Is Remote Work The Future? Jason Fried's Prediction Comes True 2022

i can't believe we're even going to talk right now so i'm like deep breath all right so admiration here i have loads of respect for what you're doing and and i wish i was as good as you and what you do so please um we're just two people talking here who both uh are maybe good at something we're good at something yeah let's hope so um now this might be crazy but in case somebody doesn't know who you are can you introduce yourself and then tell us a little story about who you are uh my name is jason freed and i started a company almost 23 years ago originally called 37 signals and you just interviewed one of my co-founders carlos segura a few weeks ago i think it was and um we were a web design company and we were doing that for a number of years and then we got pretty busy and we couldn't manage all the work we were doing with the tools that we were using so we ended up building this thing called base camp that ultimately became a big deal for us but at the time we didn't we didn't have any idea it was going to be anything and i can get into some of the details but we built that launched that in 2004 and then from about a year later we stopped doing client work and have been doing software ever since we've launched a bunch of products since then um but yeah so the company today is called basecamp although we start out as 37 signals and now we make basecamp and we make something called hey hey.com which is a new email service we just launched a couple years ago and that's uh who we are we've written a few books and done some other stuff but that's uh that's the quick summary wow okay very succinct i love where this is going um and even in that little quick introduction i've got even more questions i got my questions on the side here so let's see how this goes you are doing what i think every creative person wants to do in that they can leave client work behind i would just love to ask you like what that transition was like from doing service work and then now you're you are your own boss you're writing your own story yeah it was unintentional um but probably secretly desired you know we were doing client work well i was doing client work ever since i was in college which was i graduated college in 96 and about 95 the internet sort of kind of came around the internet that we know it the visual internet when like mosaic was launched so this is way back way back anyway i i started doing freelance work and actually did some work before that like just doing logos and stuff like that for some friends but um i'd been doing client work for since you know the mid 90s and um then we launched 37 signals we were doing client work and and client work is is it's it's good and it's bad you know it's great in that um you get to do new things all the time you get to take on problems that you don't have yourself so you get to like learn about other businesses and and do work that you wouldn't be able to do for yourself and to do some work that's really high profile and some work that's really personal and and you know you get to do a lot of different things but then of course you know you don't really really ever get to do exactly what you want because you have a client who's paying you and they and there's they're hiring you to do something for them sometimes you can get that perfect client that lets you do exactly what you want um but you know we decided to make the software for ourselves and we didn't again we didn't know that it was going to replace client work for us it was just something we were actually building to do client work better to stay more organized to keep everyone on the same page to have all feedback in one central place so we knew who said what when and who was promising what and who's working on what and deadlines and all tasks and all that stuff and it just turned out that that product as we started using it with our clients they kept saying what is this thing that you're using like we have projects too can we what is this and and we said it's just this thing we you know we built for ourselves eventually light bulb goes on over your head you're like there's an idea here there's a product here turned it into a product threw some prices on it put it out in the market not knowing what was going to happen and then about a year or so later it was generating more revenue for us than our client work was so at that point we we decided to go all in on software because we got to be our own client you're always working for a client it's either someone else or you but you you still have things that you want to do so you're always working for a client and we just decided to work for our our ourselves our client we wanted to be our own client and then um but that was only possible because we had something else that was able to pay pay our way basically i would not advocate like basically going cold turkey like dumping or dropping something and then starting something up from scratch with no safety net i'm not i don't like that so it's sort of a gradual transition over a period of a year or so until we felt comfortable and confident enough that we could do this that's the psa part in case you're thinking about dumping your very profitable business everybody that was the warning there be careful yeah yeah um i'm curious about this because we've gone through this process ourselves recently which is when you make that transition from being a service company to a product company the culture has to change the mindset has to change and i found that in our own transition it wasn't so easy for about 50 of the people they really were other motivated where they could show up every single day as long as they know here's the brief here's the client goals and they would do that but when we turned over into being like we're now our own boss and our own client they they didn't know what to do anymore they weren't the autonomous people that i thought they were so not everybody made i'm just curious what your experience was we were lucky because we were only five people when we made the decision to switch so it was yeah there's five of us at the time and so we were all on board you know but i think if we right now we're you know in the 50s of people and if we decide to completely change our business model right now it would be much much much harder um and um this is something we've talked about in our books this idea of mass the more massive and this is just physics the more mass of an object the more energy it takes to change its direction and a company with a lot of people or a long history and and legacy of doing something a certain way you know when that company wants to change it's very very hard so yeah i i don't you know you know i don't have advice um around like how to how to really change a bigger company because that's just a totally different thing but i would say if you were to do it i'd probably do it relatively slowly or spin up one group inside of an organization to begin the change versus trying to change everything and everyone at once which is just a really hard thing to do i'm a big fan of gradual changes that become obvious eventually versus knowing that something's going to work for sure i i don't i never know what's going to work you just kind of make your way there until it either works or it doesn't but you don't put yourself at risk the way i think about this is is that there's a big difference between taking a risk and putting yourself at risk so we try not to put ourselves at risk meaning that if whatever we're going to do instead doesn't work we haven't just sunk the whole thing um our risks are calculated and and they're they're gradual so we can pull back if things aren't working or we can go forward if they are but i don't like to make bet the company decisions so i would recommend against that generally and sort of find your way there over time yeah so i noticed this in in doing that exact plan there's the main company that's making the money and then there's a small group led by me when i see a small two people me and an assistant trying to build this other company this other idea and i couldn't help but to deal with the the culture shift and the observation that hey where the boss's attention is going if we're not on that train or that boat it's probably a bad sign for us and so they can see that they're not they're not dumb people obviously how do you how do you process that how do you talk to the team about that that's a really good observation because even if you don't want it to look that way it looks that way right right like where the you know whoever's in charge of something where their focus is is sort of where everyone assumes or that's where they assume every the important stuff is and if you're not on that boat then you know what am i doing or you know that sort of thing so i think we have this too when we go off and decide to build a new product so um you know we have base camp which has been around for for 17 years and is a really strong um deep product it's been around for a long time has lots and tens of thousands of companies that pay for it that's our bread and butter that allows us to do some other things and when we shift our attention typically when we build new products me and david who's my business partner will usually maybe pull one other person in and we'll do the explorations on the new product um and so we're not on the main thing for a while and you know you can imagine people wondering well is this main thing important anymore uh or or what the thing is with us as a company is that we don't have anyone dedicated just to certain parts of the business we have you know different people in different roles so if you're in customer service you do that if you're a designer you do this if you're a programmer you do this ops you do that but what i mean is that everybody works on all the products so for example when we were building hay people who were working on base camp previously knew they would ultimately be working on hay also once we got it somewhere so it wasn't like they were being left behind and only focused on this other thing they knew that they too would transition if the company transitioned so i think that's an important thing at least for us how we've done it which is that um everybody gets to move back and forth and work on different products so right now we're working on hay and base camp simultaneously and this cycle we work in what we call six week cycles this cycle you might be working on hey next cycle you might be working on base camp so it's not that you're ever left behind or that you're ever pulled along we just are constantly shifting but also communicating clearly to the group like look right now a few of us are going to focus on something else for a while to explore it it's an exploratory exercise it's quite risky it's it's not it's not we don't know if it's going to work so it's not even a great place to be it's more maybe more exciting because it's on the forefront or something or pioneering something new but it also could fall flat so you know i think you have to communicate that and then and recognize that everyone's going to come along for the ride what if we find out that there's somewhere to go that makes a lot of sense as you're going from product to product i guess the struggle for me was there's a surface company and a product company or an education company they could just not even figure out it looks like the boss is going to do something crazy having a mid-life crisis or something and you know that's kind of i can be objective about looking at it this is crazy thing that makes no money that'll take years to develop and that there's no guarantees of outcomes but all the attention at least from my point of view was directed there and so that that did cause some real concern i can see that i think that's it's a natural human response too but i think you know one way to put it is that the other part of the business the traditional part of the business is is the is the engine it's what allows it's so important it's it is it if it didn't exist we couldn't do these other things so it is actually the most important part of the business right um because it fuels explorations in other directions but naturally you're still going to have just some of the the human stuff like you know am i working on the latest and greatest am i do i get to work with the person who maybe i came here to work with well maybe not for a while um you know are are we jettisoning jettisoning our old stuff or are we gonna do both or are we gonna transition and it's it's the unknown i think makes people feel uncomfortable so i think the more you can explain sort of why you're doing this and where you're headed and what this is all about and it can be you know about stability we want to have multiple revenue streams or we just feel like we want to go in a different direction here's why um you know it's it's you just have to explain and be clear about it as clear as you can and also recognize that people are still going to feel perhaps a bit left out or nervous that they're not on the other boat at the moment but i don't know if there's much you can ultimately do about that other than be upfront and clear and transparent about it as best you can right this is what's hard about organizations this is what heart it's hard about people this is what's hard about companies these are all i mean the work is always challenging but really it's it's managing people that's i think the hardest part of it all if you ever work with people especially creative people you know the pain of this it's never that straightforward yeah we're emotional we're irrational we we fall to some of our uh worst cell sometimes about jealousy and uh whatever it is insecurities and sometimes communication can handle that being transparent as you said will help with that but it's still going to exist as long as you work with people with real emotions right yeah you know one thing we yes and we all have it yeah it's not like they have it or it's we have it it's just we all have it one thing we do we try to do is when we're working on something new like an exploration for a new product is we will try to sh not super early this is actually a good topic by the way around feedback and getting more eyes on something and when you want to do that because i don't believe you want to do it too early i think some people feel like you want to get a lot of eyes on things early i i think it's really good to protect something early for a while because it's really fragile and you know there's a lot to go into there but what we do is when we get to a point where we feel like we've got something we're particularly excited about we'll just begin sharing that throughout the company just so people can see what we're doing over there it's like what are you doing over there well here's what we're doing and i think once you begin to share it people then begin to feel like they're part of it if you just are totally secretive about it and i know there's probably some examples like you can imagine with apple when they were making the ipod they couldn't show anybody anything there's only 10 people okay but you're not apple and and i'm not apple and it's okay like you know we're not so you show you show early versions of things when you get to a place and if you don't want feedback you can say that too go hey i'm not sharing this to anyone's opinion i just want to show you what we're doing over here so you have a sense and just set the expectations but i think people appreciate being able to see what you're doing over there that's a big part of it yeah that's a great tip to include people but also say i'm not necessarily looking for your feedback here i just want to be inclusive yeah love that yeah i i'm i think i get this feeling from you that this is one of your philosophies which is to do less but better so i'm just curious i've seen 37 signals expand in products and then shrink back down and then here you are talking about another company another idea another product if if we don't want to add things to our plate then what is the genesis or catalyst for you to say i got a new itch i have an observation or something is going on here that i'd like to explore how do you manage that terribly because this is what happened you know we we we we said like this is about i think six or seven years ago we're like okay we're just going to go all in on base camp we're going to rename the company from 37 signals to base camp which is going to signal the fact that we're just focused on one thing and one thing's enough we're going to do our best work on our best product we've ever made and you do that for a while and you inevitably have a million other ideas but you always you always do and then every once in a while one idea just won't leave it won't leave you and um this email thing wouldn't leave us because we spend so we use basecamp to run our whole business all of our internal communication all of our project management all of our vendor stuff um but we also use email for the outside world so we're communicating with lawyers or accountants or or the public or you know whatever it might be you know we use email and so since we're tool builders and we want to build our own tools and we've already built our own work tool on the basecamp side we want to build our own email tool because that's what the other thing that we're in most of the most of the day and we just couldn't stop exploring this idea once we started getting somewhere with it however the initial idea for for hay which is sort of what we're talking about was actually redoing a product we built earlier called highrise we started exploring crm and stuff we want to see if we could do a new version of that but we just had this itch to do something else and one of the reasons why was because we realized that we become a more innovative company when we do at least two things and i think we started feeling ourselves um going down a narrower path wasn't allowing us to be as creative as we wanted because when you work on something that's been around for a while there's a lot of sort of legacy limitations you can't really explore a lot of brand new things because people are already used to a certain way in a certain thing and so when you do a new product you have a chance of starting from scratch and that idea those ideas fuel then your other thing and you kind of go back and forth we're calling this we kind of call it internally tick-tock development like tick over here talk over there back and forth and back and forth and so now we brought a bunch of the ideas from hay into base camp when we're bringing stuff from base camp into hay and now we're able to like play a little bit more and have a little bit more flexibility and for him to explore things and not say well this is so this doesn't fit into base camp so we're not going to explore it but now we can so i i but you know here the truth is we're actually going to explore two more products too at least so we have two more product ideas and now that we've sort of torn the lid off or or ripped the band-aid off or something i think we're going to go back to what we already are with base camp and hey but we want to go back to being a multi-product company that's beyond even just two products so we're going back to the back to the beginning back to the basics well not really the basics but back to the original thing which was build the kind of things we want to see exist in the world and not limit ourselves to to some um artificial limitation that we had and let's see what we can build if we have an idea let's let's explore it and some of these ideas may go nowhere but we're not going to say we're not doing it anymore so that's the new revision and i feel like 23 years in it's sort of fun to uh say well what if we stopped doing things the way we were doing them why not just do it a new way right for now for the next six years or 10 years i don't know you just get that degree of comfort and confidence when you've been around for a while and it's a good reminder though to change because the longer you're around the more calcified you become and you kind of get stuck in your ways and this is a way to break out of that i love that yeah um the other thing i will say though is that specifically one of the reasons why we we cut back on our products was because we didn't want to grow bigger we want to keep the company as small as we possibly could that was just something we've always wanted to do in terms of people because we wanted to know everyone's name and one just have a very small business culture and we decided recently that you know what we don't want that limitation on us anymore and therefore we can hire more people so we can do more things we couldn't do more things with a really small crew but now that we're willing to get bigger we can do more things and so we sort of took that limitation off we're not getting to a thousand people but maybe we'll get to a hundred people or 120 people like if we had that if we had a more capable company what could we build and that's sort of our current mindset i'd like to take you back to something that you had said because i think it's the beginning of something else but i'm not sure i i'm i i'm suspicious like uh i don't know who said this but the i i heard it from blair ends who said all strategy is autobiographical and it made me think like is that true i guess it is and so when i listen to you and i connect them to the book it just makes perfect sense because everything you say everything that seems to be like how you're guiding your thought and your words is reflected in the book like when you said the beginning there wasn't a grand plan and in the book and rework you write planning as guessing and it's just by listening and keeping things small uh you're able to kind of not feel the pressure of doing so much at the same time so just keeping things super simple and you talk about mass but now you're talking about potentially growing the company getting into multiple products and maybe disrupting your own way of thinking so i'm wondering if the next book will be called something like with re in front of it but maybe it'll be like rethink so you challenging yourself it's it's really funny that you mentioned that because because david and i have been talking a bit about that that this this just feels like a moment for us to um reconsider um is really the way i was thinking about it um reconsider a lot of assumptions um preconceived notions and um and recognize that we're in a fortunate position where we can um build a business uh try something else and it's still the same thing fundamentally we're not talking about we're not raising outside money we're not you know trying to be a unicorn or not none of that stuff this is like one leap or not even a leap sorry one step away from where we are today but just becoming a more capable company and that requires us to reconsider a number of things in terms of hiring middle management we need to bring in some more managers um we need to bring in some more leadership that's more strategic minded versus just individual contributors we've primarily hired individual contributors over the years and now we want to hire some people who are coming into leadership roles um from the start so there's a and it's scary and unknown and some days you're like what are we doing why are we doing this in other days you're like i'm so glad we're doing this and we're in the middle of it so i don't know how it's going to turn out but um it's kind of like why not try this now it's it's we've been doing this for a long time we know how to run a business the other way or the way we've been doing it now let's challenge ourselves to do it a little bit differently and we know we can do it because we've done it before we used to have four products and we had four products with like a team of 12. so certainly we can have multiple products with a team of 80 even though things are harder today because now you have mobile apps to do you've got more stuff that you need to build higher expectations more platforms to cover but we should absolutely be able to do this um and so yeah it's i think i think the book would probably be you know reconsider um um or like a re-rework was another topic another title we don't have a book in mind yet you know but um or reworked you know i i don't know there's there's it's exciting to think that in a few years we'll be able to reflect probably on the changes we're making now and and take some lessons so part of the reason why you might find some continuity between the book and what i'm saying is because the book is based on on what what we've done and what we think it's not uh theoretical it's very practical and so we can only write another book once we have enough lessons that we've built up and experiences that we've had and then we then put them down on paper so we're not predicting where we're going to head it's actually a summary of where we've been and we'll see when the next one comes out if we ever do another one it'll probably be about this transitional period right now right so this will serve as an interesting uh time capsule or time stamp on your thinking and and i get that like the the the books are reflecting back what has worked and what what uh what you align with so if that changes then it would make sense for them for you to release that book because people wonder like okay so they're doing things differently now and we're curious as to how they got here and then you can tell that story right yeah um that's you know that could be the plan we so we don't set out initially to decide to write books but right often what ends up happening is we come up with a title for one and then we have to do it because we like like the name i'll do the same thing with product design whenever i come up with a product name i'll give you like an example so we're um we're thinking about building a calendar a new calendaring system um which is going to be more than just a calendar but um it'll be related to hey our email thing because email and calendar seem to go go together but also it will probably stand alone um by the way i'm sharing things that like are not solidified yet so please no one quote me on this but this is what we're thinking about and i came up with this name hey day which is like the perfect name for a calendar in my mind for if that's related to the product called hey and also there's something more to it and now like i almost feel like we must do it because we have a good name for it um now that's not the only reason to do it but that's one of the things that gets me excited is a good name for something um but yeah i think um i think the plan will be to reflect back in this period of time in a few years and see if there's anything new to say and if there isn't there won't be a book if there is there will be um and i think what's interesting about this period of time in the company's history is that it's growing is challenging we have to do a bunch of things we've never done before and most of these things are things that we've railed against in the past so you have to fight your own religion um in a sense and and get past that and that's i i find that to be really exciting but it can also be really hard because sometimes you do something you're like we're not supposed to do that like who said that well we said that well if we said it we we can say something else you know like it's our own you you fight your own rules that you set up for yourself and then you have a you have this expectation to live up to your your past because you want to be consistent but like i'm much more interested in context than consistency and context the context today is different than it was before so let's do something different not worry too much about anyway these are these these these thoughts that float around in your head and and i think i've always taken comfort in the fact that i don't really know what i'm doing but i i plan on figuring it out that's just how i like i'll figure it out is how i've always thought about things i don't have a lot of confidence going into something other than knowing that the confidence is i will figure it out and if i don't again i'm not putting myself at risk so it's okay and so it's a couple of those things together that gives me the confidence to try something new well either way i'm curious to wherever that takes you because it'll either confirm like nope the original philosophy and religion was really solid even though we tried to break it ourselves or hey you know what sometimes it works like this and sometimes it works like some some other way and everybody find your own way yes which which is something i really appreciate i think in the interview you deal with carlos he was talking about how i think he thinks like advice is bull or something like that this idea that like everyone's situation is so different timing context other situational variables um luck so like giving advice is i mean i i give it but but i what i really am trying to say like this is what's worked for me i don't know what's going to work for you i don't know what's going to work for the future version of us even i don't know um but you know you got to pick a pick a direction and go with it and see what happens but yeah i think i think that's uh that's a good observation i'd like to make a hard pivot right now and talk a little bit about how you wrote the blueprint for 2020 in 2013 in the book re remote it's really interesting because i did not read it in 2013 but we've been living some of those philosophies and when i read it kind of like oh my god this is the way and we've seen what's happened to to businesses all over the world because of of covet and you you wrote this idea that there's a bunch of things in the book but about um decentralizing your office your operation to to prevent it from catastrophic failure if one system goes down and you're making the case for distributing the workload across people and allowing people to work remotely and and i'm just curious about your thoughts having written that in 2013 and seeing the just the economic devastation not even to talk about the the health uh uh impact that covetous made but i'm just curious like seven years prior to this happening you already kind of wrote about it what are your thoughts on that yeah obviously we never could have predicted this terrible couple years um but but remote working ultimately is about building resilience in an organization the ability to work from anywhere anytime and hiring people from all over the place and remote working is not just working locally far away or far apart it's actually a fundamentally different approach to work it's a it's a it's a more trustworthy way of working it's more about asynchronous communication than real time especially as you go across time zones you can't have real-time conversations with people who are seven times i mean you can but people end up it's much harder to synchronize schedules that way and people end up working longer and later because you're pulling people into conversations when it's night time for them and it's a very unhealthy approach so i think there's a lot of good fundamental ideas behind remote work even if you're working locally to work asynchronously and to trust people more um but but it is about resiliency and i think that what ended up happening here with covid is that a lot of companies found that they weren't that resilient and that if their office you know went away they would be scrambling and they wouldn't know how to work if they only relied on in-person meetings and they thought there was no other way to work than that and they couldn't have them all the sudden they were they were caught flat-footed and didn't know what to do and so remote working just gives you another option that's at the fundamental level but the other thing that's great about remote working is you get to hire people all over the world and you're not limiting yourself to hiring people just you know within 30 miles of your zip code or your your home office or your your office or whatever you can hire incredibly great people all over the place and they are everywhere there's a tendency in the tech industry to fight all over the same people um that there's this talent war for whatever for the best 50 year whatever i don't know i i don't buy it i mean of course there's incredible people and there's there's a top 100 people whatever there's another 10 000 they're exceptionally good there's another million that are exceptionally good in other places go out and find them and um and that's what we've we've always done we've never tried to fight the talent war we just find wonderful people all over the place and the only way you can do that is if you have a remote working culture where you're not afraid to hire someone who lives 4 000 miles away or seven time zones away um so yeah we didn't we weren't pressing here we didn't see the um the coming you know terrible coveted pandemic situation but um we we'd always worked this way and we thought it was a valuable way to work you know just another skill to have and i think it makes companies more resilient because look let's say let's say you've worked remotely now for two years and you decide your company decides let's we actually prefer working together we all have to get back together okay fine so you pull everyone back into the office and then and then maybe maybe the building is sold and and your lease is canceled and you don't have a new office space to work for work out of for a year now you're going to feel like well we can get by we're going to be okay because we've learned how to work remotely like we have resiliency here it's not just about pandemics it can be all sorts of other reasons why you can't get together and i think that's just a good skill for a company to have well i i think in 2013 it felt like it was a radical philosophy a way of thinking that would never work for most companies like you guys are very unique in that you're a software company you can do things remotely and you have enough profit margin relative to overhead that you can do whatever you want and and we saw the resistance at the beginning and then and then acceptance and adaptation afterwards where gigantic corporations were saying uh moving forward we're no longer requiring you to show up to work anymore and we're and they found what you wrote about the kind of hypothesis that once people get over it they're actually more productive and more effective and you can trust people to do work at home you need to support them you have to have systems in place but it's fascinating to me that it all kind of really played out the way that it was written well the other thing is that to me it's just it's more respectful at a human level if you're forced to live near where you work you have to close a lot of options off maybe your partner has to move because they have a job in another city maybe they're like i have some friends who who are teachers and and they're very specific teachers university teachers in a very specific topic or subject area and there's only like three of those departments like across the country and if a job pops up somewhere in connecticut they got to go there to get that job but their partner you know they lived in i don't know let's say san diego and now like someone has to leave their job someone has to lose their job because they can't live near where their other job was so their partner can it's like there's so many fundamental life decisions that come with where you work when you're when you're locked into a place and what's nice about remote working is that you can choose to to live your life and live wherever you want within reason you need to have a certain overlap with your team and everything but you can actually life becomes less or work becomes less influential on your life even though in some ways it's a you feel like it has more influence because now you're free to do other things but that's actually because work has less influence on your life and i think that's a really healthy thing um now granted not everybody can do this there's many many jobs you work in the restaurant industry you work in a factory you work with manual labor you assemble things like you can't you have to be there at the job site to do the thing obviously but if you're an information worker or creative or many many many many industries now um you know you can choose to live where you want um if you want to choose to live in a new place you don't lose your job and the company doesn't lose you um it's just it's there's so much good that comes from that and i think people's lives open up and i think it's nice to have employees who don't feel locked down into a certain thing to a certain place anymore um they they feel more more open to to living the life they want to live i think that's that's good to have employees like that and it's good to as a company to to to support that um since you can work wherever you want or live wherever you want where do you choose to live and this is a question my wife and i ask ourselves all the time we could be anywhere doing what we do today no one would be the wiser so i'm curious i'm seeing you in a space i assume it's your home but i don't know where you are where are you yeah so um well i'll tell you where i'm at in a second but i lived in chicago my whole life basically um and i went to school in tucson arizona so i can get out of chicago for a while and i went back to chicago afterwards and then a couple years ago actually during during the the pandemic um my wife and i and we have two young kids seven and three now they're seven and three they weren't of course back then they were two years younger we decided to come out to southern california um and primarily because the the pandemic we felt like schools were going to be shut down in chicago or we'd be locked in the basement you know in in the winter and and you know we didn't know what's going to happen and so we felt like well at least in a warm climate we could and there's many other warm climates but we california was something that was appealing to us we could be outside our kids could maybe school could happen outside schools were starting to happen outside we could spend more time outside and not feel like we were cooped up inside which is what happens in a cold weather city in the winter you feel cooped up basically especially with young kids so um we came out here we were staying out here for now i don't know how long we'll be here we might be here forever i'm not sure but um it was driven by a life decision and then um you know our work obviously allowed us to do that which was which was great and it wasn't just that because i owned the place i could do it any employee could do it you know that's the other thing like you can't have these things that this person can do this person can't that's that just doesn't really pan out you've gotta allow that ex flexibility to everybody i know there's been some companies that have allowed like executives to be a remote but not someone else it's like that that just doesn't work it's either it's all or nothing unless of course again like you might have a company that has a has retail locations and people in retail have to be there but people in corporate don't because they're not customer facing that's a different story perhaps i have a question for you because the i i just noticed this about myself i was mostly working from home but the there was this option to go into the office and see the team and and people can come and go as they need as long as they figure out what they're doing we don't really care we have very few manager types and then the pandemic happened and then now i'm in this weird routine where i'm just at home most of the time and it's starting to take a toll on me i do go out for walks i do exercise but i think you have probably a head start on all of this because you've been thinking this way and working this way how do you kind of keep fatigue of like just doing the same thing and not being social with people at bay yeah well first off the last two years have not been remote work they've been pandemic work which is a different kind of thing because typically with remote work you could go to a coffee shop and hang out or you can go to a library or a co-working space you could see your co-workers if they live in similar cities you know over the last two years i mean now it's loosening up but you really couldn't do any of that so it was it was hard yeah it was extra hard you know a lot of isolation um very difficult socially really especially you know especially for people who are single who don't have someone else they're close with or able to be close with it's really really hard so hopefully that's gonna loosen up here soon and people are going to be in certain parts of the world that already has certain states it has people are going to find out that remote working's actually probably better than they than it's been over the past couple years um for me i i would do i take a lot of walks i i have actually to be honest i wish someone to start a podcast called walking and the conversations would all be required you'd be required to walk um so i i don't like sitting down and thinking i don't like sitting down and talking i have a hard time with it actually i prefer to move so i like to move around a lot i like to think a lot when i'm moving that kind of thing so i'll do that having two young kids you know just keeps me very occupied so i don't actually have a lot of time to see a lot of other people at the moment anyway but and i'm i'm pretty introverted to begin with so i don't need a lot of social interaction but i i do feel when i don't see other people i feel cooped up and i think if i was in a cold weather city would feel especially hard something we we don't do it right we're not doing it right now at the company but we used to do these things where um we would every once a month um pick five random people at the company and send them a basically a zoom link like an hour ahead of time and we would just have five people just randomly chat across the company about stuff any anything that's not related to work and that was a nice way to at least run into other co-workers that you might not normally work with because you're not working with them on a project but you have some of that social interaction but of course not in person it was all remote so it wasn't didn't quite satisfy the the personal thing um but i i did i have found that simply even going for a walk and not interacting with people but just seeing other people around really helps my mood just knowing there's other people out there is is helpful but i know if you're really extroverted and you need to be with people it's been especially hard i would say over the past couple years okay so i have a serious question and a not so serious question for you just be mindful of time here so the serious question is this it seems like the things that you write about and from what i can gather by watching uh your videos or listening to you is that you place an importance on just uninterrupted time to think to work to do whatever you need to do i think peter drucker in his book the effective executive said it's a priority for an executive to consolidate the largest amount of discretionary time okay so if that's your your your way of your philosophy your ethos what do you do with your time like assuming that you know what there's no meetings nobody's bothering me i noticed no one's messaging you right now so there's a lot of this discretionary time what do you do with your time during work during the work day basically yeah yeah so um this is a fundamental tenant at base camp which is i feel like my job is to help people protect their time and attention because it's the thing everyone else wants from each other um and the quality of an hour is incredibly important to me so there's a bunch of different ways to slice 60 minutes but the best slice for me is 60 minutes it's not 4 15 minute blocks it's not two 30 minute blocks it's 60 minutes straight uninterrupted stretches of time what do i do i i think i draw i sketch um i i work on new ideas for the products that we're working on i reconsider how we're doing certain things i write a lot and those are the kinds of things that i can't do in fragments although i will also do them in fragments like i'll just an idea will pop into my head at nine o'clock at night when i'm you know just put the kids to bed and like you know my wife and i are having a chat and then i have some private time or whatever like something will pop in my head so things do just come in fragments of course but i feel like i can't work through those things unless i have long stretches of an uninterrupted time and this is not again just a privilege for me because i own the place this is something we're very careful about with everybody which is why at base camp we rarely have any meetings um we we advocate for um we don't have what we call presence so um our products don't have a little red or green or yellow dot next to your face showing you if you're available or busy like the assumption is is that everyone's busy working on their own thing and you need to respect people's time and attention so don't reach out and try to grab someone if you have a question write it up in long form and post it to base camp and let people get back to you when they have a chance versus when you need the answer immediately unless of course it's truly urgent so downplaying this idea of urgency this is a cultural thing though it's it's it's you know everyone has to sort of believe that urgency is overrated asap is poison unless it's absolutely truly necessary and then you do you do grab someone so when you when you when you go to more towards asynchronous communication when there's no expectation of immediate response people end up having the ability to even have two or three hours to themselves uninterrupted maybe then something comes up and you deal with it but ideally i want everyone at base camp to have an eight-hour day to themselves and they can decide how they want to spend that with their team and whatnot but it's not like well my first half of my day is just absorbed by meetings and then i've got an hour and then i got another thing and i've got an hour i got another thing so i have no time really to really work through things and so now i'm going to work late at night or on the morning or in the mornings or on the weekends because i don't have any time to do things at work anymore that's an unhealthy place to be so we try to push all that all those distractions to the side and give everybody long stretches of time and when you have that you can actually achieve a lot in a little so we work about 40 hours a week per person at base camp we're not pulling all-nighters there's no 70 80 hour weeks there's no work weekend work unless you're on a weekend shift for customer support something like that 40 hours a week is plenty of time if you have about eight hours a day to yourself if you have two hours a day or an hour it's tough because you had things to do and you can't get them done in that short period of time when your day is sliced into a billion pieces it's really hard so that's a fundamental thing that we're able to get a lot done in a short period of time in a reasonable amount of time because the quality of our hours are high and the more of those hours you can stack back to back like it's kind of a superpower to have three hours to yourself straight through that's just something most people don't have i remember i spoke at a conference a number of years ago everything was now a number of years ago um conferences and i just asked people like you know there's like 600 people in the audience like you know put your hand up if you've had four hours to yourself at work in the past month or something and like you know relatively no hand maybe five percent of the hands you know that's sad to me it's sad that people don't have four hours to themselves at work and we're trying to make sure that that's like every day's every day at base camp is sort of the aim of course yeah different jobs are like if you're in customer service you're answering tickets that's a different story but at least you're not being pulled off in meetings and then also having to answer tickets you know so we just want to make sure that the thing that you're doing is pretty much your only focus for the day that's the aim you know i i one of the things i recognized early in the pandemic was i was exhausted at the end of each day in ways that i wasn't exhausted before and then it dawned on me like a month and a half into it like why am i so tired what is going on because i was working uninterrupted for eight to ten hours a day which i've never had since starting my company so you you talk about the quality of the hour i mean i would i would challenge those five percent who raised their hands who said i had four hours of uninterrupted quality work time because man you could do a lot if you had that kind of time so even the idea of 40 hours of you know do what you need to do no one's going to interrupt you that is crazy your your effectiveness must be through the roof at that point yeah you actually eight hour you should be tired at the end of eight hours because you you you actually worked and by the way no one's literally working for eight hours like yeah you're lucky if you get like let's be honest like a good four-hour day really like but if you get four uninterrupted hours that's equivalent to like someone else working 10 hours and spreading their day across a bunch of different things i mean like four hours is awesome and for those who don't think eight hours is enough just jump on a plane in chicago and fly to london that's eight hours and just sit there and you're gonna see how long eight hours is it's a lot of time it's an extraordinary amount of time and again if you can get half of that uninterrupted and contiguous you're going to see just how much time that is and how much you can actually literally get done so the people who work 10 or 12 hour days or 14 hour days the reason they're doing that is not because there's 14 hours of work to do in a day it's because their time is spread across so many different things and it's so fragmented that they can't really get into anything and then the things they have to do do require that kind of time and they don't have the moments to do it so they're just spread but if you don't have to be spread and you can be you know uh condensed you can get a whole lot of stuff done in a short period of time yeah i just remember after reading your book i had this thought people are coming to my office asking me just the dumbest questions like what do you want to do about this and it was just like a building maintenance thing like you decide you decide so i had to send an email out to everybody and said i'd like to try something new if someone else can answer it please ask them and if you feel like you can answer it you should just do it and don't worry if it doesn't work out okay we can fix it if it if it if it doesn't turn out the way you think and that made people much more accountable and gave them it empowered them to make decisions on your behalf and things were bumpy at the beginning but things worked out much better and so i can just tell you like i was starting to uh i was able to recapture some of my time because that's where i can actually contribute real value to the company versus and it felt like this and it probably was even worse every 15 minutes something was popping up so i i couldn't get any work done until like 8 p.m and i know you write about that yeah and you know part of this too is is and i've suffered from this too which is just like this ego this sense that like only i can answer that question and so i need to be involved in all these answers and i've i've consciously tried to step back over the past couple years and just you know let other people solve these problems and they they always do and oftentimes they're solved better than i can could have and even if they're equivalent whatever it doesn't even matter just like i don't need to be involved in all these decisions it's not good for the company it's not good for me it's not good for others you let people let people use their own mind let people use their own brain solve their own problems of course i'm here to help if necessary and others are here to help too but really trying to step off that i think business owners sometimes have a really hard time letting go of feeling important because sometimes there's not a lot for you to do during the day uh if everyone else is solving problems on their own and so you feel like you need to get involved so you're still relevant or important but really what you're important because you're not involved you've you've created a place where people can solve their own problems that's a really valuable way to build a business it shouldn't just depend on you and i think it's hard sometimes for for people to realize that the business may not depend on them anymore and that's actually i think the enlightened state the place you want to get to is when you could potentially walk away and everything would be okay that's where you want to get even though it might feel scary to get there you had mentioned that you had these things where you do like a random thing where you pair five people up to talk aside from that what do you do to still feel connected to your team because i i i'll admit this right now during the last two years there's some people where i didn't even have a synchronous conversation with and i haven't had one for with them for like six months at a time yeah well so you know um it's hard so we used to even when we work remotely because we've always pretty much worked remotely we would always see each other at least twice a year so we'd fly everybody into chicago when we actually had an office in chicago from all over the world and spend two weeks a year together and that felt like we did one in the spring usually one in the fall and that felt like enough face time even though it's only two weeks but it was enough high intensity social face time to see everyone to hang out with everyone to share a meal to share a smile to goof around that kind of stuff like that was good and we haven't been able to do that for a couple years we're actually doing our first one in miami next month we're doing in miami because it's a good place for people from europe to get to and a good place for people in the u.s to get to so it's kind of a nice central location around the world of course we have people in hong kong and australia as well so it's that's always going to be far right um but we're doing it so we're very much looking forward to that it's been a long time since we've seen each other i mean i'm i'm very intimately involved with building the products that we build so i work with a lot of people on a daily basis but i don't work with everybody and and um as and as we begin to layer in a little bit more leadership i'm working with fewer people actually because other people are now running groups for example like customer service used to report to me and now they report to our ceo elaine who just started so they're reporting to her not to me anymore so i don't talk to chase who runs customer service as often you know and that's kind of weird because i'm pulling back from some of those interactions so i need to make a conscious effort to reach out to people and just say hey i'd love to catch up and just chat or something like that so that's something i think is on you is on me to do um to to reach out and to be available and to be present um and to and just to catch up with people so there's that there's also we've also instituted some some even though we don't have a lot of meetings in the company we do have a couple team calls a week so we have a design team call tuesday mornings and a product team call on thursday mornings there's one hour and the whole team gets together and there's no real agenda we just kind of shoot the talk maybe something comes up that we're working on maybe not and that's been really helpful that again doesn't cover the whole company but it you know covers more of the company than just the people i work directly with so i'm involved in some of those and but yeah i think ultimately if you want to interact with people across the company you just you have to get out there and do it it's unlikely that people will come to you just because of the inherent power dynamics of an organization it's just awkward sometimes for someone to go to the owner of the business and say hey can we just chat you know so you have to do that you as the owner or as the ceo or president or vp or whatever you have to make that happen so i think that's it's on you to do that well jason um i know that time is very precious for you and you've given me more than one hour chunk of your time and i'm just honored and thrilled to have this conversation i can't wait to share this with our audience well thank you me too and this it's hard to imagine a better way to spend an hour and 15 minutes and then to chat with you about these these topics and i hope this is uh this is useful for your audience and as i've mentioned i really really love what you're doing and it's been great to finally meet you and chat so thanks for uh having me on thank you so much if people want to find out more about you where do they go well um it's funny i i would say twitter normally but i'm not really there's my anti-twitter but if you go to if you go to um world dot hey h e y dot com okay slash jason so world dot hey dot com slash jason j a s o n that's where i'm doing a lot of my publishing these days um and you could sign up for my newsletter there and i write something once a week maybe you know so it's you won't get slammed so there's there linkedin i'm doing a little bit more writing too linkedin feels like a little bit more of a positive place these days um it's actually interesting linkedin feels like it's having a bit of a resurgence i think because so much of social media is quite negative linkedin doesn't have that it doesn't seem to have that it seems to be a pretty positive place so i'm enjoying there so you can find me on linkedin um and then um you know check us out basecamp.com hey.com um and i will tell you this um keep an eye on 37signals.com as well something coming back let's just say maybe um yeah yeah we'll we'll talk about that again another time i say but but yeah so 37signals.com is is something to keep an eye on you know you'll be watching it for a while nothing will be happening but at some point something's going to happen there i like that we'll end with the tease and to be continued it's a cliffhanger yes perfect episode jason thank you so much thanks chris hi my name is greg gunn and i'm the producer of the future podcast and yes we do have a podcast in fact we've been having one for years and that's exactly why i'm here talking with you you see it's really good and i think you should listen to it if you like what we do here on youtube then you're gonna love what we do on the podcast you'll get to hear intimate conversations and personal stories from some familiar faces and others you might not know about yet plus you can listen to it while doing something else and you won't miss a thing so if any of that sounds interesting to you go visit thefuture.com podcast or find it on your favorite podcast listening app i hope to see you there [Music]