37signals

“I don't think you have to own part of the company. And I think that's like a faux narrative oftentimes that founder, you know, founders will somewhat be manipulative around, oh, everyone's an owner here.”

“Like when we started our business, There was three founders initially, and we each put in 10 grand. So we had 30 grand, you know, just to kind of make us, make our way for a few months before we picked up some clients to pay our way after that.”

“We don't offer equity to employees.”

“We wrote we self-published our first book called Getting Real. As a PDF made, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars selling a PDF, like, way back in the day”

“And we ran them in parallel for about a year. And the idea wasn't that Basecamp was going to replace that. It just happened to do that. It happened to become so popular so quickly that we're like, you know, what do we rather do? We have limited time. We'd rath…”

“So we've got a 100,000 or so paying customers across base camp and hay, and also high rise.”

“I think businesses really, truly just unfold. And I'm here for that. I'm not here to predict where we're going to be in three years. I don't know, don't care, frankly. There's no real advantage to me predicting that.”

“So at 37 signals, we basically give people a year to find their way. Sometimes not a year, but usually a year to find their way.”

“Hey is super weird when it comes to email. Hey.com. It's just an unusual way to use email. But it resonates with tens of thousands of people who are paying for it.”

“It was easier for us to reject VC money because we didn't live in that world. We lived in the Midwest and that's not how people do things over there, you know? And we also didn't go to the parties and didn't go to the events and didn't like get influenced by t…”

“And since we've been a profitable business for a long time, we generate tens of millions currently in annual profits.”

“When you're that involved in every decision, and this, by the way, is very common for founders, right? You're like, this is my baby, this is my thing, I want it done this way. What you end up doing is you just create a bunch of people who are waiting to hear w…”

“We have a 10% profit share plan. So we hold aside 10% of our annual profits and distribute them to our employees as real money, not equity, not options, not based on what the fluctuations of the market is, but like cash you can spend tomorrow on a mortgage or …”

“One of the ways to wreck new product development is to get too many opinions too early. Everyone's got an opinion, and especially when something's new, they're gonna tell you what they think, and then you end up having to sort of field and explain your reasons…”

“So we don't do public betas. We don't pull people in, you know, we launch something. Sometimes we have a few people look at it first right before we launch to make sure we didn't miss anything really material. But like we finished the thing and launched the th…”

“Our six-week cycle process is very much like this. We kind of, you know, orient people in a certain direction around an idea and go, here, you figure it out. You make the decisions about what work needs to happen, and you make the decisions about if we're not …”

“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.”