Exactly. There were a number of comments on Slashdot[1] that pointed out that Valve may not be the problem here, but that Jeri did not fit into Valve's culture. If you read here Wikipedia[2] page, you'll see she dropped out of both highschool and later college (college due to "cultural mismatch"). Reading her wikipedia page reads like someone that may not play well as part of a team (I haven't fully listened to the Grey Area podcast yet, so I could be totally wrong here).
Jeri couldn't get buy-in for her projects at Valve so they failed. For a project at Valve to succeed you need to convince a number of other people at the company that your project is a good idea and that they should help you work on it. It sounds like she wasn't able to convince others at the company to come help her on her ideas (maybe because she didn't put forth the effort, she wasn't good at selling it, or no one thought her ideas were worth it).
Valve has a very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to fit in. Sounds like maybe she wasn't a good fit.
One of the reasons to adopt these non-traditional organizational models is to foster innovation.
So, the question becomes "If Valve can't retain people like Ellsworth, are they systematically missing out on innovating? Do they have a systemic blind spot?"
I don't know the answer to that, but that's the real question. Saying someone isn't a good fit end of story is missing the point from a business process and innovation perspective.
There is a tradeoff between being selective and inclusive. If you are too inclusive (i.e. almost everyone fits) then you can't be very selective. On the other hand if you are very selective you must be definition not be very inclusive.
From what I know Valve is very selective. It seems that both Ellsworth and Valve thought it would be a good fit but for whatever reason it turned out it wasn't. While they lost out of her many talents they preserved their culture which has been very successful so far.
But still, you have to take it as a "no hard feelings" thing and move on. The company I work at has an extremely casual attitude and some similarly extremely casual personalities. We've had a few employees that could do the work requested, but clearly didn't fit the culture. Nothing against them; it just didn't work out.
Jeri couldn't get buy-in for her projects at Valve so they failed. For a project at Valve to succeed you need to convince a number of other people at the company that your project is a good idea and that they should help you work on it. It sounds like she wasn't able to convince others at the company to come help her on her ideas (maybe because she didn't put forth the effort, she wasn't good at selling it, or no one thought her ideas were worth it).
Valve has a very specific culture and you have to really have a certain personality to fit in. Sounds like maybe she wasn't a good fit.
[1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/0214225/former-v...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth