The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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'…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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, …”
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.”
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'…”
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…”
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…”
Fried: Y Combinator Only Invited Me to Startup School Once
“I was only invited once cause I was pretty anti raising money.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Jason Fried Believes 37signals Could Not Be Launched Again Today
“Could we launch this again today? No, we couldn't.”
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 …”
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.”
Fried: Basecamp caps monthly pricing at $299 for unlimited users
“We don't charge any of our customers more than 299 dollars a month period flat. So with Basecamp, you can have 6000 users at just two 99 flat unlimited users at that point. So we don't offer the same thing where people could be spending 50, 60 grand or 10 gran…”
37signals Distributes 100% of Annual Profits Due to LLC Tax Structure
“We pull out everything at the end of the year. Now, first of all, we're an LLC. So we're taxed on everything at a personal level. So if I leave money in the business, I'm still paying personal income tax on that money. It doesn't really make sense to do that.”
Fried: 37signals will launch four products this year
“Like this year, we're going to do four products. We're going to begin. We were about to start working on two products simultaneously, which we've never done before. We've never built two things at the same time.”
Fried: Vast Majority of 37signals Co-Founders' Net Worth Is Tied to Business
“Basically all of our, you know, essentially the vast majority of our net worth is tied into our business, and we know what our distributions are and all that stuff, but yeah, we don't, I mean, we don't talk about that ever”
Fried: Over 100,000 customers pay 37signals on a monthly basis
“Over a 100,000 people pay us on a monthly basis for a variety of different products.”
37signals Built We Work Remotely in Two Weeks, Generating $30k Monthly
“We built the job board in two weeks and it was generating at the time for us something like 30 grand a month, something like that with no work, like literally close next to nothing to do.”
Stewart Butterfield Gave Jason Fried Advance Notice Before Launching Slack
“Stuart Butterfield sent me an email before they launched Slack. We were friends and he said, Hey, just want to let you know we're launching this thing. It's competitive with Campfire to some degree. We're buddies. I just want to like, let you know, like, that'…”