The Job Board also has iPhone Developer Jobs, Customer Service/Support Jobs, Business/Exec Jobs, and more.
What’s more, delegating isn’t easy for me. Even though the paperwork and other chores were piling up, I still had a hard time letting go. I have a feeling I’m not alone in this. It’s tough for the person who started the business to begin to let go. For more than a decade, I’ve been involved in every decision at this company, from which hosting company to use to what brand of paper towel goes in the kitchen. When you’re that used to having every decision run through you, it can be a bit unnerving to surrender control. I understand that it’s silly to believe that every small decision needs to run through you. But it’s such a primal instinct when your business is your baby.
February 7, 2006 – When you build an app always look out for the non-essential features. Make sure they don’t make it into your v1.0. They slow down your release, they dilute your focus, they require resources that pull you away from perfecting the core of your app, and they open the door to more bugs at launch.
“Why Work Doesn’t Work” is a CBC interview with Jason Fried. He discusses the workplace, sane work hours, and meetings vs. communicating with passive communication tools (i.e. ones that don’t require interruptions).
Communication doesn’t always have to be in real time. It can be in what we call “slow time.” You can post something and three hours later someone can get back to you and then four hours later someone else can get back to you. And everything will work out just fine.
Slow time is “Maybe it takes two or three days to have this conversation. And we do it over periods of 15 minutes here, two minutes there, four minutes there.” And that’s fine. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. Unless it’s really, incredibly, truly urgent. (Which most things aren’t. They’re made out to be that way, but they really aren’t that important.)
Meetings basically make things happen all at once. And that means you’re pulling a bunch of people off their work to have this “right now” conversation. It’s very disruptive for a bunch of people. So if they can communicate over a long period of time instead, it’s much better.
I think companies would benefit from giving employees a lot more autonomy and alone time to do their work. And then when they do need to come together, it can be more special and more meaningful. It’s like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for a long time – it’s kind of a special moment for a couple hours and then you go break up and go back to your own lives and that’s fine. And that’s how we like to treat our work here.
We also try to have sane working hours. And four day workweeks during the summer. What we’ve found is that when people have fewer hours to work, they put more time into the work. It’s like anything. If you have less of it, you conserve it a bit more. You use it better. If you have fewer dollars left, you’re probably not going to go out and buy a big screen TV if you don’t need one. You’re going to put those dollars to work in a more efficient manner. It’s the same way with time. If you only have 32 hours this week to get something done, you’re not going to waste time.
Related Don’t break Parkinson’s Law (i.e. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”)
In this Mixergy interview titled “Blasphemy & Revelation,” David Heinemeier Hansson explains his distaste for the tech world’s “swing for the fences” approach to business and why he feels it’s important to speak up about it.
The problem with swinging for the fences
Some ideas are so large and such a big gamble that either they’re going to be a flop or they’re going to be an amazing success. It seems like the vast majority of the tech startup community is working on that side of the idea fence. But I think people should also work on low risk, practical ideas.
I don’t have a trader’s mentality: “We are huge one day. We are down. We are huge. We are down.” I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.
The startup scene is too focused on “swing for the fences” type of ideas, either it’s going to go bust or it’s going to be this lavish, extreme success. I think we’d be better off with less of a focus on that and more of a focus on practical solutions to less grandiose problems.
The different kinds of risks
I think it’d be better if there was more “considered” risk taking. It’s not that you shouldn’t take any risks at all. Starting any company of any kind, even if you’re sure that it solves a problem for somebody, is going to be a risk. There’s a fair chance it won’t work.
But there are different kinds of risks. There’s the “1 in 10,000” or “1 in a 1,000,000 chance” of making something. And then there’s a “1 in 7 chance” or “1 in 14 chance.” I’m more in the “let’s take a 1 in 7 chance” rather than the “let’s take a 1 in 10,000 chance” category.
I get annoyed at the destruction of wealth, the creative inefficiencies. But it’s also deeper than that. It’s the corruption of youth. These “swing for the fences” kind of deals and companies have this intense spotlight on them. And it is brainwashing the next generation of starters to think that this is the way to go. That this is how you’re going to make it in startup land. And I think that’s absolutely horrible.
I don’t want the next generation of starters to think this sort of global approach is the only way they’re going to make it. I want them to see there are alternatives out there. That you can make it bootstrapped on your own. That you don’t have to rely on some sugar daddy giving you a big check.
The importance of being contrarian
I think it’s important that there are contrarian voices calling out things they see as unhealthy. I think the world would have been better off if the first dot-com bubble burst a couple of years earlier. The world would have been better off if the subprime bubble had burst earlier.
In all of these things, there are people who sit on perspectives or information or opinions that could, in however tiny a way, help sway public opinion. I certainly have no delusions of grandeur. A tweet on it is just a tiny drop in the ocean. But I also believe in compound impact. So enough tiny drops in the ocean and you can do something.
Note: Text above condensed and compiled from various answers. Watch the full interview below.
Basecamp was done almost entirely without risk. It was completely self-funded. We treated it as a side-product and a side-project until it could pay the bills. And only then did we make it the main focus of the company.
I absolutely hate risk. I think it’s a misnomer that entrepreneurs somehow are in love with risk and making big gambles and taking big bets. I think that’s probably true for some. It’s certainly not true for me. And I think it’s certainly not true for a large constituency of other successful entrepreneurs.
I think the act of putting yourself in a position where you’re not forced to take on all this risk and bet everything is the hallmark of running things well.
We’re not big fans of what I consider “vertical” ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere “horizontal” ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.
Extras: BugDigger lets you create bug reports at the push of a button — and it integrates with Basecamp. bcToolkit, a Basecamp reporting tool, announced an update that fixes issues with moved to-do lists. Video Bug Recorder for Basecamp is a Windows tool that records video from your screen and uploads it to your Basecamp account with just a few clicks.
REWORK
Buzz: In the Sioux City Journal, Corey Westra, the commissioner of the Great Plains Athletic Conference, talks about how he’s found REWORK insightful. REWORK is one of the best business books of all time, according to UK brand strategist Ben Austin. Scott Buchmann’s REWORK review praises getting your hands dirty. He wrote, “The world is littered with classes on how to do anything: how to ride a motorcycle, how to paint, how to juggle, how to make money. Fact is, that you will never learn to do any of these things unless you actually go out and do these things.”
