- Hey everybody, how's it going?
I'm Chase.
Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show
here on CreativeLive, and you guys know this show.
This is where I get to sit down with amazing humans
and help unpack their brains to help you live your dreams,
whether that's in career, in hobby, or in life.
My guest today is, as all the guests are, truly amazing.
However, this person has changed the future of technology
because they are the creator of Ruby on Rails,
among other things,
also, the founder of Basecamp, a project manager software
that I have used for years and years and years.
My guest is David Heinemeier Hansson.
Welcome to the show.
(soft techno music)
(applause)
They love you!
- Thank you, man, thanks for having me.
- Super happy to have you.
So, I've been tracking you and your work and your partner,
Jason Fried, with specifically one of the things
that was very impactful for me was the book, Rework.
So you can say a lot of things about your career.
Technologist, author,
how do you identify?
Like to me, self-identification,
it's like a weird thing in this world
where we're all a bunch of hyphens.
So, "Oh cool," or we're at a party, "well, what do you do?"
How do you describe yourself? - That's a good question.
Usually, when I get it, I just say I run a software company.
- Got it.
- So, that's the short summary,
but it really doesn't encapsulate it all, because I think
one of the things that's happened
is the people have gotten so pigeonholed.
- Yeah. - Lots of people are like,
"Oh, it's getting deeper and deeper,"
especially in technology, right?
It used to be a single programmer
could create the whole thing.
- Yep. - And now,
more and more people are going,
"Oh, I'm a front-end developer
"doing React with Redux, da, da, da, da,"
and then you're down the rabbit hole, right?
I like to sort of stay up as a generalist,
as a generalist in technology.
- Cool.
I think we're gonna go straight at,
well, actually let me give one context,
one element of context here which is,
I've had a really wide-ranging set of guests on this show,
people like billionaire entrepreneurs,
esoteric photographers that are just starting
but doing something really, really cool and crazy,
and a whole spectrum.
But I've been admittedly, I think, a little shy
on pure technologists, and I understand
that you don't like the word pure technologist,
though you just talked about yourself as a generalist,
but conceptually, when you come up with the framework,
an entire ecosystem for programming,
that's a super big deal, it's like a language, basically.
So, A, I feel this is me,
I underrepresented that community,
and so, following you for some time
and wanting to have you on the show is some redemption.
- Sure! - So, thank you
for being a part of my personal redemption,
but also, it's absolutely creative in the most,
in so many ways that are similar
to all the other disciplines
that have been featured on the show,
but I wanna know how you think of,
we'll just use Ruby for example,
but you can talk about it generally,
the way that creativity
and programming computers come together.
- I think it's really interesting
because I think it's really changed.
When I came into programming in early 2000s,
late 90s, a lot of programmers
did not identify themselves as creatives, in my mind.
They identified themselves as engineers or scientists.
- Yeah. - And I mean,
there's some of them who'd say that's creative work as well,
but it was quite distinct from say,
I'm a writer. - Yeah.
- Or I'm a designer, and they saw sort of a split
between these two things,
and we're actually quite proud of being like not creatives
in that sense, right? - Yeah, yeah.
- And I think that that really didn't jive with me at all.
It was one of the reasons why
I didn't want to become a programmer.
I've been a pretty reluctant programmer.
I've known programmers,
I've been friends with programmers all my life,
and it wasn't until, basically, my late teens,
early 20s, that I kind of, sort of,
stumbled into it because I needed it.
- Yeah. - And then,
once I stumbled into it, and I needed it,
and I started using it, I started realizing,
"Oh, I have the wrong conception."
This isn't just all about math.
- Yeah.
- Which is that was my early conception of programming,
"Oh this is just if you like math a lot,
"you're gonna like programming."
Which is because I grew up with demo programmers
and game programmers.
It was all about vectors and polygons,
and I have no interest, patience, or passion for that.
- Yeah. - And it wasn't until
I really discovered information technology,
the web in particular-- - Yeah.
- That it ignited something else,
and I went like, "This is pretty cool."
- Yeah.
- And then in particular, once I discovered Ruby.
so I had tried a bunch of programming languages
that I never really took to,
then I was just a reluctant programmer.
I never thought of myself as a programmer
when I was doing PHP or Java or other things
I did in school or just to make things work.
Then I found Ruby and all of a sudden
it's like my mind just goes poof.
Whoa this is something totally different,
I could actually see myself doing this.
So all of these things came together right at the same time.
We started Basecamp, the software--
- Yep. - That I'm still doing today,
the whole foundation of our business back in 2003.
That was my first real project in Ruby,
and that was what gave birth to Ruby on Rails.
- Yep. - And all these things
came together at sort of the apex,
and I just connected all the dots,
and I was just like, "This is what I want to do."
Up until that point, as I said, very reluctant programmer.
I had a lot of other things I liked doing.
I liked writing,
I had this idea of being in business, and so on.
- Yep, entrepreneur, yeah. - But once it clicked
and once Ruby sort of grabbed hold of me,
I thought like, "Wow, okay, I can be a programmer."
- Wow, so...
That was a beautiful, elegant, weaving
of a lot of things together,
so I'm gonna try and pick those apart.
- Sure. - So let's talk,
that's a great conceptual framework of how you identify.
So, let's talk about Basecamp
because I'm a passionate Basecamp user,
and I think it goes back to a piece in my world
where as sort of creators, I ran my own photo studio,
and at the time, the thought of being organized,
it felt like The Man keeping me down.
These are my ideas and when you realize
ideas need frameworks to really happen and come to life,
whether those are very intricate and detailed,
or even just general, and Basecamp,
the fact that it was online, and the fact
that it was easily shareable and it was simple,
to me it was brutally simple and you guys actively,
it was clear to me, were deciding to not go feature-crazy,
that I loved it, so A, thank you.
- Sure.
- I've given you a lot of my money over the years,
but very happily, but B,
what were some of the guiding principles?
A, talk about the founding of the company,
but B, why and what was your vision there?
- Sure, so, before Basecamp there was 37signals,
and 37signals started as a-- - There was a blog, right?
- There was a blog, too, Signal v. Noise founded in 1999,
along with the company 37signals,
and 37signals started out as a web design company.
Jason Fried, my partner,
and three other designers came together
and started making web designs for clients,
and I started working with Jason in 2001.
We started working on a couple of client projects together,
and after we'd worked together for a couple years,
we just came to this one point
where I think we dropped something.
Like, we were working with some client,
and the email got lost, or the files got sent the wrong way
and we were like, "This is silly.
"We're trying to manage this whole project,
"and there's four on our side,
"and there's I don't know how many on their side,
"and it's kind of a mess.
"We're just doing it all in email.
"There's no process, there's no central place.
"We can't find anything.
"We make software; can't we fix this?"
And we thought, "Let's give it a shot," right?
So we started making essentially just a tool for ourselves.
We had the inspiration at the time
like blogs were just taking off,
like, "Hey, if you have a project blog
"that could be one thing,
"if we just have a to-do list here
"so we know what work needs to be done.
"If we could just upload some files
"and put them in this one place.
"Just those three, four things, that'd be great."
So we started doing that, and we put together a package
that was well enough for us to start using it ourselves.
I mean, I think we spent maybe three weeks
initially tinkering, and then we started using it.
Immediately threw a real project in there,
started using it with a client,
and it didn't take much more than that
to think, "This is a huge upgrade over email."
- Yeah. - "This is huge upgrade,
"Now we have a system, we look better," right?
A lot of that is you have clients,
you kinda wanna look good! - Of course, yeah.
- And you don't look good if you miss the email
and it's just this huge thread, and it's just a mess, right?
So it made us look good and we thought,
"There's probably others who would like this too."
Half the time we were-- - Some other people
that want to look good, hmm. - Exactly! (laughs)
"Is this a market that we can exploit?"
So, the software was kinda cooking
and we were sharing an office
with Coudal Partners at the time,
advertisements, and these days all sorts of things,
kind of company, and we showed them,
showed Jim Coudal like, "What do you think of this?"
And he was like, "Can I give you my money?"
I'm like, "Okay."
We paid for this.
Again, we were sort of reluctantly building this.
We had tried a bunch of different things.
We tried to use blocking systems.
There's like moveable type
and there's this, that, and the other thing.
Never really fit, we started building something,
it started clicking, we show it to a couple of people
in the industry, they go like, "This is awesome.
"We wanna do this with you."
Alright, well let's try turning it into a product.
All the while we're not dropping anything, right?
This isn't this epiphany that just goes like,
"Oh my God, we have the world's best idea!
"Let's drop everything else that we're doing
"and put everything on red,
"and then hopefully if it works out, this is gonna be great,
"and if it doesn't work out, we're totally bust,"
so we continue to serve clients,
treating Basecamp, essentially,
as a third or a fourth client, along the way,
spend about six months building it,
and in early 2004, we just had enough to like,
"Alright, let's try to put it out there,"
and it was kind of a funny launch
because we built it for ourselves,
and it was sort of just barely adequate for that.
We put it out there and we think,
"Okay, if we can get like, I don't know,
"make 2,000 bucks a month off this thing after a year,
"that'd be pretty great, right?"
$4,000, that was the target.
$4,000 after one year.
If we can make that a month, that'd be great.
Like two weeks we cleared that, and we're like,
"Holy shit, this is crazy," right?
And it's so funny because I remember a lot of those numbers,
and if you think of those numbers today,
in sort of comparison, they're pathetic.
We had no one sign up for this thing, essentially,
but we had like, I don't know,
150 people sign up the first day,
and we were like, "Wow, this is crazy!"
- Incredible!
- Today, you're like, "Oh man, you didn't have
"100,000 people sign up on your opening day?
"That's a total flop." - It's a bust, right.
- So we went through this slow process
because there weren't really a lot
of other people doing it at the time.
One of the main things we actually had
to convince people was put in your credit card.
- Yeah, we're gonna be here. - It was still a thing!
In 2004, it was still a thing like,
"Well, I don't know if I want to put
"in my credit card." - Online shopping, huh.
- And actually, one of the hardest things
when we were just about to launch was we'd build up
this whole system to charge by the year, right?
This was gonna cost 499 a year or something else,
499 was the entry plan,
and we'd built all the software,
get ready for that, and then we'd go to the bank,
at that time, there was no Stripe.
There was not a thing you could just sign up.
You had to actually go down to the bank
and sign a stack of papers, and say,
"I wanna take credit cards,"
and they, of course, they took like five weeks
to review this, and we're all busy
just getting ready to launch.
I think the week before launch,
they then come back to us and say like,
"I don't know what you're thinking,
"but this is not gonna happen.
"We are not gonna let you charge credit cards
"and basically charge people for a year in advance.
"What if you guys go out of business in like three weeks?
"Everyone's gonna charge back the amount,
"and we're gonna be on the hook."
I'm like, "Fuck." - Yeah, "Help!"
- "Help, what are we gonna do?
"Okay, I guess we can just change it
"and charge it by the month, is that gonna be okay?"
And they were like, "Okay,
"I'll guess we'll believe enough in you
"that you can stay in business for a month."
So we changed it over to start charging for the month
and charged $49 instead, or whatever it was.
But that was the atmosphere, right?
We didn't really know what was going on,
we didn't have anyone to sort of look at,
there were none of these frameworks,
not just for payment processing,
but also the technology, right?
I had gotten enamored with Ruby, but there was no Rails.
I had to build a bunch of that stuff myself,
and if you had told me today,
"Oh, are you gonna build Ruby on Rails?"
I'd be like, "No way."
I just built a little thing,
I gotta get this thing to talk to a database.
"Oh jeez, how do I do that?
"Let me look that up, let me put that together.
"Oh, then I gotta get it to render this thing.
"Oh, we also gotta send email?
"Oh, I don't know, I gotta configure
"this Send Mail thing, and whatever."
So it was a very slow process,
there was not a great ambition.
We kinda just stumbled into it step by step
and without any of the risk, right?
So there was none of the risk.
There was none of the, "Oh, we put all our money
"on four credit cards," and whatever,
which is a founding myth that I hear a lot,
and a lot of people are resonating somehow
with this heroic ideal
that unless you're risking everything,
and you're basically on the verge of starvation,
it's not really worth it, and we were like...
We still had clients, they're paying us money!
We're just fine, right?
- Yeah, what's wrong with that?
- So there was none of that stuff going on,
which also meant, of course, there was no external money,
there was no-- - Funding.
- Seed funding, there was none of this stuff,
because we were paying ourselves
just off these clients that we already had
and that's what kinda bootstrapped the business.
And then by the time it was bootstrapped,
I think it took about a year,
and then we were paying ourselves.
The company was making just enough money
to pay our meager salaries, and we were like,
now we can do this full-time with, again, zero risk, right?
- Wow, so, embedded in that narrative
are so many individual things that I'd like
to sort of try and frame.
So the summary, I'm gonna let you put it
into your own words but,
you talked at one point about like there's a myth.
So talk to me about the myth,
and then what your experience is relative to that myth.
So the myth is--
- The myth is that entrepreneurship requires massive risk,
and in many cases, also that it requires
huge amounts of capital,
and that you have to have someone who just have,
is in a position where they can do both
of those things, right?
They can take a bunch of personal risk,
and then they can convince people to give them
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, right?
And that was always sort of the archetype
of the Silicon-Valley-style entrepreneur,
and we came out of a completely different atmosphere.
First of all, we came out of Chicago, right?
So right there, Chicago, 2004.
You know how many technology companies were
in Chicago in 2004?
None of them, right, right?
I mean, Motorola, I think,
somewhere out in the 'burbs making RAZR phones or something.
- Yes!
- So it was kind of like a desert in that sense,
which, it wasn't so much
just that we had issues with the myth, although we did.
Both Jason and I had worked in the dot-com era.
Jason had worked for a couple of San Francisco companies.
I'd worked in Denmark for a couple of incubators,
and we were both deeply, deeply skeptical of that system,
and it just bust, right?
2001, the whole thing just exploded,
and we just like, this is fake.
This is unsustainable, this is all the things
we don't want to do if we get a crack at it,
and then, of course, there was just the necessity
that even if we wanted to, there wasn't an option.
No one was going to give a couple of fellas
in Chicago any money to build any kind
of system at that time, right? - Right, yeah.
- So we were born both out of sort
of a sense of disgust somewhat
by being exposed to it,
and then a sense of necessity. - Yeah.
- And then it just kept on rolling.
As Basecamp was taking off, 2004, 2005, 2006,
the industry woke up again.
Like there was this lull,
and then they woke up again
and all these software companies starting happening
and we started seeing sort of the same things
that were happening with dot-com boom and bust.
People racing big money and this whole narrative
just came together-- - Yeah, radical growth.
- That this is how you make software companies.
And we were like, "Hello?
"No." (chuckling)
- "We're over here." - "We're over here,
"we're not doing it like this at all.
And in fact, we think that the way we're doing it
is a lot easier, is a lot more accessible
to a lot more people. - Yeah.
- And it's more sustainable
and in many ways, is more nourishing--
- Healthy. - Is more fun,
is more healthy, it's all of these things
and we're like, "Why is all the attention,
"why is all the light being shown
"on this one particular, very narrow path?
That, arguably, yes, has turned out
some spectacular successes.
But you look at what's left for the rest of it.
There's the one in 10,000, one in 100,000 breakouts
of the Facebooks, of the Googles, of whatever,
and then there's just this mass underneath
that just gets wasted. - Yeah.
- We look at that and thought like,
"This is such a waste of human potential."
It's not that we shouldn't have those things.
- Sure. - It's just that
there's this whole other segment of the market
that should also be there
and if someone wants to start a new business,
if they want to be an entrepreneur,
especially in software, they should be able
to look at two, at least,
they should be able to look at 50 paths.
But at least they should have two paths,
not just being presented with this one option
that says you have to raise this massive amount of capital,
you have to have this crazy burn rate,
you have to hire 150 people in nine months,
you have to do this full blast, right?
And that was what I ended up being so...
Angry, actually, at. - Yeah
- That we had this, the web. - Yeah.
- We had this phenomenal commercial platform
that gave so many people so many opportunities
and we narrowed the whole thing down to this one archetype
of what a software company was gonna be.
It was driving me mad,
and it was actually driving Jason mad.
So, we started writing about it.
We started writing about how did we come up?
Because we didn't do anything special.
How many people out there can do a client business
where they can get a couple clients, they can pay the bills,
and still have a little bit of time left over
just so they can pursue their things as a side project?
Lots of people, right? - Yeah.
- Versus this tiny group of people
who can manage to convince Sand Hill Road VC's
to give them money, right? - Yeah.
- So I thought, "This is just a broader message.
"We gotta get that going."
So, that's been sort of a mission and a passion
for the past decade plus
to communicate that there's a different way
to create not just software businesses,
but businesses in general,
that kinda goes like, "We don't need all this stuff."
In fact in a lot of cases, you're better off without it.
If you wanna build a wonderful $10 million a year business,
you cannot do that with that path.
You can build $100 million,
or a billion dollar business with that path,
you cannot build a wonderful,
$10 million business. - 'Cause they don't wanna
get behind it. - And there are so many
businesses that are wonderful $10 million businesses.
There are wonderful one million dollar businesses, right?
Shouldn't we have those too?
Shouldn't those be part of it?
Should we just focus on these--
- Billion dollar-- - Grand slams?
Well, there're some people who make all their money
off their grand slams, right?
With the VC's. - Sure.
- That whole ecosystem,
and they have very loud megaphones,
and they have a very compelling story.
I remember one of the pivotal moments for me
where I just got like furious,
which is, not about the person, Kevin Rose, right?
- I know Kevin, yeah. - So, with Digg,
at the cover of Business Week in I think 2016,
going like this, how this kid made $60 million in 18 months.
And I'm just like, "He didn't make $16 million."
Someone gave him a big check to build Digg
which then imploded and never created
any economic value whatsoever. - Right.
- And I was just like, "This is such fucking bullshit!"
- Right, (laughing) it's so true.
- "This is bullshit!" - Yeah.
- And like, how is this just happening?
How is this just rolling?
How is this just the one narrative
that everyone is going like,
"Clap, clap, clap, (hands clapping)
"Oh, isn't this wonderful?"
And I'm just like, "This is just too goddamn much."
(laughing)
So, this is sort of that fire
that has propelled a lot of what we have been writing about
on Signal v. Noise, it's what propelled us
to write three books already.
Getting Real, which was basically an extraction
of a series of workshops we did
that was called, Building of Basecamp,
where we were just telling people like,
"Hey, here's how we did it."
And not just, "Here's how we did it,"
like, "look at what went into it.
"Do you have those things too?
"You probably do, do you have like 10 hours a week?"
Which is what I spent building Basecamp
on the technical side, 10 hours a week.
Not 10 hours a day,
10 hours a week to build it, you probably do!
You can probably squeeze that in if you have clients,
if you have other ways of making this happen.
And here's how we otherwise went about it,
here's how we went about building an audience,
here's how we went about developing a message,
here's how we went about making software itself.
So, that was Getting Real, that was 2006 I think,
and then Rework, 2010.
We took basically all those ideas
we had from over a decade,
mashed them into the book,
sold the manuscript to a publisher for the first time,
we had self-published Getting Real,
signed a contract that said,
"You must deliver a book of 40,000 words."
And we had 40,000 words and we showed up to them like,
"We're gonna cut the book in half,
"here's 20,000 words, publish that instead."
This whole thing just kept rolling with us,
kept screaming about this alternative path
and we still are today.
I keep thinking like there's gonna be this tipping point
where we don't have to yell so hard anymore.
But we're not there yet,
so I'm here, I'm everywhere,
yelling about this (laughing) (clapping)
alternative way of doing this.
- You're yelling at the right people,
or you're with the right people
'cause I think I've also tried to be a champion
of rebelling against that sort of one path false narrative.
You know, for me it's around education,
that if you go to school, you go to these schools,
and then you get a good job and if you get a good job,
then you'll be happy and it's just like,
that was just like, yeah, don't get it started, right?
- Right, I was just about to turn the key.
(laughing) - Exactly.
Jump backwards off the building.
So, A, you're in a safe space,
B, I'm fascinated with the loud megaphone
and everyone sees the handful of people that are on,
you know, whether it's Kevin,
bless his heart, love the guy,
he's been on the show before,
he's an amazing guy. - Wonderful.
- Right, but he didn't write the headline.
- No, nor did he do the prop
with the earphones and everything.
Like I've been on one of those four shoots,
you probably directed some of those
photo shoots, just like, (laughing)
"Hey, what if I can put a prop on here?
"It'll look better, yeah, just do a thumbs up."
And before you know it,
you're like this schmuck on the cover of a magazine.
- Been guilty as charged.
But I'm fascinated by culture's obsession
around a handful of folks
that largely are anomalies. - Yes.
- And I think it contributes
to a terrible amount of anxiety, unnecessary anxiety
that compare a friend of mine, Marie Forleo,
you know the liquor, Jagermeister?
Or Goldschlager, which is even worse.
Goldschlager is like bad Jagermeister
with little flakes of gold in it.
So, it's like the worst thing
and she calls this Compare Schlager,
'cause it's terrible for you.
It looks ugly and it's terrible,
which is you're comparing your real life
with everybody else's highlight reel.
- Yes.
- And so, this is now epidemic proportion in our culture.
It's refreshing to hear honest,
heartfelt stories that are radically different.
So, that, I think in a way, is shaping Basecamp, right?
That's how it came up. - Yep.
- There had to be a few other takeaways from Basecamp.
I hear you on that counter narrative
and we're putting a flag in that.
What else, like, what's the peripheral stuff
that you learned that was really surprising
when you were on that journey?
- So, with Basecamp in particular, I think,
is that general sense.
So, when people ask me, "What is Basecamp?"
Well, Basecamp is sort of a lot of things.
Basecamp is a way to help you grow, to cope,
with things taking off and all of a sudden,
you have more things coming on.
But what are the actually tools?
There's a lot of things in Basecamp, right?
- Yep. - Because just like
how I approach technology from a very general sense of like,
"Oh, I wanna be able to know a bunch of things
"about a bunch of things,
"and I'm not go go into these super deep,"
right? - Yeah.
- Basecamp is sort of the same way.
Like, it's simple because it stayed up there.
We just built a couple tools and we put them together
and we made the integration and the integration story
was actually, in many ways, more important than,
"Do we have the best to-do section in the business?"
No, we don't, there's someone else who just does that.
"Do we have the best messaging system in the business?"
No, we don't, the value is that you put
all those things together. - Yeah.
- And what I found selling Basecamp and making Basecamp
was that the vast majority of people
just don't need that much software.
They need a little bit, right? - Yeah.
- They're coming from, still today,
our number one competitor is email.
Number one, when we ask people where did you come from
when you signed up for Basecamp?
The majority of them did not use software
to help them in their process before at home.
They used software in the form of email,
or Stickies, or something else like that.
So, just that that's still true,
that we're at such a base level, there's such a focus,
especially once you get sucked into the websphere
and you start knowing about apps
and you start following along, there's such a temptation to,
all these micro comparisons, "Oh, do you have this feature,
"do you do that," and whatever.
Most people, they don't know, they don't care,
they just need a little bit.
And our focus on bringing them just that little bit
at a reasonable price in a simple way,
is still controversial.
(laughing) It's such an odd thing.
I would have thought today,
given the fact Basecamp had the success it had,
that we would have just a million of competitors
that were trying to do this integration story.
And instead, everything else that's breaking out right now,
Slack, for example, the chat,
just the chat part, right?
Asana, just the to-do list part, like Trello,
just the boards on the camp-engine style,
like Dropbox, just the files, right?
All wonderful tools, great, great tools.
And then we talked to customers
who are trying to make all those five things talk
to each other and they go like, "Just making that happen,
"can you just give me something that does that?"
- And you're like, "Here." - "I don't need
"all of those things," and that integration story
is still so open and so right there, right?
- It's available, yeah.
- So, that's where we've focused on,
and it continues to surprise me.
And the same thing happened on the technology side.
So, Ruby on Rails, we created in 2003,
I started working on it, I released it in 2004,
and 2005, six, seven, it really blew up, right?
Tons of people started using it
and I thought like, "Okay, this is gonna last a couple years
"and then there's gonna be a Ruby on Rails
"in every single language," and whatever.
- Yeah.
- Whatever early advantage we had would be gone.
And here we are, what, 14 years later?
Just pushed on the new release Ruby on Rails,
we've never been more popular.
Even if there's less buzz,
there are more people using Ruby on Rails.
Why?
Because it's still controversial.
Because it's still doing this integration.
Ruby on Rails is just like Basecamp,
trying to take a lot of ideas,
put them into one package just so that
a small individual team could go like,
"Alright, let's get on with it."
Versus most technology today,
everything's taking off, React, Redux.
A lot of these things in the actually world,
they're very narrow-focused tools
that are very good at this one thing
and then it's basically like a box of Legos
that just someone empties on the floor and go like,
"Oh, yeah, yeah, isn't this easy?
"Just put the whole 4,000 pieces together by yourself."
(laughing)
And I'm like, "I just wanna play with a freakin' truck."
- Yeah! (laughs) - Right?
Could someone just put the truck together?
Do I have to put all 4,000 pieces together myself?
I just want a goddamn truck, right?
So, that's what we tried to sell,
both with Basecamp with Ruby on Rails,
let's just sell some trucks.
Everything doesn't have to be a construction kit.
- Yeah.
- Which, let me just, quick anecdote.
When I moved to the US in 2005,
I just finished my degree at Copenhagen Business School,
I just finished by bachelor's degree, and Jason was like,
"Oh, this Basecamp thing is going pretty well,"
this was 2005, we've been in it for two years, I was like,
"Yeah, I don't know, maybe I should
"just do the master's degree,"
since they're free in Denmark,
so, "Should I just do that?"
And it's like, "Oh, okay, I'll move to the US."
I arrive in the US and I think
one of the first places Jason took me out to dinner
was a burger place.
And the food arrived, and it's in pieces.
Like, here's the meat,
here's the salad, here's the tomato,
here's the onions, here's the bun,
and I'm like, "Where's the chef?"
Like, no one assembled this burger for me.
What am I buying here?
Am I buying ingredients?
Like, why didn't we just go to--
- A store. - I didn't know
of Whole Foods at the time, I'm like,
"Couldn't we just go to a store and get these things?"
And this is one of those things
that I just find so fascinating.
Like, I want finished things. - Yeah.
- If I go out to eat, I want the chef
to prepare the meal for me, and I'll just eat it, right?
- Yeah. - When I use technology
most of the time, I want it assembled.
- Yeah. - Right?
And I think that that's still
such a controversial idea in a lot of circles,
that the assembly shouldn't be part of it.
And especially in technology,
what really offends me is everyone puts their shit together
in the same way, which is
what offends me about the burger too.
Like how many ways are there to put a burger together?
Are you gonna put the salad on top of the bun?
There's just not that many stereotypes for it, right?
Can't we just agree on a couple of them
and then like we just do that, right?
So, that's what I tried to do with Ruby on Rails.
We don't all have to configure
how a code talks to a database.
Can we just decide once, and then we can move on
to something that's more interesting
and focus on that? - Yeah, I love that,
to me, there's so many permutations of the same argument.
Like the fact that every, most of the creators that I know,
they're trying to invent an entirely new thing
when what you did is you just took the four things
out there, the four Legos. - Yes, put them together.
- And you put 'em together and that's the remix.
And nothing is new-- - Exactly.
- There are so many ideas and we're just trying
to reassemble those ideas.
People are worried about inventing some new
once-in-a-lifetime thing-- - Yes.
- Which keeps so many people from doing shit.
- Absolutely. - Yeah.
- And I think it's because there's such a focus
on the glory, this grand insight.
Something brand new no one has ever heard of before,
that's the 1%. - Yeah.
- And then there's the 99 which is we just take the pieces
that are already there, put them together
in a different order, and all of a sudden,
that order is exactly what a group
of people need, right? - Yeah.
- And I think there should be more focus on that
and there should be more validation
that not only is that like good and totally okay,
it's fucking great! - Yeah.
- It's what the vast majority
of people in the world should be doing,
taking things that already exist
and putting them together in interesting,
slightly twisted, slightly subtly different ways,
and that's how we'd go.
If you look at both technology and the tools
that we're using,
so, Basecamp is a to-do list, and file uploads,
and some blocking and some messaging and whatever,
there's nothing new in any of them in their archetypes.
Basecamp invented nothing.
Ruby on Rails invented nothing,
all the patterns of use that we took.
I went shopping in textbooks, and I'm like,
"I want one of those, I want one of those, I want,"
and then I'm gonna put them together
and I'm gonna give you a truck.
- To me, the again, false narrative
that the best ideas are these sort of wild thing
that you have to come up with and it's
a once-in-a-lifetime deal-- - And you have to be a genius.
- Right. - Right?
If it's only the 1%, it's only the geniuses
that are allowed. - Yeah.
- It's only the geniuses that really have this sort of,
they can come up with this brand new thing.
Sometimes when I get accolades with the work that I've done,
I'm just like,
"Thank you, that's nice."
But it wasn't genius. - Right.
- It was a bunch of work,
and it was actually also, it's not even that
because the flip side sometimes of that is like,
"Well, okay, maybe I wasn't a genius,
"but I outworked everyone." - Yeah.
- This is one of those things that happened
with Gary sometimes. - Right.
- He's all about like 18 hours a day
and I'd be like, "No, just like seven or eight is fine."
(laughing) Like 40 hours a week
is plenty of time to assemble all the trucks
the world will ever need
for the vast majority of people, right?
So, if you think of things like,
"Either I have to be a genius,
"or I have to be willing to work 120 hours a week."
Clearly, a lot of people would look at those things,
they're like, "I'm not a genius,
"I don't wanna work 120 hours a week,
"entrepreneurship is not for me."
Which I just go like, "That is false!"
- Yeah. - The same thing with risk.
They're all these things that the characteristics
we ascribe to these heroes of entrepreneurship,
they're the ones that turn everyone else off.
- Yeah. - And we need to just...
Take those out, we need to actually shoot them down
and we need to puncture them and say,
"No, you can create great, sustainable, wonderful,
"impactful businesses on 40 hours a week.
"You can create great software inventing nothing," right?
"Just putting things together in novel ways.
"You can get a business off the ground
"without mortgaging your house five times over,
"just treating it as a side project
"until there's some traction you get going.
"All of a sudden, if I take those three barriers
"away from you, what's left now?
"Why aren't you doing it?"
And all of a sudden, people can go like, "Okay."
They might still not do it, right?
I think sometimes there's also an attraction
to those barriers. - Yeah.
- Because people go like--
- "I tried." - "Oh, yeah, I'd totally be
"an entrepreneur, if it was just
because I wasn't a genius-- - "I don't have billions."
- Or, "If I had 120 hours a week,
"or whatever, I'd totally do it."
But if you take those things away,
you don't have those excuses anymore.
And then you might still say,
"Okay, entrepreneurship is just not for me,
"I don't want to start anything new,
"that's kind of risky," or whatever.
But there's also plenty of people
who were legitimately put off
who now go like, "Okay, I guess I could do it."
I've heard so many times from people
who read Rework or Getting Real,
that it was that permission.
- Yeah. - "I'm allowed to do it too.
"I'm allowed to do it on a sustainable way
"that I can picture."
A lot of people can't picture themselves jumping from like,
"Okay, I work at a job, nine to five,
"and I gotta jump into this other mode
"where I'm risking everything, I'm risking my house,
"I'm risking my kids," whatever.
"I'm working 120 hours a week and I'm risking money,
"I can't even picture that jump,
"it's way too far of a jump."
And there's so many steps, not just in between,
but steps that you can stop at
and say like, "Alright, this--
- "This is a lovely existence."
- Yes! - "It's a great business.
"This is makes all the money
"and giving me all the free time and all--
- That's where I get really also just get fired up.
- Yeah.
- There's at least success criteria, right?
There's such a focus on your success in businesses,
or in software in particular,
it's as if you build Facebook, or Google, or whatever.
The difference between being an entrepreneur
to start something and just barely scraping by
and getting a business that makes, say,
a million dollars a year, that is 97% of the difference
that you will ever experience in material goodness.
Once you get to the point
where you have a million dollars cleaned in the bank,
your life is 97% different from having zero
and having to worry about every paycheck and so on,
versus the difference between jumping
from a million to 10 million, maybe that's another 2%
and then the difference between 10 million
and a billion is the last percent.
Why would you focus on those things?
And why wouldn't you focus your odds
on getting to like the 97% of the value?
Because the odds are totally different.
The odds of you setting out to start a business
that's gonna make a million dollars a year,
they're still not great, it's hard,
but they're infinitely better
than the odds of you starting the next Facebook or Google.
- The cultural narrative around that as failure
versus raising money as seen as success.
Like, raising money basically,
and someone who's done it,
Mark Cuban sat here, he's like,
"That's your first big loss-- - Yes.
- "When you raise a bunch of money and--
- Now, you owe a bunch of people money.
- Right, and yeah, or you're blood, sweat, and tears.
- Yeah.
- And I think I really appreciate you helping,
that's part of the journey and the vision of this show
and of CreativeLive in general,
is that we're helping to rewrite that narrative.
So, you bringing your passion and your heart into that,
couldn't ask for more, so if we stopped recording right now,
it would be like a slam dunk.
But I do wanna get to Rework
because that was something that really, I would say...
I looked at your guys more, I was familiar with 37signals
and you know, read the blog when I carved out a lot
of my world, was really, really early in that community,
and Rework though, there was something,
like you said earlier, I think permission.
- Yes.
- So, talk to me a little bit
about the concept behind Rework,
give a couple of the overarching themes,
and why you guys wrote it.
- So, Rework is really a compilation.
- Surprise, right? - Surprise!
- There's a pattern here. - It was not a book
written from scratch, it was a compilation of everything,
the best ideas that we'd been talking about
over the past 10 years.
And we put them into this one format, and you know what?
The number one, maybe even today, if you go on amazon.com,
the number one critique of the book was,
"Hey, I read Signal v. Noise, every article for 10 years.
"This has nothing new, thumbs down."
You know what?
You're the sliverest of the sliverest
of the sliverest, right?
The tiniest, the tiniest percent.
Who are these people who followed us for 10 years
and read everything that we ever wrote?
No one, right? (laughing)
Except that guy, clearly.
And I think that's one of these other misconceptions
is if you have something to say,
you're only allowed to say it once.
Then it's not new anymore.
You know what?
If you want an impact, you better damn well be ready
to say the same thing 10,000 times--
- So true. - Before you even start
to scratch the surface, right? - Yep.
So, that's what we were trying to do,
is to say the same things we've been saying
for years and years and years in a different format
that could reach a wider audience.
- Or different, or wider, yeah.
- Yes, and have a different kind of impact.
And a lot of the things that we put into Rework
was basically just the lessons and the differences
that we had took from running Basecamp, the business.
One of the things, for example, ASAP is poison.
So, we had, at some stage, sort of lulled ourselves,
as most people do, is like, "Oh, I need this ASAP."
And you just run out, there's this (fingers snapping)
constant urgency around. - Yeah.
- "You have to drop everything to do this one thing
"for me right now and in three hours,
"I'll tell you something else that's ASAP,
"and then you gotta drop that to do that for me,"
and we just found that as such a toxic idea.
That ASAP and the constant context switching,
that, "Oh, now you gotta do this, now you gotta do that,"
was not a good way to get things done.
And we always looked at things in the sense of
how can we get things done?
We are a tiny team, when Basecamp was founded,
we were just four people.
And it took us years and years and years,
and then we were seven people,
and years and years and years, and years more,
and then we were like 14 people.
We didn't have a lot of people to spare.
So, we had to make the hours count.
And not thrashing those hours with ASAP,
this, that, and the other thing, was a big part.
The other part that sort of relates
to that is the meetings were toxic.
That it's it's so easy,
especially for people who are managers,
to call creatives into a room and go like,
"Alright, let's have a meeting, let's brainstorm this out
"and let's spend an hour on this,"
and usually, they place that meeting at like 10:30, right?
Someone showed up to work at nine or whatever,
in an hour and a half, "I have that meeting, um,
"let me surf Reddit."
Am I gonna dive into the hard work of the day
like an hour and a half in advance
of when I need to have a long meeting with someone?
No, I'm not, so, I'm gonna waste that time.
Then we're gonna have the meeting,
which is not just like a one-hour meeting, right?
Because there's probably seven people in there,
so it's a seven-hour meeting all of a sudden.
Now, we spend seven hours figuring out what?
What we took turns telling each other what we did?
We could have just written that down
and sent out a goddamn email, right?
And then on the other side,
then your day's kind of splintered.
And this is one of the things that as us as creators,
both Jason and I, we make this stuff.
We didn't just hire a bunch of people
and then they make the stuff.
Jason made a bunch of the designs,
I made all of the code and programming in the beginning.
We didn't have the time to waste.
And then we got on this schedule
and realized that we started bombarding our day,
and we started splitting it up,
and like slicing, "Oh, let's do a meeting at 10:30,
"and then there's this one guy
"that wants to meet for coffee at two,"
that's the day, it's done.
I'm gonna get zero out of that day
even though I really only have two things on my calendar.
It's done as a creative day.
And I'm going to make a huge leap forward
in creating a new feature for Basecamp
or extracting something out of into Ruby on Rails
or any of these other things.
That has to happen on days where I have these
long stretches of uninterrupted time.
And that was one of the things
where people kept coming up to me
and they're like, "Oh, what's your secret?
"How do you get to do so much things?
"How do you get so much done?
"Is it because you worked all these hours?
"Is it because you do all these things?"
No, I just like don't take lunch meetings
and I don't meet for coffee
and I have five hours of nothing,
do you know how much stuff you can get done in five hours?
If no one's interrupting you for five hours,
you can do with work. - Yeah.
- You need no more than four to five hours
out of any given day.
If you get them in one chunk uninterrupted.
And it was lessons like that
where we took and said like people are doing it wrong.
They keep staffing up,
they keep thinking they need more people
when they just need to find out ways
to make the hours count.
It's not the number of hours,
it's the quality of those hours.
And most people are making do
with some really terribly, low quality hours.
It's not just things like meetings
and things that interrupt them,
it's also the quality of the hours themselves.
So, as a programmer, as someone who's creative,
I need like head space, focus.
Dedication on the screen, I have to keep 1,000 concepts
in my mind to put it all together.
If I'm sitting right next to the sales guy
who's yelling on the phone, what's the quality of that?
It is shit. - Yeah.
- And I've worked at places like this,
especially if they, I find it so hilarious,
it's like, "Oh, we're gonna have a modern office--
- Open. - "We're gonna have
"this open office and we're gonna sit at a long desk,"
and like, "this is all gonna be great,
"we're gonna mix people, like sales people
"and programmers and designers,
"and they're all gonna collaborate all the time."
All the programmers just went like,
"Give me the gun now," right? - Yeah.
- This is not progress, this is not modern,
this is not better, this is just shit.
And the reason it's shit is because it's designed
by people who are not actually creatives doing the work.
- Yeah, so true.
- And it's things like that that's
just like, this is so unnecessary.
You talk to any programmer, or designer or a writer,
anyone who needs this--
- Dedicated focus, yeah. - Dedicated creative time
to get done, this is where happiness lies.
For me, if I get, which is rarer these days
than it used to be and I'm regretting that,
I've been trying to find ways to get back to it,
getting those five hours where I can just dive deep
into a problem, that's the day
where I'll sit with the rest of the days just like--
(softly sighs) (Chase laughing)
You get into that flow state,
you get all the dopamine rush of creating something good
and it's a wonderful day.
Compare that to a day, as we talked about,
the one that had been punctured five different ways
where you're sitting next to the sales person.
That's the day when you go home
at the end of the day thinking,
"What did I get done today?" - Yeah.
- That's a shitty day.
Shitty days like that make you feel shitty.
Why would we want to make people feel shitty
and get less interesting work done, right?
So, we see these things like on their face,
there is no upside to this shit,
except for maybe the aesthetics of the work place.
I worked at a place like that once, right?
And we had, this was in Copenhagen,
and an investor was gonna come by.
And we all had to be arranged,
jump in our little desks,
we got turned around just so people,
some of us had to sit like facing the hallway
with our backs to it so everyone could see the screens,
"Oh, aren't they busy?" - Yeah.
- Like, "Aren't these monkeys really typing in there?
"We should really invest in this thing,
"they're typing, they're typing,
"oh, they're so busy!" (laughing)
And I'm just like, "This is such shit.
"When I'm gonna make my own goddamn company,
"we're not gonna do this monkey business."
And that was a lot of it, right?
That's a lot of what Rework was,
was both Jason and I, we got this dose
of shitty company running
when we worked for the people and we're like,
"If I get the chance to call the shots,
"we're not gonna be this stupid.
"We're gonna go back to first principles,
"we're gonna build our way up,
"and we're gonna find all the shit that doesn't make sense
"and we're not gonna do it."
- What are some other things that don't make sense
that you don't do?
- Well for me, I don't work in an office.
So, remote working is huge for me.
It's like the most natural way
to get a lot of these properties we just talked about.
No one can pull me into a meeting
when I'm like 4,000 miles away from Chicago in Malibu,
or Spain, or other places where I've lived.
Even better, the times, over the past six, seven years,
I've lived about part time in Spain.
We got started on the whole business, by the way,
the origin story there, I was in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I wrote Jason an email and we started working together,
and I was seven times hours off.
So, we did the bulk of the formative work
on Basecamp seven times hours apart.
And initially we thought, "Oh, man, that's such a handicap.
"If we were just sitting next to each other all the time,
"that would be great."
Then I moved to Chicago, I started coming to the office,
and we started getting like half the work done
and we're like, "What the fuck?"
So, I started working from home,
very early on, and just realizing
this is the environment for me,
where I can control my own environment
and I can just like not respond to people
and ignore people, right?
It's just a huge advantage.
So, remote work for us has just been huge.
Not just for me, and Jason,
and the other people who are over at the company,
but what it allowed us to do,
we've hired people from all over the US,
from Canada, from Europe,
just wonderful, great people who live in not TechOps.
Right now, we have no one who lives in New York
and no one who lives in San Fransisco,
not because there aren't good people there,
but because there's wonderful people everywhere else too.
And they're completely overlooked.
And they're a completely untapped market
of just intense talent of people
who don't want to move to any of those cities.
And right now, there's such a focus on like,
"Oh, we all gotta get everyone to the office."
Remote is such an easy win.
You just decide that this is what you do
and now you have access to world-beating talent,
wow, of course we're gonna do this.
We wrote a whole book about that too,
called, Remote: Office Not Required,
where we kind of just tried to put all these thoughts
into it, like, "This is how you should do it."
Because a lot of these cases,
with both Rework and with Remote,
the way we actually get the inspiration with it
is when I start talking to other people.
And then I listen to how their business runs
and I just go like, "What?
"Are you fucking kidding me?
"This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
(Chase laughing) And I had the same thing
with Remote, right? - Yeah.
- Remote got kicked off after I had,
I don't know how this happened,
but I had talked to three COs from three companies
and we were talking about remote work.
And they were giving me the reasons
for why they weren't doing remote work
and I just had this reel running in my head,
"Oh, my God, you're so stupid."
Like, "You really have not thought this through,
"in just an iota of it, someone should really
"help you think this through.
"Because your arguments are so shallow."
- Yeah.
- "Your defenses of why we all need to sit
"at the same table is so idiotic,
"and I know you're not that dumb.
"I know you're just misinformed, under informed.
"Someone should inform you about this shit."
- What about, I'm gonna throw a rock at this,
because I think I know the answer, but,
there are some people for whom the social aspect
is part of their personality-- - Yes.
- And for whom connecting, it feeds a part of their soul.
Do you think that people getting together physically
that there is some upside?
Do you feel like it could be a myth?
How do you think about it,
or is that just because the world used
to be much more extroverted,
and now there's room for both introverts and extroverts,
that we're seeing these blended models?
Like, what of the, why-- - No, no, that's good.
I'm putting things a bit on the edge.
- Of course, we're doing that on purpose,
otherwise it's a boring conversation.
- This is good, because it isn't that cut and dry
and even though we embrace remote work intensely
at the company I have since the formation,
we still meet up, the entire company flies
to Chicago twice a year for a week,
where all we're doing is basically connecting.
Directly with people, in person,
because it has a huge value. - Yeah.
- And we've had lots of cases of that
where someone ends up in a situation,
if all you do is you work for a remote company,
you sit at home and your breakfast blends into your dinner,
that's misery. - Yeah.
- Like, you're not gonna be a happy,
wholesome human being after just three weeks of that.
Humans are not built for that.
Humans are built for different amounts
of social interaction and with different people,
it doesn't have to come in this package
that the office used to provide us, right?
So, for me, I'm definitely an introvert
and most of the people who work at Basecamp probably is.
A lot of creatives, I think, tend to be,
if you look at programmers-- - Yeah, sure.
- Writers, designers, a lot of them are introverts,
not all of them. - Yeah.
- But they've been ignored for so long.
Everything has been driven by what the management, sales,
all these other roles that are traditionally
much more likely to be extroverted, wanted.
And they wanted, "Oh, yeah, we should have this thing,
"and wouldn't it be great if we could be there all day?"
- "All get together and brainstorm."
- "We'll put in a foosball table.
"We can brainstorm at like 11
"at night if that's what I want."
And all these introverts just quietly had to take it.
And I think remote as an idea is kind of like starting
to flip tables around, right?
But even with that said,
we have plenty of people at Basecamp
who don't wanna sit at home all day,
so they go work somewhere else,
like there's co-working spots, there's plenty of--
- Yeah, go to a WeWork or, yeah.
- Yeah, I have plenty of people who go to coffee shops,
they go somewhere else to mix it up
but it's on their schedule. - Yeah.
- And they can sort of mix and match,
they can choose to say, "Alright,
"the fours hours where I really need to dedicate
"where I'm just gonna lock myself
"into my home office and do that,
"and then I'm gonna go to the coffee shop in the afternoon
"and get sort of the vibe, and whatever,"
those things are hugely important.
It shouldn't be seen as an either/or.
The best setup of that is some sort of mix.
- Yeah, so, Ruby on Rails.
It's a big deal, okay?
Let's just acknowledge it, that's badass.
How do you think about it today,
what role, how do you touch it?
What role does it play in your life?
How do you think about it, where is it going?
Tell me a little bit of a story,
create a narrative around what that technology,
platform, or way of thinking is.
- Sure. - What's it about now?
- So, I released Ruby on Rails in 2004
when I had just extracted it, pulled it out of Basecamp,
essentially, right? - Yeah.
- And it got sent into the world as a sense of gratitude.
So, when we built Basecamp,
I built Basecamp on all these opensource tools,
MySQL, Apache, all these long-running projects
that had been around for quite a long time
and I got them all for free.
And the fact that I could get all those things for free,
Ruby itself is opensource as well, the language.
I got all those things for free were one
of those barriers that were taken away.
If you were trying to make a website in '95,
you had to buy a license from Oracle,
and you had to buy a license from this
and a license from that which meant
these barriers of entry were really high.
When we started building Basecamp, there were none of those.
I paid zero dollars for any of the software
that sort of went into creating the application itself.
And that was why we could do it.
We couldn't have done it otherwise.
So, I just felt an immense gratitude that I had to give back
when I had something of value
that I could share with others.
So, that was the first instinct,
that I don't know if anyone's gonna like it.
I liked this thing I built,
it allowed me to use Ruby,
this wonderful programming language
that really opened my mind
and that allowed me to self identify as a programmer,
and this helped me do it.
So, here's Rails, and I hope that it does the same to you,
and thankfully, it did.
So, a lot of people then picked it up
and got inspired by it and started using it.
And like as I said, that's 14 years ago
and in the interim years, I've just kept on doing it.
Because it was never about a destination,
it was about a creative outlet for me
where I could take everything as I'm working
on a piece of code and extract the common things
just so I don't have to do it again.
One of the things I absolutely hate is repeating myself.
I sometimes, I've written chapters for books
where the computer crashed and I lost the whole thing,
that chapter's not happening. - It's not in the book.
- I'm not writing again, I'm sorry, done.
I cannot stand repeating myself,
which is also one of the reasons
I'm a really bad conference speaker,
because I cannot deliver the same talk twice.
I can do it one time so I have
to put all this energy into it
and then (fingers snap) do it one time and then that's it,
I cannot repeat myself. - Record it and share it.
- Yes, exactly, which is one of the wonderful things
at the YouTube, at least you can share it in mass,
it wasn't just you did it for
like the 50 people or 100 people who showed up.
But I feel the same thing about technology.
I hate repeating myself,
I don't wanna do the same things again.
I wanna solve new problems.
If I keep solving the same problem
I've been solving over and over again,
I will get bored and I'll disconnect.
So, the way that my sparks fire
is I get to solve new problems
and the only way I get to solve new problems
is if I encode the solutions to the old problems into a box,
and then I could just take that box
next time I need that, right?
And I can share that box with other people
and they can share their solutions with me,
and then I end up just creating new stuff,
which is really the fun part.
Not necessarily creating new stuff,
but putting it together in new ways.
- Yeah. - And not having
to redo the same stuff over and over again.
So, there's that whole aspect to it
and then it's just the aspect of like it allows me
to program Ruby, and that's just fun.
I like programming Ruby more
when I'm creating something real,
that's usually the impetus to is,
but I also just like doing it itself.
- Yeah. - Like photography, obviously.
I got into photography and it's just fun to do it.
It's also great to get a great picture out of it
but there's just something in the process itself,
the flow that it provides you as a creative person
that's inherently rewarding.
So, that's why with Ruby on Rails,
I just keep on doing it as long as it's fun,
as long as I get this energy out of it.
And then of course you also get this sense of belonging,
this sense of meaning. - Yeah, yeah.
- There's hundred of thousands of programmers
who have used or are using Ruby on Rails,
all these wonderful applications that's been birthed from it
that I get to look at and say,
"Oh, I played a small part in that."
And I can get to continue to play a smart part in that
and I can continue to get programmers
to focus on programming as creative endeavor.
Not just as a scientist, not just as engineers,
but there's this whole expression of yourself
and your writing into this.
This is one of the terms I'm really fond of
is to be a software writer.
We don't have software engineers at Basecamp,
we have a lot of software writers.
- Emphasis on writers. - Getting that emphasis
on writing and getting to do it, it's just fun.
I also like actual writing, I cannot not do that.
If I take, we were talking with people
at Basecamp about this recently, doing your favorite things.
One of the reasons, we just recently decided
that we're freezing all hiring at Basecamp.
We're 54 people, the business for 2007 was
the best year it's even been. - 2007 or '17?
- '17, sorry. - Yep.
- 2017, best year it's ever been for the business,
and we're not gonna hire anymore.
Which is, "What?"
Most people go like, "Oh, you do a hiring freeze
"because things are a little tough,"
or a little tight-- - Yeah.
- And you gotta cut back.
Things are the best they've ever been, we're hire freezing.
We're hire freezing in large part
because I want to do my favorite things.
Do you know what my favorite things are not?
They're not doing a weekly-- - Interviews. (chuckles)
- Review of things you have to do when you have 54 people,
I can just already see all the shit
that I have to do to help run a company of 54.
It's like, that slice of my life is big enough.
If I make it any bigger, I'm gonna puke,
and I'm gonna quit.
And I don't wanna puke and I don't wanna quit.
So, this is it, we've got 54 people,
that's what we can manage,
and then I get to do my favorite things.
I get to write, I get to program,
and I want to do more of that,
and I want to stay in that state forever.
People keep asking me, "Oh, what's next?
"What's the next big thing you're gonna do?"
What do you mean?
I'm gonna keep writing, I'm gonna keep programming.
That's good enough.
I can do 50 years?
Yeah, sounds good.
- Sign me up. - Exactly.
- So, I think this is beautiful and it's elegant,
but doesn't it, and for what it's worth, I agree,
I'm capitulating right now.
I think when I have at different times in my life
through the expectations of others,
it's very hard to stake out this claim
which is one of the reasons I love how strongly
you're presenting this. - Yes.
- And I feel like I've done the same thing,
I've had to, you know, bailed on professional soccer
and dropped out of school, you know, to do the thing.
And I found that was hard.
But once you've done that a couple times,
you're like, "Wow, I'm actually the boss.
"I'm the boss of me." - Yep.
- I'm in charge, I don't have to do this shit.
If I don't wanna do this shit, I gotta do the thing,
I might have to cover up my own path,
but I'm the author of my life--
- Yes. - And no one else is.
And so, it's very courageous.
But what about all the success,
of course, I'm speaking tongue in cheek here,
but what about all the success
that you're walking away from? - Yes.
- By having Ruby on Rails be even bigger,
to have Basecamp instead of, you know,
10 million in revenue, what about 100 million?
- Yep, I get this all the time,
and I get this accusation that I'm not ambitious enough.
- Yeah. - And like...
First of all, really?
Usually, I feel slightly embarrassed of like aerating
through the things that I've done over the last 15 years
because it sounds like, (mumbling)
- Created Ruby on Rails, and wrote a couple
of best-selling books, and--
- But right, so first of all, I'm well past good enough
and done enough, I don't owe the world anything more than
what I've put into it right now.
What I do owe myself is that I have complete freedom
to do what I want to do.
If I wanted tomorrow to walk away from Basecamp,
I could not work for the rest of my life
and be totally fine.
When you have that freedom, when you've reached that point,
you get to this sort of mirror
where you're looking at yourself like,
"Why am I doing this?
"What is the meaning behind it?"
And what I found is the meaning behind it
is not adding another zero to by bank account.
I've kind of stopped counting.
At one point, I totally did count,
right? - Yeah, 'cause you needed to.
- I needed to and it was also just this tension,
like I didn't come from money
and you get exposed to this thing
and your brain kinda goes a little haywire,
and I think humans are wired for that,
like this accumulation.
And all of a sudden, you're accumulating,
you're accumulating, like,
"Shit, my life isn't any better than it was five years ago.
"I've accumulated all this extra stuff.
"What is it that I actually want out of life?"
And when I looked for those sort of pillars of meaning,
they are things like I want to continue
to spend most of my time doing my favorite things,
like programming and whatever.
I want to have the impact in the form
that I want to have the impact,
I don't want to be forced into some constraints
where I'm gonna sorta bend.
A lot of people, I think, go into business
and ideas with the best of intentions.
And then once the pressure starts squeezing,
they're human. - Yeah.
- And they crack, and they break in all sorts of ways
where I think I'm no different.
If you took me and you inserted me
onto the standard pressure cooker
of a high-flung VC-backed startup company,
my ethics might start to squeak.
- Yeah.
- Here I am though, have none of those pressures.
I feel like I have an obligation to myself and the world to,
"Okay, let me live the very best life,"
closest to the ethics that I can get,
closes to the best use of the time that I can get,
and then what more is there?
Isn't that already perfection?
Isn't that the arrival point?
What else am I gonna get to?
Is it like, if you can afford the jet?
That's when everything starts getting magic?
No, come on, seriously.
As we talked about these, there are these thresholds
and there are these barriers where you're worrying
about paying the bills and the water's gonna get shut off.
Money is a very large part
of what's going on, right? - Your psychology, of course.
- Then you reach these points
which we reached like 10 years ago,
when like, "Okay, I have a million dollars in the bank."
Have none of these concerns.
Maybe if I just stopped working, I didn't work for 20 years,
I might have some of these concerns.
But they're erased.
So, whatever else I can accumulate really is not gonna add
so much to it, I'm at 97, right?
I love the 80/20 principle.
If I can put in 20% and I can get 80 back,
that's the stuff that I wanna do.
I don't wanna keep squeezing and squeezing and squeezing
to get the last 2% out of the citrus, right?
It's just, it's sour.
And that's that contentment
and that's still hard. - Yeah.
- Because everything in our culture,
especially in the entrepreneurial world,
it's all about like serial entrepreneurs,
doing the next thing, building a bigger thing.
Grow, and grow, and grow, and grow, right?
To reach the point where you can say, "Enough,
"I have everything that I need, I'm at a good place,
"I wanna stay there," is really hard.
This is one of things where I've been so happy
to discover Stoicism, Tim Ferriss and others
have been-- - Yeah, some others,
and Ryan, and all, yeah. - Ryan had been really pushing
and I think it's a really healthy anecdote
to all these other pressures that we have in life.
We have these Roman emperors and whoever else
from 2000 years ago telling us like,
"Hey, do you know what?
"Even though I have everything,
"like including the whole Roman Empire,
"I am still susceptible to all of these pressures
"and uncertainties and whatever and I need to step back
"and get to a better place where I'm at ease
"and I'm at rest with the world."
So, that has been part of sort of my focus
of the last five years, is to realize what I have
and not fuck it up.
I think the easiest thing you can do
when you have something good is to fuck it up
by keep striving for more, and more, and more.
- That's beautiful, I wanna understand
the psychology behind that, what do you have to do to?
Clearly, you have to actively deprogram,
so let's get tactical for a second.
Do you shape every day, do you have a set
of values that you write on the mirror in the morning?
Is it the meditation on the thing of staying status quo?
What are some of your tools?
You mentioned Stoicism, presumably,
there's a half a dozen others because again,
I feel like I've lived that in a lot of different ways
and it resonates so deeply,
and there, frankly, are not a lot of people
out here in the world talking in the same way
that you're talking right now.
So, the people that have tapped into that,
and I'm sure there's a lot of people
who are watching and listening that are like,
"Oh, shit, this is my unlock."
So, let's shift gears for a second
and try and get really tactical,
what are some of the key things that you've done
that have helped you?
Presumably, you've got some shit in your childhood
that's really good, you had parents that did X or Y,
but maybe not, so what's the thing?
Or is there a set of things
that have helped you A, get to,
and then B, maintained this point of view?
- Love that, because one of the reasons I resonated
so dearly with Stoicism was I felt
like I had like a cruddy version
of running my own personal operating system already.
But I already had a bunch of the tactics
that Stoicism preaches built it.
And one of the key ones is negative visualization.
This idea that loss is going to happen
and you better start preparing for it now.
Just that if it does, and when it does, because it will,
you won't get destroyed.
So, negative visualization is something I practice everyday.
I practice thinking some calamity's gonna happen,
Basecamp is gonna blow up,
we get hacked and plundered or whatever
and the whole thing is gonna fall apart.
What's left, have I invested everything that I have?
Have I invested my entire ego into that
just so that if it goes away, poof, then I'm no one?
If I have, or if I'm too heavily invested in it,
I need to pull back, I need to have other things in my life.
I can't just be all in on this one thing.
If you're all in on one thing
and that thing goes away, you're all out, right?
- Yeah. - There's nothing left.
So, that's not a good strategy in life,
in finance, in anywhere.
You go to any stock broker and you're like,
"Oh, yeah-- - Diversify.
- "I'd like to put everything into this one growth stock."
They'd go like, "You crazy?
"You gotta diversify," right? - Yeah.
- So, I think about ways I can diversify.
My ego, my sense of self worth,
and all the things, my interests,
especially if this one pillar crashes down, I'm still here.
And I'll still be totally fine.
And I think about it then even
within the categories of things that I do like.
Especially around coping with success and wealth.
I know a lot of people who've made it very well,
who've narrowed their comfort zone down
to like a very thin slice.
Because their expectations about what life now owes them
now that they're rich or whatever, are extremely high.
And they put it on themselves like,
"Oh, I'm in first class, I mean, what the fuck?
"I haven't even gotten my champagne yet?
"This is outrageous!"
And you just go like-- - Dude, you're flying
through the air at 600 miles an hour.
- In a fucking seat that reclines and you can sleep!
And you see the people traveling with three kids
back in coach, like that's fucking hard.
Stop goddamn complaining! (Chase laughing)
And I think most people,
it's not that that person is a bad person,
this is the natural outcome.
- Yeah. - This is autopilot.
Once you get to, you acclimate.
An then you become an asshole.
Once you acclimate to that level,
like, you've reached the level of asshole, right?
You're like, "Alright, now I wasn't an asshole,
"now I'm an asshole."
And to push back against that,
you constantly have to think like, "You know what?
"I could be back in coach
"and I'd still be fucking wonderful."
We'd still be flying through the air,
I'd still be going to some amazing place
that like 100 years ago-- - On the internet
at 600 miles an hour. - Exactly!
Like, how is this not wonderful right?
So, you have to constantly go back
and think through those things and try to resist,
and broaden your comfort zone.
The natural sense is that it's going to shrink
and you have to constantly widen it up.
So, I tried to do that through all sorts of things
and I tried to put it into perspective.
What are the things I actually like and enjoy?
So, if everything went to shit tomorrow,
and we lost everything, and we went bankrupt and whatever,
if I still have my hands and my eye, I can still program.
Hey wait a minute, programming is one
of my favorite things in the world.
So, I lost everything, but I still have
my favorite thing in the world?
It's probably not that bad, right?
Life is probably still pretty good
and once you get to that point,
I think you remove a lot of the anxiety.
So, I know a lot of people who've made it really well
who have a lot of anxiety. - Yeah.
- Because they're so afraid
of losing the things that they've accumulated.
But if you stop looking at the things you've accumulated
and you look at yourself, "Did I grow as a person?"
How is anyone gonna take anything away from that, right?
If I get wiser, if I get better,
if I get smarter, if I get kinder,
how am I going to lose these things
just because something happens to the market,
something outside of me, out of my control,
takes my material things away.
I'm not, and it gives a sense of peace.
I'm at peace now with the fact
that Basecamp could end tomorrow.
There's no indication it's going to,
as we've just talked about,
best ever blah, blah, blah, things are great.
But I've at times in my life
where I thought like, "Oh, shit, what if this thing stops?"
And you just get such a sense of ease
and a sense of comfort once you let go of that.
So, negative visualization to realize,
to expand your comfort zone-- - Gratitude.
- Your range, and the acceptable outcomes, right?
Which gets me to sort of the second point of this,
which is amor fati, loving your faith.
Not trying to change anything.
People always talk to me in interviews like,
"What's the one thing you would tell yourself
"like five years from now that you wanna do different?"
I would tell myself nothing.
The fact that it's been a journey like this
where we make mistakes, that's what makes it worth it.
I think back of when I used to play video games a lot.
You'd have cheat codes, right?
You could look at the back of a magazine
and you could go get, I'd get infinite lives.
As soon as you got infinite life,
the game was uninteresting. - Yeah.
- I haven't even read this book
but I just like the title,
The Path Is The Struggle, or The Struggle Is The Path,
or something, this idea that we're built
to strive-- - The Obstacle Is The Way.
- Yes, The Obstacle Is The Way!
That's what, I haven't read the book,
I just love the title, right? - Okay, yeah, Stoic.
- It resonates with me in just the sense
that it is meant to be somewhat of a struggle.
Not a deeply uncomfortable struggle in all the ways,
but a struggle somewhat, and once it stops being a struggle,
once there stops being meaning to it,
the whole thing falls apart.
Which is also the whole reason why people go like,
"Oh, what if you could sell your company tomorrow?
"Like Google came by and they would buy it
"for a billion dollars or something, would you do it?"
Like, no, then what am I gonna do?
I can already sit on a beach and drink a Mojito
for three months if that's what I wanna do.
Then I would do it for nine months?
No, do you know any entrepreneur who sold their company
and then like just retired to the beach
and leaned back and like, for the next 10 years,
just sat there sipping Mojitos?
They'd be dead, that's not what humans are built for.
They're built for doing things.
They're built for having a purpose and having meaning.
And those things come from such different things
that we tend to think they come from.
So, there's a lot of focus on that
and I think about that a lot,
and trying to line these tactics up
and these perspectives.
Like amor fati, like negative visualization,
like expanding your comfort zone,
like constantly having self criticism running
as a dialog for not becoming that asshole.
- What about specific tactics?
To me, those are ideals,
what are the actual things that you do?
Do you carve out 20 minutes a day?
Do you write, do you have a journal?
Let's get tactical for a second.
- Sure, so one thing I do, the way I think
through all of this is through writing.
So, I write quite a lot.
We have our blog, Signal v. Noise, that we've been running
since '99. - Yep, I know it well.
- It's a continuation of the same thing,
it's where we extract the books from,
and it's how I think through
and how I process a lot of these things.
So, whenever I have something that I'm wrestling with,
I always try to, "Can I write it out?
"Can I get something out of it?"
Because it's not just about, "Oh,
"this is an interesting piece of writing."
It's also like a way for me to think.
And writing is a way to think and a way to get clarity,
it is just such a powerful tool.
So, I write, I have maybe, I don't know,
50 blog posts I haven't published
that are in my notes on my iPhone.
I tend to write, actually a lot on planes
and I'm just writing on my iPhone in the Notes app
and it's just a calming way to sort of
get these things out of my system.
This idea, I'm not a big fan of these productivity hacks,
but the idea of getting things done, for example, right?
It's a framework for getting things out of your mind
so you don't have to keep fussing about them,
keep stressing about that.
I have the same thing with these tensions.
When I have anxieties, when I have discomforts,
you can get them out of your body by typing them out.
Almost like extracting them out, you're like,
bloodletting, right? - Yeah. (laughs)
Couple leeches on you. - That's totally not a thing,
you shouldn't let your blood and whatever.
But I do that with writing, that's a key tactic.
And the other thing I do is
I keep thinking I have enough time.
So, when I'm really engaged in a project or whatever,
I have a natural temptation
to being just obsessive about it.
Like, "Oh, let's just keep going.
"Oh, it's six o'clock, let's just keep going.
"Oh, it's eight o'clock, let's just keep going."
And a lot of people celebrate that and I don't.
I actually get to that and I'm like,
"Oh, it's five o'clock?
"I've been at my desk for eight hours.
"Do you know what?
"The kids are next door, I should just go play with them."
And I think like I have this good flow going,
and it's wonderful, but it'll also be there tomorrow.
And like, I'm gonna do this for,
did we talk about, the next 50 years,
whether I put another hour in now or tomorrow
probably doesn't matter that much.
So, this notion of constraints, I love constraints.
I love constraints as I said,
we freezed hiring at Basecamp with 54 people
because that's a way of setting a constraint.
- Yeah. - It sets constraints
about our ambition, our vision,
these are the things we can do
and we can't do everything, and that's great.
The worst things I have is like
when I have this blank canvas,
when you can do anything you want,
it's incredibly intimidating.
I want like a space, I can draw within these lines in here,
I have eight hours to do something,
(hands clap) let's get to it, right?
Not I have unlimited hours,
not I could work 22 hours and I could somehow
get myself into it, there's no constraint there.
I could just be flabby and inefficient.
If I say to myself, "I just have the eight hours.
"I can just do that," then that's what I got, let's go.
- This is an extraordinary, I feel like,
reframing of so many cultural memes or ideas
or constructs, and in a very sort of authentic way,
that's, to me, unlocking the ability
to go against the grain.
Like the meta narrative here is one of the things
I'm most excited about, what we've covered,
and we've covered a lot of ground.
But to try and synthesize all that,
are these key operating principles for you
and do you think about them?
And are there three of them or five of them,
of course, you've been talking about it all along,
but when you think about, it's the ability
to go against the grain. - Yes.
- The ability, when everyone, yeah,
I think about this as a founder and CEO of a company
that has a bunch of really smart people on the board
and really smart people that are on the executive team
and at every level of the company,
there's always competing ideas.
- Yes. - And it's your sort
of willingness to say no under a lot of pressure.
- Right. - Your willingness
to stick to your own internal values.
- Yes. - Either as a leader
or as an independent thinker. - Yes.
- To me, that's the meta narrative
of what we've been talking about.
So, I think as a sort of a bow on this,
is there something that you've done to cultivate the ability
to go against the grain?
Because that is massively useful, what have you done?
- I think one of the tactics that I've picked up
is this notion that if I'm saying something
where everyone is nodding, I'm not saying anything.
Then we're all agreeing, right?
Which means that most of the time,
and I'm not saying just you and me.
- Sure. - I'm saying like the world
at large as a sounding board for ideas.
If I send something out and it
just comes back 100% positive--
- Yeah. - It was probably trite.
It was probably banal, right? - Yeah.
- When I send something out,
I wanna get at least some part back that go like,
"You're a fucking idiot!" - "You're crazy!"
- "You're crazy!" - Yeah, yeah.
- "This is stupid, it's never gonna work.
"It's dumb, this is not how you build a success company.
"You're unambitious, you're all these things!"
I keep training myself to be a little addictive
to that like vinegar, right? - Yeah. (laughs)
- That when I send that out
and I get some of that vinegary back I'm like, (hands clap)
"There might be something here."
And I don't mean just because people call you stupid
that you're not also actually stupid.
But it just means that there's gotta be a mix of that.
Kathy Sierra, who's one of my all time favorite writers
and idols, she's not writing a lot online anymore,
but in the mid 2000s, she had this blog
called, Creating Passionate Users.
And she had this notion of you can be bland,
you can be in the middle,
you can be sort of just whatever, no one cares, right?
Or you can have people absolutely love what you do.
But if you have people who absolutely love what you do,
in order for the universe to balance,
there has to be an almost equal sized group of people
who absolutely hate what you do.
- Yeah. - So, you have to embrace
the fact that there's gonna be these pole to poles.
You cannot have people love what you do
without also having people who hate what you do.
So, these are one of these ideas that I have,
I'm like, "Am I doing something meaningful and worthwhile?
"Do I have both poles?"
If I just have one of the things,
I'm probably not, I'm banal and trite and whatever,
but if I have the other pole, there might be something here.
So, that's one of the ideas.
The other thing is to cultivate a sense
of intrinsic self worth.
That I shall evaluate the quality of my work.
And even though I have these two poles
and they provide some feedback,
the main feedback comes from the fact
am I happy with what I've done?
And I think its' hard to maintain
that in this world of likes, and hearts, and whatever
because it erodes your own sense of self criticism
because you have this instant reaction from the crowd,
like, "Oh, we liked it," or, "we didn't like it," right?
And you can grow addicted and you can grow weak
very quickly from that.
So, I try to really keep an arm's length distance to that.
And then I keep thinking about passages,
and the worst that I have that are ridiculous
that people liked, I go like, "Yeah, that was stupid."
So, Rework, for example, we have,
I think there's like five phrases
that are the most quoted phrases.
One of those phrases is,
"Watch the waves, see where they break, adjust accordingly."
I'm like, "That's so stupid." (laughing)
That is so stupid, and a lot of people react,
they're like, "Oh, yeah, wow!"
That sounds like it has something,
and to me, it has nothing. (laughing)
It's such an empty calorie, poster with like the wave
and like we're we can all be like,
oh, that's hanging in the waiting room in a doctor's office.
And I wrote that?
I mean, that's just dumb.
So, that's a good grounding effect,
just to look back at your own idiocy.
To just go like, "Yeah-- - Have a good laugh.
- Exactly, have a good laugh at it, right?
- I'm so grateful for you coming on the show.
This has been an absolute treat.
I'm already reading the show notes in my mind.
Thank you for being wildly, radically unconventional
and for helping the rest of us think that way.
- Thanks for having me.
- It's been a huge treat, David, thanks, bud.
- Cool.
- Alright, signing off until probably tomorrow.
(soft techno rock music)
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