Every day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that they’re only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies.

If we were only trying to hire in Chicago, we’d never have the world-class team we have today. 37signals has people from such distinct tech hubs as Fenwick (Canada), Phoenix, Caldwell (Idaho), Romiley (UK), Jefferson Hills (Pensylvania), Ann Arbor (Michigan), Boulder (Colorado), Tampa (Florida).

The technology to successfully run and manage remote teams has never been better. We use Basecamp to keep track of our projects, Campfire as the virtual water cooler, Skype for calls and screensharing, and iChat and email to top it off.

None of it is fancy, expensive, or hard to use. Everything we do to manage a business consisting mainly of remote employees is something anyone else could do too. There’s so much untapped tech talent that does not live near your office, but would work for you if you allowed them to.

So stop whining, spend a day to get up to speed on remote working practices, and hire outside of your commuter zone.

Cheap distribution model
Apple with iTunes has ushered in an era where CDs and DVDs are fast becoming extinct. CDs and DVDs require packaging to be produced, space in warehouses to store, and discs to be fabricated. Presumably offering the music and movies on iTunes is cheaper because all the costs to manufacture have been cut. The savings get passed on to the customer.

The Lazy Tax
Video games are different though, and I can’t really figure out why that is. You can get the game L.A. Noire from Amazon for under $19. It ships free (if you’re a Prime customer) too. The only problem is it comes on disc. You have to load it into your console when you want to play. You have to find someplace to store the game when you’re not playing it.

You can download the exact same game for $40 on Xbox Live. It gets saved to your console. You don’t need to insert the disc to play. You don’t need to store a case. You don’t have a box laying around.

My friend calls this the “Lazy Tax” because you pay extra for the convenience of not having a disc to insert into your console when you want to play. This doesn’t make sense to me though. App stores seem to be the future, so why are game manufacturers still encouraging gamers to buy physical media?

If you want to reach peak performance, you have to find the limit. Finding the limit means stepping over the limit. Going too far, going too fast. It means taking a good idea to the extreme to learn just how far it’ll bend before it snaps.

In racing, the driver who can most consistently drive just beyond the limit — running the optimal seven degrees of slip — is most likely to win. The same applies in business.

When you continously seek out the limit, you’ll realize that it’s often much higher than you expected. Yes, you can make that screen even simpler than the bare-boned version you’re looking at. Yes, you can trust your employees much more than you imagined. Yes, you can launch without a billing system.

Once you train yourself to seek out the limit in all endeavors, you’ll get better and faster at correcting the inevitable oversteps, and hit that peak performance.

But if you never dare venture close to the limit, you’ll find that it’s shrinking all the time. There will be even more people you could possibly offend, even more bells that need whistling, ever more realities of the real world you cannot change.

Records are set by the people who said fuck your limits and found their own.

Over the past 8 years, millions of people across every imaginable industry have used Basecamp to manage over 8 million projects. In total, they’ve shared over 275 million to-dos, messages, and files.

What started as a side project in 2004 has become the world’s most popular web-based project management and collaboration app. 96% of our customers say they’d recommend Basecamp to a friend, colleague, or co-worker.

The Basecamp business is booming.

But too much good news is a formula for complacency. And honestly, we have grown a bit complacent.

That’s about to end.

We’ve gone back to the basics and made them better, faster, clearer, easier, and smarter.

In early 2012, 37signals will introduce Basecamp Next and change the way people collaborate all over again.

We’ll initially be launching by invite only. If you’d like a chance at an invite, visit the teaser page, scroll down, and enter your email address at the bottom.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be revealing more details about Basecamp Next. Stay tuned.

Nobody has covered the beauty pageant of startup contestants and venture judges better than TechCrunch. They not only cheered on a generation of Silicon Valley dolls to dress their finest for the pump’n’dump cycle, they fucking owned the barn where the show was held.

So it’s hard to summon a pittance of pity for the mascara tears they’re now sporting. They knew this day was coming. When sugar daddy AOL, father of the Master Plan, pulled out the big checkbook to buy the prettiest doll of tech rags, did they really think it was true love?

Sure, they were all excited at the trophy wedding. TechCrunch was “delighted about becoming part of the AOL family,” and AOL’s PR department was thrilled that “[TechCrunch’s] reputation for top-class journalism precisely matches AOL’s commitment to delivering the expert content critical to this audience”.

But now it’s been 11 months since the check cleared, AOL daddy is all out of sugar, and the TechCrunch trophy is full of dust. Cue a drama worthy of the Bachelorette.

I recently purchased a bike from Mission Bicycle Company. I wanted to share a great experience I had when something went wrong. Shit happens – how companies deal with the shit is what sets apart the great ones from the other ones.

Mission Bicycle Company is based in San Francisco. I placed the order online using their easy build your bike configurator. Since I’m in Chicago, they had to ship the bike UPS.

When I received the big box, there was a 4” hole/tear in the side. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but after I finished removing all of the well-packed packaging around the bike frame itself, I noticed a large and deep gash in the paint all the way down to the metal down tube. The tear in the box lined up with the gash on the bike. The bike was clearly damaged in shipping.

I sent an email to Mission with some pictures of the box and the damage and asked them what to do next. They wrote back quickly and asked me to give them a day to think about how best to handle the situation.

The next day I got an email from them. They said sending the whole bike back would be overkill since the only thing that was damaged was the frame. Further, the bike was ridable – it was just a paint problem – so sending the bike back would mean I didn’t have a bike for a week or so. They didn’t feel good about that.

So here’s what they did: They called up a local shop (On The Route) and arranged to ship a new frame to them. Then one of their bike techs would drive down to my office and swap the frames and reassemble the bike for me while I waited. All of this at Mission’s expense.

They went above and beyond and took care of the problem with virtually no disruption or inconvenience on my end. That’s incredible customer service. I’m a happy customer for life. If you’re in the market for a great custom bike, check out the good people and products at Mission Bicycle Company.

A few years ago at one of our annual company meetups, the topic of options/equity came up. We’ve never had an options/equity program, but some employees were wondering if we could explore the idea.

So David and I started thinking about it. We consulted some other business owners, Jeff Bezos (our sole investor), and our accountants and lawyers. We wanted to get a pretty full picture of the implications of an equity program.

The more people we talked to, the more complex it started to sound. The complexity was both psychological (company dynamics) and economic (options/equity doesn’t really mesh well with an LLC corporate structure). And since we have no intention of selling 37signals or going public – the two scenarios where options/equity really make sense – the complexity became too hard to justify.

However, we were determined to come up with another way so everyone could participate in the unlikely event of a sale or IPO. You never know, so we wanted to have a system in place just in case.

Some of the considerations included:

1. It needs to be simple to administer. The closer we could get to zero administration, the better.
2. It should be easy to understand and explain.
3. It should reward current employees. This was about who was at the company at the time of a sale/IPO, not people who worked here years ago.
4. It should reward seniority. The longer you’ve been here the more you would participate in the upside.
5. The plan would be consistent from day one until the last day. Some companies grant lots of options in the early days and then barely trickle them out later. We wanted the same opportunity for all new employees forever.
6. We didn’t want to discriminate by position. Every employee, no matter the position, participates in the same way.

There were other considerations as well, but those were the key things we kept in mind as we developed the program.

Here’s what we came up with in the event of a sale or IPO:

• At least 5% of the ultimate sale price (or, in the case of an IPO, the fair market value of the capital stock) would be set aside for an employee bonus pool.
• Each current employee will be credited with one unit for every full year they’ve worked at 37signals, starting after the first full year. The maximum amount of units one person could earn would be five units. So if you worked at 37signals for two years you’d get two units. Three-and-a-half years, three units. Four years, four units. Five years, five units. Seven years, five units. Etc.
• We would divide the total employee bonus pool dollar amount by the total number of units held by all employees. This would determine the unit value.
• Each person would receive the unit value multiplied by their units.

We’re pretty happy with how this turned out. We think it’s a simple, clear, and fair system. And it’s a great alternative to the organizational complexity of option grants, acceleration, strike prices, conversion into shares, private markets vs. public markets, dilution by outside parties, partial vesting, etc.

One other thing: We treat this entire idea purely as a bonus in the unlikely event of a future sale/IPO. We don’t even discuss it with new hires. It’s not part of the overall compensation package (we don’t pay a smaller salary and try to make it up for it with this program). I wouldn’t be surprised if many employees have forgotten about it or don’t even know about it at all.

Slicehost—a scrappy web company bootstrapped with $20,000—cashed out for big bucks in 2008. How did they do it? More importantly, was it worth it?

We had a growing wait-list of people that wanted to give us money but couldn’t.

David Heinemeier Hansson chats with the founders of Slicehost, Jason Seats and Matt Tanase, to find out.

In a big company you have to construct artificial ways to get information.

Watch the complete interview at 37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost.