Fried: Heavy Corporate Structures Create Distance From Customers and Products
Jason Fried · Jason Fried: Your Only Competition Is Your Costs · Feb 15, 2026 · at 19:57
Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of 37signals, discusses why he intentionally designs 37signals with minimal corporate overhead and administrative layers.
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“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 of like a thick business. It's hard to change. It's heavy. It's massive. It's, there's too much distance between it and the customers and it and the product. There's space, like, right? You can imagine, like, if you just imagine something very thick, this is the thing that matters. And you got to go through all this and compress all this down to get to the thing that matters. Like, I don't like that. I think the thing that matters should be big and that the rest of it should be as thin as possible. And so that's what we've tried to build at 37 Signals. It's a very thin business with a thick set of products”
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