Over the holiday I thought about what makes GitHub so awesome and why I like the company so much (even tho I'm not a coder) and I think it's this:

Github has created a brilliant culture of creation, in spite of the fact that its distributed. Everything seems to come together - good design, good coding, good employee attitude (from what I've seen in talks/videos/photos/blogs) and even a good physical space (from what I've seen in photos of your office).

So, how do you create such a brilliant synthesis of so many good things?

Your first answer will likely be: it's the people. Hire good people. Okay, great, but that doesn't tell you how to find these good people, how to treat these good people, or how to act around these people in the workplace so as to best bring out what makes them good people in the first place.

I've seen like all of your talks, so I know you're a sharp guy. What sort of things do you see at GitHub that leads to what I'm describing? Do you have any stories of specific examples?