From http://meowmeowmaru.tumblr.com/post/6727438587 Back in May, when I started my internship at Basecamp — the company known for creating Rails and very popular project management apps — I was nervous, intimidated, and self-doubting: What did I know about tech and about coding? I questioned if I belonged, whether I misrepresented myself and my emerging programming skills on my application, and… keep reading
I can’t imagine anything less interesting in business than maximizing shareholder value. Yet this is what public companies are pressured — if not legally required — to do. A lot of non-public companies follow the same path towards performance and results. To take it further, maximization as a concept just isn’t interesting to me. I don’t care about maximization.… keep reading
Illustration by Nate Otto The Distance is back from our holiday hiatus with new episodes every other Tuesday! Our new story is about a kind of business you might have thought was pretty much extinct: the neighborhood appliance and furniture store. Kevin Krasney’s grandfather opened Cole’s Appliance and Furniture Co. with a partner on Chicago’s north… keep reading
Sarah Green-Carmichael from the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast interviews me about sanity at work, how over-collaboration and excessive real-time communication/chat are destroying our work days, and plenty more. What follows is a word-for-word, unedited transcript of the recorded podcast: SARAH GREEN-CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green-Carmichael. How is it… keep reading
When people talk about monetizing, they’re usually talking about some sort of scheme. Because anything that needs to be monetized can’t just be simple. If it was simple, you wouldn’t need a word like monetize. You’d just be making money selling a service or product. No, monetizing is that word we need to explain how… keep reading
The mantra in real estate is “location, location, location.” You can upgrade kitchens and bathrooms all day, but if you’re in the wrong neighborhood it won’t sell. The same is true for products. Focusing on individual features and experiences is good, but you should never forget about the position you’re trying to hold. A product’s… keep reading
Highrise has had an iOS app, going on now for 7 years. However, the development on that mobile app has been slow. In June of 2015, we released version 2.0 and we’re still on that version today. We’ll update it soon, but I have to admit we’ve been saying that for awhile. Regardless, at least,… keep reading
If you use Inbox by Gmail, you know how helpful bundles can be for organizing your email. The Basecamp team has worked with Google to organize Basecamp 3 email notifications into bundles. Here’s what it looks like in the Inbox web app: Bundled email notifications from the “Android” project in Basecamp 3 Inbox shows you a summary… keep reading
Before The Distance went on a brief hiatus for the holidays, we had produced new episodes for eight straight months. Counting the mini stories that we released between our main ones, that’s 31 episodes covering 17 businesses—from a maple syrup producer to a junk removal company to an embalming fluid manufacturer. The Distance is a… keep reading
Free, clear, and calm Whenever I’m at a coffee shop, and I walk by people with their laptops open to their calendar, I’ll often see something like this: via Google Images Or this… via Google Images Or a game of calendar Tetris like this… via Google Images What?? I can’t identify with this level of busy. Here’s my actual… keep reading