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Thread: Valve has long been a poster child for flat, "bossless" firms, but the company's legendary secrecy has made it difficult to know if and how its unique system of organizing actually works.
But in early 2020, Valve gave Geoff Keighley full access to document the final hours of the production of Half-Life: Alyx, the first game the company had shipped in nearly ten years.
They wanted him to look at the company warts and all, and the sheer amount of material he gathered through interviews with staff led him to write this short interactive book about the last decade or so of Valve's history.
What Keighley discovered should come as no surprise to those who familiar with the judgment-based approach to entrepreneurship. Basically, the bossless system works, except when it doesn't. And sometimes it doesn't for the better part of fifteen years.
Both Keighley and numerous Valve employees are adamant that Valve's unique lack of structure, which served it well in the past, also caused creative intertia and destroyed the company's focus.
This lead to countless abandoned games and its resources being stretched too thin across all kinds of software, middleware, and hardware projects that never came to fruition. It was only by consciously organizing people across the company that a new game became possible.
There are lots of judgment-related themes on display here, including the way Gabe Newell maintains original judgment in the firm, the way informal hierarchies replace formal ones, and the various costs and tradeoffs involved in having minimal oversight and management.
If you're interested in these issues, I highly recommend checking out Keighley's book. Ulrich Moller and I also have a paper coming out that surveys a lot of the theory and history surrounding Valve, including these recent developments.
