Jason Fried
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the maker of Basecamp and HEY. 37signals is a very different kind of company. With fewer than 80 employees, they have over 100,000 customers, generate tens of millions of dollars in profit each year, and have no investors, board, or any plans to ever raise money or sell the company.
Communication Skills
Effective written communication starts with mastering the structure and clarity of individual sentences.
"The first one is this book here, so Several Short Sentences About Writing... It's an extraordinarily good book about writing and it's all about the sentence, beautifully written, fun to read, really g..."
Growth Skills
Disrupt established SaaS markets by offering high-quality 'generic' versions of commodity software for a one-time fee.
"We're out there looking for commodities that are still charging luxury prices that we can create really beautifully tight, simple, essential generics of very high quality that don't do everything that..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Use paid, real-world work samples followed by a live critique to evaluate a candidate's taste, execution, and ability to handle feedback.
"One of the things that we do during the interview process for designers specifically and product people... is they do a project for us at the end. So the last five finalists will do a project for us...."
The language used in a company shapes its culture; avoiding war metaphors fosters a spirit of creation rather than destruction.
"We use words to establish a perspective in a way of thinking about the world. And if those are the words that are in your head, then you feel like it's this war... I like to think of words that are mo..."
Leadership Skills
Acknowledge that most business decisions are ultimately judgment calls based on experience and intuition rather than purely rational data analysis.
"I don't know how to make decisions by numbers or I don't find any joy in it, frankly. I've always been intuition driven and gut driven. And frankly, to be honest, I think everyone actually is... I thi..."
Product Management Skills
Avoid long-term roadmaps to maintain the flexibility to act on current information and intuition.
"I don't plan long-term because I want to do what I think, not what I thought... Every six weeks, we rethink what we're going to do next. We're very much an in-the-now company, making it up as we go."
Use a fixed time budget (an 'appetite') rather than an estimate to force the team to find the simplest, most effective version of a feature.
"We instead have appetites. And our appetite for any individual feature is no more than six weeks. Essentially that's our budget we're willing to spend. I'm only willing to spend six weeks in any featu..."
Maintain the integrity of time constraints by killing projects that aren't completed within their allotted 'appetite' window.
"If we say we're going to give it six weeks and we give it seven or eight or nine or 10, then we're not really giving it six weeks, we're giving it 10, then we don't really have a system... If there's..."
Track project progress using 'hill charts' to distinguish between the uncertainty of discovery and the certainty of execution.
"We have these things in Basecamp called hill charts. And things that are on, that's actually work... A project's more like a hill. It's not like a linear line. If you're on the left side of the hill,..."