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.
41statements → 4claims → 0claims resolved → 4.05/5average certainty → 2.59/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 22said about them ↓
4 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 3 assertions · 3 opinions · 17 insights · 17 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 4 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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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Jason Fried on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Jason Fried said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Fried: Silicon Valley turned high-margin software into an unprofitable business model
“What's interesting is that Silicon Valley has found a way to make the most profitable style of business the least profitable. Like, software has, there's like, No physical costs. It should, the margin should be close to 80 or 90%, and it turns out that they're…”
Fried: 37signals tracks no OKRs, KPIs, revenue, or customer growth targets
“We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have growth targets in terms of the number of customers we need to pick up this year versus last year. I don't look at any of those things.”
Fried: Making delivery promises is the downfall of businesses
“Promises are the downfall of every business. Like every time we've made a promise to get something out in a certain period of time, like, and we kind of inevitably seem to miss, miss it.”
Fried: Analyzing past business failures is largely futile in complex work
“I don't like to look back on, on things. I'm not much of a fan of looking back on failures and trying to figure out what went wrong so we don't do it again, because I don't think we know what went wrong.”
Fried: Raising outside capital turns entrepreneurs into employees for others
“The moment you go out and take money, or have these big obligations, you end up working for someone else, and I don't really understand, I do understand why some companies do it, but I don't understand why a lot of people do it who probably shouldn't do it.”
Fried: Venture backing destroys viable mid-sized software business opportunities
“There really is only kind of one outcome for venture backed companies, which is go huge. And if you think about all of the space between Kind of a small business and a massive, huge unicorn business. There's so much room there that you could normally find your…”
Fried: 37signals employs zero salespeople and ignores enterprise customers
“We don't have any salespeople. You know, we don't have 15 different versions of Basecamp. You know, we're not after enterprise.”
Fried: 37signals builds every feature with two people within six weeks
“We build products with two people at a time. So every feature we work on in Basecamp or Hay or whatever we're building is two people, one programmer, one designer, and they have a maximum of six weeks to deliver the feature that they're working on. Most of the…”
Fried: Pure software products only need venture capital for marketing
“Airbnb is a physical product. Uber is a physical product. Basecamp, Monday, Asana, they're available everywhere instantly anyway. I don't know what you need the money for other than marketing.”
Fried: 37signals never asks employees to justify product decisions with data
“We almost never, sometimes we look at numbers to sort of Be an input, but it's never like, prove that. I'll never say like, justify that. That's just not terminology or lingo that we ever bring up.”
Fried: Software industry will swing back from SaaS toward buy-once software
“The idea behind once is David and I kind of feel like, we're probably a bit early here, but we feel like there's going to be a bit of a turn back towards the way things were. Pendulums always swing.”
Fried: High revenue is meaningless if a company still goes bankrupt
“Revenues don't really matter because you can go broke generating a lot of money.”
Fried: 37signals avoids tracking individual product P&Ls
“I don't have different P and L's for each product in a way where we're looking at them very carefully. It's like in total, collectively, are we making more money than we spend? And that's the only thing we ultimately look at.”
Fried: Most businesses globally are bootstrapped, not venture-backed outliers
“The majority of companies on this planet run like ours. They're bootstrapped. They don't have any money. No one's willing to give them a penny. And they open up a shop somewhere, they do something, they put their shingle out, and they, you know, launch a websi…”
Fried: Almost nobody succeeds through venture-backed unicorn moonshots
“Basically almost nobody makes it that way. Like really almost nobody really makes it that way. And there's a lot more room to make it and to build a successful business if you throw out that outlier and look at all the other places you can land as a business.”
Fried: He would never trade Basecamp for Monday.com's venture-backed business
“I would not trade Basecamp for Monday's business any day of the week, because I love what we're doing. We're profitable. We're happy. We don't have to deal with the things they have to deal with.”
Fried: 37signals assigns no specs or tickets to product teams
“We don't have, like, a spec. We don't create to-dos or tasks or tickets for people. They create the work that needs to get done to fulfill the idea that we've written up and designed, essentially, and they figure out how to do it.”
Fried: 37signals operates by never promising delivery deadlines
“So I just, we've learned to not promise anything. We can share what we're working on. If we want to, we can tell people we're doing something.”
Fried: Continuous back-to-back sprints do not work at work
“And that's why I don't like the word because you can't layer that back to back to back to back. You cannot sprint back to back to back to back in life. And you can't do it at work. I mean, people do it at work, but like, I don't think it actually works.”
Fried: Companies hire executives for amorphous judgment, not spreadsheet literacy
“When companies hire executives, What are they looking for in executive? They typically go, ah, judgment and experience. They're not like they can read an Excel spreadsheet. That's not the thing that matters. Like anyone can read that, or anyone can read a char…”
Fried: 37signals operates exclusively on six-week planning cycles without long-term plans
“Like we don't have a multi-year plan. I don't even have a one-year plan. I don't even have a six month plan or a court. Like we think about everything we're going to do every six weeks, we rethink what we're going to do next.”
Fried: Founders should avoid hiring a second person as long as possible
“Figure out how to do as much as they can on their own before they bring on a second person. Like, Really work and struggle through something on your own. The moment you bring on someone else, you've got another mouth to feed. It's becomes expensive. You get an…”
Fried: Excess venture capital creates operational sloppiness in startups
“The thing with the VC route, so like the idea of like having too much money, it doesn't mean you can't work efficiently and thoughtfully, but it does create a degree of sloppiness because you don't have to when you don't have to, and when I'm saying have to, y…”
Fried: Bootstrapping forces founders to learn how to make money
“The value in bootstrapping is that it teaches entrepreneurs. It not even teaches, it forces them to have to figure out how to make money. And the more time under the curve they have making money and practicing making money, the better at it they're going to ge…”
The other half of the tape: Jason Fried's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 22 times in 4 episodes on Lenny's Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ryan Singer 11Lenny Rachitsky 4Bob Moesta 4Phyl Terry 2Dan Shipper 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2025 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 6 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more | Dec 17, 2023 | 1h 19m |