Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub.com, highlights the competitive advantages behind a number of company virtues I admire. A few of these virtues are organic growth, outstanding user experience, and a distributed workforce.

Below is an video excerpt from a fireside chat interview with Mr. Preston-Werner from July 2013, speaking to the benefits of a remote workers, particularly developers:

One of the most memorable quotations from the interview is:

“Companies that aren’t distributed can’t possibly say that they hire the best people.”

I have the privilege of working at a great employer that also “gets it”. Most of my colleagues are remote workers across nearly every time zone. Constraining your team to a single city is a self-imposed barrier, particularly for creative work like coding that fits brilliantly with remote collaboration.