Signal v. Noise

If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t be trusted not to sell, barter, or abuse that data whether for profit, growth, or negligence.

While individuals have long been rallying around #DeleteFacebook, there hasn’t been a comparable campaign for business. Enter: The Facebook-Free Business.

Being a Facebook-Free Business means your customers can trust that you aren’t collaborators with the Facebook machine. That when you spend your money with a Facebook-Free Business, none of that money will find its way back to Facebook’s coffers.

The rules are pretty simple. Being Facebook Free means:

1. We do not buy advertisement on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
2. We do not use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp to promote or represent our business or to communicate with our customers.
3. We do not assist Facebook in its data collection regime through use of Facebook social Like buttons or by offering Facebook logins.

In short, that the business does not use Facebook or its subsidiaries in any way shape or form to operate, further, or conduct itself.

Keep reading “Become A Facebook-Free Business”

Oh those superhuman CEOs who get up at 4am for that killer start to the day! Aren’t they just amazing? Such sacrifice, such grit, such tenacity.

Such fucking bullshit.

If you’re the CEO, and you can’t get work done at work, you only have one person to blame for it: Yourself. There’s no law of nature that dictates that it should be impossible to get deep work done at 11am or 2pm, just habits, values, and policies.

It’s your job to fix the damn workplace, not run away from it. Stop playing calendar Tetris with a whole organization. Stop loading up on meetings. Stop demanding endless status reports. Stop interrupting everyone all the time with shit that can wait.

Organizational dysfunction, such as the inability to get work done at work during regular work hours, is a reflection of executive habits and beliefs. Work isn’t crazy because of the nature of its being. Work is crazy because you’re making it crazy!

But it’s hard to fix that which you don’t know is broken. So let me spell it out: Having to get up at 4am to get real work done is broken. Busted. Kaput.

And it isn’t any less broken because a fawning business media keeps exalting the virtues of your morning routine or strict regiment. Quite contraire.

You know what’s cool? Getting to work at 9, putting in eight solid hours, and then being done by 5. There’s nothing stodgy or uncool about having reasonable work day that allows for a workout at 7:30am or playing with your kids at 5:30pm.

There’s no prize for being the first to rise. You’re not a fucking bird and there ain’t no fucking worm. So chill. Set a good example for your organization. Make calm a mission. Start getting work done at work again.

Business rhetoric is rife with the language of war — there’s constant talk of conquering markets and dominating the competition. These tropes indicate a dangerous way of thinking that can have real consequences, intended or not, on human behavior. In this episode of the Rework podcast, two professors share their research on the impact of violent rhetoric on business ethics, and a member of Basecamp’s Support team talks about communication techniques that get us out of the mentality that everything is a zero-sum game.

We try hard to write good policies at Basecamp. Make them plain and easy to understand. Without out all the dreaded legalese. By humans, for humans.

I particularly like our refund policy and our Until The End of The Internet policy.

But I’m sure we don’t always succeed. And sometimes our policies may decay over time. Terms that are or become unreasonable linger on. Ugh.

So that’s why we now invite our customers and anyone else who’s interested in reviewing our policies to collaborate on making them better, making them fairer. To this purpose, we’ve put all our Basecamp policies on GitHub!

This also means that every revision is tracked and date stamped. You can even subscribe to be updated whenever they change, if you care to follow along at that level.

Furthermore, since the spirit of this idea is to collaborate, we’ve also licensed all these policies under the Creative Commons Attribution license. If you’d like to use any of the policies for your own business, feel free! All we ask is that you give us a bit of credit, if you either copy them entirely or materially.

This act of sharing was inspired by the reception to opening up our Basecamp Employee Handbook. We’ve heard from so many business owners and employees that our handbook helped them put together their own. That they were inspired by some of our values or practices enough to adopt them as their own.

Our hope is that the same might happen with our policies. If more companies would adopt a no-nonsense refund policy, we’d all be better off. If more companies — AND YES I’M LOOKING AT YOU GOOGLE 😂 — would honor their legacy systems, and not willy-nilly kick users to the curb, we’d all gain from the level-up in trust.

Policies are part of the organizational code of a company. Not only should that code be open source, it should be tinkered with, improved, critiqued, forked, and refactored. Let’s do that.

Back in October I was in San Francisco to record an episode of the Chase Jarvis Live show. We talked for nearly two hours about work, life, building calm (and crazy) companies, FOMO + JOMO, philosophy, the downsides of real-time communication tech, not setting goals, saying no, our new book “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”, etc. Loads of stuff, a really fun conversation.

Here’s the full YouTube video:

If you prefer audio-only, you can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Big thanks to Chase for having me on, and for being such a kind host. He also had David on a while back — well worth watching that one as well.

We hope you enjoy!

When the Pixel 3 was announced a few months ago there was a lot of press about the incredible Camera and the enormous Notch. Lost in this noise is a wireless charging accessory that Google calls the Pixel Stand.

The Pixel Stand is basically a standard wireless charger. It’s just a piece of plastic with no visual user-interface. Some say it’s overpriced at $79. Like I said, it’s a boring plastic stand.

But it completely transforms the Pixel 3.

This boring plastic stand transforms the Pixel 3 into an Assistant…

This boring plastic stand transforms the Pixel 3 into a photo frame…

This boring plastic stand transforms the Pixel 3 into a gradually brightening alarm clock…

Google is onto something by transforming your phone when placed in situations like on your nightstand or on your desk. Perhaps the most interesting part about all this is there is no software on the boring plastic stand. It’s all in the Pixel 3 phone.

When you place the Pixel 3 onto the stand it goes into a special mode. When you take it off it goes back to being a regular phone. It’s pretty magical to see your phone transform into something else just by putting it onto a boring plastic stand. I hope as mobile devices continue to evolve we’ll see more of these thoughtful transformations.

---

Have questions about the Basecamp 3 Android app? Let our awesome support team know by sending us an email.

Basecamp 3 works where you do on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows — anywhere you’ve got a web browser and an internet connection. Your first Basecamp is completely free so try it today, it takes just a minute to sign-up.

In October, Jason Fried and DHH released their new book, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. The book featured their writing, as well as cover art and interior illustrations from Basecamp designers Adam Stoddard and Jason Zimdars. The launch initially seemed like a great success — but then things went awry. In this episode of the Rework podcast, we look at the work that went into the book and the problems with the release, and attempt to find some lessons in the aftermath.

There used to be a panicked feeling that would set in when we’d have any sort of outage or issue in Basecamp past — that stomach-dropping, heart-palpitating, sweaty-palmed feeling. But on November 8th when I awoke to a 6am text spelling out Basecamp’s downtime, I wasn’t worried. Before I finished reading the full text, I remember thinking, “Oh, they’ll have it sorted out before I can finish making coffee.” But as I continued reading and began to understand the estimated downtime to be at least two hours, my adrenaline hit.

The first thing I wanted to do was check on the support team. Were they in panic-mode? How sweaty were their palms? How many customers had they talked to already today? How close to capacity were they?

And by the time I received the alert and logged on (coffee brewing while I said Good Morning, thank glob for remote work), Basecamp had been in read-only for about 30 minutes, three times my prediction. Despite the stress of a lengthy downtime, knowing that we’d have a few hours of this status allowed us to settle in and accept our predicament. We had time to get into a flow and trust ourselves to talk our customers through this.

Really, what I realized when I logged on was that everything was absolutely under control on the support team. And of course it was: for the past two years, our team has been conducting crisis drills with each other. Once a month, we rotate responsibility for these drills and each person is responsible for coming up with their own style of drill. They’ve become quite the gif-filled, fun time! We work from a playbook (hosted on GitHub in case Basecamp is down) that acts as a living document we can update as-needed. We’re currently in the process of using our experience from the read-only outage to revamp and reassess the playbook to make it even more accessible, comprehensive, and succinct — no small task, mind you!

Keep reading “The Support Side of Downtime”

For the last decade or so, I’ve been on a number of boards, consulted with a number of entrepreneurs, and have been both formally and informally involved in helping a number of young companies find their way.

Many young companies I’ve seen have one thing in common: They can’t wait to grow up. They desperately want to be taken seriously by others. They want to be perceived as sophisticated, as having it all figured out.

This is where they begin to get into trouble. As they technically begin to be able to do more things, it’s the things they can no longer do that turn out to be the big losses.

Take company size, for example. One way to be taken seriously is to hire more people. As a whole, bigger companies are taken more seriously than small companies. Thing is, small has major practical advantages over large. Small companies can do both small and big things. Big companies can not do small things. Once you get to a certain size, you can no longer do the small things. When you’re big, every initiative turns big, like it or not. Except the small things are often all that’s necessary.

Take “systems”, for example. I’ve seen a number of small companies jump into big sophisticated content management, inventory management, e-commerce management platforms. Buying into something the big guys use helps a small company feel like they’ve arrived. Now they’re ready to scale! But now all the sudden they can no longer do the things they need to do. Trying a quick idea they used to be able to just whip up becomes a wrestling match with the new system that prefers you do things the more complicated way. Now “let’s just try that” becomes “when can we schedule a time to figure out how we can try that?”

The other thing that’s lost in transition from small to big are instincts. I’ve seen companies paralyzed by ideas they can’t seem to implement anymore. They could still do things they same way they used to, but they can’t think that way anymore. For example, a small company that would have just spent a couple hours sending out 50 hand-written emails to test a personalized selling campaign, is stuck for days or weeks trying to figure out how to get their new e-commerce platform to automate the same thing. They could still just pick the customers and write the emails by hand, but they’re forgotten how to think about doing it that way. Once you have something in place that’s supposed to be able to do that work for you, you lose flexibility, your mind and muscles atrophy. You cease to be able to be scrappy.

Scrappy is a mindset, and the skills are lossy — once they’re gone, you can never recreate them the same way again. Being scrappy is easier the smaller you are, the younger you are, and the fewer options you have. Hang on to it for as long as possible! Don’t be in a rush to abandon such critical survival instincts.

It happens to all growing companies. We’ve certainly lost our fair share of scrappiness as well. My suggestion: Resist the allure of large — there’s very little payback, especially if you artificially get there before you’re really ready. Be aware — and beware — of the things you give up too early and never get back.

We don’t need to wait for the singularity before artificial intelligence becomes capable of turning the world into a dystopian nightmare. AI-branded algorithms are already serving up new portions of fresh hell on a regular basis. But instead of worrying about run-away computers, we should be worrying about the entrepreneurs that feed them the algorithms, and the consumers who mindlessly execute them.

It’s not that Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, et al are wrong to ponder whether Skynet might one day decide that humankind is a bug in the code of the universe that should be eliminated. In much the same way that evangelicals aren’t necessarily wrong to believe that the rapture will at some point prove the end of history. Having faith in supernatural stories about vengeful deities condemning us all to an eternity of misery is a bedrock pastime since the cognitive revolution. Precisely because there’s no scope for refuting such a story today.

It’s just that such a preoccupation with the possible calamities of tomorrow might distract us from dealing with the actual disasters of today. And algorithmic disasters are not only already here, but growing in scale, impact, and regularity.

A growing body of work is taking the algorithms of social media to task for optimizing for addiction and despair. Whipping its users into the highest possible state of frenzy, anxiety, and envy. Because that’s the deepest well of engagement to draw from.

Keep reading “The AI apocalypse is already here”