Free food is easy. It's "just money". Low on money? Cut back to soda and snacks from Costco. A flat organization is something else entirely. The Valve way is s

Free food is easy. It's "just money". Low on money? Cut back to soda and snacks from Costco. A flat organization is something else entirely. The Valve way is simple, but not easy. You need to be able to put a huge amount of trust in people. You can't be shy about getting rid of people who aren't working out. It's not "managerless nirvana," it's different, and it's unclear if it's really what you want in a focused company like a start-up, where you have a financial fuse and little luxury to experiment. (I read the Zappos manifesto. It was full bull-goose batshit crazy; basically unreadable psychobabble power-blended with scientology-class buzzwords. It looked like they didn't want employees, they wanted bio-robots capable of running some funky version of Python. Hoo boy).