7. Jason Fried on building products, calm companies and the Jeff Bezos investment

Hey folks, welcome to the Builders Gonna Build Podcast episode 7. This is your host, Ilia Bezos Delive, and today we are doing another re-run. This is an interview with Jason Fried, the co-founder and CEO of 37 Signals, the company behind Base Camp and Hay and once. He is also a co-author of the book's re-work, remote. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. And all around great guy to listen to when he was doing a startup the traditional way, meaning the bootstrapped way.

We had this conversation with Jason back in July last year and it was originally published on episode 28 of the Metacast behind the scenes podcast. There are lots of great things I could say about Jason, but I think most of our listeners know who he is, so without further ado, please enjoy the interview with Jason. And as a quick reminder, this is the best enjoyed in our podcast, Metacast. You can download the

open beta at metacast.app. It's available for both IWAs and Android. And now here's Jason. We try to run our business like the pizza shop in the corner or the dry cleaners, just things like they're not out there going, God, if we can lose more money on every pizza we sell, we're going to do well.

They're not saying that, you know? The dry cleaners not saying, I'm going to lose four bucks in every shirt I dry clean, but I'll just get enough shirts that were eventually will match like that whole formula doesn't work for almost every business in the world. And there's a few that somehow get away with it. Hello and welcome to Metacast. And I'm your host, Iléa Bizdiliff, coming from sunny Miami. And with me today is Michael Host Arnab from also sunny Vancouver.

Cool. So today we have a very special guest. And I want to start with a big of a backstory. It was year 2010 or 2011. And I was living in Singapore. And I had a friend there. I mean, still have that friend, but we were working together in the same company. And he's like, dude, you should really read this book. And it's about entrepreneurship and stuff. And I think he lent me his book. I don't remember buying it. And that book was actually reworked by Jason Fried and David Hanimari Hansen.

And I remember just like solving that book in one or two evenings. It was a great book about how to do business in tech, unconventionally. And it was a breath of fresh air, very, very inspiring. And I think that episode, freaking that book and all of the years that passed from there. I've been following Jason and David in 37 signals, getting more and more inspiration. And you'll finally, you know, it kind of popped in a finally quit the job and we started the company with Arnab.

So today it's a great honor to have Jason Fried, the man himself on the Metacast. Welcome to the show Jason. Thanks for having me guys. Appreciate it. Where are you calling from? I'm in Los Angeles right now. Okay, is it sunny? It is sunny. Yes, it is. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here. Yeah. Yeah, we grew up in Chicago where it was sunny, you know, barely ever. And now it's sunny all the time, which is nice.

Jason, I'm sure people who listen to this interview or watch this interview know everything about you because you've just published so much. But if somebody happens to actually not know who you are, maybe can you give me a very short summary of 37 signals, you know, based on pay and yourself. Yeah, sure. So companies called 37 signals and we started 24 years ago back in 1999. And we built a number of software's and service products. One of the early sort of pioneers in this in this world,

basecamp was our first product came out in 2004. Before that, we are a web design company. So we we're making websites for other companies. And that's why we built base camp because we needed a better way to manage all the work that we were doing. We were dropping the ball. And I didn't know who was doing what. And it wasn't a good scene. So we had to get organized and get on the same page. And so we built base camp.

And that turned out to be a big hit. About a year later, we stopped doing website design and started doing software ever since. So we built a bunch of products since then. Basecamp, campfire, backpack, high rise, hey, some other stuff. Built a couple of job boards, wrote a bunch of books, getting real rework. It doesn't have to be crazy at work, remote, shape up. And been publishing on our blog and in our podcast, which is at rework.fm.

And our whole thing has been try to build a sustainable small business that makes more money than it spends. That's bootstrapped so we get to do it our own way and don't have to answer to anybody. And we've had a lot of fun over the years. We've also built a remote company. So we've always been fully remote pretty much. We've had an office here and there. But everyone's been allowed to work wherever they wanted. And now we're fully remote.

So that's sort of a, you know, brief history. Happy to go into anything you want. And along the way, just produce some minor pieces of open source software like Ruby on Rails and stuff like that. I mean, my partner gets credit for that. So Ruby on Rails that came out of David, which came out of Basecamp. Basecamp was the first ever Rails product essentially. And we've open sourced a whole bunch of other stuff since then. And are very, very involved in the open source community as well.

It's not my particular focus. I'm more on the design business side, but that's definitely David and our engineering team's focus. That was my introduction to like Basecamp and all of you through Rails back in like around 2005, 2006. Yeah, you were early then because it was out in 2005, I think. I actually contributed a few small things back into Rails too, but yeah. Oh wow, cool. That's great. Cool, cool. No, it's an honor having you here. Thanks. What's good to be here?

What is your role in the company? So I'm the founder and the CEO. And the thing that's interesting is that I wrote a bit about this a few months ago about. Yeah, that's the reason why I'm asking this because I read the article. And then Elias Chains is titled immediately after that. Well, the thing is that usually when you're the founder and you think like the founder is that job is over. It's like something you do and then it's done and then now you're running the place.

But I've kind of realized that if you're a founder, if you're one of the original people who started the business, you need to act as if you started the business as well. As if you're the CEO also running the business. So the founder's job is to inject risk into the business. It's to do things we wouldn't normally do. It's to sort of scare things a little bit and not like fear and that kind of scare. But like let's do some new things we haven't tried before. Like that kind of scaryness.

And then the CEO's job is to make sure that the business runs well. So I kind of try to do both of those things. Although they're very much at odds. And I think it's an interesting thing for people to think about who are trying to do both jobs. They're very different jobs. Yeah, I really like that post. We will link to this in show notes where you said that CEO is a role. So it's not something that you do like 100% of the time. You just wear a CEO hat when the business requires it.

But otherwise you're a founder, which is like, I guess an all-encompassing thing. Yeah, man. That's how I've separated. Some people might separate it differently. But I think a lot of people don't separate it and they don't think about it. Because they don't think of founder as a job. They think of founder as a job that was done when the company started. And now you're no longer... But I think it's... I've really come to realize it's actually a job.

Because there's nobody else who's allowed to take the kind of risks you're allowed to take as founder. Or is willing to do that. Most people's jobs, you know, people don't want to get fired. They don't want to lose their job and to do something incredibly risky. I mean, some companies support that. But at some point, like there's some ridiculous things you may have to do as founder. And no one else would be willing to take those risks. So that it is a job.

And I found that that's the job I enjoy more than the CEO role. We don't really need a chief executive officer that often. You know, sometimes we do. Most of the time we don't. We need a founder who's pushing the company forward. And as more on the vision side of things than on the execution side of things. Yeah, it just kind of reminds me. I was listening to broadcasts interview with the Netflix co-founder. Not the risk-estings of the other one. So I forgot his name. I forget his name as well.

Yeah. She was saying that when they were switching from the shipping DVDs to digital, they didn't allow the DVD people into the board room or something. And I think it's a crazy thing that only a founder can do in the company. Yeah, exactly. It's like they just said we're doing this. We have to be done. We're going to kind of kill our existing great business because it has to be killed. And someone else is going to kill it. It's very hard to do that unless you're willing to risk it all.

And there's only the founder or founder crew, whoever it might be. They're the only people who can really risk it all. And occasionally you have to do that. Although you hope you never do, but you occasionally do. So like working with the same person DHH for like 24 years in an intentionally small company, that's very unusual. How does it work? Like how is it going? It's longer than most marriages. Yeah, it is. I've been married for 10 years. So I'm, I've been married to David for 20, basically.

Plus, yeah, it's interesting. It is actually like being married twice in a sense at the same time. So David and I have been working together I think since 2001. So not quite 24 for him because I had originally had two other founders and originally started the business. But let's call it 20 years. It made it's been wonderful. And I think the secret to this is, well, I don't know if they're secrets, but we'll call them secrets. There's a few things.

One is to make sure that we both do different things. So David's primarily on the technical side. I'm primarily on the design side. So we don't overlap that much on those roles. But then we all, we do overlap heavily on the business side of things. If there's too much disagreement on the core business stuff, it's going to be very hard to maintain a long-term business relationship.

And also, if you're both do the exact same thing, you're going to butt heads because you're probably both strong-willed and that can be really complicated to do all the time. So we kind of stay out of each other's way most of the time. And then on the core things we see eye to eye and most things, but not all things. The second thing is, or maybe that's the third and fourth.

I know, but the other thing is like, I think you have to have a lot of admiration and deep respect for the other person's skills and abilities. David is an extraordinary person. He's an extraordinarily talented programmer. An incredibly poetic and beautiful writer. And he's really going into that role. He's very good at making decisions. He's very quick about things. Sometimes too quick, but like, I'd rather have that than the other. You know, we battle over things.

Sometimes he's a bit more impatient than I am about certain things. But I have just such a deep admiration for his abilities. And I think you have to admire your partner. I think that's a really important thing. Because if you don't, resentment can build up. And that's a pretty unhealthy thing in your relationship. So I think that that's the other thing that's really quite important. And you can't certainly continue that for 20 plus years. No, I mean, you can sustain it for a while, right?

And then it falls apart. I think David and I like to argue. I think that's the other thing. I'm not afraid of arguing and he's not afraid of arguing. And so we argue and not all really ships can sustain that. Because one person may not like to argue. They might be more concilatory or they might just avoid conflict. Whatever it might be fine. But in the business context where there's a lot of decisions to be made and difficult decisions oftentimes, you need to be able to argue.

Give us an example. Like that was going to be one of our questions anyway. Like what are some of the big disagreements that you've had and how did you like come for a conclusion? I think one of the bigger ones in more recent times when we first launched Hey, so hey.com, our email service, we were originally going to build it for business. And then we also decided to build it for personal. But it was originally going to be a business email tool.

And as we got into it, I had the instinct that like, I think we should make this personal first and launch it personal first and then come back around later and do the business version. Which is what we ended up doing. But that conversation, that discussion on that debate was pretty heavy. David was pretty sure that the business approach was the right approach. Primarily because the business approach was where more of the revenue would come in and also it's our bread and butter.

We know how to sell business software. We don't really know how to sell personal software. And he's right about that. He was totally right about that. That we didn't really have good experience selling consumer software, let's say. But I just had this instinct that it was the right thing to do for a number of different reasons. The onboarding was simpler. There was less barrier to entry. You don't have to move your whole company over. You could just move yourself over.

The risk was lower, all that stuff. And we battled it out. I mean, there's a lot of discussions and head shaking and eye rolling and all the things that we both do. And then one of the things you always realize in the end, in most cases, is that the decision you're about to make, it's not that big of a deal whichever direction you kind of go in. Not always true. But he's like, all right, let's just, you want this more. You want the personal first?

Well, we're going to do the business version anyway. So we'll roll that one out a few months later. So it's not that big of a deal. In the end, it wasn't that big of a deal. It may have been a bigger deal though. Had we launched the business version first, because the business version is not as popular as the personal version. So that would have changed the equation a little bit. By the way, I'm using an example where I was quote, right. But that's not, that's just the most recent thing.

There's plenty of things where David's been right about. Primarily around size of company and roles. And who do we really need? And what roles don't we need? And a lot of things like that. I tend to be more optimistic about experiments. He tends to be more skeptical about things. And oftentimes he's right. And it's many ways easier to be a skeptic. Because most things don't work anyway. So we battle that kind of stuff out occasionally. I don't know.

But I think we all have our shares of wins and losses. One of the things we've adopted is this concept of disagree and commit. Amazon. Which we have everybody from it. Because if I were you, it was a Amazon. Amazon, right? Bezos thing. Right. And that's where it got her from. It's like disagree and commit. Like battle hard and then get behind you no matter what. And that's what we do. And so we're both comfortable doing that. We don't hold grudges against each other and like that.

So actually one of the harder principles to follow, I think from the Amazon principles. But it's one that if you master it, it can really do wonders. If you're really able to let it go and commit. It depends on the decisions, right? Sometimes it's very hard. Often it is not that hard. It again depends on what the decision is and how much you're buying into it. Yeah. It's also a kind of just a big life skill, I think. Which is just this understanding it.

Like you're not going to get to agree with everything. The world's not going to go your way all the time. And you better get used to that. Because if you don't, you're going to be bitter and upset constantly and think that the world's wrong all the time. It's just it's not a really good way to approach life. So it's good practice at work. Because it's going to show up in life too all the time.

Once you commit to this decision, even if that was not your original program, it gives you a completely different perspective. If you're able to actually commit to it fully. Yes. Yeah. It can actually liberate you in a lot of ways from whatever corner you were getting pushed into. Yes. For sure. And it is liberating. I find it liberating. I really do.

Because at the end of the day, with the group of people and you're making something and you can't have anyone pulling it the other direction once you've decided which direction you're going in. I mean, you can have people push back in healthy ways, but you can't have someone hold it back. That is not going to work. Right. So I want to stay a little bit on the founders' relationships. One thing that I noticed listening to your rework podcast.

Because when we get to see the live interaction between the two of you, David is very much into the business side of things, like I just said, especially on the cost side. Cost and revenue. When he talks, you could almost feel like this is the kind of the CEO talking, not the CEO talking. In the more traditional, I guess, in pretty much any other place. So I'm curious, I guess first, what's your background? What background do you come from into the company?

And also, in those business things, do you have a division of things who does what? Maybe he's more interested in cost and you do something else? What is that line? Or if there is one? Yeah. So my background is in finance and his business as well. So we both kind of come from that world. We've sort of gravitated towards just figuring out the things that we enjoy more. He actually really likes the numbers. I've never been a big numbers person. I don't like looking at them.

I'm familiar with them and I know enough about them. But as long as you're sort of headed generally in the right direction, I'm fine with that. He's very much about knowing exactly. So that's his thing. I think it's more of an engineer's mind, frankly. And that's cool. I think it's important that someone is like them. We also have a finance person here who also pays attention to all that as well. But David's definitely more interested in that side of the business if you had to say so.

And so I don't fight that. I don't, it's just like that's naturally where he leans. So that's his thing. I would sometimes say putting a lot of effort into something to save a few bucks is not worth it. Or like that's big deal. You know, that kind of thing. And you would just argue the other side, which is great. So that's his thing. I'm more on the vision side of the business. I would say on the new products, what we decide to do, how we decide to approach them, how they work.

That's more of my interest personally. If David wasn't here, I'd have to also look at all the number stuff that he looks at. But like he looks at that. So I don't look at it as much. And he's less interested in the, I mean, he's interested. But he's less, I'd say he contributes less to the overall big picture vision unless we have conversations about it. And then we do. But he's generally not offering that side of it in the same way. So we just find our own niches. There's lots of gaps to fill.

And there's lots of surface area to cover. And so we just sort of do that. I mean, way back when, way, way back when, when we did our all of our books and quick books, like we would do them together. We would do the books together. I would do them or he would do them. And I'd look at them and he'd look at whatever. Like we would do all that together. But over the years, he's just sort of gotten more interested in that. Like he's a chief accounting officer.

He definitely likes to keep his eye on all those things. And it's healthy for the business, obviously. I think there's limiting factors, though, to it as well, because you can get into a place. And I'm not suggesting this is where he's at. But you can get into a place where certain things, like do take a long time to pay off potentially. And if you're just looking at the cost side of things, it can be challenging to see what could this turn into down the road.

That's not where we're at and that's not where he's at. But I can see if you have too close an eye on early paybacks on things, you can get stingy in a way that doesn't benefit you. Yeah, I think Steve Job famously said that you can't cut your way into growth, speaking about cost cutting, but that you can increase profitability by cutting costs. But it's not going to grow your thought plan. You're probably not going to cut your way into growth.

You can probably improve some profitability, but you can also buy yourself some time. I mean, depending on what you're spending, like if you can cut that back significantly, and we've just did that with some cuts in the cloud, but we're not just doing it for money only. But there's a principle behind it too. But there's a variety of things that we've done to save money over the years. It's baked into who we are and how we run the business. It's not a new thing. It's an always thing.

We've always kept our costs tight. I think a lot of companies don't do that. They don't pay enough attention to costs. They're just focused on revenue. And you can go broke, generating revenue. You can go broke, growing 100% a year. You can go broke doing all these things, which sound really good. But if you don't make more money than you spend, none of it really matters. And you're not going to live to see another day or year or whatever.

So if you love business and you love making things, you should love profit because it lets you do those things. It lets you stay in business. It gives you a chance to make something new. That's one of the beautiful things about making more money than you spend. It's interesting topic, but making sure that business is profitable. I remember talking to my mother a little, maybe 10 years ago. And she's like, how does Instagram make money? I'm like, it doesn't. She's like a one person business.

She's like, how? I don't know. But they just leave off investors money. And then they get acquired by Facebook. And I guess everything else is history. But it was just like this person, my mother, she just couldn't understand it. How you could be a business without revenue. Yeah, we try to run our business like the pizza shop in the corner or the dry cleaners or something. It's like, they're not out there going, God, if we can lose more money on every pizza we sell, we're going to do well.

They're not saying that. You know? The dry cleaner's not saying, I'm going to lose four bucks in every shirt I dry clean. But I'll just get enough shirts that were eventually will mat. That whole formula doesn't work for almost every business in the world. And there's a few that somehow get away with it. But to book your fortune to that approach of hoping you're going to get away with it, I think the odds are just so far against you. I think you're much better off.

Like this is all a probability game. It's all unlikely you're going to make it. We're always trying to figure out what gives us the best odds of making it, of being successful. And keeping your costs low and keeping your eye on the ball with those numbers is important, especially in the early days. Because it's the habits you form early on that really matter. And if you are just a wild spender, it's very hard later on eight years down the road, three years down the road.

When things tighten up and the economy changes and free money is dries up, like it's all of a sudden be frugal. You just not built that way. You haven't practiced that. You're better off being really good at that than you are just really good at spending money. Books have intentionally stayed small, right? Counter to the Silicon Valley typical mindset.

And I love, I think one of the podcast episodes I was listening to last week, either you or the host said, going to the moon but missing all the flowers on the way. That kind of like struck the perfect tone for me. As you grew and as the company like kind of grew intentionally small, did you have ever any temptations to go bigger? Like you must have had offers to go big or things like that.

Yeah. You know, all the usual suspects have gotten in touch about acquisitions or venture capital or private equity. And I feel it's still continuing to field emails all the time on that. And it just doesn't interest us. I mean, just bottom line is not interesting. We'd rather keep building what we're doing and doing it the way we want to do it. Not have to ask permission from anybody and not have to go work for someone else for two years.

All those things tell us, I think we'd see that as the end. And like, I want to keep doing this. We both want to keep doing this. We all want to keep doing this. So that may not be true forever and ever and ever. I mean, if I'm 75 years old, I probably wouldn't want to be doing this anymore, right? But more in our 40s, and this feels pretty good right now. We're enjoying it. So there have been temptations for us internally to set our minds and certain targets over the years here and there.

And every time we've done that, like, basically twice. And every time we've done that, a year after we did it, or like, this is stupid. This is not us. This is no fun. We're doing things we don't want to do just to hit some number we made up. Not really. So we have gotten quite a bit bigger. We're the biggest we've ever been now. We have 80 people in the company. And the primary reason we did this is because we wanted to be able to build multiple products at once again.

So it used to be we can only do one thing at a time. And so we'd work on base camp for a while. And then we'd work on hey, for a while. And we'd work on base camp for a while. And that's okay. Sort of it worked. It's been okay. But it's not as satisfying as working on both and improving both. And we have two more things we're building right now. One new big thing for one of our existing products and then a brand new product. And we want to do all the stuff simultaneously.

So we had to build some more people. Now, we're still relatively small. I mean, we're tiny. All things considered. A lot of companies who we, quote, compete with have teams building their products that are five times the size of our whole company. So we're small, but we're the biggest we've been. But it feels like this is big enough. We're not really hiring at the moment. We might fill a role if a role opens up. And there's a handful of things here and there, perhaps.

But we feel like we're in a really good size right now. And we have more than enough to do what we want to do. And if we can't do it, we don't do it. Or we wait to do it. Or we do a simpler version of it. That's the right pressure to have. And that's the pressure we've always had. And I think that's where we like to be. That's a space for us to do our thing. I also did a thing is like, if someone gave us $50 million, I would know what to do with it. Honestly, I would not know what to do with it.

We don't want to hire more people. So we'd have to just spend it on marketing or advertising. It's like, that would be fun. But it would screw up all of the economics. I don't really think it'd be a good idea for us. And so we don't really want it. And we don't need it. We're not going to take it. You've always kind of taught this way, right? And now you have base campaign, hey, two different products. Soon you're going to have four, you said.

But for the longest time when you had just base campaign, how did you think about risk in this world? Where you're intentionally small working on one thing. But you make like one fatal mistake or something like that or a competitor takes over. And you're out. That can happen. That can happen at companies with many products. One product can happen at any time. And the thing is that we got in comfortable understanding that there's only a few things we can control.

And there's a lot of things we cannot. So if some competitor comes in and like, crushes us, I don't know where, because there's a paradigm shift and it just, that's, we couldn't have stopped that anyway. If we didn't have the idea and it happens, like, there's not much you can do. What we can do is focus on what we know how to do. Do it better. Take good care of our customers. Take good care of our employees. Be proud of the work that we're doing. Do our best.

And get our message out the way we know how and share and teach and all the things. And that's what we're good at. That's what we can do. And we'll continue to do that. There are lots of risks, of course, out there. Many of them are things you can't control. And a lot of people obsess about those things.

So we're just kind of focused on the things that we can control, which is actually a really good piece of advice that Bezos gave us, which is focus on the things in your business that will not change. The example he gave us, it was, you know, I know he's talked about this publicly, I think, as well, but was like, people aren't going to wake up in 10 years and wish Amazon selection was worse. They're not going to wake up in 10 years and wish Amazon's shipping was slower.

They're not going to wake up in 10 years and wish Amazon's prices were higher, you know? And he's like, what are those things in your business? And so for us, it's like, people aren't going to wake up in 10 years and wish base camp was more complicated. They're not going to wake up in 10 years and wish Hay was twice as expensive. They're not going to wake up in 10 years and wish our customer service was terrible.

So we're focused on the things that we can control that we know we can deliver at a high level and continue to improve on. And take care of everybody that we can. But that's it. I can't do any about the asteroid hurling in from outer space that no one's aware of until the last minute. There's not much I can do about that. And so we tend not to get wrapped up and fear the things that we can't control.

I think back in 2006, I think you took investment from basis that's the only evidence of external investment that we found about your company. As I'm curious, how was it? If you still hold the stake. Sure. Well, first off, so he bought a piece of the company from David and I. So none of his money ever went into the business. So this was like secondary sales.

So David and I took that money and put in our pockets and the business has always been 100% funded by customer revenues, always has been, and 100%. So none of his money made it in. But he owns a small piece of the business because we sold him some of our shares. And yeah, he still owns his stake. And it's been great. I mean, like we learned a lot from him. We used to talk to him once or twice a year. We'd have dinner once or twice a year. But we haven't really spoken for a few years now.

And if we ever needed to get in touch with them, we could. We have to send him numbers every year, that kind of thing. But it all happens sort of back. This is in 2006. We'd been again approached by all the VCs and the whole thing. And it never interested us and still didn't. But then Jeff reached out and it was amazing to have a chance to meet someone like Jeff. So remember back in 2006, like Amazon was big, but not anywhere near as big of their today.

So it was more of like an entrepreneurial, small company story, even though they're quite big. But this single founder who built this thing, like yeah sure, well of course we'll meet up. He'd seen me speak at this conference in St. Diego and one of his other portfolio companies had to use Basecamp. And so I think there's like a triangulation. And he was curious about what we were doing. He likes company.

He likes people who are different, you know, approach things differently and the whole thing. So we met up and we really liked him and he liked us. We talked a little bit more. And eventually it was an opportunity for David and I as founders to take a bit of risk off the table. So we were two years in Basecamp at launch in 2004. It's 2006. This whole thing could come burning and crashing down. Right?

And the traditional thing is, well you keep pouring all the money back into the business, back into the business, back into the business. But we always tell like what if the business goes out of business after doing that, you get nothing for it. You put in all this work, I mean, you get your salary along the way perhaps. But if you keep throwing everything back in, you get nothing out of it. That's a bad outcome.

So we're like, well let's say this thing all went to hell and just blew up and a competitor came in, wiped us out, or we made a fatal error or whatever it was. Like we put a lot of work into this thing. If we take some money off the table now, we can put it away and it would reduce our overall exposure and risk. And if this thing fell apart, we wouldn't have nothing to show for it.

And it gave us a lot of confidence to just go for it, actually, because now we had a little bit of cushion in the bank personally, that we could go for it a bit more. And so it was really nice. So that's why we did that whole deal. And it was the only deal that ever came close to being an straightforward deal like that. Like I'll buy some shares from you guys. I don't want to be on the board. We're like, we're not going to have a board, so you're not on the board. No control, really.

There's a couple little clauses where there's some things where some situations where he could have some control. But generally, no. Minority share. So we own the majority. It's the unanimity power there. And it was just like, he wasn't after power. He wasn't after any of those things. He was once after supporting interesting entrepreneurs doing interesting things.

And also, because we're an LLC, and he owns shares in the US, that means we distribute whatever profits are left over to the members of the LLC. So he's getting distributions every single year off of his investment. It's been a wonderful investment for him. And he still owns his shares. So he owns his share, making money off his share without having to sell any of his shares. That's like the sort of the dream, kind of like in a newity situation, basically.

So it also gave you folks enough of the freedom to take hard decisions in the years afterwards. Because you never felt like, I mean, if we make this big decision, it dies. It dies. It's fine. We still feel that way. I think it's a healthy way to feel. You want to feel some fear of it, in a sense, you don't want it to go away. But also, you've just got to come to terms with the fact that it could. And so David and I practice a lot of negative visualization on all sorts of things.

Like, what if we spend two years on this product and launch it and it sucks? It doesn't work. OK, that can happen. And if that happens, we're going to be all right. So we've got this other thing going on. And let's try something else. And this new thing we're working on right now is a big, unusual new thing for us to try. And that might not work. And we're going to think half a year and do it and see what happens. And maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. And if it doesn't, that's OK too.

We don't have to pin our future on these things. So we obviously hope they work, though, but if they don't, they don't. So we thought about that. And we're always thinking about that. But it definitely helped comfort us back in 2006 that if this all fell apart, it wouldn't be for nothing. And I've just seen too many entrepreneurs, because the story is just pile it in all in. Whatever you make, put it right back in the business and grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.

Well, until it doesn't work, and then all the potential gains you've made are all gone now. I don't want to be that way. That's just how we want to do it. Some people want to throw it all in. They're poker players all in. And that's fine, too. Totally fine. But that's not right for us. So we want this path. Yeah, the simnicalist of the lab speaks about this pretty well. I forgot which book it was in. But what he says is that he should avoid ruin.

And then basically you allow yourself some of that cushion so that even if the business goes in flames, and like you left with zero, you personally will not do ruined by this financially. Right. So this is a great point. And we talk about this in slightly a different perspective. But I like this avoid ruin rule, which is we're willing to take risks, but we're very unwilling to put ourselves at risk generally. So very rarely are we going to bet the company on something.

Now, in case we absolutely had to, if it came down to that's the last decision you can make, and OK, but we're careful to make sure that we take the risks that we want to take what we don't put ourselves at risk. So the outcome will not be ruined. Again, less the asteroid comes in, which can happen. And there can be other things that can happen. I mean, we could totally screw up. We could botched customer data terribly. There's things that we could definitely do to ourselves. Absolutely.

But we don't want it. We're not deliberately choosing a path that could lead to that. Something that could inadvertently lead to that, because we didn't pay attention to something. That's on us. But we're not like, all right, base camp, we're not going to pay attention to anymore. And we're going to put everything we have on this really risky new idea. And sometimes that's maybe necessary in some companies, but we have a good thing going. So it's not necessary in this company.

So we're not going to do that. So staying on the topic of these new ideas, are you at this point with 80 people big enough that you're focusing on all four things at the same time, or are you switching around, like you mentioned, between products? We're focusing on all four things at once. One of them is a whole new product. One of them is a, I've mentioned this before, one of them is a calendar for hay. It's almost its own product in itself. It's a whole thing.

Which certainly, if we didn't have hay, we could launch this as a separate product. It's a product, basically. And then base camp and hay email itself. So there's four things that we're working on, essentially simultaneously. It's three to four, because when I think of it as we're working on hay, even though it's a new part of hay, it's really three things, because it's still hay, but it feels like a separate product. And our teams are small.

We have teams up to, we've hired up some product teams, so we can work on all four at once. We don't have six teams on base camp anymore. We have a few teams on base camp, a few teams on hay, a few teams on the other thing, and one team on the other thing. And that's working on great force right now.

You talk a lot about the six-week cycles, where you plan what's going to be delivered within six weeks, and then that's how your company operates on this six-week cadence, whatever, six to eight times a year. So that definitely works for incremental improvements of existing products. How about things like hay, for example? I mean, you can't build an email client in six weeks, with email servers and all that, right? It probably took, I was probably at least a year, two years.

So what's the process there, August process or approach for these kinds of more strategic investments? Yeah, so it starts out very loose. It's usually a team of two or three people like going off into the woods to prototype some ideas, and to see where we get with it. There's no time frame, they're pioneers, literally, pioneers going out into the unknown. And you don't know what you're gonna find, and you don't know how long it's gonna take to get back.

You're not gonna spend years out there, a few months. So they're not in the six-week cycle. They're not. Let's spend a few months. So it's called 12 weeks, a few months. Seeing how far we get with this, are we getting somewhere? We've gone down roads before, we've spent a few months, and we've gotten nowhere, or we've gotten somewhere, and the somewhere we got to we didn't like, and so we stopped. By the time it's like, oh, we're onto something here. We're excited. It's a feeling.

You get goosebumps. There's something here. I don't know what it is. Something is here. And then you go, oh, let's put a little more time into it. It's kind of still loose. And then there's a point where you're like, you commit. You go, there's something here. We now know what that something is. We don't know what all of it's going to be, but we know what the core of it is, and we believe that there's something here. And then you get on a cycle system.

So then we go six weeks at a time, and we build different sets of features. So it's cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle until we decide to launch it. So it starts out very loose in a morphus, not on the six week cycle thing. We finally get somewhere we like, then we move it onto the rails, basically, onto the six week cycle track, and then we just go back to back to back to back on those. We won't spend those six week cycles exploring anymore.

We spend them building things we know we need. So it's still like up to six, and by the way, when I say six weeks, some features take two days or a week or three weeks. It's up to six weeks. But those are structured projects now. So it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like the screener, and hey, it was like a six week project. Reply later where you can stack up a bunch of emails to get back to people later on, and reply to them all at once.

Like that was a distinct feature that happened within a cycle. Like these are things that start to pile up, and then you knock them down cycle after cycle after cycle. So that's how it works. And then you set up, like typically, we'll set like a, for a new product, we'll set a launch date that's like six months, and it will be like, okay, let's just say it's April or something, it'll be like, okay, look, we got a launch this October.

And so we're like, there's enough time, six months ish to like finish this thing, but also like we're shipping in October. So we got to keep in mind that it's not going to do everything we wanted to do. It's going to have to be a lot of trade offs along the way. And that deadline's pretty hard and fast unless something happens. So like something unusual happens. So there's still room, but you got a hone in now. Just curious, why is there a deadline there?

That seems like it goes a bit counter to what you typically say, right? Like no expectations, no specific road maps or goals. Deadlines are our friends though. So like in six weeks cycles have deadlines. Everything's about like, this is all the amount of time. So the idea is that it's really an appetite. Like we're only spending six more months on this thing than we got to get out the door. And these are really healthy things to do. Otherwise things will go on and on and on.

Because think about software is that software has no edges. So physical objects, so I got a can here, right? It's very obvious like this is a good design. It fits in your hand. It's not too heavy. It's made of a light aluminum. So if there's some weight in here, I know there's something in it. If this was made of lead and I picked it up, I wouldn't be able to tell if there was liquid, all the things, right? And we would all kind of agree this is good.

If this was like seven times as tall and really big, you couldn't grip it, we'd go that, that's a bad idea. And if it had spikes on it, that wouldn't work. And it's so easy to look at a physical object and go, no, there's limits here. Physics has rules and that would be a bad design. Software doesn't have any of those things. It just grows. It just grows and grows and grows and grows. And until you stop it from growing or spreading, it won't.

So for us like V1, the first initial version, like it has to stop somewhere. It can't stop when it's quote, ready? Because it'll never be ready. Because you always have more ideas than you're able to do. So it's more like, we have a six month appetite to finish this damn thing. That's like a few cycles. It's only V1. We'll keep working on it right after it's out, but it's gotta get out. And that's why we have these deadlines. But they're not set way ahead of time.

So it's not set like in the beginning. But as we're getting close, we're like, OK, we're gonna give this six more months and that's it. Is that helpful? Does that make sense? It's like at some point, you gotta draw a line. Yeah. I think it also, like the six week cycles when you're working on say base camp, it sounds like you're literally picking the things that you want to work on at the beginning of those six weeks. Or maybe there's a bit of a higher level.

These are the next few things we're gonna work on. This is what will pick up. But for a product like, hey, I think that's sort of a bit longer time scale while knowing that we still have to ship this before all of these things are going to be bolted on. It makes sense, yeah. Yeah. I want to go back a bit, well, not a bit actually, 15 years ago. Well, actually more than 15. When you were doing your web design consultancy, which is actually was my background in the early 2002.

And then at some point, you figured out the base camp is actually working. So we no longer need to do the web kind of the project work. And then you actually renamed the company from 37 signals at the base camp. But I think probably around when the time when introduced, hey, you renamed back to 37 signals, because now you have a kind of greater portfolio of products. So I'm curious, talk us through about that whole changing the branding thing.

But also, what was that moment when you were like, gosh, it's working. We don't know what we need to do that other stuff. Yeah, it was kind of a moment of relief, frankly. Because client work is, we used to enjoy it. It's fun, but it's hard. You got to, I mean, all this software's hard too. But it's hard because you got to find the next client. And you work hard for them and deliver stuff. And a lot of it never gets used or gets used in a way that isn't quite what you were hoping for.

And you give a lot of advice and it's not taken. And that's all fine. That's just how it goes. But at some point, we've been telling people what to do for five years now. Let's see if we know what to do. Let's do our own thing. And so when it became clear that we could support ourselves just on the software side, we just were enjoying it a whole lot more.

It's better than going out and finding another client and doing a contract and trying to bid and pitch against other companies and all that stuff. You've been through it probably. It's a slog. You're always in somebody else's schedule. Yeah, you're on someone else's schedule. You're competing in different kinds of ways. It's frustrating work. I find it to be frustrating in the end. And so when you're doing it for yourself, it just was like, this is what we love to do.

We love to make things anyway. We're making things for other people. Now we get to make stuff for us. And we have enough people who are willing to pay us for it. And we can keep doing it. Let's not do client working anymore. So it was a smooth transition, but it was a relief. It was like, this is going to be great. This is more fun for us. We enjoy this. It was great every single day to do the things. And then we could see things working. Because oftentimes you make a recommendation to a client.

And you don't really know if it's going to work or not. And it's like four months before you find out if they even did it. And then you don't even know if it's going to work. This immediate feedback was really pleasant, frankly. So that was that. So then we did that. We developed a bunch of other products. We had this crazy four years. We did Basecamp in 2004, Backpack in 2005, which was a personal information organizer, kind of like Evernote or Notion, years ahead of those.

So it was like Basecamp, Backpack, then Campfire, which was like a group chat thing way ahead of Slack for that was around. And then HiRise, which is a CRM tool. So we did one product a year for four years. And then we did some other stuff as well. We wrote some books and did some other things. And then it turned out that at some point we realized we can't do all these things anymore at a high level. We're relatively small. I think it was like we had 30 somebody people at that point.

And we had too many products. Mobile was coming on the scene. Like mobile wasn't a thing. Mobile apps were not things until 2007, eight, something like that. Knife phone was kind of hitting whatever that was, I think it was 2007, maybe 2008, 2009, or whatever it was when native apps came out. Anyway, and like every product now is three products. You gotta have a web, a desktop, slash desktop, Android, iOS, like three different code bases, three from products. It's a lot.

You have four things now. You have 12 things and it became a lot. So we decided to consolidate and just focus on base camp, which is our biggest winner. It was like 10X anything else that we would ever done. HiRise was their second most popular product, great business, but not as great as base camp. So decided to focus on base camp, renamed the company to base camp to reinforce the fact that that's who we were and that's what we were doing. And did that for many years.

Until we had this itch to make something new, which turned out to be, hey, didn't start out that way, it started out as we were gonna make a new version of HiRise, which is our CRM tool. And as we were doing that, we realized that we were building this really unique and interesting email tool instead. And so we kind of, oh, this is actually what we're doing. I see, I remember bringing this to David. So I was working on this with a fellow named Jonas, who's to work for us.

Jonas and I were going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on this design for this new CRM tool and I remember going, I wanna use this for all my email. Like I don't just wanna use this for like business-y stuff. I remember making this pitch to David because David wasn't involved in that project at the time. I'm like, David, I think we're making like an email thing here. And it was a cool meeting because he was surprised.

I was sort of surprised even that this is where we were going but sometimes you just, you follow the trail and this is where we were going and we got excited about it. Anyway, once we did all that, once we launched this, we can't be base camp anymore because it's not fair to hey, but we were base camp when we launched hey. And then a little bit later, we're like, hey is it success? We need to be like a multi-product company again.

So we're gonna go back to 37 signals and that's how that whole, I know there's a lot of, like, why'd you make the call and how was the decision-making? But like, that was a timeline essentially for how it happened. So I'm really curious the moment where you had four or five successful products.

That was a big decision point to either, I'm sure you already were making enough revenue in terms of like being able to fund all four with independent teams at that time and grow bigger or stay the same size but only focus on one product. I wouldn't call all four products successful. They were generating revenue. But like, for example, backpack and campfire were never really substantial products for us.

I think collectively maybe they were doing a million bucks or something at some point a year or maybe, which is good, but base camp and high rise were doing much, much better. They were successful and they worked really well but they never found market fit really. I mean, campfire we were way early on, Slack obviously came out and like blew up in a huge way. For Friday reasons, the product was really good and timing was right and all that stuff too.

And then like, backpack was way ahead of its time in really interesting ways. And now, notion and there's ever no, which I think ever no it's gone now or maybe whatever, but notion, other these sort of document style mixed tools have come out, we just never hit on those really. So it's basically base camp and high rise were the two big winners for us. And what we decided to do was not to stop supporting those products but just not to sell them anymore. So we still have lots of customers.

High rise is a multimillion dollar business still and people who are using high rise can use it forever. We'll never shut it down until the last customer goes. But we're not bringing in new customers. So it's obviously leaky to some degree or it's declining over time as you'd expect but we'll support everyone who's a customer of ours and we will not kick them off anything, basically sort of our approach.

And the same thing is true for earliest version of base camp, base camp classic, which came out in 2004 we still support that. We don't improve it anymore, but we support it. It's online, lots and lots and lots of people still use it. Tens of thousands of people I think still use it. And it's still a good business for us and we'll take care of those people too. We don't kick them off or force them to upgrade or anything like that. So that's sort of been our approach to this.

If you don't take in new customers, it just slowly gradually goes down which makes it easier to manage and it doesn't have the same burden as a product that's growing, would. Yeah, we've also met with this from the AWS where we worked. It's like it would never shut anything down. It would be running somewhere. You can't even find documentation for this but there would still be thousands of customers using the thing and paying for the thing.

But even if it's like not profitable anymore, it's the reputation that you uphold by not shutting the thing down, right? It's a trust. Well, there's that site, what Google, what's called like Google's, killed by Google. Kill by Google, that's it. It's like I think 288 products on that site right now. And fine, that's our choice and whatever. But it does make you wonder when you use Google product. If it's not worth it, let's call it top five. Like, is it gonna be around?

And we've sort of committed to this line we call till the end of the internet, which is the idea that like we will support our stuff, our legacy products till the end of the internet or as long as we're around as a company. Of course, we can't support it if we're not around anymore. Our plan is to be around. No company lasts forever and ever and ever. But like, we're here for the long haul, sort of the message we're sending and what we're living by. So I think it's important to do that.

And I've always admired companies that do that. So like Porsche, it's a great example of a company that still sells classic parts for a 9.11 from 1963 or a 356 from before that. Like we'll repair any camera they've ever made and even cameras that are decades old. I like that. It's rare. Protect Philippe Watchmaker will service any watch they've ever made even if it's 100 and whatever years old. It's just wonderful. And they'll make parts for it if they don't have it.

Like that's their commitment to their products. I think that's a great thing. It's a rare thing. And in the software industry, we want to do that too. Let's switch a little bit into the, I want to talk about the calm companies and that space. So actually, can I inject something? So we were talking about the book. It doesn't have to be crazy at work when we were preparing for this interview. And I forgot how it came up.

But we were talking about the calm companies and we were like, do they call it calm companies? We looked up the URL of the book. And the URL is 37stichloss.com slash book slash calm. Yeah, that was the original name of the book. The original name of the book was the calm company. We switched it near the end. Because the title was the calm company and the subtitle was, it doesn't have to be crazy at work. But we just found that it doesn't have to be crazy at work, had more energy in it.

So we went with that as the title. I would ask everybody who's listening to actually go read these books. These are short to the point kind of punchy books. I won't take too much of your time. But they probably offer a very different perspective to work than you're used to. Certainly what Ilya and I were used to. So the first question is, so no KPIs, no goals, no expectations on yourself. How do you continuously learn and improve products like base camp and hay? It's qualitative in a sense.

I mean, you listen to customers, you hear from them all the time. We get between five, I think, five and 600 emails a day from customers, customer service, some are pre-sales questions, some are existing customers with problems, some are criticisms, some are praises. You get a whole, I mean, you get a lot. There's never ending stream of feedback coming in. And then there's also feedback on Twitter and LinkedIn and all the places.

So we pay attention to words more than we pay attention to percentages or numbers in that sense. I wanna read someone's email and spot where the emotion is. What are they upset about? Where how do we screw this up? Or wow, this is what they like? I didn't even think this is a big deal, but this apparently is a pretty big deal for some companies, like this little thing. And you sort of pick up on these patterns and you generate intuitions and you have a sense of what's working and what isn't.

And then you look at the big picture, like making more money than we spend, so all as well. But it's not because of this one feature or that one feature. Or not driven that way. I know some companies are. I remember Facebook was saying this for this. Like if you upload at least the lore and the mythology was, like if you upload a picture in the first 15 minutes or six minutes, like you're a user for life or one of those, we're not into finding that so much.

I don't know, maybe that exists in Basecamp, maybe it doesn't. We've looked for it in the past, haven't really been able to find it. It's just more interesting to us to listen and to think and to hear and to see the insights and to see the seams and find the seams, you know? Find the seams of gold in these mountains of feedback and go, ah, there's something here.

There's something here and then innovate around that and come up with ideas around that and try to move the product and improve the product in that way. And then you hear it from people. Like, oh, that's great. Or thank you so much for this. Or you missed it. Or why haven't you done this yet? Or whatever it is. And you can feel the heat and the pressure and the satisfaction and the dissatisfaction. Think you got to tap into that. At least I shouldn't say you. That's what we tap into.

I don't know what you need to do. You should do how you feel like you can read the room, the best. You know, maybe that's your data. All fine, but that's our approach. So that itself, it's a art and a science in itself. You are getting a tremendous amount of feedback. How do you figure out that these are the meaningful ones, right? That's the art. Yes. And then how do you translate that feedback to something quantitative that tells you that, okay, we need to work on this.

Or we did a bad job with this. How many people do you have working on this? Are there specific people with scales in this area? Also, typically, so there's like three of us that really focus on deciding what to do next. It's me, Brian, and then David will typically chime in. Sometimes Jeff Chimes-in, who's principal programmer, different people. But typically me, and Brian, and David are deciding every cycle what projects we're going to do. But this is coming up.

Like Brian is very, very much involved with reading the customer room in a sense. Like he's talking with support. He's really getting the vibe for what people are wanting and complaining about and liking and praising and criticizing. He's bringing a lot of that up. I'm getting a lot of that too, because I get a lot of personal emails from customers. So I'm bringing that side of it. He's bringing another side of it.

Sometimes there's just things that we want to do as a company that no one's ever asked for. We have an idea no one's asked for this. Or maybe people sort of kind of asked for it, but like, and not really, but we think this would be really beneficial. And hey, it's full of those features. Like, nobody asked for anything in hey, because people just like email is email. And I'm like, no, email can be way, different way better.

So we had to create those ideas, you know, based on our own frustrations with email. So there's a few of us doing that. And then the projects are defined. Defined means they're written up in a page or two of this kind of Amazon style. Actually, a page or two outlining the vision of the idea and kind of what we're after broadly. And then the teams that are assigned, there's one program or one designer per feature.

They're assigned with figuring out how to do it in the amount of time that we've given it. And it's not an estimate, it's an appetite. So we're willing to give this feature three weeks. This feels like a three-weeker, we'll say, or a six-weeker or a one-weeker. And they'll figure out how to do it. And they'll, it's on them at that point.

We'll advise and help in whatever, but like, it's on the teams to decide the best way to implement this idea, because it's not spelled out in tasks or spelled out in ultra specifics. But they have a sense of what this is about, what, or after. So they have a lot of agency to figure that out and get it right. And then how do we know if it's right? We don't really know, you ship the feature. And we don't go out and survey customers, we don't look at the data really.

It's just, sometimes we might, if we're curious about something, I don't know. Every time we've ever done that, it's like, well, 11% of the people have used it. Like, I don't know, is that good? Bad? I don't even know what that means. What if it was 13%? What if it was eight? We made the feature. There it is. And for those 11%, maybe it's the best thing in the world. And I don't know, and we could find out, maybe, sort of, or we could trick ourselves into thinking we could find out.

Or we could just say, let's move on to the next thing. And continue to improve the product the way we've always done, which is, what's our intuition? What's the customer say? Like, how do we make something better? And so far, that's worked out for 20 years. And so we just kind of, go down that path. So one of the things we're not interested in is maximizing or fully optimizing anything. So certainly, we might be able to do better and make more money than delight people, just 3% more.

There might be ways to do all this, but the effort required to do all that doesn't ever seem to be worth it in our minds. So we'd rather just keep listening, doing, learning, and hoping that we're doing the right thing long enough. Yeah, love it. You said one thing that is really interesting. You said that you also wrote about it. That you basically publicize your email address. So a customer can write to you pretty much anybody can write to you because your email is very easy.

Actually, I think it's in your LinkedIn profile, even. It's everywhere. So I'm curious, do you get a lot of spam or some kind of negative stuff that you wish you, like you did the other wish you like you did publish your email? Well, so I use hay. So hay's really good at filtering out the stuff. I don't want to see spam or I can screen people out of their abusive or something like that and never hear from them again. But no, most people are very, for minded. It's actually very interesting.

Email is a wonderful medium to get feedback in because even when people are critical in harsh, wherever, like, they're still civil because there's not a public square cheering them on. There's no grants, you can't grandstand an email because no one else knows you're sending it. On Twitter, you can scream at people or whatever because people are cheering you on and the likes are piling up because everyone likes that kind of abuse. And email is a very personal thing.

I get bad feedback all the time about our stuff. Like, hey, it doesn't do this. It should have or this error or I do it this. It's sent from one human to another, not one avatar to another, not one username to another, but a human to another human. And I find that to be great. So I don't find it to be negative, even if it's critical. It's fairly critical. All of it's fair.

It's meant to, I think, ultimately make it better for themselves and for you, rather than for some artificial metric like more likes or more retreats and things like that. That's right. There's an intention behind it, which is like, I've got a beef with this thing. And I'm like, you know, God, that's a good idea. I hadn't thought about that. Like, someone just sent me something yesterday saying, why can't I duplicate a to-do in basecamp?

And they sent me a screenshot of where the duplicate feature should live. And I'm like, I was kind of frankly surprised. Like, I'm kind of surprised we don't have that. Why don't we have that? But then I said, what are you trying to do? Why do you want to duplicate a to-do? And then he wrote back and it was like this. I go, you know, we have this thing called to-do templates. Because he was sort of saying, like, I use a lot of to-do is the same way across projects.

I'm like, ah, and this may not have solved his problem. But I'm like, I don't know if you knew about this thing called to-do templates. And here's this help thing, explaining how they work. And maybe this would be helpful. By the way, it's still a great idea on the individually duplicating a to-do thing. So we'll probably get the duplicating to-do thing in. Because it's a very, very fast, simple thing to do. I don't know when we'll do it, but it makes sense. We should do it.

I was surprised I didn't have it. But then I also had a dialogue with someone and go, maybe you might want like this. And then if I did that on Twitter, or someone would be like, what are you just missing his idea? It's like, no, I'm just trying to point something out that maybe it would be helpful. But you know, you just, it's so hard to do that in public sometimes. You know, it's like you can't be a troll in an email, right? Right, you can't. Because no one else is looking.

And that's what's great about it, actually. So yeah, I love it. And when I write on my Hey World blog, we made a conscious decision on Hey World, which is our newsletter service that's included with every Hey account to not allow comments. But you can just reply, since everything sent out as an email, you can just reply. So you can write back to the author with your thoughts. And they're not public. They're just private comments.

And we get, I get tons of comments every time I post something in David does too. And they're very simple. There's no way if we had a public comment board, they would be that way. They'd be very different and they would be worse. So I think it's a really good medium, actually. That's why we post our, or publish our email addresses. And every new customer that signs up gets my email address. And I want to hear from them. It's an important thing. You do have comments on your LinkedIn posts.

And actually, yeah, thank you for your blank to one of my comments. I was like, okay, great. LinkedIn's pretty, pretty okay, actually, in that respect. I feel like everyone's pretty chill. Yeah, that's a pretty civil. Maybe because people use their real names, like their reputation is on the line. It's tied to your professional avatar. So yeah, that's exactly, I mean, exactly. It's your career history. It's all that stuff.

And so it just goes to show, I think like anonymity can be valuable, but it's also a brutal hammer for a lot of people because they get to just spout off with no consequences. And I don't think it's one of the best parts of humanity. So going back to the calm company mindset, right? Like from what I understand, you also don't have like employee performance reviews or things like that. You probably do some form of that.

But my matter question is, do you think this could work in a bigger company, maybe in a smaller part of a bigger company, if not the whole company? And if so, how can somebody foster evangelize this sort of a mindset in there? Yeah, so a couple of things. We do do performance reviews, but we're not looking back at again, like KPIs or do the things you do move some needle or something. It's about the work or expectations of the work because we asked you to do something.

We asked you to do something. If it doesn't do well, that probably our fault, not your fault, you did the best you could, hopefully. So we look at the work and we have a conversation between people. That's how we evaluate someone's performance in that regard. And then the other thing is, so all of our salaries are fixed. So there's basically five levels per position. You can come in as a junior designer, designer, senior designer, lead designer principle.

And so that junior lead thing, the whole thing principle, that is basically equivalent for all positions. And each one of those has a salary attached to it. And the negotiation is simply, which tier are you in? Everyone who's a junior or who's a lead gets paid the exact same. So the performance review thing is more about, first of all, how you're doing your career and where you at and how can you get better. But it's mostly like, ultimately, if you want to, how do you move up a level?

It's not like a salary negotiations piece so much as it is a level piece and then a salary comes with that. That's kind of how that works. What was the second part of your question? I forgot, I'm sorry. If somebody wanted to adopt this sort of like no KPIs, no goals. Oh, it bigger companies. I mean, I have two answers. The first one is, I don't care. So I don't really care about big companies. There's enough people who do. I'm for the small company. I love small companies.

So I'm more interested in what works for them because that's the majority of businesses and the ones I really care about. That said, one of the books that inspired David and I right from the beginning was a book called Maverick by this guy named Ricardo Semmer. Have you heard of him? I know. I'm not sure the books in print anymore, but I know you can get it probably in Amazon or wherever. It's awesome. It's about this Brazilian. It's a true story.

Brazilian businessman, his father had built this big huge industrial company. I think 7, 6, 7, 8,000 employees. They made like oil pumps and industrial equipment, heavy industrial equipment. Very traditional business in a very traditional company and a very traditional country, Brazil. And he inherited the business or took over. And he walked in there and he goes, I don't get any of this. There's a rule book. It's so rigid, just not about humans at all. And he's like, I'm throwing this all away.

And we're going to figure out as we go. And the book is all about how he really radically transformed this business in a really positive way by not doing all the traditional things that most companies do. It's been a while since I've read it, but one of the wonderful things was is that the company doesn't get to hire managers. Teams hire their own manager. So if a company needs a manager, the team gets to, they do all the interviews and they get to choose who their manager is going to be.

Salaries at that company were a completely open book, which was totally not something that was ever done before down in Brazil. The factory workers get to rearrange the factory floor any way they want based on their understanding of how it should be. Not someone up top. This is how we work. This is how we move. This is what's safer. So they had all the freedom to do that. There's a million different fascinating radical things at a company of many, many thousands of people.

Now, that's one example. We're another example on the small end. So this is an end of two, which is basically nothing. But I think so many more things are possible. And I think if the answer is, well, it can't happen here. We're too big or you're already going to lose that battle. So I think a lot of it is just will and interest. But the biggest thing I would say is like, don't change if everything's going well.

If you're happy with how things are working at your big company and it's a very rigid place or whatever, then fine. But I think if you ask people, do you think this is the best we could do? They probably go, probably not. This is really annoying. This is really annoying. There's red tape here. And I'm trying to do this. And this is always getting in the way. When there's enough motivation to make a change, I think people should be open to exploring different things.

And you don't need to do it all wholesale all at once. There could be one small thing or one team or one like experimental place of the business where you can do some of these things and not try to change it all at once because that's probably not going to work either. So I do think it's possible. I think Amazon's a good example of this in its own way. The two-peats-a-team thing, is that a pretty realistic thing? Maybe you want a two-peats-a-team like when we were there.

Okay. So two-peats-a-teams, that's pretty radical. Yeah, I love it. That's a pretty radical principle. And the fact that meetings, this is all the mythology here. meetings don't start until people sit down and read the same thing together or whatever these things are. These are highly unusual things. And they worked there. I mean, these things can work if they make sense.

And I think a lot of things big companies do don't really make sense, but they do them because they do amount of momentum and habit and history. So I think some of these things absolutely can apply. No question. Read that book, though, Maverick. I think you guys, it thoroughly motivated us. And David, I refer to it all the time, is giving us permission to try new unusual things.

So the point he just made goes back to, I think, the founder versus the CEO mentality because I think to make radical changes, you actually have to be either the founder or the owner of the company. You have to be the principal, not an agent. And when I was living in Amazon in 2020, Bezos was still the CEO. I mean, the company was running well, but then I came into Google, which was run by an agent. Sundar was still his hired person who grew through the ranks, right?

And you could just feel that kind of indecisiveness from the CEO. It's just, some people just can't inject risk because they are not to write kind of people maybe for that. And for the big company to adopt something of those radical things, you can necessarily do it like at the middle management level. It has to start from the top, where are the principal is? I think that's mostly true. Nadella at Microsoft is a great example though of someone who Microsoft is an incredible place right now.

It feels like an incredible place, special place. They're doing some radically different things. They've really shaken it up over there. And that's him. I mean, he has a team, but like he feels more like a founder to me, actually, even though he clearly wasn't, then Balmer. Balmer wasn't a founder, by the way. But he was also there from like really early on, wasn't he? Balmer? Yeah, probably like late seven years or something.

Yeah, but anyway, he seemed closer, like you'd think he was closer to Gates in a sense, but really like he ran a more like a traditional executive. And I think Nadella is running it like a founder, actually. And I think it's possible. It's rare though, I think quite rare. And you don't see many founder-led companies. I think Airbnb is a good example of a founder-led company still. I know Joe left, but I'm blanking on the other guy's name. Brian Chesky? Yeah, Brian.

Brian's still there, obviously, and one of the best CEOs in the business, I think. And founders also. But I think the reason he's so good is because he's a founder still. And he can push things that no one else could, who if someone else was just simply hired, there's a point where if you know your job, like his job's on the line, I guess the board could remove him, but his job's probably not on the line. A hired CEO's job is on the line in a different way.

And I think that the founder just has that permission. I don't know what it was like in Amazon or what it's like today, but I can imagine Jeff was never afraid to make a really unusual call when, you know, I forget the guy's name who replaced him, but. And did you see? Yeah, even though he was probably really damn good, he's still in the back of his mind. It's like, can I do this? If I love to do this, Jeff was probably never like, am I allowed to do this? Is that what I'm doing this? Right.

But the crazy idea of speaking, fingo, the kitchen counter, you know, he had, right? Yeah. One last question in this space is, so you're famous, like 37 signals is a famous calm company. How do people go about finding such companies? And there's also on the flip side, there's now because it has become kind of like trendy to be a calm company. There's a lot of companies saying, we are that sort of a company.

How do you go about when you're interviewing with them, identifying that are they really a calm company? Or is it just like lip service? Well, I mean, I know someone's been trying to compile a list, but people have asked us to make a list, but it's so hard to verify. I would ask if you're looking to work somewhere and they profess to be this way, or even if they don't, I would just ask some basic questions, like what happens if it's six o'clock in the Thursday and I need to go home?

What do they say? Do I have to work weekends? Do I have to work nights? You know, things like that. Can I turn off all my notifications during the day and just like heads down or like, how many meetings am I going to be pulled into? Like, you can ask all these questions to get a sense of what it's like, but I would actually talk to other people who work at that company. That's where the real truth is, not from like the person you're asking, but people who work there?

And it should be on balance because there's always stressful moments where it can be stressful even at the calmest places. But on balance, how does it feel to work here? What does it feel like to work? What kind of pressures are we under? That kind of thing. Those are the questions I would probably ask of someone who works or any of you can find people on LinkedIn, you know, and Glassdoor. I don't know. Glassdoor have people who work there or only people who don't work there anymore.

Probably because both, but then I don't know if you were able to contact them. I see. So yeah, I used LinkedIn and say, hey, I'm thinking about working here. I would love to off the record, have a sense of what it's like to work there and talk about it. And actually, people are surprisingly good at responding to this kind of requests. Oh, actually, any kind of requests. When I actually love to comment on your post, you wanted to do this podcast. I was like, this is probably like 20% chance.

I will give it a reply, right? But then you're like, yeah, sure. And yeah, now we are recording this. So yeah, people do get back and like share their experience and also, for sure. So I want to talk about all of the content that you publish. I mean, obviously like we said in the beginning, we discovered you through your books. You have four or five books at this point, like blog posts. There is probably hundreds of thousands of millions of words that the UNDHH have published so far, right?

Yeah, I know. It's weird. Books is the topic that I'm really interested in because we are working on the book, how to start a podcast. When you write a book, how do you decide if you are going to make it a free book like you had the Get in the Real, I think was a free PDF? Versus if you actually work with a publisher, do the whole thing and editing, paperbacks, hard covers, whatever. How do you think about that?

But not, I guess, from your perspective, where are you at right now, but more from perspective where maybe like folks like us right now and when you were like 15, 20 years ago. When we were getting real, a big part of it, I think we looked maybe into do some traditional publishing, but it was going to be like a year, it's so slow. And I think we got frustrated by that. We're just going to write ourselves and then just publishes a PDF next week.

The idea that you could just get this out next week was just a wonderful, special thing. And we didn't know anything and no one really knew who we were. So we wouldn't have gotten a good publishing deal anyway and it just didn't make sense, right? And then after we did that and we became more well known and we had a more of a track record, we were able to take that.

We sold, I don't know, how many copies of getting real, hundreds of thousands of copies, ultimately I think, probably, and we took that to the publisher when we were pitching rework and we said, look, we've got a following. We've got this big of a list, this many people felt read our blog. We've sold this many copies of this PDF thing. We've got this many customers like people know who we are.

We want to go bigger in terms of publishing because we want to have some degree of like seriousness behind a hardcover book from a big publisher. You've got that in your hand. You can share that. Someone gave that to you, right? So there's just something about that that you can't beat still. And we wanted something like that that could land on someone's desk and make a thud. We just wanted that.

So with rework and remote and it doesn't have to be crazy or if we did that, shape up, we did another PDF. We also have a paperback, these are print on demand and we have a free version of that as well. That would never have been a mass market kind of book. It's much more niche things. I think like niche things like that feel pretty good as a PDF or an online publication of some sort.

But if you want to go mass market, I think you're going to want to have some leverage behind you to do that because it's already hard enough. Publishers don't really do much for you. They make the book, that's kind of it. You're on your own for promoting it. They get it into bookstores but you're on your own to promote the book really. And so you've got to have enough of an audience to even promote the book. And if you don't sell many copies, you're off their radar pretty fast.

So I would recommend starting with a sell published thing. And then if you do well with that, you can parlay that into something more real in a sense, more physical by going with a major publisher. But it's still slow. It's a very slow process. And it's frustrating, really frustrating. So the very last topic we want to touch today, which is actually not a very easy topic. So with you guys, I think have been very contrarian in general, right? I was skimming rework yesterday.

I think for the fourth time I read the book yesterday morning. And there are lots of things there where that are selling me very kind of strong language. You take a stance, right? And I think you talk about that on your podcast as well, where basically you just have to make some people kind of unhappy if you have to, right? And I think it's really really well. The specific question I want to ask is like, there are some topics that may not be related to business at all.

I'm referring to DHH's recent post about the pandemic. I think it was called, but what if you're wrong? So I personally actually agree with every single word he said there. I'm like, oh my god, finally, somebody's actually saying what he said, somebody of his profile, I'm like, I can't believe this. It just goes so much against half the population in the United States, right? But then that half the population in the United States might get really upset about this.

He's like, who is he to say like these things? This is all fake or whatever, right? You can make lots of arguments there. So that thing doesn't have to be published, but he still like sent it out, right? Because that's what he thinks. So I'm curious if you get any, oh, if you've ever had any kind of flag for these kind of things that I've never been to, you know what I mean? For sure. Well, first of all, that's on David's personal blog. So his hate world thing is not the company thing.

It's his own personal thoughts. So he sends that out. Like we wouldn't publish that on basecamp.com or whatever it says personally. So everyone's free to say whatever they want here, right? But yeah, we've taken some strong stands. I mean, the biggest one was a few years ago where we said, we're not doing politics at work. We're not talking politics at work and a third of the company ended up leaving over that. That's a big thing, right? A huge thing.

It was very hard, but we felt like it was just fundamentally important decision to make because we didn't enjoy working at this place anymore. We didn't enjoy how everything got dragged through these other topics, which we just did not feel had anything to do with work. And some people disagreed. Some people felt like it's all about work. And, you know, okay, are all about the world and the world is part of work and how can we separate the things? And I understand that perspective. I do.

But we made a decision that that wasn't the kind of company we wanted to run and people made a decision about where they wanted to be and people left and people stayed and we've hired a bunch of new people since and other people have gone on to do other things, wonderful things and work at other places and great, good for them and everything's fine. People are allowed to do whatever they want. These are adults who can make their own decisions. And they did. And I don't blame them for it at all.

So this is about like making principled stands. It's very important to us and we do it around privacy. We don't do target advertising. On other people's platforms, we don't use personal data for any reason for advertising especially, even if we could grow the business. We're not doing it that way. We're just simply not doing it. So there are some lines in the sand. And for us, like we want to enjoy work. We want to focus on the task at hand.

We want to hone our craft, we want to talk about the work. There's so much that we need to do together to work on these things to build the things we want to build that we just don't want to be distracted during the day by anything else. And it's not that these issues, political issues, social issues aren't important, but you can have those discussions outside of work. You don't need to have them at work. We're going to work while we're here at work. And that was the decision we made.

And it was very controversial and the whole thing. I'm happy we made it. We should have made it sooner. And I'd make the same decision again, even though it was very difficult and painful at the time. As far as David's point, like David has his own personal blog. He's going to make his own statements. He's going to make his own points. They're not published internally. They're not published on our corporate sites. They're his own opinions and that's totally fine.

And we're totally comfortable with that. And you'd have to ask David's very, very comfortable sharing his personal points of view on pretty much everything. I'm a lot less like that much more private in terms of my personal points of view. I just don't need to share them with other people. It's not like what I'm interested in doing. Many of them I don't even agree with myself on. I'm just constantly wondering what I really think. I don't know what I think on about a lot of things.

I'm really unsure. And so I tend not to write about those kinds of things. So yeah, it's cool. I mean, he's a lot to do whatever he wants. And that's fun. And everyone here too, a personal blog or Twitter or whatever they can see whatever they want. And I'll see some of our employees, like obviously posting things that are very much at odds with someone else who works here. And that's fine. Everyone's cool with that. Because it's not in the middle of work.

It's outside work, which is their lives. That's fine. Cool. All right. Jason, well, thanks a lot for coming here. This is great. It's really fun. We better get people to find you. On Twitter, you know, you can link this stuff up. But we have our own podcast called the rework podcast. Which you can find on your podcast things, podcast apps. Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, of course. And my own newsletters at world.hay.com slash Jason.

And then check out Basecamp and Hey and 37 signals and all the other places that you can probably link up. And then emails, well, you can put my email address in the notes as well. Yeah, we'll certainly do. And we'll also link all of the books. And you can mention a couple of books. Thank you. Yeah, it was a great pleasure to come here. It was really fun. Great questions. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm happy to do it again sometime.