alt Hacker NewsWhen I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in positions of power today.
I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
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Maybe that's why he stays most of the time away from valve? It's his way of training the company into functioning without him, only intervening occasionally when necessary.
Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers can do the job.
Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can.
I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
I think as long as Valve remains a private company, they can continue Gabe's way of doing things. It's when it's a public company will the leader have the pressure of satisfying shareholder returns as opposed to doing what is right and what got them a loyal base of customers in the first place.