Author
Jason Fried
The Basecamp co-founder who built a calm, profitable software company and argued that most startup advice is wrong.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Jason Fried founded 37signals in Chicago in 1999 as a small web-design firm. In 2004 the firm released Basecamp, a project-management tool built for its own use, and the tool became the business; the company was renamed Basecamp in 2014 and returned to the 37signals name in 2022. He has run it as chief executive since, keeping it small, profitable and independent of venture capital by choice.
With his partner David Heinemeier Hansson he wrote the company's philosophy into a series of books: Getting Real, Rework in 2010, Remote in 2013 on distributed work, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work in 2018 on the calm company. In 2020 the company launched HEY, an email service built on the same convictions.
Fried has been a consistent public critic of the growth-at-all-costs model of technology companies, and Rework is the best-known statement of the alternative he and Heinemeier Hansson propose.
The signature
Fried writes in very short chapters that each make one blunt point: planning is guessing, meetings are toxic, underdo your competition. His signature is subtraction, the insistence that the way to a better product and a better company is to remove things, and the confidence to say it in two paragraphs rather than twenty.