Insight
Avalos: Developer-first messaging fails with international enterprise buyers
“As we went to market outside of the United States, and maybe even outside of the Valley leading with a developer first kind of messaging, that wasn't always the right thing for your procurement, or your CIOs, or the CTOs, or the technical decision makers in In…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Avalos: The next millions of software developers won't come from Silicon Valley
“The next several million software developers and users of all of our technology are not coming from the same places as where the last several million people came from. They're not coming necessarily just from Menlo Park and from Stanford. They're coming from D…”
What-if
Avalos: Keeping GitHub manager-free would have required far more bureaucracy
“If we had wanted to, and I'm not sure that we wanted to, we would have needed way more process, and way more bureaucracy than what we thought, ah, we had an appetite for. And that in some way, the lack of process, the lack of structure, leads to confusion with…”
Insight
Avalos: Tech hiring uses 'culture fit' to reject candidates arbitrarily
“Culture fit is a, ah, nobody knows what that means. It is a thing that too often gets used to bat down candidates for reasons that are unclear to you, unclear to them, and that you are not in a position to articulate necessarily.”
Disclosure
Avalos: GitHub wasted years and millions building custom HR software
“Do we want to be in the business of building out our own applicant tracking system, which we had? Do we want to be in the building business of building our own HR tools? Is this the right HR? Like, what do we know about any of these things? And that in a lot o…”
Assertion Supported
Avalos: GitHub operated with ~100 employees without managers, titles, or teams
“Where we were right around a hundred people, maybe a little bit over, no managers, Weren't going to have managers for another year and a half or close to two years, I think, from that point. And we didn't have titles. We didn't have managers. We didn't have re…”
Insight
Avalos: Ambiguous decision-making causes greater productivity loss than process
“Ah, I think that you end up having way more loss of productivity and confusion within your organization when people don't know where to go for answers. When people don't know who the ultimate decision rests on.”
Disclosure
Avalos: GitHub was overly infatuated with internal culture over customers
“I think that for a while there we maybe were overly infatuated with how we were working as a company, As opposed to what we were doing, and why we were doing it, and who we were doing it for.”
Assertion Supported
Julio Avalos: GitHub grew from 2.5–3M developers in 2012 to 25–26M in 2018
“We've gone from two and a half, three million people maybe back in 2012 to 25, twenty-six million people, developers using the site today.”
Disclosure
Avalos: GitHub had no sales or marketing functions in 2012
“We didn't have, say, we didn't have a sales function at the time. We didn't have a marketing function. We were primarily developers”
Disclosure
Avalos: GitHub built a billing engine unable to collect international taxes
“You're in a situation that, you know, that we found ourselves in where we built a billing engine that wasn't able to collect that in a particular jurisdiction, or you're not, you know, you're not creating, you're not collecting sales tax, whatever that happens…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Avalos: At least 90% of GitHub employees were technical in 2012
“I think probably 90% of the company at least was technical at the time.”
Julio Avalos