Chapters · 2 min read
How we got here
Flagon's scrappy origins, and the companies we openly learned from.
Chase Pierce started Flagon after enough years inside software companies to know how they usually go: a good idea gets sanded down by process, honest work gets wrapped in language nobody believes, and the gap between what a company says and what it does widens every quarter until the two are barely on speaking terms. Most of that is habit, copied from the company before. Flagon is the attempt to build the other thing, in daylight.
The handbook came before there was much to put in it, and that was deliberate. Writing down how we wanted to work, in public, forced the thinking to be real and gave anyone, inside or out, a way to hold us to it. The company has grown into the document rather than the other way around.
What shaped us
We didn't invent any of this. A handful of companies figured out how to do it well before we existed, and we studied them closely. The trick is to take a thread from each, not a blueprint from any one of them, because copying a single company page for page just gets you a worse copy of it. Here's open credit for what we borrowed.
GitLab treats its handbook as a product: thousands of pages, versioned in git, editable by anyone, with a compensation model you can read instead of negotiate in the dark. We took the handbook-as-product, and pay you can reason about.
Basecamp / 37signals made the case for the calm company, small on purpose and unbothered by the hype cycle. Their Shape Up method taught us to fix an appetite and shape the work rather than groom an endless backlog; its fingerprints are all over how we plan.
PostHog proved a handbook can have a pulse: public, opinionated, funny in places, and honest about money down to a public pay calculator. We took the nerve to publish before everything is perfect.
Stripe made craft something you could feel in the product, and set the documentation bar the whole industry now measures against. We took craft as a real value and docs as part of the product.
Linear showed that taste scales, with opinionated defaults and polish in every corner. We took taste as something you build in from the start, not a coat of paint at the end.
Valve showed that capable people, given room, find the important work without a manager assigning it. We took the flat structure and the trust it runs on, which shapes how we're organized.
Credit where it's due
None of these companies asked to be on this page. Hiding your influences is just insecurity with a press release; we would rather point at the people who proved this was possible.
Where all of it lands is in our values and how we work. If you want to talk, we are on GitHub, in Discord, and at hey@flagon.io.