[gwern]

> I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom.

Reading in economics once, I hit the phrase 'all economics is coordination problems', and it seemed exactly true to me: why do businesses have all these managers and infrastructure and stuff? Because of principal-agent problems and similar issues, all of which can be construed as coordination problems. Why do we need them? Because there are so many heterogenous people involved, all differing in various ways with different interests, and they need to be hammered into a coherent force.

Why not just select similar people, eliminate this massive overhead of coordination, and just let them work on stuff? Well... there's only so many energetic skilled young techies. But when you can cluster enough of them in one homogenous company, you get something like Github.

Until it keeps growing, heterogenity builds up, and problems with coordination start happening...