I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”
Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!
By "things" do you mean "build an even moderately successful PC game distribution platform"? Because no one else has managed to do that. Epic, EA, Xbox, Ubisoft, and a dozen others have tried, none of them reached 10% the popularity of Steam, and if they still exist today its because they have one keystone game keeping them alive.
Or, by "things" do they mean "make successful games"? Because Valve does that too; they produce games that have far more and longer success than most publishers. They've had failed projects, sure; its funny how when projects fail in hierarchically structured companies, as they do every day, we just put our hands up, retro it, and move on; but when they fail at Valve it has to be because they don't have managers, right?
Do your friends mean "be profitable"? Couldn't be that; Valve is tremendously profitable by any account. Highly productive? No... they're also that. Loved by customers? Strike three, Valve also checks that box.
I guess you could argue that "things" means "build twenty different directly competing messaging apps". Got me there, Google's army of managers did manage to do that when Valve couldn't.