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(crowd noise)
The vision of the company from the very beginning was
through payments, improve the global economy.
Now we have to innovate in ways that are really interesting.
Everything that we talk about, be it pricing, be it functionality, are all open.
Those are the reasons why we grow and why
our customers love us.
[GitHub Films presents]
♪(cheerful funk music)♪
[OctoTales Episode 1]
Any time I do this, I always start from the beginning.
♪(funk music)♪
I was born in Iran. I grew up in Maryland, went to University
of Maryland, College Park, studied computer engineering.
For me, a lot of what was really important was infrastructure.
It affects how prosperous, how productive, and how happy
the society is. I started off with something that I understood.
Then I brought in a co-founder by the name of Mahmoud.
Matin calls me, and he goes, "hey, listen, I think you might be
wasting your life if you go to this hedge fund.
I think you should come out here and see what we're building."
I talked to marketplaces that were doing two-sided commerce.
They wanted something that could integrate directly, set their own
fees, and hold on to the money in between. I was pretty skeptical;
I didn't understand why they didn't use PayPal or Amazon Payments.
By the tenth company that told me the exact same thing,
I realized there's a market there. No one's really properly doing
payments for marketplaces.
It's very hard for a payment service to be iterative.
We can't exactly move fast and break things.
♪(1950s music)♪
We had to be much more thoughtful and we had to have
much more communication upfront.
I'd actually pushed internally for being open, and then Matin
had some thoughts internally as well, and he just took it.
He was like, "I think we should be an open company."
Our previous process was that we would create an issue internally,
sometimes by way of conversations with customers through
our sales staff. There was no opportunity for customer input
during that planning phase, and there was no centralized
repository where anyone could track the life cycle of this issue,
read the discussion surrounding this issue, and follow up post-release.
One of the most important parts of our product, and a very important
part of our platform is our dashboard, that we built from scratch
using Ember.js, entirely open-source, on GitHub.
If you go on the GitHub repo for our dashboard right now,
you are looking at as up-to-date design mocks as I have,
as the CEO of the company, and when I comment, I also do it
on GitHub so everybody sees it. What's interesting is, in the
process of doing that, we've actually created better communication internally.
When you get people who are remote, there's no
disadvantage that they have from communication to an engineer
who's in this office right now. No difference. You can scale
a lot faster.
Contracting, recruiting, all goes through the same exact
work flow that we do every single day. It's a win-win for both of us.
Open source is gonna shake up the world, right?
You're gonna have successful companies that just literally
focus on doing open-source work. I think the next level and
the next evolution of this is taking it to open companies,
where people just know what's going on. People have a voice.
♪(funk music)♪
We have customers and other people in the developer community
contributing to us. We are bringing people to GitHub but
for the most part, that's where people were.
GitHub took coding and made it very cool. You'll get 15 people that'll
just hop on and tell you, "oh yeah, I did this before," or
"oh yeah, PayPal doesn't do that and it sucked; I've been trying to
get them to do it for three years." That is so powerful.
We are laser-focused on producing something that people want,
and GitHub just allows me to do that. It's a tool in my toolbox
that I just use to essentially guide me, as a compass,
where I need to go.
I don't see GitHub as just a developer-centric tool;
I see it as a task management tool. It's a customer feedback tool.
It's kind of a design tool and definitely an open forum for people to voice
what their concerns are about our product and about our company.
This is great feedback that people are getting.
It creates this conversation that we never would have had otherwise.
♪(funk music)♪
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