The Ledger, every show

“Our advocacy has been, don't fucking chase being a unicorn. Being a unicorn is a shitty place to be for most people most of the time, and the kinds of companies that come out of that that are unicorns, half or more of them are totally morally deplorable, and y…”

“Seems like an historic inevitability that remote work is going to take off and going to be the dominant force of How we work when we do creative work that can be done in front of a computer from anywhere.”

“People make the mistake of thinking remote work is just like the office, but from home. So they take all the same principles or approaches that they would do in an office, and they try to replicate those remotely. The number one perhaps being meetings. Lots of…”

“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 …”

“I will guarantee you that that path will continue to bind you in unhappiness, because there is no point where you suddenly wake up once you're on that treadmill and think, oh, that was it. That extra million, or that extra ten million, or that extra billion, t…”

“All the shit that they've done that's kind of on the sly, whether it was last year when they installed this uninstallable web server, just because they wanted to save a click, right? And then Apple all of a sudden had to release this emergency fix to remove th…”

“Meetings are great when you have two or three or four. That's probably the limit. If you get into five, it's already starting to be problematic. But let's just say four people who are very well informed about specific set of issues, and they're not on the same…”

“I think meetings suck for that purpose, and I think we're much better off when we use anything from email to Basecamp to other ways of asynchronous communication where someone can write something up, be considered In their thought, using full sentences, formin…”

“Yes, that filter will cut off at least 80% of all the meetings that most people have.”

“We've had several employees join Basecamp who said after they've been here for a while, they know their coworkers at Basecamp much better than they knew their coworkers at their past job where they were working together in an office.”

“I think one of the key problems in a lot of companies is that executives simply have too much time, and they need to spend that time on something, and often that time is spent interfering with the people who actually do the work.”

“Accountability is only meaningful, in my opinion, when it's tied to an individual's own declaration of work. You can't have meaningful accountability if you're also telling them how much work to do and in which time to do it.”

“Before we hit record, we were talking briefly about Zoom, and I just fell over this yesterday, and I think the Zoom mission statement is deliver happiness or some bland shit like that, and you're like, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Any organization t…”

“The mission statement, if it is to have any effect at all is a way of weighing trade-offs between two things that you want both, and then deciding which of the two you want more. If it's not providing that function, if it's not putting a hand on the scale in t…”

“It's never been easier to start a new software company than it is today without raising money.”

“The money is nice, and they buy a bunch of nice, fine things, but it is not the primary source of happiness for someone who's cleared a baseline bar.”

“If I can make it to whatever the average life expectancy is for someone at my socioeconomic level, I think it's maybe 86 or something. If I can make it to 86, that's enough. I don't need any more. That, that's fine.”

“In, in sort of a more basic sense than changing the world, I think far too many tech entrepreneurs are obsessed with disruption. You know what? A little less disruption and a little more fixing.”

“A lot of times you don't need a fucking laser focus. You need a broad perspective. And if you can't change and switch between those two sort of at regular intervals, it's really a weakness.”

“The difference between an organization of five people and an organization of 10 people or one between 10 and 20, it's not twice as hard. It's far more than twice as hard, and the amount of coordination overhead that it requires when you double your headcount i…”

“We work 40 hour weeks, eight hours, five days a week, right?”

“We have quite few regular meetings on any given week. I'd be surprised if I have more than three, maybe four. And in some weeks I have zero face-to-face or video to video conversations with people. The vast majority of the coordination work that we do, the exe…”

“By the time we moved full-time, there was zero risk, zero, because we were already making more than well enough money to pay our own salaries and have a fair margin.”

“I enjoy writing Ruby code, and making Rails, and making Basecamp, and now we're making this new hey.com email service, and I'm excited about that”

“There's a clock frequency, essentially, at Basecamp. And that clock frequency runs on six-week cycles. Every six weeks, we stop for a week or two and take stock of what we've done in the past six weeks and what we're going to do next.”