Latest / Founder Mode / When Enough is Enough with Jason Fried

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When Enough is Enough with Jason Fried · Founder Mode

• 0:00
  I, I just don't think of this stuff as software.
• 0:02
  It happens to be software because that's the medium of
• 0:05
  computers. You have to tell these things to
• 0:07
  do things and it's software. But I really think of them as
• 0:09
  objects, our products as objects.
• 0:12
  And yeah, they're, they're flattened because they're on a,
• 0:15
  a flat screen. But I think that that does come
• 0:18
  through in the way that they're built and the way that they
• 0:20
  work. And I, I do think it's a
• 0:23
  different approach than than many people in the industry, at
• 0:26
  least that I've seen. And there's also this other
• 0:29
  thing I tend to try to ignore everyone else's work actually
• 0:32
  in, in, I, I don't want to pay too much attention to it.
• 0:35
  And there I have seen it and it's, there's a lot of great
• 0:38
  stuff. Obviously the industry is full
• 0:40
  of incredibly well built software, but I, I don't obsess
• 0:45
  over it or use it or look at it very often because I don't want
• 0:48
  to be influenced by it. And I don't want that to be sort
• 0:51
  of the the thing that's in my mind.
• 0:53
  I'd rather think about great architecture or a great iece of
• 0:56
  furniture or iece of art, or a garden or something that is more
• 1:02
  physical. Again, to inspire me to make
• 1:05
  things that can't be physical but should feel like they are.
• 1:23
  You're listening to Founder mode.
• 1:24
  Where we talk to builders who question the default
• 1:26
  assumptions. Today's episode's about building
• 1:28
  things that last without turning your company into a machine that
• 1:32
  you hate running. And it also is about what
• 1:34
  happens when you treat software like something you want to touch
• 1:36
  and use every single day. Our guest is Jason Free, Co
• 1:39
  founder of 37 Signals at the makers of Base Camp in Hay.
• 1:43
  And they just launched Fizzy, which is their take on Kanban
• 1:46
  and a refreshing look at how you can build software if it doesn't
• 1:49
  have a decade old code. Base, should we talk to Jason?
• 1:52
  Let's do it. Jason, welcome to Founder Mode,
• 2:06
  excited to talk to you. Yeah, it's great to be here.
• 2:08
  Thanks for having me on. Yeah, we do the show called
• 2:10
  Founder Mode and we talked to a bunch of founders that have
• 2:12
  built really amazing things over the years.
• 2:15
  And, and you've you've had many hits and, and, and the biggest
• 2:20
  of which is base camp. But there's a pretty exciting
• 2:23
  new product you just launched and I would love for you to
• 2:25
  share that with folks and talk a little bit about it.
• 2:27
  I'm I'm an early user, I'm a big fan.
• 2:29
  So maybe you can tell us more about Fizzy?
• 2:32
  I mean, Fizzy is basically our take on Kanban, which is an old
• 2:36
  idea, which I think stems back to the 40s or 50s actually.
• 2:40
  It's been around for, for a long, long, long time.
• 2:43
  And then I think it was 2011 when Trello came out and kind of
• 2:46
  brought that to more of the, you know, technical masses or the
• 2:50
  project management side of things.
• 2:52
  And it, it, Trello is and was a great product, but it's sort of
• 2:56
  like most things that have been around for that long have sort
• 2:59
  of become a lot more than just the fundamental basics of what
• 3:02
  makes Kanban a really good idea. And so we want to make our own
• 3:08
  version of what we think Kanban should be, which is a similar
• 3:12
  concept, but also has some new twists and a simpler approach
• 3:17
  and a fresher thing. And it's not burdened by decades
• 3:21
  now of of legacy extra stuff that gets added to products.
• 3:24
  So Fizzy's our take on that. And we use it for tracking bugs
• 3:28
  here at 37 Signals. I'm also using it to like manage
• 3:32
  my family, you know, stuff. My wife and I are using it to
• 3:35
  deal with stuff around the house.
• 3:37
  And a lot of people are using it for all sorts of reasons.
• 3:39
  So it's not just about software. It's certainly not even tailored
• 3:42
  for bug tracking or software development, but it certainly
• 3:45
  can be used that way. But it can be used for all sorts
• 3:47
  of things. Basically, if you use To Do List
• 3:49
  or to want to track anything, Kanban Style tracker is a really
• 3:53
  good approach, and Fizzy's probably one of the simplest and
• 3:57
  I'd say most vibrant, playful, hopefully joyous versions to do
• 4:01
  that. Yeah, I think the thing that I
• 4:03
  noticed is just the fluidity of the UI.
• 4:05
  Like I remember like, you know, so I've used obviously Trello
• 4:07
  and then Asana and it's just the number of things you have to
• 4:10
  click. And then, you know, as a the
• 4:12
  technologist, right, you feel it loading, right?
• 4:13
  It's doing work. Like it doesn't feel like
• 4:16
  Fizzy's working. Like it feels like it's just,
• 4:18
  it's just, you know, you're kind of almost thinking and doing and
• 4:20
  it's just kind of like that fluidity.
• 4:22
  And I'm curious like where that work lived in 37 Signals before
• 4:26
  Fizzy? Like was it in base camp and you
• 4:28
  guys were using sort of features inside of there or was there
• 4:30
  something else that you guys were using to track bugs?
• 4:33
  Yeah. So first, the fluidity in the,
• 4:36
  in the sort of responsiveness and, and just sort of the way it
• 4:40
  works is, is really core to it and was a big effort to get it
• 4:46
  to just feel right and feel fast in the right places and make
• 4:51
  the, you know, the things you do all the time feel really good.
• 4:54
  Like the, the common touch points just felt great.
• 4:56
  You know that we've worked really hard on that and I'm glad
• 4:58
  that you noticed it. Before Physio, we used
• 5:01
  Basecamp's card tables, which is basically card tables are Kanban
• 5:05
  boards inside Basecamp. And Fizzy drew from that was
• 5:10
  inspired by that, but has a very different visual approach.
• 5:13
  The functionality is quite similar, but the, the way it
• 5:17
  works is quite different and the way it looks is certainly quite,
• 5:20
  quite different. And you know, what's interesting
• 5:23
  is with software, you know, in, in the world, most people pick a
• 5:28
  lot of things just for the way they look.
• 5:30
  You know, they pick clothes, they pick cars, they pick all
• 5:33
  sorts of things just for the way things look.
• 5:34
  They pick a house, they pick furniture this way.
• 5:37
  And so in the software world, it seems like everything kind of
• 5:39
  looks about the same. Unfortunately, that's kind of
• 5:41
  what's happened over the past 10 years.
• 5:43
  And we want to make products. We've always made products that
• 5:45
  look different, work different, but we want to make Fizzy feel
• 5:48
  vibrant and colorful and playful and fast and fluid, which is
• 5:53
  not, unfortunately, it's, it's not sort of the current norm.
• 5:56
  Everything's become sort of Gray and blue and light or dark mode
• 6:01
  and just kind of like very dour and, and one note.
• 6:05
  And so, you know, if you sign up for Fizzy, you'll see
• 6:08
  immediately that it feels like it's alive.
• 6:10
  And that's something we are aiming for as well.
• 6:12
  Yeah, I love I, I I think with all 37 signals products and I
• 6:16
  mentioned this to you when we when we first met that, you
• 6:18
  know, I'm, I'm also from Chicago and kind of was, was living and
• 6:21
  working there and, and kind of watching you guys blow up in the
• 6:24
  in the early base camp days. And there's, there is a
• 6:27
  joyfulness that is kind of comes through in a lot of the products
• 6:31
  that you've built. And, and, and there's a there's
• 6:34
  kind of a take that is what is everyone else doing?
• 6:37
  OK, we're not going to do that, which I think is I think it's
• 6:40
  great. And some people do that for the
• 6:42
  sake of it just to be different. But I think philosophically, you
• 6:46
  have some thoughts around like the choices you're making from a
• 6:50
  product and design perspective that are very intentional.
• 6:52
  I'd love for you to talk more about that.
• 6:54
  And you know, for this, you've done lots of interviews.
• 6:57
  So where there's where there's things you haven't shared
• 6:59
  before, insights that you have into how things are made
• 7:01
  beautiful and joyful. Like I'd love to hear more about
• 7:03
  that. Yeah.
• 7:04
  I mean, you know, part of it is we make tools that we use, we
• 7:08
  only make products that we use and we use these products all
• 7:10
  day long. So if you're going to be using a
• 7:12
  tool all day long and you're in front of this thing and it's
• 7:15
  with you, why not make it something that's has a little
• 7:19
  bit of joy in it has has a good feel to it is it makes you feel
• 7:22
  good about the tool itself. I mean, the tool has to be
• 7:25
  functional, has to work, but why not just make it feel good, look
• 7:29
  good? I mean, again, I tend to think
• 7:31
  of these things as if they were physical objects.
• 7:33
  If I had a physical object and I had to grip it a lot, I'd
• 7:36
  probably want some sort of really nice material or a little
• 7:40
  bit of knurling. So I had some grip depending on
• 7:42
  what it would be, but not too much because then it would like,
• 7:43
  you know, poke into your hand. You probably use like a weight
• 7:47
  bar or something with too much knurling and it's like it, it
• 7:49
  hurts, you know, you got to find the right amount of that.
• 7:52
  Or if you're going to use leather for, for a grip, like
• 7:55
  what kind of leather, you know, you, you want to think about
• 7:57
  these, these, these touch points.
• 7:59
  And that's how I tend to think about software is like, what
• 8:02
  would it feel like if it was a physical object?
• 8:04
  And if I had to hold this thing all day and work with this thing
• 8:07
  all day. At the end of the day, would I
• 8:09
  want to like put it down because I'm sick of it?
• 8:11
  Or would I be like, that was a great day's worth of work.
• 8:14
  I can't wait to pick this thing up again tomorrow.
• 8:17
  That's the mentality we try to bring to it.
• 8:19
  It doesn't always map 1 to one from a physical object to a
• 8:21
  virtual object. But conceptually, I just keep
• 8:25
  thinking, what if this was real? What if this was real?
• 8:29
  And that helps because I, I, I don't know, I mean, I, I can't
• 8:33
  speak. And it's, it's too, you can't
• 8:35
  say like the industry really, because it's, it's too broad.
• 8:38
  But I, I just don't think of this stuff as software.
• 8:41
  It happens to be software because that's the medium of
• 8:44
  computers. You have to tell these things to
• 8:45
  do things. And it's software, but I really
• 8:48
  think of them as objects, our products as objects.
• 8:51
  And yeah, they're, they're flattened because they're on a,
• 8:54
  a flat screen. But I think that that does come
• 8:57
  through in the way that they're built and the way that they
• 8:59
  work. And I, I do think it's a
• 9:01
  different approach than than many people in the industry, at
• 9:05
  least that I've seen. And there's also this other
• 9:08
  thing I tend to try to ignore everyone else's work actually
• 9:11
  in, in I, I don't want to pay too much attention to it.
• 9:14
  And there I have seen it and it's, there's a lot of great
• 9:17
  stuff. Obviously the industry is full
• 9:19
  of incredibly well built software, but I I don't obsess
• 9:24
  over it or use it or look at it very often because I don't want
• 9:27
  to be influenced by it and I don't want that to be sort of
• 9:30
  the the thing that's in my mind. I'd rather think about great
• 9:33
  architecture or a great piece of furniture or piece of art or a
• 9:38
  garden or something that is more physical.
• 9:41
  Again, to inspire me to make things that can't be physical
• 9:45
  but should feel like they are. Yeah, it's incredible.
• 9:49
  I think thinking back to like, you know, you guys have, hey,
• 9:52
  the calendar and e-mail and stuff and I'm guessing you run
• 9:54
  the company on that now, but 'cause you use stuff that you
• 9:57
  build and build stuff you use like if when you, what were you
• 9:59
  e-mail? So I worked an e-mail for like
• 10:01
  18 years, you know, ended up, you know, building Outlook on
• 10:03
  the mobile side. And what did you guys use
• 10:06
  before? Hey, like were you on Google or
• 10:08
  were you on Microsoft? And you know, the company was
• 10:10
  been around for a while. What were you?
• 10:11
  Which e-mail were you using, or? Something more native IMAP
• 10:14
  internally, we don't send any emails.
• 10:16
  We use Basecamp internally exclusively for that stuff.
• 10:18
  But for the outside world, we use Gmail.
• 10:21
  So everyone of each of one of us have Gmail account.
• 10:24
  And like, Gmail's an incredible product.
• 10:25
  There's about a billion people using it.
• 10:27
  It's great, you know, but it's also not great.
• 10:29
  It's like, great. And then it's also not great.
• 10:32
  And to be in a tool like e-mail, which is what we also use all
• 10:36
  day because we communicate with people in the outside world all
• 10:38
  day, we're like, yeah, I don't want to use this tool anymore.
• 10:41
  I don't like this tool. This, this tool feels bare to
• 10:44
  me. It doesn't feel right to me.
• 10:46
  I, I, I don't want to pick it up every morning, you know, and,
• 10:49
  and that was one of the impetus for, for making something like,
• 10:52
  hey, although hay initially started out as, as actually an
• 10:55
  exploration to redo ACRM tool that we made years and years ago
• 10:59
  called high rise, but it turned into a full blown e-mail thing.
• 11:03
  And that's where that where hay was born.
• 11:05
  But as we use hay and as we use it today and hay on e-mail and
• 11:09
  on calendar, it again feels like something I want to ick U in the
• 11:12
  morning, which is not something most people would say about
• 11:15
  e-mail. Most people feel like email's a
• 11:17
  chore. It's a hassle.
• 11:18
  It's in the way. It's this thing you got to do
• 11:20
  that you don't want to deal with.
• 11:21
  I don't feel that way when I use hey.
• 11:23
  And so that's sort of the guiding light for us.
• 11:25
  It's like if we have to use it all day, it better be something
• 11:28
  we want to use and we want to feel good about using it and are
• 11:31
  excited to fire up in the morning and that's sort of what
• 11:34
  we're aiming. For yeah, I mean I saw you like
• 11:35
  you guys added like the kind of like year view to like the
• 11:38
  calendar, right? And like this, like it's just
• 11:40
  insane, like 'cause and you want to look at your year like you
• 11:42
  know, you like you want and it's very visual and like, and with
• 11:45
  the photos and stuff was kind. Of cool.
• 11:46
  That wasn't our idea, by the way.
• 11:47
  Someone else, I don't know if you saw like.
• 11:49
  But you gave them credit, which I thought was nice.
• 11:50
  Yeah, like someone else posted this thing, I'm like, that's a
• 11:52
  great idea. We should do that too.
• 11:54
  And and of course, yeah, it gave him some credit because he he
• 11:57
  deserves it. And it's it's also like, it's
• 11:59
  funny because we all used to have a long time ago would have
• 12:04
  like a big, huge paper calendar. My mom still does on the wall.
• 12:07
  My wife on the wall. We have to.
• 12:09
  So it's not even like a new idea, it's an old idea again.
• 12:11
  And there's a lot of good old ideas that like I love to bring
• 12:14
  back into the world because it's software, because there is
• 12:17
  something nice about having that big bird's eye view.
• 12:20
  And so that's essentially what this is.
• 12:22
  Do you? Do you think about the surface
• 12:23
  area of the future? Like are you, I don't know, you
• 12:26
  guys are famous for not having Rd. maps and taking a very
• 12:29
  different approach to how you build software, but and, and
• 12:31
  build the tools and the objects that you're creating, right.
• 12:34
  But when you, when you look at the, all the, the landscape from
• 12:37
  a tech perspective and the way that new interfaces continue,
• 12:40
  you know, we're, we're actually here in Las Vegas right now.
• 12:43
  We're at CES and there's, you know, there's so many new kind
• 12:46
  of ways to interact with software and technology now that
• 12:50
  are. I imagine you are thinking about
• 12:52
  the future and what that looks like and the kinds of
• 12:55
  interesting objects you can create when we aren't attached
• 12:57
  to the screen all the time and and can kind of look through our
• 13:00
  glasses or on our wrists. Like, how do you think about
• 13:02
  that stuff? Yeah, I still.
• 13:04
  Tend to look at, I look at my desk a lot actually, like my
• 13:09
  physical desk, you know, and I go like how do I organize stuff?
• 13:12
  How do most like they just make piles of things.
• 13:16
  Yeah. And I think it's really
• 13:18
  effective. Like I, I, I don't think they're
• 13:20
  bad. Like I've got a few piles on my
• 13:21
  desk and like, I should probably go through some of them.
• 13:24
  But like, you know, I will eventually.
• 13:25
  But I, I know when I put something down in that pile, I
• 13:28
  know, well, that's the bill pile or the pile of stuff.
• 13:30
  I really should deal with this other pile of stuff.
• 13:33
  Like, yeah, maybe later. I don't want to throw it out
• 13:36
  because I, I kind of probably need it, but it's not that
• 13:38
  important. And so you, you visual, you have
• 13:41
  this spatial orientation and visualization of like your, your
• 13:43
  space and you make piles. And so I, I look at stuff like
• 13:47
  that, like hey, has piles, 2 piles at the bottom of the
• 13:50
  screen, reply later. These are emails I need to reply
• 13:52
  later to and then emails called set aside, which are things like
• 13:56
  I need later. This is modeled exactly on like
• 13:59
  my desk, you know, and Basecamp 5, which we're working on now
• 14:02
  also has, they're really called stacks, not piles, but it
• 14:05
  doesn't matter. Stacks 2 stacks at the bottom as
• 14:08
  well it it sounds. Less like messy.
• 14:11
  It's yeah. It does stack sounds cleaner
• 14:13
  than piles. And then Fizzy has a a stack in
• 14:16
  the right corner, a stack in the left corner.
• 14:18
  So this this idea is now carried through three of our products
• 14:22
  and it came from just looking at a physical workspace and and
• 14:26
  going this isn't bad like in reality.
• 14:28
  You could have. You could literally see the
• 14:31
  piles digitally as well. I wonder you?
• 14:33
  Could there's a point though? I think just like here, here's
• 14:37
  what I love about the physical world that, that I'm trying to
• 14:39
  bring the software world. Like in the physical world, you,
• 14:41
  you have some sense of limits. You go like if I had 18 piles on
• 14:46
  my desk, that would like be a problem.
• 14:48
  Like I just, it wouldn't be right.
• 14:50
  It wouldn't feel right. It wouldn't feel manageable.
• 14:54
  You know, it, there'd be too many to discern.
• 14:56
  Like what was the difference between this one and that one?
• 14:58
  I am not totally sure anymore if there's two or three, I totally
• 15:01
  get it. And I can look at the topmost
• 15:02
  thing go, oh, those are bills, you know, whatever.
• 15:06
  And so the problem with the virtual world is there's no
• 15:08
  natural pushback in the virtual world.
• 15:10
  You can, like you said, you can make dozens of piles.
• 15:13
  And if you talk about like what Apple's doing with Vision Pro
• 15:16
  with spatial computing, and you can stack them all over in the
• 15:19
  anywhere right behind you, above you, below you.
• 15:22
  And like, I don't think that's actually, I don't think that's a
• 15:25
  human. I don't think that's human scale
• 15:29
  basically is what I would say. I, I think it is nice to have
• 15:32
  just a few. A few is something you can hold
• 15:34
  in your head. A few is something you can
• 15:36
  identify and that's enough. And so I do think it's important
• 15:40
  again to think physically, what would this be like physically?
• 15:44
  And if I could have an unlimited number of piles over the place,
• 15:47
  would that physically work? But the answer would be no.
• 15:49
  We live in a physical world. I think we're just, we, we,
• 15:52
  we're, we've evolved into a physical world.
• 15:54
  The software stuff is like brand new.
• 15:57
  Working on a piece of glass is like brand new.
• 15:59
  Like we are used to space and I think too much stuff in too many
• 16:04
  places, things get lost. A few things in the right
• 16:07
  places, things are organized. And I think that's how we we
• 16:09
  tend to kind of try to think about things.
• 16:12
  When you guys think about software that you use inside of
• 16:16
  37 signals today that's not built by your team, like is, is
• 16:20
  that one of the inspirations for like, wow, like we use this a
• 16:22
  lot or we pay a lot for it. I think maybe later we'll talk
• 16:25
  about the whole like AWS move off the cloud and you know, sort
• 16:27
  of thinks where you were spending a big bill.
• 16:29
  But I'm curious if there's other sort of like productivity or
• 16:32
  business software thing that fall in line with things that 37
• 16:35
  signals has been historically building where you're like, man,
• 16:37
  that's kind of on the something that I'm thinking about the hit
• 16:40
  list. Yeah, I mean, Gmail was one of
• 16:44
  those things, right? We're like, yeah, don't like
• 16:46
  this so much anymore. I mean, we use, we use GitHub,
• 16:49
  but I don't, we don't have any intention to make a like a
• 16:52
  GitHub thing, whatever git clone or something like that.
• 16:55
  Like it doesn't really, you know, we're, we're using some AI
• 16:58
  stuff now internally. We don't really have any
• 16:59
  interest in building, you know, an AI competitor.
• 17:04
  We, we wouldn't know what to do with that, you know, so we're
• 17:07
  totally comfortable using external tools.
• 17:09
  I, I use a variety of different tools that are just great tools
• 17:13
  and I just use them because they're great.
• 17:14
  And I have no interest in building those because they're
• 17:16
  not something we feel like we can improve on.
• 17:18
  I think it has to be something we're not just going to build
• 17:20
  something we can simulate and like achieve parity with
• 17:24
  something else. Like we have to have a point of
• 17:25
  view that is, oh, we can do this better because this is missing
• 17:29
  this, that and the other thing, or I don't enjoy using this
• 17:33
  thing. And Fizzy's like a great example
• 17:35
  of that. Like we have Kanban and
• 17:37
  Basecamp. There are other great Kanban
• 17:40
  esque tools, but there's a lot of stuff that's also in the way.
• 17:43
  Like base camp is is it has a lot of things.
• 17:46
  It has messages, it has chat, it has scheduling, it has Kanban as
• 17:49
  to do's and for complete full projects, it's perfect to have
• 17:53
  all those things. But if you just want to organize
• 17:54
  a few things, Kanban's enough. And I don't have to like make my
• 17:58
  way like through all the other stuff just to get to that, which
• 18:02
  is why Fizzy is a stand alone Kanban style approach.
• 18:05
  And, and so we have to have a point of view, I would say, in
• 18:08
  order to go in there and decide that we're going to put in the
• 18:12
  effort to build something because it's a lot of work.
• 18:15
  And you know, people, it's, it's easier maybe than ever in some
• 18:18
  ways, but it's still always a lot of work to build a really
• 18:22
  good product from scratch. That's not just a demo, that's
• 18:26
  not just a vibe coded proof of concept, but like a full blown
• 18:31
  product that that the public has to use, that has to deal with
• 18:35
  all the contingencies and all the edge cases and all the
• 18:38
  things that people run into that that takes a lot of time to do
• 18:42
  right. And so we have to make sure that
• 18:43
  it's worth it for us to to do that.
• 18:44
  And to make it worth it, we need to have, we need to be bringing
• 18:47
  something new to that. Did you feel?
• 18:51
  Like the bar for Fizzy was higher today to bring that out
• 18:54
  versus previous products because of that exact nature of like
• 18:57
  this notion of like what kind of, you know, 37 signals has
• 19:01
  reached this kind of level of like, man, people are expecting
• 19:03
  this level of Polish and completeness.
• 19:05
  And did you feel like, you know, this product required more work
• 19:08
  than sort of previous ones to kind of get to the point where
• 19:10
  you click release? It's a good question.
• 19:13
  It took a long time, took like 18 months to build this, but not
• 19:17
  because of what you see now, but because of all the radical
• 19:22
  iterations we came up with early.
• 19:24
  It took us a while to find the right balance on this one.
• 19:29
  If we would build it over it right now, I think it would have
• 19:31
  taken six months instead of 18 months, you know, to get it just
• 19:35
  right. But we, we've gone through a
• 19:36
  bunch of iterations. I think there is, there is an
• 19:39
  expectation of, of high fidelity these days.
• 19:42
  And we also wanted to up our own game and, and everything we do,
• 19:46
  we want to make it better than the last thing.
• 19:47
  And so a lot of the ideas in Physi are now making their way
• 19:50
  into base Camp 5. And so if something's going to
• 19:53
  make it into base camp, it's got to be better than what we have.
• 19:56
  And so that was sort of base camp's a pretty high bar.
• 19:58
  We want to make sure that we made it better than that.
• 20:00
  And then we had new ideas we want to explore, and there's new
• 20:02
  tech that we can use. And we just want to keep like
• 20:07
  delighting ourselves and making the thing.
• 20:09
  And so we just kind of kept add some more color.
• 20:12
  Let's let's add some more animate, let's make this bounce
• 20:14
  a little bit like let's make this more fun to interact with.
• 20:17
  And it just kind of kept building on itself.
• 20:20
  So I wouldn't say that there's like a bar or an expectation or
• 20:24
  necessarily trying to meet, but there is an implicit like pride
• 20:30
  in the work that we're doing. And we want to impress
• 20:32
  ourselves. I mean, mostly.
• 20:36
  And we want to be like, Oh yeah, that's all, let's do that.
• 20:39
  That's that's cool. Let's do that.
• 20:40
  Let's, let's make this good for us.
• 20:43
  And we know if we make it good for us, it's going to be good
• 20:44
  for others too. But we want to really impress
• 20:47
  ourselves first with like what we can do and what we can pull
• 20:50
  off and how we can make something come together.
• 20:52
  And that that's really ultimately we're the audience at
• 20:55
  the end of the day. You have kind of famously talked
• 20:59
  about how you do not think about or really like the idea of
• 21:03
  running a business and more more think about kind of, you know,
• 21:08
  creating things, making products and bringing them into the
• 21:11
  world. Even in the way you talk about
• 21:12
  it right now, you're you're kind of that theme is very present.
• 21:16
  This show is called founder mode and, and kind of talks to
• 21:20
  founders and, and, and bodies that I don't know if you read,
• 21:23
  read the Paul Graham essay and the Brian Chesky stuff and it's
• 21:26
  like kind of 996 in every detail, really obsessive.
• 21:29
  I'm sitting next to like the, the prototypical kind of case
• 21:33
  study of that. I, I just, I, I kind of enjoy
• 21:38
  hearing you and, and the other interviews you've been in the
• 21:41
  talk that you gave that I attended.
• 21:42
  There's this general sense of like, we're, we're not, we're
• 21:47
  not gonna operate that way. We're not gonna do the grind
• 21:50
  until you collapse approach. And you know, I'd love for you
• 21:54
  to talk about more of your philosophy of work and culture
• 21:57
  and people and how how you guys get things done at 37 signals
• 22:01
  'cause I do think it's quite different.
• 22:02
  Yeah. Well, for us like about 40 hours
• 22:05
  a week is enough. So there's no 996 thing or
• 22:08
  whatever that is. Is that the thing 9969 AM to?
• 22:11
  9:00 PM Six days a week. Yeah, No.
• 22:13
  No 9:00 to 5:00-ish right? An 840 hour a week is enough.
• 22:18
  Sometimes it's 45, it can be 50 sometimes if we're like in some
• 22:21
  crunch mode things were launching like.
• 22:23
  But roughly about 40 hours a week is more than enough time.
• 22:27
  In fact, nobody works fully 8 hour a day anyway.
• 22:29
  Like you don't really work that long.
• 22:32
  You might if you get 4 good hours in a day really, you know,
• 22:36
  there's other things you're doing too which aren't like work
• 22:39
  in the same way as you might think about like a deep work
• 22:42
  session. But 40 hours is plenty per
• 22:45
  person. It also keeps you honest, like
• 22:47
  you, you don't have time to waste.
• 22:49
  You know, I, I don't know what people are doing from 9:00 to
• 22:51
  9:00 six days a week. Like certainly they're wasting a
• 22:53
  lot of time. That's a lot of extra time that
• 22:56
  I think is unnecessary to spend on doing something.
• 22:58
  There's also diminishing returns.
• 23:00
  At some point, you're just wearing yourself out.
• 23:01
  You're not creative or thoughtful enough.
• 23:03
  You haven't gotten enough rest or big into making sure.
• 23:05
  Like I can't make sure people sleep.
• 23:07
  I'm not like that. But we encourage it.
• 23:09
  You know, I get, I get a full night's sleep, you know, 8 plus
• 23:12
  hours a night. Like it's important.
• 23:14
  I think very important. Not only do I think I know it's
• 23:17
  not even, it's not even opinion. It's just like science at that
• 23:20
  point, you know? But yeah, I mean, we, we, we
• 23:25
  care, we work hard in the time that we have and we, we think a
• 23:29
  lot about what we're doing and what we're not doing.
• 23:31
  I think that's the biggest thing is like when you, when you're
• 23:34
  very deliberate about what you don't do, you find out that you
• 23:37
  actually end up, end up having a lot of time to do the things you
• 23:40
  want to do versus never be able to get to the things you want to
• 23:43
  do because you're doing a bunch of stuff that you don't want to
• 23:45
  do or don't have to do or shouldn't be doing.
• 23:47
  So we're, we're careful about that too.
• 23:49
  And when you do that, 40 hours is plenty of time.
• 23:52
  I do, I mean to the founder mode stuff like I do pay attention to
• 23:55
  a lot of things, but I also very hands off as well because you,
• 24:01
  you can't. I mean, I, this is my take.
• 24:04
  Like you need to care a lot about some of the things, but
• 24:08
  you can't care a lot about all the things because first of all,
• 24:13
  you just can't, you don't have enough bandwidth personally to
• 24:16
  do that. And also, I think when you're
• 24:18
  micromanaging people, that's what that basically means is
• 24:21
  when you care a lot about everything you're micromanaging
• 24:24
  and then people can't do, they don't grow.
• 24:27
  So then you're the bottleneck. And I, I don't think that that's
• 24:30
  healthy at all. I think you need to really care
• 24:32
  about key details. And I, I care a lot about those.
• 24:36
  Depending on what we're doing, there might be, you know, 15% of
• 24:39
  the things are like really, really important to me.
• 24:41
  And I want to make sure that we get that stuff out the door.
• 24:43
  That's just right. Certain interactions, certain
• 24:45
  flows, onboarding, the way something feels, the way
• 24:49
  something looks, the the interaction, all that stuff like
• 24:51
  I'm paying a very close attention to that, unlike the
• 24:53
  high target, high value target items, let's call it.
• 24:57
  And then there's other things that you just want people to
• 24:59
  figure out on their own and like make sure that they're proud of
• 25:01
  the work and they care about that stuff.
• 25:03
  And you might be an editor and might say, hey, you know, I'm
• 25:05
  not thrilled with the way this is, but I'm not going to tell
• 25:08
  you how to do it. I'm just not thrilled with it.
• 25:11
  Maybe you might want to try another thing.
• 25:12
  Here's what's kind of feels a little sluggish or something.
• 25:14
  Let them figure it out. Otherwise, you're the
• 25:17
  bottleneck. You're the pain in the ass.
• 25:19
  People are then are limited by your involvement.
• 25:22
  And I don't think that that's ultimately a healthy thing.
• 25:27
  So yeah, you need to drive. You know, at the end of the day,
• 25:30
  you can make the final calls for a lot of things.
• 25:33
  But for a lot of things, I think you want other people to be
• 25:35
  making these calls. So that's at least my point of
• 25:37
  view on it. I do believe that founder LED
• 25:40
  companies typically make better things.
• 25:44
  Not always, but typically I think it's great when you see
• 25:48
  people who've been around the business, who started the
• 25:49
  business and they're still running the thing.
• 25:51
  Now, I'm biased of course, to your point about running a
• 25:54
  business, like I don't, I actually don't.
• 25:56
  I maybe used to like business more, I don't know in the early
• 25:59
  days. But to me business is like
• 26:01
  business is the envelope. I'm not that excited about the
• 26:04
  envelope. I'm excited with the letter
• 26:05
  inside. And the letter inside, to me are
• 26:08
  the products. Like a letter's a product.
• 26:10
  The envelope is just like what you have to put around it so you
• 26:13
  can send it somewhere. And to me, the business is sort
• 26:16
  of the envelope and it's like it needs to be there and it should
• 26:19
  be a good one. It shouldn't have a bunch of
• 26:20
  holes in it and, you know, fall apart and be flimsy.
• 26:22
  Like it's got to be solid. But I care more about the letter
• 26:25
  I think. The thing that's embedded in
• 26:27
  that, and I know you've written and talked about this before, is
• 26:29
  this notion of optionality. Like all my previous businesses
• 26:32
  were venture backed for 25 years.
• 26:33
  And so the current one we're working on is bootstrapped.
• 26:35
  And a lot of people ask like, oh, why don't you go take money?
• 26:38
  You have all these investors you can go, you know, hit, hit the,
• 26:40
  you know, hit the bank again kind of thing.
• 26:41
  It's pretty easy to go get that first check if you've done it a
• 26:43
  few times and been reasonably successful.
• 26:46
  And it's like, it's not, it's just the, it is the optionality.
• 26:49
  It's like you don't have a boss. You can pick the customers you
• 26:51
  work with, you can pick what decisions you work on, who you
• 26:53
  hire. And it's, and it's this, I'm
• 26:55
  curious, your stage like where you have run the same business
• 26:58
  for so many years and you still have like arguably probably more
• 27:02
  optionality than almost any founder out there because of
• 27:05
  where the business is in its place and like how those choices
• 27:07
  are. And like what sort of
• 27:09
  optionality would you say the last, you know, year or two have
• 27:13
  versus like those first couple years when you guys started the
• 27:15
  company? Like has has that optionality
• 27:17
  changed or you're sort of the impact that optionality has on
• 27:20
  your day-to-day changed? Yeah, I mean the.
• 27:22
  It's essentially always been the same, but the, but the truth,
• 27:25
  like the the truth, if you look at it like literally is that in
• 27:29
  the first few years, no one knew who we were.
• 27:31
  So like, yeah, we had all the options in the world, but like,
• 27:34
  who was going to give us any anything, right?
• 27:36
  So the only option we had was to like make it work.
• 27:40
  Now that we've made it work and we're successful in making
• 27:43
  Oregon been doing it for 26 years now, we have more options.
• 27:47
  One is to continue to do it the way we want to do it, which is
• 27:49
  what we're doing independence. But we could raise a bunch of
• 27:51
  money. I'm sure we could sell the
• 27:52
  business, we could acquire other businesses.
• 27:54
  There's like more We we have more options now because we have
• 27:58
  a track record, we have a history, we have money.
• 28:01
  People want what we have. All that stuff.
• 28:04
  Year one, no one wanted what we had because we had nothing.
• 28:07
  No one would give us any money because we didn't have a track
• 28:10
  record. Like all the things, right?
• 28:12
  So we, we've grown more in that way, but we've maintained it by
• 28:16
  remaining independent. We don't have a board.
• 28:20
  We do technically have an investor and that Jeff Bezos
• 28:23
  bought a piece of the company, but the money didn't go into
• 28:26
  the, into the, the business that went to David and I, this is a
• 28:30
  number of years ago. He doesn't have any power over
• 28:33
  the company. He can't make any decisions.
• 28:35
  He's a minority investor, but we're fully independent.
• 28:40
  We decide everything and we do what we want to do, how we want
• 28:43
  to do it. And if we decide to sell the
• 28:44
  business one day, that'll be our decision.
• 28:46
  And no one can say they that we can't do that if we want, we
• 28:49
  don't want to do this, but if we ever want to go IPO, that'd be
• 28:51
  our decision. No one can tell us we couldn't
• 28:53
  do that except like the SEC or whatever the regulations are,
• 28:55
  that kind of stuff. I, I like, I like having that
• 28:58
  kind of optionality. We can do whatever we could also
• 29:00
  to shut the business down if we'd like done.
• 29:02
  We don't want to sell it. We don't want to do any more.
• 29:04
  We could do that too, which would be an insane thing to do.
• 29:06
  But like we could do that, you know, like nobody would be like
• 29:09
  you got to take the money out because it's not like you got to
• 29:11
  pay investors. But we don't have to do any of
• 29:13
  those things. And I mean some of those things
• 29:16
  wouldn't be prudent to do. It'd be silly, just like shut
• 29:18
  the business down, but like we could do it.
• 29:20
  And I just like that there's things that we could do even if
• 29:23
  we would never ever do them. I that gives me a sense of of
• 29:28
  freedom. It's hard to explain the why
• 29:30
  that's valuable to do things you would never do.
• 29:34
  But I guess deeply embedded in that is this idea that knowing
• 29:39
  that nobody can tell us what to do is just, for me conference
• 29:44
  inspiring, even though materially it doesn't mean a
• 29:48
  whole lot in many cases, but just knowing there's no,
• 29:53
  someone's not gonna go. Yeah, But, you know, you just
• 29:55
  can't do that. I just like to.
• 29:56
  I like knowing that that's not there.
• 29:59
  Yeah. The.
• 30:00
  The, the values thing is very interesting 'cause my sense of,
• 30:04
  of you and, and not having met David, but you know, his writing
• 30:08
  and, and his, his kind of stances on things.
• 30:10
  Both of you seem like you have very strong points of view and,
• 30:13
  and strong a strong kind of compass as to where you want,
• 30:17
  want to go. You know, when you think about
• 30:19
  the values that have gotten 37 signals to where it is and some
• 30:22
  of these choices that you've made that have given you that
• 30:25
  kind of optionality. I'm just curious.
• 30:27
  Like there's probably been many moments where you made decisions
• 30:32
  that cost you money that made the business less profitable,
• 30:35
  grow less, be, you know, less exciting to outside investors
• 30:39
  and people that would be pushing you and be your kind of the,
• 30:43
  the, the, the board, the outside investors, the folks that are in
• 30:46
  charge of you that you're saying that you're glad that you don't
• 30:49
  have. How would you kind of articulate
• 30:52
  the, the position that you've taken to make choices that are
• 30:56
  inherently yours and ultimately the values that underpin those
• 31:00
  when it comes to the future of 37 signals?
• 31:03
  You know, you launched a product that wasn't a subscription and
• 31:06
  you know, that wasn't a huge money maker, right?
• 31:07
  So how do you think about choices like that?
• 31:09
  Are you going to make more choices like that?
• 31:11
  You know, given how values driven you guys are?
• 31:14
  Yeah, I think it's actually just become a lot more fun to do
• 31:18
  weird things because I mean, we, we've made our money, we're
• 31:24
  we're financially independent or profitable business have been
• 31:28
  every year for 26 years or whatever, it's been 27.
• 31:31
  I think like we've done well. We are, we've done beyond well.
• 31:37
  And so we kind of feel like there's this in a sense, almost
• 31:40
  an obligation to screw around and to do things that nobody
• 31:46
  would give us permission to do and to do things that are not
• 31:49
  financially prudent. It, you know, like Fizzy's also
• 31:54
  open source, like that's kind of a weird thing to do is to sell a
• 31:57
  SAS tool and also say you can have it for free.
• 31:59
  Actually, if you want to install it yourself, it's totally free.
• 32:01
  Like I would say that on paper, that's a bad business decision.
• 32:06
  If I was just looking at it in terms of how do you maximize
• 32:09
  revenue, depends on how you guys look.
• 32:12
  At it, No. I don't look at it that way, but
• 32:14
  like if I was to look at it from the outside like like to to your
• 32:20
  question like this is something like an investor would look at
• 32:23
  this business and go where's the massive growth?
• 32:26
  Like you guys? Yeah, we're we're not growing
• 32:28
  massive. That's not that's never growth
• 32:30
  has never been a thing. Like we have years where we grow
• 32:32
  more than other years, but we're not like there's we've been
• 32:35
  around for a while. We're more stable than, than
• 32:38
  growing, growing, you know, like, so like an investor might
• 32:42
  look at that and go, oh, we're looking for growth companies and
• 32:44
  we're like, well, we could, you know, we could pump the numbers
• 32:46
  and get the, do all the things and pour a bunch of money into
• 32:49
  marketing and make the curve look different and all that.
• 32:52
  But I, I don't want to do those things.
• 32:53
  It just doesn't interest me. It's, it's not something that,
• 32:56
  that would make me want to get up in the morning and get pumped
• 32:58
  about work. So I think that there might have
• 33:01
  been a time earlier in our business career where we would
• 33:05
  have felt more pressure to do some of those things.
• 33:07
  But now we like, we feel 0 we just want to make like good
• 33:11
  stuff, put good stuff out in the world and, and take advantage of
• 33:14
  the place we are in our careers, which is that we don't need to
• 33:17
  do a lot of things a lot of other companies need to do to
• 33:20
  justify their existence. We can just put great stuff out
• 33:23
  there. David's been talking about I, I
• 33:25
  love his metaphor of like a teaching hospital.
• 33:27
  Like part of open sourcing Fizzy is in a sense like it's kind of
• 33:32
  a teaching hospital. Like we put a lot of effort into
• 33:33
  making that product really good, the code really clean and really
• 33:37
  clear and really well organized. And now everyone can see it and
• 33:40
  people can learn from that. And again, it doesn't maximize
• 33:44
  our revenue. It doesn't like make sense
• 33:46
  financially. Maybe in the long term it does
• 33:49
  somehow through reputation and all, but who knows, right?
• 33:53
  But in the short term, it certainly doesn't to say here,
• 33:55
  this thing's free, take it, but we still feel like it's the
• 33:59
  right thing to do and we wouldn't do it any other way.
• 34:01
  So I, I, I guess, I guess that we're, we're just having more
• 34:06
  fun, frankly, at this point in our careers.
• 34:09
  And, and part of that, though, hopefully is giving, is giving
• 34:12
  back by exposing more of the work that we've done that we
• 34:17
  think is good, that we think other people can learn from.
• 34:21
  And like David with the whole marshy thing, the, the, you
• 34:24
  know, the, the Linux distribution that he's put out
• 34:26
  there, like it's wild. Like he just like spent six
• 34:29
  months with a bunch of other people's help and like there's a
• 34:32
  whole Linux distribution now that's that, that he's built.
• 34:35
  And it's like, that's a wild thing to do too.
• 34:38
  And totally free, completely open source and free and time
• 34:41
  consuming on his part, but he's thrilled about it.
• 34:43
  Would we have spent, would he have spent that kind of time as
• 34:47
  a company? Could we have afforded him six
• 34:51
  months of not like working on some other stuff just to do that
• 34:54
  like 1520 years ago? Probably not.
• 34:56
  But we can do that now. And that's the beauty of it all.
• 35:00
  Yeah, it's amazing. And I think both of those hit on
• 35:02
  interesting points. I think you know, if you look
• 35:03
  back when my first company was an open source company and we
• 35:06
  thought of the open source pieces marketing, right, it was
• 35:08
  like this freemium sort of. You get a lot of awareness and I
• 35:10
  think there is a sense that you are getting a lot of awareness
• 35:12
  for the work that you guys are doing and whether you, you know,
• 35:15
  directly get credit for that or not.
• 35:16
  I mean, like there's a ton of, you know, interest that have
• 35:19
  come probably recently and from a different, you know, kind of
• 35:22
  viewpoint where people are coming to look at the stuff
• 35:24
  you're doing both on the Linux side or fizzy side where it's
• 35:25
  like, hey, this open source thing is generating awareness.
• 35:27
  And maybe those people may or may not have paid, but they're
• 35:30
  definitely giving back and participating in your sort of
• 35:33
  community. I'm curious, like on the Linux
• 35:35
  one, like internally in the company, like has everybody
• 35:38
  moved to that? Like do you run Linux on your,
• 35:40
  you know, desktop and like like how much of that is like of
• 35:44
  values or religion type thing where it's like, wow, this is
• 35:46
  like you and David are excited for it and it really like, you
• 35:49
  know, the company kind of rallies behind that and the team
• 35:51
  that I'm sure at this point a lot of them have been there a
• 35:53
  long time, right with you guys. Yep.
• 35:55
  Like how much of that sort of like, wow, we're all going to go
• 35:57
  do this. There's this sense of
• 35:58
  camaraderie or it's like, hey, that's kind of like some slice
• 36:01
  of the company, like gets more excited about some of these
• 36:03
  things than others. Well.
• 36:05
  It's now like the default. Linux is sort of the default OS
• 36:10
  and and platform for our development team.
• 36:12
  So when a new person comes on, for example, they will now get a
• 36:16
  framework laptop or, or, or some desktop that will run Linux,
• 36:21
  right? That's like the default thing
• 36:22
  now. It used to be you get a MacBook,
• 36:25
  now you get something else right Now you can still use a Mac.
• 36:28
  I'm currently talking to you on a Mac like right here.
• 36:31
  I have my framework laptop, which I've been using, this is
• 36:35
  the running Omarchi, you know, and I've been using this a lot.
• 36:38
  I'm I'm kind of between 2 worlds right now and I'm I'm sort of
• 36:41
  between the Mac world and the Linux world.
• 36:43
  Enjoying the world you see. The piles on your desk, Sorry.
• 36:49
  I'm enjoying the Linux world a lot actually.
• 36:50
  It's very, it's all new to me. It's very cool.
• 36:53
  And I'm, I'm getting more and more into that as well.
• 36:55
  And a lot of people, a lot of our designers are, are moving
• 36:58
  into that as well, like Jason Zimdar's, who's one of our, our
• 37:01
  lead, our principal designers. He's all in on, on, on Linux now
• 37:05
  and others are as well. So it's, it's not a requirement.
• 37:08
  It's a preference now for the technical team.
• 37:12
  And, you know, at the end of the day, it has to speak for itself.
• 37:15
  Like, if you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
• 37:18
  But the aim is, is to make it irresistible.
• 37:21
  So you want to use it. And there's a lot of benefits to
• 37:24
  it. And so that's the aim, you know,
• 37:27
  And David makes this thing in his own image.
• 37:30
  He makes what he wants, just like we've made products that we
• 37:33
  want and you hope, we hope that we make them good enough and
• 37:36
  other people want them too. And so he's making something
• 37:38
  that he wants and hopefully other people in the company want
• 37:40
  it and a lot of people do. And maybe more and more will
• 37:42
  will want it more and more. And it's had a big impact.
• 37:46
  And and to your, to your point earlier, like, yeah, I don't
• 37:48
  know if this stuff pays off or not, but I've never measured it,
• 37:51
  never cared to measure it, never have ever.
• 37:54
  I mean, we've been writing and sharing and blogging and all the
• 37:56
  things for years and written books.
• 37:58
  And like, I don't know if someone who reads rework buys
• 38:00
  base camp. We don't have a survey.
• 38:02
  I don't care. It doesn't matter.
• 38:04
  Like we're going to do it anyway.
• 38:06
  I would assume that it probably leaves some sort of imprint on
• 38:10
  somebody and they might think of us next time they're thinking
• 38:13
  about switching software and try those guys out, you know, great.
• 38:17
  And if you never do, that's fine too.
• 38:19
  But I, I don't think about like, what will this, if we do this,
• 38:24
  what will this do for us? It's more like, what can we just
• 38:28
  do that we enjoy doing? And what can we put out there
• 38:30
  into the world that we think should be there?
• 38:31
  And what do we want to exist in the world?
• 38:33
  And we're going to do that. And for better or for worse, it
• 38:36
  works or it doesn't. The company functions or it
• 38:38
  doesn't. We stay in business or we go out
• 38:41
  of business like it's, it's what's going to happen is going
• 38:44
  to happen. There's not like a all of a
• 38:45
  sudden we're going to hire 18 people in marketing and try to
• 38:48
  like keep the thing afloat. Like if if we can't keep the
• 38:50
  thing afloat, like if it go, if it, I mean, every business will
• 38:53
  die at some point or whatever it gets sold, whatever.
• 38:55
  It's like if that happens in nine years, like that'd be a
• 38:58
  pretty damn good run and I'd be totally proud of it.
• 39:00
  I wouldn't try to like artificially there's no life
• 39:02
  support kind of stuff like, you know, if it's, if it's had its
• 39:05
  run, it's had its run. Now we're, I feel like we're
• 39:07
  kind of entering maybe another new prime right now.
• 39:10
  It's something feels really good about what we're doing.
• 39:13
  But also the world's changing rapidly.
• 39:15
  So who knows? Like nobody knows what this
• 39:17
  world's going to look like in three years, you know?
• 39:21
  As you're talking and kind of as I think about you and David and
• 39:24
  what you've built, I keep coming back to this book by Eris Klein,
• 39:28
  Ready Player 1. I don't know if you've read it,
• 39:30
  but like, no, but I'm familiar with it.
• 39:32
  Yeah. You, you guys are like this kind
• 39:34
  of James Halladay type character where you've built this whole
• 39:36
  world, the Oasis, this virtual reality and, and you have this
• 39:40
  mission and vision, which is much bigger than, oh, we're
• 39:42
  going to build this profitable enterprise.
• 39:44
  And we're, you know, we're trying to, trying to make a, a,
• 39:47
  a big business. Rather we want to make something
• 39:48
  beautiful and make the world a little bit better and brighter.
• 39:51
  And no. Because that's, I appreciate
• 39:54
  that. Thank you.
• 39:54
  But that's, it's not a mission. So it's not like, just to be
• 39:57
  clear, that's not why we do this.
• 40:00
  We do this because we're entertaining ourselves.
• 40:03
  We want to make tools that we love that we get to use to do
• 40:06
  the work that we need to do. And the positive externalities
• 40:11
  of that might perhaps beat some of the things that you said, But
• 40:13
  we don't set out to make the world a better place or, or
• 40:17
  anything like that. That's just not it's actually a
• 40:19
  very selfish in that book. It's.
• 40:22
  All in that book, which is now a movie, it's all about how he he
• 40:28
  made a world for himself. He created this this this
• 40:31
  virtual universe that is is perfect and exactly what he
• 40:35
  wanted to play in and I I think that's what you guys have done
• 40:39
  yeah. And I think.
• 40:40
  David gets a lot of credit or should get a lot of credit for
• 40:42
  that with Rails, especially in in Omachi because or Machi.
• 40:47
  However, no one knows how to pronounce it because these are
• 40:52
  literally worlds like an OS, like a Linux distribution is a
• 40:55
  world, right? And and Rails is an environment,
• 41:00
  programming environment is a world.
• 41:01
  You know, now base camp is a world too.
• 41:03
  And you think things Hay is a world in a sense.
• 41:05
  But David's world that he's made are kind of broader than just
• 41:09
  products. They're things that other people
• 41:10
  can use to build other things. And and it's very impressive to
• 41:14
  see him put his world out there into the world.
• 41:18
  And so we all kind of follow in his wake in that way.
• 41:21
  But yeah, I, I think, you know, we, we've, we, we've just been
• 41:26
  very fortunate to, I think have started this at the right time,
• 41:32
  been lucky along the way, followed our own intuitions in
• 41:35
  our, our, our desires and interests, which happened to
• 41:39
  align with enough people at the right time in the right way that
• 41:43
  we were able to build a business out of this.
• 41:46
  You know, this was not a scientific endeavor.
• 41:49
  This has never been a maximization effort.
• 41:51
  I don't, I don't know, you know, this isn't about squeezing the
• 41:54
  last anything out of anything. This is just like we well, we're
• 41:57
  going to, we have a career. We are going to work every day
• 42:01
  for us or for someone else. If we can do it for us, great.
• 42:04
  And if we can make the things we're going to use every day
• 42:07
  that we're going to use to make the other things we're going to
• 42:08
  make even better. And if we can charge for that,
• 42:11
  even better 'cause then we can keep doing it the way we want
• 42:14
  to. Like it's all these things just
• 42:15
  sort of like 1 after another line up to create this and we're
• 42:21
  very proud of it and and enjoy it and and feel very fortunate
• 42:24
  to be part of it. Yeah, I think.
• 42:27
  It's magical, and I think that the notion of the way you guys
• 42:30
  do it actually raises the bar for other people.
• 42:32
  Like, you know, I've used Linux a bunch on and off.
• 42:35
  I still use a Mac today, but I've tried Linux and it's never
• 42:37
  like, you know, there's things missing, right?
• 42:39
  I think David's done an amazing job like adding the things that
• 42:41
  were missing to make it so that it's like usable.
• 42:44
  But then because of that, other people are adapting and adding
• 42:46
  things. It's like, oh, well, like now it
• 42:48
  just needs this or it needs a graphic thing or it needs A and
• 42:51
  it's like, that's this amazing thing.
• 42:52
  And I think what Fizzy's going to bring to like a lot of the
• 42:55
  open source, it's going to raise the bar for like what open
• 42:57
  source can be and why people can go do it.
• 42:59
  And that that actually ends up having this kind of broader
• 43:01
  impact, which I think that to me is always like this part that I
• 43:04
  always look to you guys, I'm like that Damn.
• 43:05
  Like it's, it's, it's more than like the thing you did.
• 43:08
  It's actually how it's having an impact on other people.
• 43:10
  Like we do have like one last question from the audience,
• 43:12
  which was like how do you under complicate the first 12 months
• 43:16
  of a new business? Under complicate, is that what
• 43:22
  you said? Yeah.
• 43:23
  Under I'm not even sure what. That means so.
• 43:25
  For a lot of the folks that we, they're listening and watching,
• 43:29
  they, you know, these are founders, they're starting a new
• 43:31
  thing. And it's very easy to
• 43:33
  overcomplicate, yes. OK, so how would?
• 43:36
  You how would you give the opposite advice or how would you
• 43:39
  suggest somebody starting a business, you know, under
• 43:41
  complicated, Yeah. OK, that's a great phrase, my
• 43:47
  sense. Now I want to be clear, I
• 43:50
  haven't started a new thing for 20 some odd years.
• 43:53
  So yeah, I don't really have the experience anymore, but what I
• 44:01
  would say, having seen a lot of people who are starting new
• 44:04
  things, I find that they are obsessed with things that are
• 44:09
  larger organization things like they're, they're worried.
• 44:13
  They they, they look to bigger organizations and they try to
• 44:16
  adopt their practices. Well, Facebook's successful and
• 44:20
  Airbnb is successful and that one's so successful.
• 44:23
  How do they work? Oh, they work like this.
• 44:25
  Then we should work like that because I want to be like them.
• 44:27
  The problem is, is that you're not like them.
• 44:29
  You're tiny. Don't adopt, don't follow big
• 44:34
  companies if you're going to want to learn or follow, follow
• 44:37
  small ones. Follow someone who's six months
• 44:39
  ahead of you who's also doing it in a small way.
• 44:42
  Like, don't try to be bigger than you are and don't focus on
• 44:47
  things that are any like you want a small sphere, a little
• 44:51
  bit of surface area. You use the word surface area
• 44:53
  earlier was something I like to use a lot.
• 44:55
  I think about this again in physical terms.
• 44:57
  Keep your surface area as small as possible so you can see the
• 45:00
  whole object. Your object is your business.
• 45:04
  The bigger the surface area, the fewer things you can see at
• 45:06
  once. You've got to turn the whole
• 45:08
  thing around to see the other side.
• 45:09
  If you have nooks and crannies and valleys and stuff, you can't
• 45:12
  see all the way into them. Everything becomes really
• 45:15
  challenging. So just keep thinking about if
• 45:17
  this thing that I'm doing is a physical object, how small would
• 45:19
  it be? How?
• 45:20
  What would I have to make it? How small would I have to make
• 45:22
  it and tight would I have to make it to be able to see
• 45:24
  basically the whole thing at once.
• 45:26
  That's what I think you should. That's what should be in your
• 45:28
  vision. It's kind of the whole thing at
• 45:29
  once early on. And if you're making it too big
• 45:32
  and too complicated and doing too many things and hiring too
• 45:34
  many people and trying too many initiatives all at once, the
• 45:37
  surface area is enormous. And then it becomes very hard to
• 45:40
  monitor all of that stuff and to do all those things well.
• 45:44
  It's very hard to do anything well and to try and do 19 things
• 45:47
  well and, and to organize it based on how big organizations
• 45:51
  work. I think those are all the
• 45:52
  mistakes you'd want to try to avoid.
• 45:54
  The other thing I would just say is like, get whatever it is that
• 45:58
  you're doing, get to making it as soon as possible.
• 46:00
  Stop planning it, stop thinking about what it could be, stop
• 46:05
  brainstorming it, and start making the thing as soon as
• 46:09
  possible. That is the only real thing you
• 46:12
  can do. And the further away you can
• 46:15
  push abstractions, the better off you are.
• 46:17
  Like, get to real as soon as you possibly can and you're going to
• 46:20
  be better off too. So I think a lot of the
• 46:22
  overcomplicated stuff is abstract conceptual stuff.
• 46:27
  Get away from that. Get to real practical things and
• 46:31
  make progress on the thing that you're making.
• 46:33
  And I think that's kind of the the most honest way to approach
• 46:36
  this sort of thing. Amazing.
• 46:39
  Yeah, yeah. Thanks.
• 46:40
  So. Much for for joining us, Jason,
• 46:41
  it's. Awesome.
• 46:42
  Where? Where?
• 46:43
  Can folks find you online, connect with you, follow what
• 46:46
  you're doing? Where should they go to sign up
• 46:47
  for the the coolest, newest thing that you're working on?
• 46:50
  Well, I'm mostly like on the in the social world, I'm on exit,
• 46:54
  just my name just at Jason Fried FRIED.
• 46:57
  I'm on LinkedIn as well. Those are the only two places I
• 46:59
  really on the social side of things. 37 signals.com,
• 47:04
  basecamp.com, fizzy.dohey.com, hey.com, those places.
• 47:10
  That's where that's where we are.
• 47:11
  That's what we do. Check us out there.
• 47:14
  You can also e-mail me directlyjason@hey.com.
• 47:18
  So it's hey.com or jason@basecamp.com or Jason at
• 47:21
  37 signals.com. Just reach out to me any way you
• 47:23
  want. If you have a question or
• 47:24
  whatever, I'm I'm, I try to get back to everyone within a few
• 47:27
  days. And I don't have an assistant or
• 47:30
  anything. It's just me.
• 47:31
  So write, write me and I'll write you back.
• 47:32
  And that's it. Yeah.
• 47:35
  Wow, amazing. Thank you so much.
• 47:37
  You back. Thank you so much.
• 47:38
  Fun to be here. That was Jason.
• 47:40
  Fried. And if you ever felt the
• 47:41
  pressure to build louder, faster and bigger, this episode was the
• 47:45
  perfect counterweight. Totally.
• 47:47
  The theme running through everything that he said was keep
• 47:50
  it human, scale the team, the business, even the way you think
• 47:56
  about how you spend your day. All right, Jason.
• 47:58
  What was the founder mode? Top five Takeaways 1.
• 48:01
  Build tools you want to pick up every morning 2.
• 48:03
  Keep the surface area small, especially in year 1340 hours is
• 48:07
  enough. You don't have to 996 Kevin Four
• 48:11
  Founder involvement is selective, not total.
• 48:13
  David went off and spent six months building a whole new
• 48:15
  Linux 5. Optionality can come from
• 48:18
  independence. Profitable board free companies
• 48:20
  are allowed to do weird stuff. If this episode helped you
• 48:23
  rethink the growth and simplicity of the culture you're
• 48:25
  building, share it with another founder who needs to hear it and
• 48:27
  subscribe. To Founder Mode, new episodes
• 48:29
  every week. That's it for today.
• 48:31
  Because sometimes the smartest move is knowing when enough is
• 48:34
  enough.