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Jason Fried (@jasonfried) of Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals) shares his wisdom on cutting through the noise to find your own voice. There are some great nuggets in here about design, and how to be a contrarian thinker. This will be a great episode for entrepreneurs, whether they're experienced, or relatively new. Also, this is the FIRST EPISODE of Love Your Work! Please subscribe, and leave us a review to help us get featured in the iTunes "New and Noteworthy" section. Show notes: http://kadavy.net/podcast Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/jason-fried-basecamp/ Transcript: [music] David Kadavy 00:11 This is Love Your Work. On this show we meet people who have carved out success by their own definition. I'm David Kadavy, best-selling author and entrepreneur. This is the first episode of the show, so if you're not familiar with me, I wrote a book called Design for Hackers, which is a bestseller. It debuted in the Top 20 on all of Amazon. Before that, I was the lead designer for a couple of startups in Silicon Valley, and I freelanced as well. I blog at kadavy.net. That's K-A-D as in David, A-V as in Victor, Y, and you can tell how many times I've repeated that in my life. You can follow me on Twitter at @kadavy, or you can join 60,000 others and take my free design course at designforhackers.com. One thing that's really important to me is helping people build a business and a lifestyle that suits them. It's something that I've managed to do, and I want more people to experience it, and that's kind of the idea behind the show. With this show, I want to introduce you to people who have created businesses and lifestyles that are all their own. They've achieved success by their own definition and built a life according to their own values. They're not necessarily going to be millionaires, but they will be happy people. As the name of the show would imply, they love their work, and also, I love their work. Now, to help us get the show off to a great start, can I ask you a favor? David Kadavy 01:26 In this first few weeks of the show we have the opportunity to be featured in the iTunes store in their new and noteworthy section, and this show is a bit of an experiment. I'm launching with a few episodes and I'm going to see how it goes, but this first few weeks is absolutely critical. This is the one chance in the lifetime of this show to really bring in more listeners, and more listeners means I can put more of my energy into bringing you great guests with wisdom to share. But in order for that to happen we need reviews on iTunes. Lots of them. They also have to be positive reviews, but that's, of course, up to you and the actual quality the show. So can you please review this show on the iTunes store? If you loved it and want to hear more, please give it five stars. [music] David Kadavy 02:14 I'm very grateful to bring you this first guest. He is one of my biggest heroes, and he's the perfect example of someone who has built a business and a life according to his own values. Jason Fried - yes, the Jason Fried - hardly needs an introduction. He is the CEO of Basecamp and a New York Times best selling author. Jason co-founded Basecamp way back in 1999. It was originally a web design shop, but they built a little project management app called Basecamp, and now that's the focus of the company. In the process of building Basecamp the company also created Ruby on Rails, which is an open-source web framework that powers thousands of sites. And the thing I admire most about Jason is his contrarion thinking. Whatever the prevailing wisdom is, Jason seems to speak up and explain why that wisdom is wrong. He intentionally has setup his company small. His employees can live and work wherever they want, and they get a three day week during the summer months. The company is almost totally bootstrap. I say "almost" because they did take a little bit of investment from the one and only Jeff Bezos of Amazon, primarily just to be able to give him a call once in a while. David Kadavy 03:23 Jason has co-authored three books, one of which is the New York Times best selling Rework, in which he and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, share their rules for running a simple business. This interview is about one hour long, and there is so much more that I wanted to ask Jason. It could've been several hours easily. We talk about Basecamp in the beginning, which you may already be intimately familiar with, but stick it out and we soon start digging into the source of Jason's famously contrarion thinking. I'm really fascinated by where it comes from, because I'm someone who tends to be a bit contrarion myself, but these thoughts, they usually come after I have this deep internal conflict, and it seems like it just comes so naturally to Jason. So that's something that I try to unpack in the interview, and you're going to find some good tips for listening to that mischievous voice in your head. If you aren't already familiar with Jason, prepare yourself. He really spews brilliance. Everything that comes out of his mouth could be quoted, or could be a Tweet or could be the subject of a blog post. He's really easy to interview, which is great because he's one of the first people that I've interviewed. So I'm very excited to bring you this interview. Let's get started. [music] David Kadavy 04:44 Okay. So I'm here with Jason Fried in the Basecamp offices, and I look around here, and there's this beautiful wood paneling and it's just a quiet office. I can't help but notice there's nobody here. Jason Fried 04:58 No one's here. One person's here, but he's at lunch. David Kadavy 05:00 Oh, okay. That person's at lunch. Jason Fried 05:02 That person's at lunch. David Kadavy 05:03 Well, we are talking here on the day before Thanksgiving, so I wonder if that has something to do with it. Jason Fried 05:09 A little bit, but also most of the people even who work in Chicago work remotely, so we're a remote company. People across 30 some-odd different cities around the world, and, including the people who are here, we have 14 people in Chicago. Usually any given day there's five of them here, and it might be a different five each day but that's how we work here. Yeah. David Kadavy 05:28 Wow, five people. Okay. And this is a huge office. Jason Fried 05:31 It's a big office, yeah. So we have 50 people in the company and we all get together twice a year. We have an office that's built to handle the whole company, but a very small portion of the company is in the office on any given day. Half the office, too, is dedicated to public space. We have a theater. We've got a big kitchen area, a reception area. It is still a large office, though. David Kadavy 05:54 Yeah. We're in Chicago so there's a little more space available. So you guys have had this office for how long now? Jason Fried 06:04 Since August of 2010. David Kadavy 06:07 Okay. It's quiet, there's lots of space, there's lots of private spaces as well. To what extent do you feel like this office kind of is an expression of your own personality? Jason Fried 06:19 Well, I think it's an expression of the company's personality, which is probably derived at some point from mine since I was one of the founders. But mostly we're kind of an introverted group for the most part. Definitely there's some extroverted people here though as well, but we try to be respectful of one another's space, and privacy and time. So we kind of treat the office like a library, in that the rules here are kind of like library rules, which is that you walk into a library, everyone knows how to behave. You're respectful of one another. You're quiet. You don't interrupt people. People are studying, and thinking and working, and that's the same way the office here works. So for the most part, even if it's full of people, it's pretty quiet and pretty hush, and then people can go into these private rooms like you and I are sitting in right now and have a full volume conversation without interrupting people on the outside. Just like a library, they have little side rooms where you can sort of talk loudly and not interrupt people who are reading outside. David Kadavy 07:14 Yeah, that was always something that bothered me whenever I worked at a company. I might have a bunch of different roles, but I might be ears deep in some code, and somebody would come up, and tap me on the shoulder, and interrupt me and just lose all of it. Jason Fried 07:28 You lose it all. You lose the focus, the zone, and so we want to protect that because that's a really hard thing to get into in the first place. So if you're in that, we want to make sure that you stay in that as long as possible, versus inviting interruptions all day long, which is what a lot of modern offices are all about these days. David Kadavy 07:45 Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. I've noticed that before. So you guys started out as a software sort of consultancy, right? Or a web design company. Jason Fried 07:57 Web design. Yeah, we started as a web design company. David Kadavy 08:01 And that was called 37signals. Jason Fried 08:02 Yeah. In 1999 we launched the company in August, and we were doing website design for hire, but just redesign work for the most parts. So we weren't doing programming. We were just doing visual redesigns. So people already had the sites and we were like, "We can make that site a little bit better," and so they would hire us to do that. David Kadavy 08:19 Yeah. And now you are concentrated entirely pretty much on this one product, Basecamp. Jason Fried 08:25 Yeah, Basecamp. And Basecamp 3, the third version of that, just launched a couple weeks ago. David Kadavy 08:30 Oh, cool. Jason Fried 08:30 Every four years or so we completely reinvent the product from the ground up. Not a single line of code, not a single piece of design is shared. We make it all over again every four years, roughly. So we just did that for our third major time. Basecamp's been around for 12 years. It came out in February 2004. So about 12 years total now. So we're on the third major version. David Kadavy 08:50 That's funny. I guess I hadn't noticed that you reinvent the whole product every four years. Jason Fried 08:55 There's similar themes. So it's a lot like-- think about cars. We'll take the Porsche 911. Porsche 911 was released in 1963. It's about 52 years old now, but there's been seven generations of the Porsche 911. So every seven years, roughly, they do a new chassis, they do new engines, they do new technology around it. But it's still a Porsche 911. It looks roughly the same. The engines in the back. The driving dynamics are similar. You can identify a 911 that was made today and a 911 that was made 50 years ago. You can tell there's continuity, but roughly every seven years it's an entirely new car. And the same thing is true for like a Honda Accord or a Civic. These lines have been around for decades, but every four, five, six, seven, eight - in cars it's more like five to eight years because it's very expensive to make a new car - they make a new car. It's still an Accord, which means it's a four-door primarily. They have a coupe version too, but it's like a family car. And the Civic's a little bit smaller. They have these themes and these spirits around the things, but they're all new. And so that's what we do with Basecamp, is that Basecamp today, in 2015, can trace back to base camp classic, which is the first version of Basecamp in February 2004. The themes were similar but the product is reconsidered in a big way every four years, and in between that we just sort of improve the existing version. But then there's a point where you can't pack new ideas onto an old chassis, so we kind of redo the thing from scratch. David Kadavy 10:26 Yeah, that car analogy is interesting. I'm not totally up on the designs of cars, but I imagine that, say a Honda Accord, there's certain values that are portrayed - values about what a car is and what is important in a car being portrayed in that. And then there's all this changing technology, and then there's certain trends maybe that are influenced by other-- Jason Fried 10:47 Exactly. David Kadavy 10:48 --what the drivers are used to. Jason Fried 10:52 Yes. David Kadavy 10:53 That those sort of things change, and so that sort of calls for a total redo. Jason Fried 10:59 Totally. And you think about, like-- I think just cars are really good metaphors for this because you think about the Corvette, which has been around, I think, since the 50s, and there's like a spirit to that car. It's a two-door sports car, it's kind of a long-nose. There's a spirit to it. And even though they don't all look the same over the years, there's a language and an idea behind the Corvette which stays in the DNA of the car, but the car is redesigned and reengineered completely from the ground up every seven years or something. That's just how that industry-- most industries work that same way. David Kadavy 11:33 Yeah. I mean, they're still positioned, in a way, against other types of cars. The Corvette, it's a different thing from a Camaro, right? It's a different type of person that will drive it and it's different sort of values that person has. Right? Jason Fried 11:48 Yes. So each car has it's spirit-- it's much like-- look, you are not the same person - I'm not even talking, like, personality - you don't share a single cell in common with yourself from ten years ago. David Kadavy 12:00 Yeah. Jason Fried 12:01 So you're actually-- but you're still David. You're still the same guy. You've changed. Your tastes have changed and your points of view have changed, but you're still you, even though you've been completely reengineered from the ground up in many ways all the time. So there's iterative tweaks, and then at a certain point you're all new. You're actually all new compared to what you were ten years ago. David Kadavy 12:23 Yeah. So let's talk about that. Jason Fried 12:24 That's a little bit of a weird analogy, let's stick to the car one. But that's kind of what we're trying to do here, instead of the alternative, which is typically how software works, which is that it's constantly iterated on. Which is good, but that's when the code base gets really difficult to work on at a certain point, because it gets old and the technologies that you build on are kind of old. It becomes hard to work on, you begin to slow down, and you can't handle brand new ideas because you try and fit them into the current patterns and it's like, "But this won't quite fit anymore." So you kind of shoehorn it in, then you make compromises, and that's how things start to get bad over a certain point of time. David Kadavy 13:01 Yeah. So let's talk about that DNA, then. Basecamp, for those who aren't familiar, is a project management web app, basically. Jason Fried 13:14 Yes. David Kadavy 13:14 I mean, there's probably-- Jason Fried 13:16 There's iOS and android apps, yeah. All that stuff [inaudible]. David Kadavy 13:19 When you started, it's like your main competitor was maybe Microsoft Project. Jason Fried 13:26 Main competitor has always been the same: email. David Kadavy 13:28 Email, okay. Jason Fried 13:28 Email and habits. David Kadavy 13:31 But when people would think of…
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