Dave K. asks:

A follow-up question to “Is formal education important”... How does a “beginning” programmer/developer/designer gain the experience that you guys, or any company for that matter, want to see? I’m assuming that you want to see a portfolio of a someone’s work…but how do they go about building up their portfolio? I guess the general question would be, how does someone get started?

A great way to build a portfolio without clients is to make up fake clients. That’s how I got started.

Designers have it easiest

If you’re a designer you’ve got it easy. Design a few screens for your own fake online shoe store. Or online bank. Or cell phone company. Or grocery store. Show the world what you would do if you had the chance. I’ll guarantee your fake client portfolio will look better than your future actual client portfolio too.

Programmers: Go open source

It’s easy to show the world what you can do visually, but if you’re a programmer you’re going to have a tougher time making the quick sell. So what I would suggest is to get involved in open source projects. Find a project you’re passionate about and lend a hand. You’ll learn a lot, be exposed to different approaches, and be able to pitch in on something real. Everyone we’ve hired at 37signals has contributed to an open source project. It’s a great way to show an employer what you can do.

Just do it

No one is going to give you a portfolio. You have to build it. Make up your own clients. Fill in your own portfolio pages. Show people what you can do given the chance. That’ll get you started.

A couple of years ago my dad introduced me to a friend of his he met at the local coffee shop. The fellow’s name was Darryl.

Honestly, what I noticed first was what was wrong with him: He walked with a severe limp, his speech was slurred, his face distorted, his motor skills were affected, and he couldn’t hear that well. Our hands missed on the first few handshake attempts.

But what I noticed next — and will always remember — was everything that was right about him. This guy was incredible. He had troubles, but they didn’t seem to trouble him. His life-is-wonderful outlook was piercing. His optimism became his defining trait. The guy was a fighter and didn’t let anyone tell him he couldn’t do something. He shared his inspiring story at schools, businesses, and prisons. He volunteered his time at his church and local hospital.

Darryl was about 39 when I met him. At 24 he was diagnosed with malignant, terminal brain cancer of the cerebellum and brain stem. The surgery would knock out his memory, movement, and speech. If he survived at all they said he probably wouldn’t walk or talk again. He was told he’d spend his time in a nursing home. But somehow about 15 years later I was meeting him at a coffee shop.

As these rare but amazing stories go, he had the surgery and beat his prognosis. He persevered through grueling rehab, dealt with demoralizing setbacks, but pushed on. He eventually regained his independence, the ability to move around on his own, speak, and live a mostly-normal life.

He wrote a book called Force a Miracle about his experience. Mike Ditka, a personal hero of Darryl’s, got ahold of an early manuscript and was so moved he wrote the foreword.

The book is pretty amazing. You’ll empty your eyes reading it.

Unfortunately about six weeks ago his tumor returned. It grew rapidly and was inoperable. On October 31st Darryl passed away (guestbook). We’ll miss everything about him. He was a great man. Donations in his memory can be made to the American Brain Tumor Association.

Chris asks:

What importance do you place on formal education in your team? In today’s information age, it seems that about any kind of knowledge is only a few keystrokes away, and anything one might want to learn about is freely available and can be mastered given the drive and, of course, trial and error to develop the skill. Naturally, this especially applies to web technologies (more so than, say, neural surgery). What kind of educational background does your team harbor, be it for business or technology, what practical advantage does it lend, and what do you think about the crowds of talented, self-taught “amateurs” which the web has made possible?

We don’t put much value in formal education when deciding who to hire. In fact, I believe only three of the eight people at 37signals have a formal higher education degree. Some spent a little time at college and decided it wasn’t for them. Some didn’t go at all. We couldn’t care less.

What we care about is intelligence, curiosity, passion, character, motivation, taste, intuition, writing skills, and the ability to make smart value judgements. A few of these qualities may benefit from exposure to higher education, but we feel most of them are better learned through practical experience. Further, we don’t believe taste can be taught—you either got it or you don’t. We believe taste is one of the most important qualities in anyone we hire.

Of course we don’t hold a formal education against anyone, we just don’t pay much attention to it. We’re more interested in someone’s experience, real work, and point of view than we are with their diploma, degree, or GPA. Formal education is probably last on our list of qualities we feel make someone qualified to work at 37signals.

Thanks for the questions!

So far we’ve received nearly 100 questions since posting the Ask 37signals announcement. We’d love to answer yours. Please send it along to svn [at] 37signals dot com. Title the email “Ask 37signals”. Thanks again!

On the evening of Monday, November 12, we experienced a few of hours of downtime due to an explosion at Rackspace’s main data center in Dallas, TX. This event lead to the eventual failure of a backup cooling system. Without adequate cooling, our servers had to be shut down to prevent permanent damage. We have detailed the events that led to the downtime. We deeply apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused and will work hard to make sure we reduce the likelihood of this happening again.

Congratulations to our friends at VEER for being acquired by Corbis.

Scott asks:

Do you use formal personas when thinking about the users of a new app?

We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.

Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. We recognize our problems aren’t unique. In fact, our problems are probably a lot like your problems. So we bundle up the solutions to our problems in the form of web-based software and offer them for sale.

We recognize not everyone shares our problems, our point of view, or our opinions, but that verdict’s the same if you use personas. Making decisions based on real opinions trumps making decisions based on imaginary opinions.

I’ve never been a big believer in personas. They’re artificial, abstract, and fictitious. I don’t think you can build a great product for a person that doesn’t exist. And I definitely don’t think you can build a great product based on a composite sketch of 10 different people all rolled into one (or two or three).

Personas don’t

Personas don’t talk back. Personas can’t answer questions. Personas don’t have opinions. Personas can’t tell you when something just doesn’t feel right. Personas can’t tell you when a sentence doesn’t make sense. Personas don’t get frustrated. Personas aren’t pressed for time. Personas aren’t moody. Personas can’t click things. Personas can’t make mistakes. Personas can’t make value judgements. Personas don’t use products. Personas aren’t real.

People do

People talk back. People answer questions. People have opinions. People can tell you when something just doesn’t feel right. People can tell you when a sentence doesn’t make sense. People get frustrated. People are pressed for time. People are moody. People click things. People make mistakes. People make value judgements. People use products. People are real.

Get Real

So if you can’t design something for yourself, design something for someone you know. Get that person or people involved in your project early on. Basing your decisions on a matrix of personality traits isn’t what I’d recommend if you really want to build a great product.

Dallas P. asks:

Looking back on your history, what was the 1 big, risky decision that you had to make. And how did you come to the answer. (and was it the right answer?)

We take pride in not making big risky decisions. It’s not that we’re risk averse, it’s that we’re small decision friendly. We think the best way to avoid big mistakes is to make tiny decisions.

Molecules vs. Atoms

Big decisions are molecules. Each molecule is made up of multiple atoms. Each atom is a separate decision. We prefer to deal with decisions on the atomic level.

Inertia

The problem with big decisions is that they’re hard to make and hard to change. And once you make one the tendency is to continue to believe you made the right decision even if you didn’t. Big decisions are full of Pride, Politics, Posturing, and Persuasion. Changing direction after making a big decision is admitting you made a big mistake. Humans don’t like admitting that—especially when jobs, careers, and mortgage payments are on the line.

Think big, decide small

Making tiny decisions doesn’t mean you can’t make big plans or think big ideas. It just means that we believe the best way to achieve those big plans/dreams/ideas is one tiny decision at a time. Tiny decisions allow for easy course correction. Changing your mind about something small is a whole lot easier than changing your mind about something big. When’s the last time you really changed your mind about a big decision? It’s rare on your own and ten times as rare in an organization when other people are involved.

You asked for one, I’ll give you two

However, sometimes a big decision is unavoidable. We’ve had two in recent memory. 1. The Jeff Bezos investment in 37signals and 2. Starting Highrise over half-way through the initial development.

1. The Jeff Bezos investment

We’ve always believed that outside money is plan B. We believe in bootstrapping, self-funding, and making your customers your investors. We said no to over 30 VC firms since we first launched Basecamp in Feb 2004. But then we got a call from Jeff Bezos’ people letting us know Jeff liked what we were up to and was interested in investing in 37signals.

We had tremendous respect for Jeff. We loved Amazon, we loved what we’d read about him, we asked people we know who knew him and they loved him too. So we said, sure, let’s see where this goes.

After a couple of trip to Seattle we decided to work out a deal. This was a big (expensive) decision. Time, lawyers, selling a piece of the company—these were huge decisions for us. We’d always done things our way and answered to no one but ourselves and our customers. So this was big.

The decision was based on gut, primarily. We didn’t need the money for operations, but we really valued Jeff’s experience, advice, opinion, and general business sense. He built one of the world’s best retailing operations in a few short years. From an idea, from scratch. He’d been through that we were going through. We wanted a guy like that in our corner. We thought that was valuable so we took a chance on it. As with any tough negotiation there were times when both sides were on the verge of backing out, but everyone persevered for the better.

So far so great. We’re happy with the deal, happy with Jeff’s involvement, and happy with Jeff’s team. Good people, good support, good ideas, and pretty hands off. It feels like an idea situation for both sides.

2. Highrise restart

About half-way through the initial development of Highrise we took a look at the product and didn’t like it. We’d gone to far without Getting Real. We weren’t using it while we were building it, we were “complexifying” simple things, we were saying “wouldn’t it be cool if…” too often.

When we finally got honest about it we didn’t like it. Instead of trying to convince ourselves that we could salvage it, we decided to scrap it and start over. That was a big decision and it was most certainly the right one. The product we would have built would have sucked. The product we did build was great.

The Highrise experience reiterated the advantages of tiny decisions. We let a bunch of tiny unmade decisions snowball into one big critical decision. And then we put off the big decision so long that we’d finished half the product before we got up the stones to say “No, this sucks, we have to stop.” We definitely wasted a lot of time and chipped away a fair bit of morale.

But in the end it was the right decision. We started over, got real with our work, and produced something we’re very proud of.

Thanks for the questions!

So far we’ve received about 75 questions since posting the Ask 37signals announcement. We’ve earmarked a handful of especially good ones to answer so far. We’d love to answer yours. Please send it along to svn [at] 37signals dot com and use the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks again!

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of speaking at the BIF 3 conference in Providence, RI. Walt Mossberg and I discussed simple software, feature creep, and why the software industry is structured to churn out big software.

Watch the 20-minute interview. Photo by: Michelle Riggen-Ransom.

What’s BIF?

BIF (Business Innovation Factory) is a wonderful organization head up by a great guy named Saul Kaplan. Saul is one of those guys who lives for innovation. He loves seeing it, he loves hearing about it, and he loves implementing it. He embraces Rhode Islands’ main constraint: Its small size. He sees it as an opportunity to position Rhode Island as a controlled testbed of innovation. And the Business Innovation Factory is at the center of this innovation storm.

BIF-3, like BIF-1 and 2 before it, was about stories. Each storyteller had 15 minutes on the stage talking about something that inspired them, something that helped them innovate. Past speakers included Dean Kamen, Richard Saul Wurman, John Seely Brown, Jane Fulton Suri, and plenty of others making a real difference. This year they added interviews by Walt Mossberg and Bill Taylor to the mix.

I didn’t attend BIF-1 or BIF-2, but BIF-3 was amazing, enlightening, and inspiring. The great thing about BIF is that they bring people from different industries together to share their stories. This is not a technology conference, it’s a conference about ideas that can come from anywhere.

Some of my favorite talks from BIF-3

Colonel Dean Esserman talks about knowing your beat cops like you know your doctor. Nationally recognized as a leader in public safety innovation, Providence’s Chief of Police has revamped the city’s crimefighting force and sucessfully replaced the department’s traditional methods with a new community policing concept.

Denise Nemchev talks about inventing a nail that can save billions of dollars and millions of lives. Nemchev is President of Stanley Bostitch, a Division of the Stanley Works. The Stanley Works is a worldwide supplier of tools, hardware and security solutions for professional, industrial, and consumer use. Stanley Bostitch is a $600M division of SWK headquartered out of East Greenwich, Rhode Island employing nearly 3,000 people world-wide.

Clayton Christensen talks about education, health care, disruptive innovation and fearing the 12 year olds. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. His research and teaching interests center on managing innovation and creating new growth markets. A seasoned entrepreneur, Christensen founded three successful companies: CPS Corporation, Innosign, and Innosign Capital. Christensen is also author or co-author of five books and is presently completing two books concerning the problems of our health care and public education systems.

Mark Cuban is interviewed by Walt Mossberg on a variety of topics. Cuban is an active investor in leading and cutting-edge technologies and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Prior to his purchase of the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban co-founded Broadcast.com, the leading provider of multimedia and streaming on the Internet. Today, in addition to his ownership of the Mavericks, Cuban is also Chairman of the high-definition television station HDNet which he launched in 2001. HDNet is the world’s first national television network broadcasting all of its programming in 1080i high-definition television (HDTV).

More and more

You can see all the talks from the conference online. I would highly recommend checking out a future BIF conference if you can. Providence is a cool town, the speakers are top notch, and you’ll definitely come away inspired.

Also, special thanks to Jack Templin and the Providence Geeks for inviting me to speak at their event while I was in town. Extra special thanks also go out to Tori Drew and Christine Flanagan for their magical organizational efforts.

We have a slot open for November in The Deck, our advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals. Give us a holler if you can pull the trigger quick and we’ll make a nice deal for a first-time advertiser.

Check out the icon Apple uses to represent a PC in Mac OS X: