Jason Fried
36 statements across 2 episodes · 12 bullish · 11 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Feb 15, 2026 by Jason Fried · said 21 times in 2 episodes since 2026 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Jason Fried's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by David Senra (13), David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) (7)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 21 mentions in 2 episodes 11 per episode
Everything said about Jason Fried, oldest first
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Fried: Many Founders Build Businesses to Meet External Expectations, Not Self-Knowledge
“A lot of people don't know what they like. They like what other people like. They like what they're supposed to like. They live up to other people's expectations. They kind of run someone else's business in a sense. Not like an executive running their business…”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: 37signals Distributes 10% of Profits Based on Employee Longevity, Not Title
“10% of our profits go to our employees every year and it's based on seniority or actually, that's the wrong, it's based on longevity, not seniority. It's kind of, you know, The two aren't the same thing, however long you've been here. So every, every, every mo…”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Fried: Equal Pricing Protects Software Businesses From Dangerous Customer Concentration Risk
“What you don't want are a bunch of outlier companies that you cannot afford to lose. You don't want customers that you cannot afford to lose. And so by equalizing our pricing and not letting anyone pay us more than anybody else, we create a bunch of small unit…”
Feb 15, 2026
Fried: Businesses Are Just Thin Envelopes Designed to Hold a Product
“There's this two sides of business. Basically there's the envelope and there's the letter. The envelope is the outside, the shell, the business, the vehicle that holds the letter and the letter is the product or products. I'm a product guy. I love product. Tha…”
Feb 15, 2026 neutral
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 …”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
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…”
Feb 15, 2026 neutral
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…”
Feb 15, 2026
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: True Success Is Defined by Wanting to Repeat the Experience, Not Money
“Would I want to do this, whatever I just did again? If so, it's successful. And I think that that's enough of a definition for me. It's not about money. It's not about any of those things. It's like, would I want to do it again?”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
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…”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
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.”
Feb 15, 2026
Fried: Heavy Corporate Structures Create Distance From Customers and Products
“The more massive an object, the more energy it takes to change its direction, right? This is just like, this is getting back to basic physics. A thick, when I think of this stuff, and sometimes these metaphors don't perfectly line up, but in my head, I think o…”
Feb 15, 2026
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Fried: 37signals Explicitly Refuses to IPO, Raise VC, or Sell to PE
“We can go IPO. I don't want to. We could raise money. I don't want to. We could raise more money. I don't want to. We could sell to PE. I don't want to. Like we could quit. I don't want to. Like these are all options that we have and keep going for as long as …”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Designers Should Draw Color Inspiration From Nature, Not Design Books
“If you want to find great colors, look at a bird. Don't look at a book. Like, look, look, look at a leaf, right? Look at the ocean. Look, look, look, look, go to a tide pool, and just look at the colors in that tide pool.”
Feb 15, 2026 bearish
Feb 15, 2026
Fried: Intuition Is Refined Only Through Decision Volume, Not Deliberate Practice
“The more decisions you make the more time you have, the more intuition you're refining, but you don't like actively refine it. It's not like you're, you don't practice intuition. You just make decisions. And the more you make, the more it sharpens everything u…”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Basecamp Welcome Emails Provide Customers With His Direct Personal Email
“Whenever you sign up for Basecamp, the first thing you see is a letter from me with my email address and my signature and my email address, and I want my customers to email me. I don't want to hide from anybody. There's no AI. There's no assistant. There's no …”
Feb 15, 2026 neutral
Feb 15, 2026 bullish
Feb 15, 2026 neutral
Fried: I Lack the Stamina and Hunger to Build Another Software Startup
“I wouldn't want to try to do this again, because I don't think I could. I don't think I could. And I think it's totally fair to admit, like, I don't think I'm good enough again to do what I did before. I don't have the stamina. I don't have the drive. I don't …”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Setting Clear Daily Output Limits Increases Long-Term Business Longevity
“I just think this idea of like, well, you're done at two 30 is healthy. I think the business lasts longer because of that. I think, like, if you think about, like, you don't probably get bored of a business like that. There's something about that versus this i…”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
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…”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Roughly 20 of 62 Employees at 37signals Received Six-Figure Cash Bonuses
“Our bonuses are based on profits. We've been profitable for 27 years, and they're distributed every year, and they're meaningful. They're, I looked this up before the show about 20 out of the 62 people Last year, or twenty-twenty-four, because we haven't close…”
Feb 15, 2026
Feb 15, 2026 bearish
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Fried: Tying Identity to Entrepreneurship Breeds Deep Disappointment After an Exit
“If you identify as an entrepreneur and you sell your business, like if your identity is tied up into entrepreneurship, like you have to go start another business because you have to, there's continuity there that you have to be that person again. And then if y…”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Decades of Business Longevity Prove Repeated Fundamentals, Not Luck
“There's something about, I'm not talking about us here, but there's something about if it's been around that long, it's not a fluke. You can, like, have something that's hot for a while, and it can go out. That's kind of a fluke, or like a trend, or a fad, or …”
Feb 15, 2026
Fried: 37signals Relies Exclusively on Gut Intuition Over User Testing and Focus Groups
“I go by gut. I go by intuition, whether it's a pricing or a product decision or a feature or a new product or a name or whatever it is. We don't test things. We don't do focus groups. I don't, we occasionally AB test for fun, but not like, cause it matters.”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Fried: Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Ruined Email With Neglected Products
“I blame Apple. I blame Google. I blame Yahoo. I blame Microsoft for making shit email products that they just don't care about. Now, they've started to care more about them, but they didn't care about them for a long time, and everybody knows that nobody cared…”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Basecamp Hard-Caps Its Maximum Subscription Price at Just $299 Monthly
“So with Basecamp, for example, nobody can pay us more than two 99 a month. Okay. It doesn't matter how many users you have. So you could be a big enterprise, and two nine a month is the most you can possibly. Our prices go way, way low, but that's the most we …”
Feb 15, 2026 positive
Fried: Founders Should Build Products for Themselves to Guarantee an Audience
“Make stuff for yourself. There's probably other people out there like you who want what you want, and make it available to sell. So you are the customer, you are the audience, it's you, and then there'll be other people just like you. We're not all that unique…”
Feb 15, 2026 negative
Fried: Paying Attention to Competitors Forces Fear-Driven Feature Parity and Copying
“Everyone follows everybody else because when you're paying so much attention to what everyone else is doing, you tend to just, that's the way you think it has to be done or can be done. You're not open to like alternatives because you don't see them anywhere. …”
Jul 26, 2026 neutral
Jul 26, 2026
Jul 26, 2026 positive
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…”