There are lots of tiny companies (2-20 people) that can "wing it", but it's difficult to make decentralized or distributed decision-making work at scale.

We're a slightly larger team (almost 50 peeps) at Axiom Zen (https://axiomzen.co). Our entire raison d'etre is predicated on coming up with interesting, high-risk ideas and carrying them through the various stages of market validation, prototyping, iteration, and growth. Because of this, we are working really hard to become and remain the best place for brilliant people to build awesome things.

We try to clearly define our values (just like Valve/GitHub), build them into our products, and use them as a heavy filter for hiring. We also go out of our way to ensure total transparency in the team, using GitHub for everything from sales to hiring so that everyone can see the stage everything is at, decisions leading up to a particular status quo, etc. Also everyone has an equal voice in jumping in to suggest / push forward changes.

For a bit on our workflow, take a look at this blog post: https://www.zenhub.io/blog/beyond-code-use-github-zenhub-for...

We'll eventually polish up and publish our company handbook which dives into the `how` and `why` much more thoroughly than I ever could here.