Jason Fried
Co-founder and CEO, 37signals. On 7 shows, 10 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@jasonfried ↗LinkedIn ↗world.hey.com/jason ↗
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the software company behind Basecamp and HEY. He is an advocate for bootstrapped businesses and has co-authored bestselling books including Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.
7shows
10appearances
218statements
12resolved
10supported
0contradicted
83%fully supported
133said about them ↓ Everything Jason Fried said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Fried: Treating Startups as Financial Instruments for Exits Is 'Repellent'
“I think playing entrepreneur is like spinning up businesses all the time, making all sorts of stuff, and giving it a name, and giving it a logo, and trying to raise money, and coming up with valuations, and talking about all this stuff, and there's like nothin…”
Fried: Companies Should Settle Into Orbit Rather Than Pursuing Endless Growth
“You gotta get off the ground, and you gotta break free of gravity, but then there's a point where you actually just want to sit in orbit and sort of maintain. You want to be within a certain range and fluctuate a little bit up, a little bit down, but be in thi…”
Fried: Startup Stock Options and RSUs Are Largely Bullshit
“No options, no RSUs, no stock, no, like, any of that BS. I find almost all that to be pretty much BS, unless you're like a really well-established public company.”
Fried: Raising Venture Capital Eliminates Almost All Exit Options and Off-Ramps
“The moment they go raise money, they've cut off almost every option. They think they've expanded their experience and their opportunities, but they've cut off almost every possible off-ramp outcome because now they have to be in big business or they fail. That…”
Fried: Silicon Valley turned high-margin software into an unprofitable business model
“What's interesting is that Silicon Valley has found a way to make the most profitable style of business the least profitable. Like, software has, there's like, No physical costs. It should, the margin should be close to 80 or 90%, and it turns out that they're…”
Fried: 37signals tracks no OKRs, KPIs, revenue, or customer growth targets
“We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have growth targets in terms of the number of customers we need to pick up this year versus last year. I don't look at any of those things.”
Fried: Making delivery promises is the downfall of businesses
“Promises are the downfall of every business. Like every time we've made a promise to get something out in a certain period of time, like, and we kind of inevitably seem to miss, miss it.”
Fried: Analyzing past business failures is largely futile in complex work
“I don't like to look back on, on things. I'm not much of a fan of looking back on failures and trying to figure out what went wrong so we don't do it again, because I don't think we know what went wrong.”
Fried: Raising outside capital turns entrepreneurs into employees for others
“The moment you go out and take money, or have these big obligations, you end up working for someone else, and I don't really understand, I do understand why some companies do it, but I don't understand why a lot of people do it who probably shouldn't do it.”
One-third of Basecamp employees quit within two weeks of political talk ban
“Ultimately about a third of the company quit in a matter of is it a week or two.”
Jason Fried would ban workplace political discussions again despite the employee backlash
“If I had to make it again today, I would make the same decision.”
Basecamp is in a significantly better place following its political discussion ban
“I can tell you the company's in a significantly better place.”
Basecamp does not beta test products or survey users before launch
“This is the thing I think that's so important, and this is why, like, when we build products, we don't beta test them, really, and we, sometimes we get a few people in, but we're not, like, asking people what they think.”
Fried: Uber is held up as successful but is a fundamentally terrible business
“I have a hard time though sometimes with tech businesses that are quote successful or held up as successful examples of businesses that are actually fundamentally terrible businesses. I think like things like companies like Uber is an example.”
Fried: Minimal Costs and Small Teams Eliminate the Need for Mass Scale
“Keep your costs low, keep your company as small as you possibly can and make great stuff. And then you don't have to find as many people just like you, but the ones you find really love what you do. And that's like, that's enough.”
Fried: A Company's Only True Competition Is Its Own Operating Costs
“Well, like, a business is very simple. You gotta make more than you spend. That's a business, basically. Like, I mean, you can keep borrowing money, and then you can, you know, borrow more than you spend, and eventually you got to make more than you spend. So …”
Fried: Lacking Physical Constraints, Software Inevitably Expands and Degrades
“In software, you don't get that. Software can be anything. It's infinitely malleable. And what ends up happening is because there's nothing pushing back, it just expands forever and gets worse. Software slides downhill. It gets better for a while than slides d…”
Fried: 37signals Intentionally Leaves Money on the Table by Skipping A/B Testing
“We're definitely leaving money on the table. I'm sure of it. Like, we don't optimize our pricing. I'm not testing pricing, not constantly. We're not A-B testing constantly. I'm certain there's some formula that we're not following that could lead to more growt…”
Fried: 37signals Left AWS and the Cloud to Run Physical Data Centers
“We just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we're running our own stuff now in data centers.”
Fried: Moving 37signals Off the Cloud Will Save Roughly $10 Million
“David wrote this great article about like getting off the cloud. It's going to save us something like ten million bucks and whatever it is.”
Fried: Business Post-Mortems Are Useless Because Outcomes Cannot Be Truly Explained
“The reason I don't like the postmortems in business, and I know a lot of businesses do this, they do, they launch something, they spend all this time and energy looking back on it, trying to figure out why it did what it did, and my general sense is you'll hav…”
Fried: A founder's job is to inject risk into the business
“My job as a founder, what I've realized is, is it's to inject risk into the business. Most people, everyone pretty much at your company's job is to manage risk to some degree, to keep their job, to not push too hard or too far.”
Jason Fried: Slack Crushed Campfire With Onboarding and Bots, Not Chat
“The chat itself isn't better or worse. Chat is chat essentially. Onboarding and bots were the thing. And we didn't have them and they crushed us.”
37signals Aborted $5M Ad Campaign Because Paid Ads Produced Zero Return
“Last year, we're like, we're gonna spend five million bucks for the first time ever on like ads. We started getting into it in a few months. So we spent a bunch of money and we're like, this is just, it just, It's vanity money because like this isn't doing any…”
The other half of the tape: Jason Fried's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 125 times in 32 episodes across the shows. 8 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) 20Greg Isenberg 16David Senra 13Ryan Singer 11Alex Lieberman 11Sam Parr 8Jonathan Courtney 8Shaan Puri 6
Statements about Jason Fried, by other people (8)
DHH: 37signals offered six months severance to employees rejecting politics ban
“If you can't see yourself at a company where we're not going to discuss fucking Palestine during work hours with your random coworkers, we will pay you up to six months salary to go somewhere else.”
DHH: 37signals ignored its data scientist for a decade, trusting intuition instead
“And after trying that for over a decade, Jason and I finally came to the conclusion in honesty that we never did what the numbers told us to do. What we would do was, we would do whatever the hell we wanted to do, and then if the numbers supported that, we'd g…”
DHH: Basecamp Intentionally Avoids Expanding to Hundreds of Employees
“I don't think we could do the things that we could do if we were 300 people or a thousand people, which is actually one of the main reasons we try not to get to that, Right? Like, I don't want to work at a place that has 300 people or a thousand people that I …”
DHH: 37signals took profits by year two and sold secondaries to Bezos
“We took money out from day one, almost, not quite. Year two, at the very latest, we were pulling out profits and then we had Bezos buying secondaries from Jason and I that just set a baseline.”
DHH: 37signals has no board or investors directing founders
“Jason and I have structured our entire business around that concept of pure independence. We don't have any investors who get to tell us what to do. We don't have a board to tell us what to do.”
Company culture is a 50-day moving average of actions, not slogans
“His definition of culture is that a company's culture
Is a fifty-day moving average of your actions and your company's actions, and I love that because it is all based on behaviors and not some words that are written on a wall.”
Dignan: Organizations sabotage themselves by overreacting to isolated mistakes with sweeping policies
“The first thing is that we tend to do what Jason Freed calls scarring on the first cut. So when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop, the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a proce…”
DHH: Rework Manuscript Was Cut in Half from 50,000 Words to 25,000
“In fact, when we wrote Rework, the initial manuscript that we submitted was, I think, 50,000 words. That was what the publisher got to see, right? And they were very excited. Great. This fits. This is like just the size of the book. And then Jason and I went t…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
My First Million 28
the Startup Ideas Podcast 28
Lenny's Podcast 22
David Senra 21
20VC 11
Founder's Journal 11
the Knowledge Project 4
2026 45 mentions in 4 episodes 11 per episode
2025 17 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- A better way to plan, build, and ship products | Ryan Singer (creator of “Shape Up")
- How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)
- The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code. | Dan Shipper (Every)
- Just found out my neighbor’s business sold for $450M
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 39 mentions in 14 episodes 3 per episode
- 80 mins of life hacks to level up your career
- How I Lost $10,000,000
- How to build a million dollar sales funnel using Facebook Ads
- Do this to make more money from your startup
- Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, more | Phyl Terry
- The step by step guide to starting a business from $0
- Why We Sold Morning Brew
- Rich vs. King
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 9 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2020 11 mentions in 2 episodes 6 per episode
- 20VC: Basecamp Founder David Heinemeier Hansson on Why It Is The Biggest BS To Chase Being A Unicorn, His Relationship to Wealth and Status and Why Now More Than Ever It Is A Myth Entrepreneurs Have To Raise VC
- 20VC: Andrew Wilkinson on Building The Berkshire Hathway of Tech, Sustainable vs Unsustainable Growth and The Relationship Between Money and Freedom
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jason's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAVID SENRALEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 1 | 46 | 100% 2/2 | full record on David Senra → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 1 | 41 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 2 | 40 | 86% 6/7 | full record on 20VC → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 2 | 31 | — | full record on My First Million → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 1 | 26 | — | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| FOUNDER'S JOURNALLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 2 | 25 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Founder's Journal → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, 37signals | 1 | 9 | — | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |