The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 46 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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: 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…”
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…”
Fried: 37signals Intentionally Avoids Enterprise Customers to Focus Exclusively on SMBs
“Our customers are small business owners, and I just, I don't care about enterprise customers. I don't want them. I like small, medium-sized businesses. They're more like me.”
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…”
Fried: 37signals Caps All Project Planning Horizons at Just Six Weeks
“So at our company, we typically think about six weeks in advance and that's about it. There's some occasional projects, maybe a few over the 27 years that we've done, that we needed to think further ahead. Like we just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we…”
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. …”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Fried: 37signals Sets Zero Sales, Revenue, or User Growth Targets
“We don't have revenue targets, except for like, I want to be profitable. I don't have sales targets, revenue targets, user targets. I don't have any of these things. We just do the best work we can.”
Fried: Most Founders Who Sell a Successful Startup Fail to Repeat It
“And it's not arrogance. It's just like belief, like, oh, I can do that again. And some people can't. Most people cannot. Or if they can, they don't reach the same height.”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
Fried: 37signals Product Teams Are Only One Programmer and One Designer
“Any team we have making something is usually two people, like two people working on a feature, one programmer, one designer.”
Fried: Employee Performance Reviews Reduce to One Question: 'Would I Rehire?'
“So the question we ask after the first year with any new employee is, knowing what I know now, would I hire them again? And that answers pretty much every question.”
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…”
Fried: Personally Answered Around 200 Customer Emails in a Single Day
“Yesterday, I answered like, 200 emails from my customers.”
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 …”
Fried: The Concept2 Rower Is One of the Few Perfect Products
“The buttons you press, there's no touch screens. The thing is reliable. It always works. It's incredibly durable. It does exactly what it's supposed to do with nothing else. And I look at that and I go, that is a perfect product. One of the few perfect product…”
Fried: Making Small, Disposable Decisions Makes a Business Antifragile
“Make things small, tiny little units that you can throw them away. It doesn't matter. It's like, what you basically want then is enough good things, enough good units in a year. Right? Not like one great year, one great plan, but enough good little things, bec…”
Fried: 37signals Does Not Use Email Internally, Communicating Strictly via Basecamp
“I don't, we don't use email inside our company. We use Basecamp. But for the outside world, we use email.”
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.”
Fried: The Current Computing Era Is the Best Since the 1990s Web
“And right now is like an amazing time for computers. Like one of the most amazing times since the web back in the late nineties or mid nineties, really.”
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…”
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…”
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?”
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 …”
Fried: Non-Tesla Automakers Are Reverting From Touchscreens Back to Physical Buttons
“In fact, car manufacturers with the exception of Tesla, because Tesla is outstanding, but everyone else who put a bunch of screens in their cars, they're starting to move back to dials again and buttons again, because people are like, this sucks.”
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 …”
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…”
Fried: 37signals Employs About 62 People, Down From a Peak of 80
“We have 62 people at 37 signals, and we've gotten as high as, I think, 80 at some point, and then we're about 63, or 62 right now, which is feels really good.”
Fried: Personally Writes All Marketing Copy and Landing Pages at 37signals
“I don't do the design on the line. I work with our designer to do a lot of that, but he's sort of the visual person there. But I do all the writing.”
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 …”