The Exchanges

Q Do any examples come to mind either through running base camp or growing up that you witnessed your parents, uh, do that?

A I saw it a lot. So, um, one, so growing up, um, I had a friend named Freddy, and Freddy, um, Freddy's family didn't have a lot of money. Um, my family was Okay, we're doing pretty good. Um, and, uh, and Freddie and I used to play basketball outside. We had a basketball hoop outside in our driveway, and, um, uh, it came time to play basketball, like, to try out for basketball in junior high or whatever it was. Actually, this was not even a tryout. This was just like a junior high basketball team sort of thing, and, um, Freddie couldn't afford to, it was like a hundred bucks or something, and couldn't afford to do it, and I remember my dad, um, just taking care of that for him, Um, because, uh, it was the right thing to do. Freddie loved basketball. Uh, we used to play all the time and, um, it'd be, you know, you could say like, well, his parents didn't want to do it or couldn't afford it. Like, oh, well, but my dad's like, you know, that's just not right. Like he, he should, he wants to play. It's, it's not his fault. The kid's 15 or whatever. Like, um, if we can help him out, let's help him out. So that's like a one example. And that's a monetary example, but it wasn't really the money so much. It was the, it was the thought. And it was a recognition in the situation that, um, this kid wanted to do something and he was being held back because his folks couldn't afford it. Um, a…

AI assessment note: “I remember my dad, um, just taking care of that for him”

Q Can we geek out on that a little bit? Like, talk to me a little bit more about the internals of how Basecamp is run, how things are allocated, how teams come together, what the process is like on the inside. What does that look like? And how many people are you now, just to start out with?

A Sure. We have 55 people in the company, and different teams work slightly different ways. So I'll talk about, like, product development, which is primarily my responsibility. I guess everything's my responsibility. I, I run the place, but I mean, that's kind of where I spend most of my time, um, on product development. We basically, uh, choose work to do every six weeks and we do work over a six week period of time. Um, and I can get into how we choose that, but let me kind of set the, set the framework here. So, um, sit what we call six week cycles. And during those six weeks, we pick off three to five ish projects and each Uh, each cycle of six weeks, there's usually two to three different product teams working on the features we've decided to work on, and those teams are three people or less. Oftentimes, it's two people, and we basically decide that there's, there's, um, six weeks is enough time. A big fundamental thing about Basecamp is this idea of enough, and I've already talked about that, like enough time during the day, and six weeks is enough time to make substantial progress on something that's important, and it also forces us to make sure that we understand exactly what it is that is important. In any feature that we're building, because if you give it three months, it'll take three months. If you give it six months, it'll take six months. And the exciting thing to …

AI assessment note: “We have 55 people in the company, and different teams work slightly different ways.”

Q Um, how do you feel about competing against people that seemingly can take unlimited losses because they're funded by, uh, people willing to gamble a lot of money on an ultimate outcome?

A Yeah, I mean, I, I, I don't care basically because their, their, um, their performance or their lack of performance or their, uh, success doesn't really necessarily affect mine. And the fact that, like I said earlier, I, I only need some customers. They need all customers. Um, and so they can take as much, as much as they want, and there's probably going to be plenty enough leftover for me anyway. Um, and, and not only that, like at some point they will go away. One of the great ways to, to, to quote, win in business is to just to stick around. Um, and the best way I've found to stick around is to be profitable because that, if you're profitable, you get to stick around as long as you want. Of course, that's not to say that we couldn't be beat one day or something could go catastrophically wrong. Like, of course, Every business dies. Every single one of them die. Often they kill themselves though. Um, they don't change. They don't do something right. They don't pay attention to customers. They get cocky. They get greedy, whatever it might be. It's usually those things. It's not, um, that's a competitor has more money than you and outspends you. Um, it might be true in a, in a specific market where it is really winner take all, but I don't think it is in our industry. I mean, that's why there's hundreds of companies roughly doing kind of similar things that we're doing. And many…

AI assessment note: “I don't care basically because their... success doesn't really necessarily affect mine.”

Q Who, who are some of the people that you admire that are running businesses that you maybe don't look to for inspiration, but sort of like keep tabs on and then why?

A Well, I admire, um, anybody who stays in business for, let's say, more than five years. Um, so I, I, like, for example, uh, a friend of mine runs a small grocery store down the street from, from where I live, and I admire him because he has something we don't have, which is that he gets to know every one of his customers by name. Um, I, I can't know a 100,000 customers by name, but, but people walk into his shop, he knows who they are. Or he could get to know them, and he gets to know their preferences, and he gets to know them, and he gets to know their family, and he can say, hey, Jim, hey, Bill, hey, Sally, whatever. And, um, that's something that I think is really cool. Um, he can also experiment much faster. It's funny, like, you think in technology you can experiment really quickly with A-B tests and stuff, but he can experiment even faster. He can, he can just, like, put something on the counter where you check out and see if it sells faster than it did when it was on the shelf. Like, You can play around, I think, in the physical world a lot better, a lot faster, in fact, than in the technical world, and you can also pick up on things. You can see things that you can't necessarily see in the technical world. We all, again, like, think there's so much data available to us as far as customer preferences and whatnot, but like, I don't think very few, I would say very few th…

AI assessment note: “a friend of mine runs a small grocery store down the street”

Q How do you, uh, switching gears just a little bit here, like, how do you feed your brain? What sort of books do you read? Do you read magazines? Do you sort of like keep your eyes open to what's around you? Like, how does that, how do things crop up in there?

A Yeah, it's, it depends right now. Um, the last four years have been more challenging. We have, uh, two kids who just had, uh, another baby, uh, a few months ago. So like, thank you. I don't have a lot of personal time at the moment. Like I, I do, I'll go home at 5:30, but like, you know, family dinner, kid in bed at seven, kid gets up at five 30. So I got to go to bed by eight 30 or nine. So I'm not a complete waste, you know? Um, so I haven't had a lot of, uh, free time lately. Um, I do enjoy reading books, um, Um, but because I don't have as much time, I find that I'm listening to books more frequently because I can, I find like I can listen for 20 minutes in the car on the way into work, you know, and like kind of with audio books or, or podcasts or that sort of thing. So I'm, I'm consuming that, but, um, although I hate that word, use the word consuming, I, I, consuming content is like the worst thing I can imagine. Um, uh, I, I listen and try to learn and pay attention to things that are interesting to me. So, um, mostly nonfiction stuff. Um, I like autobiographies. I like learning about people. I like learning about history. I like nature. So I pay a lot of attention to that. And then there's also things I'll do. Like I have, um, I like to go on walks. I like to pay attention to nature. I like to, you know, like I said, pay attention to architecture and that kind of stuff…

AI assessment note: “mostly nonfiction stuff. Um, I like autobiographies. I like learning about people.”

Q What's one of the biggest lessons that you learned from your parents growing up?

A A number of them, but I would say always figure out what the right thing to do is in any given situation. It's not always that you're going to do the right thing, but, but know what the right thing is. Um, I think that's something that I've, I've always taken away from my folks. My folks, I've always seen them do the right thing, even when it's inconvenient. And I think that that's something that's really stuck with me. Now, again, like we don't all live by that all the time, but we try, we try. So I'm always looking for like, you know, Hey, it would be really nice if I didn't have to do this, but really the right thing to do is to do this or, um, you know, uh, in a situation where you see something where it'd be more convenient to look away, you know, but like the right thing to do is to stop and help that kind of thing.

AI assessment note: “always figure out what the right thing to do is in any given situation”

Q Are you like a one X audio guy or are you like two X?

A How does that, I've experimented with, um, speeding things up and, um, I've decided to come back to one X. Um, so I used to be, I would do like one and a half or two, um, mostly on podcasts, sometimes on audio books. And it kind of depends. Some reads are some, some authors who read books, they seem like at two X speed, it's fine. Brothers. It's so fast. But anyway, the point was, is that I'm like, what, what, what am I rushing? Why am I, why am I trying to pack everything into my head? Like there's time to get to these things. And if I don't get to them, I don't get to them. So I've gone back to one X and I also think it's, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to have information come at you that fast because you're in a hurry to get it. I think it kind of creates this expectation of everything coming at you fast. I don't think that that's necessarily that healthy either. So I've just gone back to want to go, it takes nine hours to listen to this book instead of five or whatever, like, oh, well, that's fine. I'll get to, you know, yeah, I could have saved five hours, but like over the course of my life, like big deal. Um, I'd rather just listen to it in the author's actual voice and just take it, take it at that speed.

AI assessment note: “I've decided to come back to one X.”

Q There's two things I want to sort of like tease apart in that response. Uh, the first is use the word feel. And I thought that was really interesting because, uh, we're in this sort of age of machine learning and sort of algorithmic driven, uh, insight. Can you talk to me a little bit or expand upon your thoughts around that?

A Yeah. Um, I know I, I put a lot of value on, on feel and intuition and gut in these things. Um, we're not a data driven company in terms of product development. Um, we use data a lot for improving performance in terms of our infrastructure, making sure that we get back to customers in a reasonable amount of time, which is like currently about 10 minutes. If you email us, you'll get a response in about 10 minutes. Um, and we look at data in those ways, but in terms of, of How does something feel to work on? How, how does it feel to develop it, to deliver it? How do we feel about it when it's done? Um, I, I think that, um, that that's sort of a, it's a, it's a difficult thing to measure with numbers. It's more of a, again, like this, the problem is, is that Again, like I said, if you deliver a product, a feature, or a product that hits it out of the park on certain metrics, perhaps, but it damages the people who worked on it together, and that can easily happen, and happens a lot. Um, not here, necessarily, but I hear about it. I read stories about it, where like, the product was great, but man, like, three product managers quit along the way, and someone else is like, this is the last project I'm ever doing here, and like, like, there's shrapnel from these things, and, and there's, there's, there's, um, there's side effects. So like, If you're only measuring the output and the o…

AI assessment note: “I put a lot of value on, on feel and intuition and gut”

Q a system whereby we're driven to pass the test to, um, demonstrate knowledge, but that success is often pushed by parents as well, who view their success as a parent tied up to their child's sort of like academic, uh, success, but it seems to be missing the broader point about what really makes for a successful life. I'm wondering, can you expand on that with some of your thoughts?

A I've seen sort of two, two groups of parents around that. Like there's the parent who was very academically successful growing up, went to maybe an Ivy league school, you know, and feels like their kid needs to do that too, because they understandably like, that's how they went through life. And they've been successful, you know, in terms of someone's a doctor now, or someone's a lawyer now, or someone's a whatever now. And like, so that's their path. And I get that. And I'm, I'm bringing my path to the picture because like, I was basically a C student, and so like, I'm like, it doesn't really matter that much, and that's my perspective, and not theirs, and their perspective is not mine. So there's also, of course, the situation where someone's, um, uh, someone's parents maybe didn't go to school ever, and, um, and they want their child to, to, to, to be educated, and, and to, uh, to have a better life than they did, and they see education as the, as the path for that, and I totally get that too. So there's just different, different approaches. Um, I think it's more about, um, What I try, what I, what I don't want to do, I guess, is to apply unnecessary pressure. Saying like, you have to be this way, or you have to learn this thing, or you have to do this, or else you won't X, Y, Z. I don't like the, or else you won't X, Y, Z angle, right? And if you don't go to school and don'…

AI assessment note: “I've seen sort of two, two groups of parents around that.”