Steve Smith On Optimizing For Happiness

I had a chance to chat with the dashing and determined Mr. Steve Smith recently. His company, Ordered List, was acquired by GitHub in 2011 and since then, he and his fellow coworkers have been focused on creating new products such as the latest release of GitHub for Mac, support tools, internal analytics, improving Speaker Deck, and more.

We’ve been talking a lot about flat teams at nGen over the last year and a bit. So chatting with Steve was fascinating because Ordered List was a flat company that employed five people, and of course, GitHub is flat and employs 148 (as of this writing). Quite a spread.

Naturally, I wanted to know about the mechanism behind that flatness. How do things work? Does it matter how big or small your teams are? What’s important where you work? What happens when things get tough? Steve gave me so much to work with I probably could have written a short novel, but then we’d have to work out royalties and I’d have to put up fake pictures of him in sparkly drag to test his loyalty—he does have great hair.

Instead, I decided to lay out the teeth and bones of being flat at GitHub so you could see how large companies are doing flat these days.

Some Things You Should Know About Steve

• He’s got a wicked sense of humor.
• He’s from South Bend, Indiana, which should never be confused with Silicon Valley.
• In 2007 he formed Ordered List with his pal John Nunemaker and later added Jonathan Hoyt, Branden Keepers, and Matt Graham to the mix.
• Together they created cool stuff like Speaker Deck and Gauges which caught GitHub’s attention.