On setting goals: "We don't care about squeezing out the last drops by setting ambitious goals.
Those drops taste sour."
Comfy's cool: rather than always embracing discomfort, "if you listen to your discomfort and back
off from what's causing it, you're more likely to find the right path. We've been in that place
many times over the years at Basecamp."
"Most people don't actually have 8 hours a day to work, they have a couple of hours. The rest of
the day is stolen from them by meetings, conference calls, and other distractions."
Financial controls, bureaucracy, and heavyweight process guard against so many things, but all too
often they fail to protect what's both most vulnerable and most precious: their employees' time
and attention.
Don't let others schedule your time: If you don't own the vast majority of your time, it's
impossible to be calm. You'll always be stressed out, feeling robbed of the ability to actually do
your job.
What you want is the "oblivious joy of focus." Not to be in touch, not to be constantly
reprioritizing your work to ensure it's maximally relevant and aligned.
"The best companies aren't families. They're supporters of families."
At Basecamp, "we don't have imperial ambitions." It's about growing the pie and customer
happiness, not taking market share from the competition.
"Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no
agenda. It's completely exhausting."
On roadmaps: there is no one year plan. It's bullshit. Using a 6 week horizon lets you change your
mind often; "it's a huge relief."
Setting company goals, OKRs: "It's hard enough to build a long-lasting sustainable business with
happy employees. So why impose some arbitrary number to loom over your job, salary, bonus, and
kid's college fund?"
"The joy of missing out": don't think you can know everything that's going on at the company.
Instead, prioritize the oblivious joy of focus.
"Best practices" is a powerful, blunt label. It's hard to question ideas published with this
label, and so people blindly follow them.
"We don't throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across
the finish line by teams of three."
They "celebrate the summer months" by cutting out a workday each week. Part of the reason why is
that otherwise, work isn't seasonal and becomes monotonous.
"As we continued to hear fellow entrepreneurs reminiscing about the good old days, the more we
kept thinking, 'Why didn't they just grow slower and stay closer to the size they enjoyed the
most?'" We decided that if the good old days were so good, we'd do our best to simply settle
there, and grow headcount very slowly.
It's crazy at work
The workday is being sliced into tiny, fleeting work moments by an onslaught of distractions.
An unhealthy obsession with growth at any cost sets towering, unrealistic expectations that stress
people out.
"People can't get work done at work anymore" because of distractions, so work inevitably bleeds
into home life.
"The answer isn't more hours, it's less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer
distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress."
"It's time to give people the uninterrupted time that great work demands."
Relieve people from the conveyor belts of information and give them the focus that their best work
requires.
"Calm company": this is their goal for Basecamp. There's no ego-driven goals.
"The modern workplace is sick. Chaos should not be the natural state at work. Anxiety isn't a
prerequisite for progress. Sitting in meetings all day isn't required for success. These are all
perversions of work — side effects of broken models."
"Calm is more independence, less interdependence."
Your company is a product
"Your company is the thing that makes your products. That's why your company should be your best
product."
Companies should be malleable, to afford iteration, just like we try to make our products and our
eng systems malleable.
A company is like software. It has to be usable. It has bugs, places where the company crashes
because of bad organizational design or cultural oversights.
Bury the hustle
The human experience is so much more than 24/7 hustle to the max.
It's also just bad advice. You're not very likely to find that key insight or breakthrough idea
north of the 14th hour in the day. Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force.
Happy pacifists
Business literature is about fighting and dominating. It leads to zero-sum thinking.
At Basecamp, "we don't have imperial ambitions."
"What's our market share? Don't know, don't care. It's irrelevant. Do we have enough customers
paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing
every year? Yes. That's good enough for us."
Comparisons
"Comparison is the death of joy." - Mark Twain
"We don't compare. What others do has no bearing on what we're able to do, what we want to do,
or what we choose to do. There's no chase at Basecamp, no rabbit to pursue. Just a deep
satisfaction with doing our very best work as measured by our happiness and our customers'
purchases."
Our goal: no goals
"No customer-count goals, no sales goals, no retention goals, no revenue goals, no specific
profitability goals."
Don't care about squeezing out the last drops by setting ambitious goals. Those drops taste sour.
"There are four quarters to a year. Forty to a decade. Every one of them has to produce, exceed,
and beat EXPECTATIONS." (He assumes all numbers that get put into goals are arbitrary).
It's hard enough to build a long-lasting sustainable business with happy employees. So why impose
some arbitrary number to loom over your job, salary, bonus, and kid's college fund?
How about this: no targets, no goals?
"If you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or
being a delightful place to work?"
I.e. using goals which are already aligned with what you want to do, but which aren't quantified
and don't have any teeth.
Don't change the world
Founders are infatuated with disruption. Aiming for a regular impact lifts burden off of your
shoulders, letting you be satisfied with normal work efforts.
Make it up as you go
At Basecamp, there's no 1 year plan. The product plan has just a few weeks' horizon.
6 week horizon lets you change your mind often; "it's a huge relief."
"Much corporate anxiety comes from the realization that the company has been doing the wrong
thing, but it's too late to change direction because of the 'Plan'."
Comfy's cool
Going deeper into where you're already comfortable can produce gains and mastery. Most companies
don't need unnecessarily painful breadth.
"If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you're going to lose yourself."
"On the contrary, if you listen to your discomfort and back off from what's causing it, you're
more likely to find the right path. We've been in that place many times over the years at
Basecamp."
"That's how we ended up throwing out individual negotiations and differences in pay, and going
with a simpler system."
"Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm."
8's enough, 40's plenty
"Most people don't actually have 8 hours a day to work, they have a couple of hours. The rest of
the day is stolen from them by meetings, conference calls, and other distractions."
If you can't fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at
picking what to do.
Protectionism
Financial controls, bureaucracy, and heavyweight process guard against so many things, but all too
often they fail to protect what's both most vulnerable and most precious: their employees' time
and attention.
Time and attention are best spent in large bills, if you will, not spare coins and small change.
A high quality hour is "1x60", not "2x30", "4x15".
Effective > productive
When people focus on productivity, they end up focusing on being busy. Filling every moment with
something to do. There's always more to do!
We don't believe in busyness at Basecamp. We believe in effectiveness. How little can we do? How
much can we cut out? Instead of adding to-dos, we add to-don'ts.
The Outwork Myth
Assertion: nobody is successful just because they put in more time than the next person. It was
something else: luck, smarter technique, ...
Office hours
Work doesn't happen at work any more. The ideal places that work really gets done are any kind of
interruption-free zone.
On pinging experts
The person with the question needed something and they got it. The person with the answer was
doing something else and had to stop. That's rarely a fair trade.
It fragments the expert's workday. It's the productivity curse of being an expert. Control this
productivity loss by containing it within office hours.
While office hours increase latency of help, it can often wait. And it's a model that explicitly
aligns with a calm work environment.
Calendar Tetris
At Basecamp, all calendars are private, which makes it much higher friction to get on someone's
calendar.
"If you make it easy for someone to invite five other people to a meeting — because software can
find the open slot that works for everyone — then meetings with six people will proliferate."
Taking someone's time should be a pain in the ass. Taking many people's time should be so
cumbersome that most people won't even bother to try it unless it's really important. Meetings
should be a last resort, especially big ones.
If you don't own the vast majority of your time, it's impossible to be calm. You'll always be
stressed out, feeling robbed of the ability to actually do your job.
The presence prison
The only way to know work is getting done is by looking at the actual work. Not if they're sitting
at their desk.
Indicators which reveal when you're online and available invite others to interrupt you.
I'll get back to you whenever
Basecamp has a culture of eventual response. Don't check and reply to email for long stretches of
time, so that you always favor your primary job over communication.
FOMO? JOMO!
"People should be missing out! Most people should miss out on most things most of the time. That's
we try to encourage at Basecamp JOMO — the joy of missing out."
"It's JOMO that lets you turn off the firehose of information and chatter and interruptions to
actually get the right shit done."
It's a fool's errand to think you can know everything that's going on at the company.
The solution for status updates? Monthly snippets, written by the tech lead, distilled and curated
to be broad appeal and useful.
It's "the oblivious joy of focus."
We're not family
Calling a company a family is manipulation to the employees.
"By invoking the image of the family, the valor of doing whatever it takes naturally follows.
You're not just working long nights or skipping a vacation to further the bottom line; no, no,
you're doing this for the family. Such a blunt emotional appeal is only needed if someone is
trying to make you forget about your rational self-interest."
The best companies aren't families. They're supporters of families.
Low-hanging fruit can still be out of reach
Beware thinking an unfamiliar task or first-of hire will obviously produce easy, low-hanging fruit
without a ton of investment.
The next time you ask an employee to go pick some low-hanging fruit, stop yourself. Respect the
work you've never done before.
Out of whack
If it's easier for work to claim a Sunday than for life to borrow a Thursday, there ain't no
balance.
Work shouldn't be able to claim weekends, or time past 5pm.
Hire the work, not the resume
"We do better work, broader work, and more considered work when the team reflects the diversity of
our customer base. 'Not exactly what we already have' is a quality in itself."
Method: put a project in front of the candidate, pay them $1,500, and have them work on it for a
week. Forget the resume; who knows which part of the nike.com redesign they actually did. This
gives more people a chance, and it avoids hiring an imaginary person.
Ignore the talent war
"Talent isn't worth fighting over. It's not a fixed, scarce resource that either you have or you
don't. It rarely even transplants all that well. Someone who's a superstar at one company often
turns out to be completely ineffectual at another. Don't go to war over talent." Instead, get it
through growing and nurturing.
"We've found nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who's
already at their peak."
Don't negotiate salaries
It's a ritual that no one likes, and often leaves you uncertain about whether you got a fair deal
or could've gotten more. Free your employees from this tress.
Basecamp's comp method:
Salaries
5 levels per department/role.
Everyone in the same level is paid the same.
They pay top 10% of market, and track market each year by issuing raises.
To increase comp greatly means increasing your level.
Pay at Bay Area rates even though their team is distributed, to combat the appeal of FANG.
"We don't pay traditional bonuses at Basecamp, either, so our salaries are benchmarked against
other companies' salaries plus bonus packages. We used to do bonuses many years ago, but we
found that they were quickly treated as expected salary, so if they ever dipped, people felt
like they got a demotion."
They pay 25% of the growth in EBITDA of that year out to the current employees.
(It seems to me like they give competitive salary and no stock, so their packages are 1/2 of what
Google or FB will pay.)
Benefits who?
"Gotcha benefits": those designed to keep you in the office.
Basecamp's philosophy is to help people get away from work.
Fully paid vacations every year for everyone who's been with the company for more than a year.
The whole trip is covered: airfare, hotel accommodations — up to $5,000 per person or family.
($5,000 doesn't seem like enough for a family vacation.)
Three-day weekends all summer. May through September we only work 32-hour weeks. This allows
everyone to take Friday off, or Monday off.
30d paid sabbaticals every three years.
$1K per year continuing-education stipend, to develop non-work skills, like cooking.
"Encouraging people to do things they've always wanted to do but needed a bit of encouragement
and help to actually make happen."
A local monthly CSA share.
Once-a-month massage at an actual spa, not the office.
Library rules
Open offices: "such offices are great at one thing: packing in as many people as possible at the
expense of the individual."
"When sales or service people, who often need to be loud and jovial on the phone, have to share
accommodations with people who need long stretches of quiet, you're not only destroying
productivity, you're fomenting resentment."
Offices should use "library rules": quiet, focused.
The wrong time for real time
"Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no
agenda. It's completely exhausting."
If it's an important decision to make, first "write it up," which moves it out of chat.
People will always misuse chat. Chat is only good for urgent communication, handling crises, and
1:1 collaboration.
"Dreadlines"
Delivery dates should either be flexible, or the scope of what gets delivered should be flexible.
A deadline with a flexible scope invites pushback, compromises, and tradeoffs — all ingredients
in healthy, calm projects. It's when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for
dread and overwork.
Don't be a knee jerk
In-person idea pitches invite interruption and knee jerk reactions.
Instead, write up a complete memo, let everyone read it offline multiple times, and then host a
considered discussion.
Watch out for 12-day weeks
Don't routinely ship on a Friday and then have to work weekends because you're monitoring and
bugfixing the release.
Bad habits beat good intentions
"If we had started by hiring a bunch of people we didn't need in the beginning, we would have
continued to hire a bunch more people we don't need today. Instead, we hire when it hurts. Slowly,
and only after we clearly need someone. Not in anticipation of possibly maybe."
Narrow as you go
Commit to an idea, see it through, make it happen. You can always go back to revise and improve it
later, but only if you actually finish.
"It's not that new approaches or ideas are bad, but their timing may well be. Always keeping the
door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing. Confidently close that door.
Accept that better ideas aren't necessarily better if they arrive after the train has left the
station. If they're so good, they can catch the next one."
Worst practices
Be careful about taking popular wisdom without critical consideration.
"Best practices" is a powerful, blunt label. It's hard to question ideas published with this
label, and so people blindly follow them.
Have less to do
"Too much shit to do" is usually the root problem, and people try to solve it with productivity
hacks.
Saying no is the only way to claw back time. It's obligation elimination. Every other time saving
hack is snake oil.
"At Basecamp we've become ruthless about eliminating either work that doesn't need to be done or
work we don't want to do."
They stopped accepting payment by check early on. They let go of that non-trivial revenue
because they didn't want the work of processing paper checks to be on anyone's plate.
Three's company
A team of three is their magic number. It's often one designer, two programmers.
"We don't throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across
the finish line by teams of three."
"What if there are five departments involved in a project or decision? There aren't." We
intentionally don't work on projects requiring that level of coordination.
Benefits:
With three people, scheduling is easy.
Having such a small team tempers your ambition and keeps you honest.
Three is a sharp wedge. "The problem with four is that you almost always need to add a fifth to
manage the the team."
Season's greetings
They "celebrate the summer months" by cutting out a workday each week. Part of the reason why is
that otherwise, work isn't seasonal and becomes monotonous.
They use the summer months to tackle lighter projects.
Their CSA box perk also acknowledges the seasons, since the ingredients change every quarter.
Calm's in the black
Until you're profitable, you're racing the runway.
Priced to lose
Basecamp uses flat pricing, no matter the size of the customer. There's no "per seat" pricing
model. The reason for this is they don't want to deal with outsized customers having influence
over them, and don't want to worry about revenue concentration.
(This is crazy; they must be giving up so much potential revenue.)
On principle, they want to help small businesses, not the fortune 500. Those companies are already
big enough.
"This leaves us free to make software for ourselves and on behalf of a broad base of customers,
not at the behest of any single one or a privileged few. It's a lot easier to do the right thing
for the many when you don't fear displeasing a few super customers."
"Key account managers. Sales meetings. Schmoozing. The enterprise sales playbook is well
established and repulsive to us."
They don't want to split their culture and team in half, with one part focused on big enterprise
and the other on small businesses.
"Becoming a calm company is all about making decisions about who you are, who you want to serve,
and who you want to say no to. It's about knowing what to optimize for. It's not that any
particular choice is the right one, but not making one or dithering is definitely the wrong
one."
Promise not to promise
"We've always wanted customers to judge the product they could buy and use today, not some
imaginary version that might exist in the future."
Says beware of roadmaps of any kind, and of saying "yes, but later" to stakeholders and customers.
both lead to expectations and stress managing those expectations.
They continue to operate three separate versions of Basecamp, and don't plan to ever migrate those
customers to later versions. Most customers don't care about the new UI they've added, and don't
want their workflows changed.
The good old days
"As we continued to hear fellow entrepreneurs reminiscing about the good old days, the more we
kept thinking, 'Why didn't they just grow slower and stay closer to the size they enjoyed the
most?'"
"We decided that if the good old days were so good, we'd do our best to simply settle there.
Maintain a sustainable, manageable size. We'd still grow, but slowly and in control. We'd stay in
the good days — no need to call them old anymore."