
Ismail: GE sold its appliance business to Haier after failing to compete
“GE actually gave up and sold GE appliances to them because they couldn't compete.”
Ismail: Top exponential Fortune 100 companies outperformed bottom 10 by 40x
“Over a seven-year period, the top 10 did better than the bottom 10 by three x on revenue growth 6.4 times on profitability, 10.9 times on return on assets, but shareholder returns, compound annual growth rate, top 10 outperformed the bottom 10 by 40 x.”