Jason Fried
Co-founder and CEO, 37signals · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@jasonfried ↗LinkedIn ↗world.hey.com/jason ↗
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the software company behind Basecamp and HEY. He is an advocate for bootstrapped businesses and has co-authored bestselling books including Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.
26statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.92/5average certainty → 2.69/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 5said about them ↓
2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 assertions · 6 opinions · 6 insights · 12 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Jason argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Jason Fried said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Fried: Uber is held up as successful but is a fundamentally terrible business
“I have a hard time though sometimes with tech businesses that are quote successful or held up as successful examples of businesses that are actually fundamentally terrible businesses. I think like things like companies like Uber is an example.”
Basecamp bans shared calendars, forcing direct negotiation for colleagues' time
“We don't have, for example, we don't have shared calendars at base camp, so I can't see anyone else's schedule and they can't see mine. So I can't take their time and they can't take mine. If they want some of mine or I want some of theirs, we have to ask each…”
Fried: Basecamp operates without any product roadmap beyond eight weeks
“So we don't have a roadmap. So we don't have a, I don't know what we're going to do. Actually, I have no idea what we're going to do eight weeks from now. I just don't know.”
Fried: Businesses fail from internal mistakes, not competitor spending
“Every single one of them die. Often they kill themselves though. 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 that's a compet…”
Fried: Basecamp expects eventual responses rather than immediate communication
“And so like at our company, at Basecamp, we try to think, you know, the expectation is of eventual response, not of immediate response. And if someone doesn't get back to you quickly, it's because they're working. They're doing something more important than wh…”
Fried: Long work hours stem from fragmentation, not workload volume
“The reason why a lot of people are working those longer hours is not because there's 12 hours of work to do. It's because they can't find time within those 12 hours to actually get a few contiguous hours of time to actually do the work they need to do. So thei…”
Fried: Six-week cycles force product teams to define what is important
“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…”
Fried: Basecamp sets no quantitative goals or metrics for success
“We're different in that we don't have any goals or any metrics for success.”
Basecamp uses zero data to guide its product development
“We're not a data driven company in terms of product development.
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.
…”
Fried: Basecamp intends to stay as small as possible
“We're going to keep our business as small as possible. He wants to build the business, biggest business in the world.”
Jason Fried: Physical retail enables faster experimentation than digital tech
“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.”
Fried: The software industry is not winner-take-all
“It might be true 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 of them are going to do quite we…”
Jason Fried rejects growth targets and desires to 'change the world'
“So those are the expectations I have for myself, but I don't have expectations or run growth. I don't have personal goals. I don't want to be seen in a certain way. Like I don't need to be in the media. Like I don't have that kind of stuff. I also don't have a…”
Jason Fried strongly dislikes Facebook and its business practices
“We don't like Facebook. I don't like their company.”
Fried: Software industry is sick with perpetual high-growth expectations
“I see it in our industry is sick with that. I think Primarily, I would guess because it's a high growth industry, first of all. So like, there's this expectation you're supposed to live up to. And when you look at all the, let's say the great companies in the …”
Fried: Speeding up audio is unhealthy and creates false expectations of speed
“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.”
Fried: College graduates are poorly taught how to write and communicate
“The thing that surprises me most about people coming out of school is how poorly school teaches people how to write and communicate actually. I read cover letters and whatnot, and I'm just surprised that, you know, you can graduate college and not really know …”
Fried: Publicly sharing internal business methods does not threaten a company's survival
“Chefs, great chefs will write cookbooks and they're putting their recipes in a cookbook and they're not afraid of someone taking that cookbook. Reading other recipes and opening a restaurant next to them and putting them out of business. That's just not how it…”
Fried: Basecamp CEO limits himself to a single 13-inch laptop screen
“I don't have an external screen, so I have a 13 inch laptop, and that's my only screen, because I think screen real estate is actually, like, you don't want a lot of it. I think you want a little of it.”
Fried: Autonomous Basecamp teams complete six-week projects over 90% of the time
“These teams are autonomous. They're not checking in with anybody automatically. They check in when they Feel like they need to check in, or they have questions, or if I want to look at something, we'll look at something, but they're given the full responsibili…”
Fried: Jeff Bezos bought secondary shares in Basecamp in 2006
“He never invested in Basecamp, the company, essentially. Like, his money was never put in the business to run the business. We've always a hundred, for 20 years as we've been, as long as we've been in business, we've always been a hundred percent funded by cus…”
Fried: Profitability is the best way to win in business
“One of the great ways to quote, win in business is to just to stick around. 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.”
The other half of the tape: Jason Fried's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes on the Knowledge Project. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Aaron Dignan 2Neil Pasricha 1Andrew Wilkinson 1
Statements about Jason Fried, by other people (1)
Dignan: Organizations sabotage themselves by overreacting to isolated mistakes with sweeping policies
“The first thing is that we tend to do what Jason Freed calls scarring on the first cut. So when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop, the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a proce…”
Every mention by year
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2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #54 Jason Fried: Doing the Enough Thing | Mar 19, 2019 | 42m |