Of course, there are people that say that Github is a special case[2]. Which I believe is a nice way to deflect the hard question: "how can we do better?" Which, as it seems, is the very question that Chris Dixon is tackling.
[1] https://twitter.com/timanderson/status/178093828111208449
Github is a product for geeks (few of those take off), build by a founder team consisting exclusively of uber-geeks, with the exact right timing (wasn't possible before, and someone else would have done git hosting later - and did, but less well), in a winner-takes-all market (which, to be fair to them, they engineered - source code hosting didn't use to be a winner-takes-all market, but github's social features made it so). Moreover, Github lent itself very well to a viral spread model (doesn't work in most cases, and is hard to bolt on to an unsuitable product), and so had less need for sales efforts than most B2B products.
I'm not putting down Github's team (they executed brilliantly), or even the lessons that they garnered - those are worthwhile lessons to pay attention to and learn from. However, be careful when translating those to your startup, which is probably a very different beast and may crash and burn if you just apply Github's lessons directly!
I have spinned up the contrarian touch a bit in order to exactly get this kind of reaction, and to raise this conversation, which I don't think we have enough.
Hey, you don't have to agree to read my articles :-) Disagreers are welcome too ;-)
If the goal of a company is to keep all of it's employees, then it by assumption the employees will have no motivation to do well in their jobs, if it is known in the company that there is no threat of firing.
While firing sucks, it is always there looming. In a startup, this forces people to push themselves, work hard, strive for good results. It is the role of a manager to determine the extent of the hard work, but it is also his role to say when enough is enough.
Bottom line, if a company never fired anyone it would have no implicit motivational pressure of it's employees.
They just make some people use svn, and they go and quit by themselves