About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, 'How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?'

Piracy is almost always a service problem.

I'm a utility infielder. There's always somebody who is better at a specific task than I am, but I can pitch in at a bunch of different things as needed.

The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You're going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.

It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming. It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.

Valve wouldn’t have gotten its start