Insight
Fried: A founder's job is to inject risk into the business
“My job as a founder, what I've realized is, is it's to inject risk into the business. Most people, everyone pretty much at your company's job is to manage risk to some degree, to keep their job, to not push too hard or too far.”
Insight
Jason Fried: Slack Crushed Campfire With Onboarding and Bots, Not Chat
“The chat itself isn't better or worse. Chat is chat essentially. Onboarding and bots were the thing. And we didn't have them and they crushed us.”
Disclosure
37signals Aborted $5M Ad Campaign Because Paid Ads Produced Zero Return
“Last year, we're like, we're gonna spend five million bucks for the first time ever on like ads. We started getting into it in a few months. So we spent a bunch of money and we're like, this is just, it just, It's vanity money because like this isn't doing any…”
Insight
Fried: Active Stock Pickers Will Inevitably Lose Over Long Term
“So people, I think, have this idea of short term performance in the market, feeling like I can do this forever. Just like in Vegas, you can't do that forever and you will begin to lose. And the same thing is true in the market.”
Insight
Jason Fried: Business imports outside lessons only because it pays for advice
“And the main reason is why, in my opinion, is because the business world pays for that advice. It's not that it deserves the advice. It's not even that it's advice that's applicable, but that it pays for the advice. And the way I've been thinking about it is n…”
Insight
Fried: Hired CEOs lack the latitude to take founder-level risks
“Even if you hire a great, great CEO to replace you with CEO, like they're, they just don't have that... There's that thing that's present in a founder simply because they were there from the beginning, that they have an extra ounce of, it's not even that they'…”
Insight
Fried: Luck and Unchosen Circumstances Drive More Than 50% of Success
“And I think it's way more than 50%. I mean, all the way back to you didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose anything, right? You didn't choose your mind.”
Disclosure
Fried: 37signals plans work in six-week cycles and adjusts continuously
“We think about things six months or sorry, six weeks at a time and go from there and adjust all the time. And that's fine. We've always done it that way.”
Insight
Fried: More People Should Simply Give Up on Uninspiring Ideas
“And you stop and you just give up. Frankly, you just give up, which is something I think more people ought to do.”
Opinion
Fried: Elon Musk's fast problem-solving reduces risk rather than being reckless
“So that might seem reckless. And I think it was positioned or pitched almost as reckless in the book. To me, that's like, Common sense, fundamental, smart problem solving. And you think about all the other risks it saves, and all the other things it prevents, …”
Insight
Fried: Software chat tools are commodities still priced like luxuries
“The principle around this is that in any industry generics eventually come in. For example, there's a lot of chat tools that exist in software today in, in, in, in the industry. So they're basically commodities, but they're still priced like luxuries.”
Opinion
Jason Fried: SaaS Subscriptions Overcharge Users for Marginal Software Updates
“Software. I know it's improving, but it's improving around the marginal edges. You already have 90% of it on day one when you bought the damn thing. And so you're paying over and over and over and over for essentially the same thing. And at some point, if you'…”
Insight
Build Novel Features First Because Public Feedback Demands Standard Features
“If you just wait till the end to try to add those novelties, you'll never have enough time. You're always running out of time at the end and you're never going to try new things. You're not going to have the tolerance or the patience to wander. So then you end…”
Insight
Jason Fried: Cool wears off, but useful never does
“Cool wears off, but useful never does.”
Disclosure
Fried: DHH and I are great partners but rarely socialize outside work
“We're not, like, we're friends, but we don't see each other very often. We live in the same town, and we don't see each other. I see them once every, I don't know, couple months. We're very good partners and we're friendly, but we just don't, we don't hang out…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fried: Y Combinator Only Invited Me to Startup School Once
“I was only invited once cause I was pretty anti raising money.”
Insight
Fried: Building AI wrappers on OpenAI creates extreme platform risk
“All the companies that began to implement AI stuff early on and then open AI is just like wiped them out in a lot of ways for a lot of different reasons. And when you build other people's platforms, you're very, very much at risk of things changing, tectonic p…”
Disclosure
Jason Fried Tried to Hide Property Purchases Using Double LLCs
“It's fucking embarrassing, and frankly, I tried to hide them. You try to do all the things, like, double LLC and the whole thing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fried: 37signals has been profitable every single year for 25 years
“Our only goal is to be profitable on a given year. We've been profitable every year for 25 years.”
Insight
Fried: Saying 'no' preserves options while 'yes' eliminates future opportunities
“No is a very precise, you know, precision instrument because you get to evaluate a thing and say no to it. And they have the whole spectrum of everything else that's possible available to you at that point. So I think no is a great tool. It's very specific. Ye…”
Disclosure
Fried: 37signals generates tens of millions in annual profit
“The only thing we've ever shared is that we generate tens of millions in annual profits because I don't really care about revenue numbers.”
What-if
Jason Fried Believes 37signals Could Not Be Launched Again Today
“Could we launch this again today? No, we couldn't.”
Disclosure
Jeff Bezos's 2006 Investment in 37signals Was Entirely Secondary
“We did take some money from Jeff Bezos, though, back in 2006, six or seven or six, I think. It was like a secondary thing. So he bought some shares from me and from David. So that money went into our pockets and never went into the business. No money has ever …”
Disclosure
Bezos Recouped 37signals Investment Many Times Over Via LLC Distributions
“Well, we're an LLC, so he's a member, he has units, and every year he gets distributions, and he's made his money back many times over, and he still owns, you know, his shares, and we haven't had to sell the business. It's been a great investment for him.”
Jason Fried