I read David Lee’s blog post last night, and reading the comments today really hit home.

Enrique Allen commented: 

I’m starting to look more for signals of how top athletes/engineers/designers lead teams eg do they make themselves superior and others around them feel inferior or do they raise the whole team bar up…we used to have this saying when I was growing up along the lines of “great players set their teammates up with great passes and can finish passes when they receive them.” This is relevant when checking in code etc… also think it’s important to consider the unique team dynamics between different sports. Swimming, track and often basketball and baseball can be metric driven, have a start-stop flow and individual stars can make a huge difference…versus soccer where’s there’s not as many goals, it’s a constant flow, there’s a lot of players at once, and it’s much more difficult for one player like Pele to completely dominate the game

This idea of passes really intriques me: “great players set their teammates up with great passes and can finish passes when they receive them.”

Some of our team is segmented. So passes or handoffs (especially code handoffs) are super important. Maintaining a team mentality when the field is your github repo is really interesting.

We’ve tried multiple different tracking systems — Podio, simply using Github issues for tasks, and now Trello. Just like talking on the field is important to notify a player of a coming pass or that “I’ve got it!” to let others know you’ve got it covered, I think these communication tools are just as important. 

Setting up an engineer or team member for a pass means providing total transparency on how things work. It’s one thing when it’s a team of one or two people coding or you’re playing a 2v2 tournament, but it’s another thing when you start to form a team — you have to talk.

Startups might resemble different sports at different phases. But right now, I think our team resembles soccer. We have sub-ins when someone gets stuck on a portion of an algorithm. But we are always out there in a constant flow of code. And even if we do our best to set up great passes or receive great passes, I feel like the main thing we need to do is talk while on the field. Finding the best possible tool to facilitate that when you can’t just yell, “I got it,” is pretty interesting.

“Social” is becoming ubiquitous. In a recent study by Forrster, the number of people who haven’t adopted social is narrowing:

Forrester found that 86 percent of people have adopted social networking services. In Canada, it’s 88 percent, and in Poland, 95 percent. Urban areas of China are at 97 percent.

The research suggests that, “the next wave of social services will be ‘more efficient and more time-saving.’” 

Combine this with the data presented by Fast Co. Design about the app market, I’m convinced we’ll be seeing more services like Github, where social is present, but the core offering is the native ability to facilitate something other than consumption — in Github’s case code version control, code storage, and conversation/code critiques.

Here’s a look at the top most downloaded apps + people’s willingness to pay for types of apps:

I’m most interested in the Fast Co. Design author’s comments: 

While 93% of people who paid for apps might be willing to pay for a game, 84% are also willing to pay for a productivity app and 77% are willing to pay for a food app. Compare that to the things that people actually bought, in the first panel we saw above: Only 21% actually bought a productivity app and only 18% actually bought a food app.

That means one of two things: Either people say they’ll buy things they actually won’t. Or: There’s a massive gap in the app market. I find the latter option a bit more likely: As app developers have chased the dream of creating the next Angry Birds, they’ve left some huge gaps in the market. 

My thinking is that there is a massive gap. Apps are categorized as either social or productivity, not both = huge flaw.

Today, some are still building as if there is a separation between social and professional (or productivity). I think sites like Stack Overflow suggest the mergence of them. Granted, Github and Stack Overflow have been around for a while. But in the coding community, the line between social and productivity has almost always been blurred considering the depth and breadth of opensource code.

Communication and conversation around personal interests will fuel social interactions. Already studies show that interest based bonds are stronger than purely social bonds. My thinking is that this socially charged conversation and community will propel and fuel some sort of action making productivity in one’s area of interest pretty damn fun. 

Already those who are ripe to shake up education (like Veri and Coursekit) are embodying the idea of community, interests, and productivity.  

Excited to see what happens next in the wake of almost total social adoption. As my friend Elliot often says, there is still SO MUCH that has yet to be built.