Episode 18: Jason Fried on Treating Workers Like Adults

Howdy, howdy, and welcome to The Distributed Podcast. I am your host, Matt Mullenweg, and I'm here with our first episode of 2020. Today's guest is Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, a semi-distributed company that's been making project management tools for about 20 years now. Back in 2013, Jason wrote a book called Remote, which was an early manifesto for remote and distributed work models. I'm excited to catch up with him to hear about what he's learned in the 6 years since that book came out and how Basecamp operates today. Alrighty, let's get started.

Jason, I am so glad to connect today.

Likewise.

Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, has been in so many ways an inspiration for Automattic over the years, and I'm sure countless other distributed companies.

So thank you for that, first and foremost.

Of course. And I would say likewise. I mean, you guys are even more distributed than us, so I feel like we're— you're the ideal situation. We're getting there because we still have about 15 people in Chicago, and we have an office that we're maybe getting rid of. So we're going to be following in your footsteps.

Ah, so we, we had zero office, but then with the acquisition of Tumblr, we've now got a space in New York again. So we've gone the opposite direction. Ah, right.

That's funny how we keep trading. Yeah, we're not sure what we're gonna do, but our lease ends in August, so we're thinking about moving on, uh, as, as in moving on to nothing and then trying to do that for a while and see what happens. And if that works out, we'll do that. If not, we'll, uh, we can always go back to getting an office again, but we'll see.

Just for our listeners who might not be as familiar with Basecamp, what do you kind of publicly share about the scale of the company, customers, number of employees, that sort of thing?

Well, we have about 56 people who work at Basecamp, and we have close to 100,000 paying customers all in across all of our different products. Although Basecamp is the primary product, but we have Basecamp, we have Highrise, we have a few others, but basically it's Basecamp in all 3 generations. So we have Classic, Basecamp 2, and Basecamp 3. This is as specific as we'll be, but we, we generate tens of millions in annual revenues and annual profits. And we've been around for 20 years. This is our 20th year in business, and we've been profitable since the start. That's kind of a big—

wow—

thing for us is to always be profitable. So that's, that's kind of the only KPI. We don't really use those terms, but that's the only one we have, which is let's make sure we make more money than we spend every year. And other than that, whatever happens, happens.

How do you think about investing more or not?

It's like we don't have an investment shortfall kind of thing. It's not like if we only had an extra— I'm just making up rough numbers here— an extra million bucks, we would do X or Y. Like, we have everything that we need to do, and we don't want more people because we want to keep the company as small as we possibly can. So we have a bit of a— it's not a dilemma really, but it kind of is in a sense, because I feel like we're doing everything we could do and having more wouldn't help us. Um, in fact, I think in some ways it would probably hurt us. We'd be a little bit slower. We'd be probably doing too much work at the same time, which I think can often dilute what you're really trying to do. We might take on more stuff than we really want to. We might just find work, invent work to keep people busy. There's always, of course, more work to do, but we kind of believe in doing it at a certain pace. And I think having more people or fewer people would at this point would kind of mess up that pace.

When you say as small as possible, do you mean by customers or by colleagues and employees?

I mean employees. I mean the number of people who work here. We've always wanted to stay at 50 or less, but we're about 56 right now, and that feels like a really good place to be. So we're very comfortable with that. The thing is, is that we could have considerably more people, but again, we're just not really Maybe we're just not good at it. I mean, I'll just take the blame for that. Like, I'm not probably good at running a much larger company than this, and I don't think David is either. I don't think we want to. I think it also keeps you a bit more honest in terms of the experiments you're willing to do, which I know in some places more and more and more experiments is a good thing. I think a few are a good thing, but I think too many people can get stuck doing things that never ship over and over and over and over and over. And I think that can be a bit demoralizing. So we think we've got kind of a good enough feeling here right now, at least. But then again, we're the largest we've ever been. And I'm sure when we were 30 people, we said, you know, 30 is enough. So, you know, we're here at 56. It feels like enough right now. We'll see how it all shakes out. A lot of it probably has to do with, with the success of this other product we're going to launch next year, because the one part of our company that does have to continue to grow is customer service. So product development doesn't have to grow. We have enough people there. But as we have more and more and more customers, of course, like we have to make sure we support them at the highest level. So that's that's one place where growth does continue to happen, even if we don't want it to.

Yeah, for Automattic, that's been pretty large. It's been at points that half of our company was customer service, just because we wanted to maintain a certain level there. And as the customers went up, it kind of goes linearly. It's one of those things that, of course, you want to invest in making the product easier and documentation, self-help and everything like that. But at some level, if you want a person talking to a person, you need some more of them.

Yeah, you want to do documentation to make things easier and everything, but I've also— I've come to sort of change my mind a little bit on it. I think earlier on when we just had fewer people, we were really focused on the self-help side of things and making sure our documentation was really good and answers were great online and people could find their own answers. And we want to make sure that that's true too. But I actually see customer service interactions as a competitive advantage. Most companies are pretty terrible at it.. And the larger the company is, it seems like the worse they get. Try to email, you know, Google and get help. It's like, forget it. Or Amazon sometimes, but not always that great, although quite good sometimes also. It's one of these things where the larger you get, the more customers you have, like just the harder it is to maintain that level of standard.

Have you tried a live chat for customer support yet?

Yeah, we, we do that sometimes and it sort of depends on availability. And then we also use Twitter as well for that. Those things all work out really well as well. It just kind of depends. We want to meet people essentially where they are, with the exception of we don't have a published phone number, but if you want us to call you, we will.

Yeah, live chat was a big step function for us, just both in terms of agent and customer happiness, because you can kind of resolve things on the spot. Actually, you know, we do a support rotation where everyone at the company goes and does customer service for at least one week a year. Mine's actually coming up in, I think, a couple of weeks.

Your turn, you mean?

Yeah. So if you contact us in, I think it's the third week of December, you might get me.

We do the same thing. We call everyone on support one day every roughly 6 weeks or 8 weeks or however the number of people are as we rotate through. So we'll each do support for a few days a year throughout the year. It's great. I'm glad you guys do that too. I think it's one of the most valuable things you can do. For a variety of reasons. Camaraderie, hearing from customers and understanding the language they're using, sensing their frustrations or their happiness or their, you know, whatever it might be. And then also just having a lot of respect for customer service as a job and as a career. In a lot of places, customer service is sort of treated as almost a part-time job, as a stepping stone somewhere else. But I think it can be a wonderful career. And it's just really nice to see the people who've dedicated their time here. And this is my only experience, of course, to working in customer service for 5, 6, 7, 8, plus years and really see the work that they do and see how important it is. And it's our front door, it's our front line. It's really important to experience that.

What is your company breakdown right now in terms of roles in the 50-ish?

I'll give you some rough numbers because some people are sort of multiple things, so you can't really—

Sure.

Like, if I give you the counts, this might not add up to 56. So we have about currently, I believe, 16 people on customer support. And that also includes, I believe, this might make it 17 or still 16, the team lead. So all of our managers or team leads are working managers and that they do the work too. So 16-ish on customer service. We have 7-ish on technical operations, all the server work, that kind of stuff, all the low-level infrastructure work. Then we have 4 people on what we call the SIP team, which is security, infrastructure, and performance. We have about 7 full-time designers. We have around 15 developers. Actually, a few fewer than that because some of them are now on SIP, on the SIP team, but around that number. We have 2 people who do our podcast work. We have 1 data analyst. We have an office manager/bookkeeper. We have a head of people ops. Then we have David, who's CTO, and me, I'm CEO. We have a head of strategy and a head of marketing.

And did I hear it right that you seems to have like a 2-to-1 or a 3-to-1 developer-to-designer ratio?

Yeah, close. Depending on, you know, again, if some— in some companies you'd consider ops programmers, just kind of depends how you all add it up. But yeah, we have a probably a 2-to-1 programmer-to-designer ratio, or I should say like product development programmers, because we have programmers who do other things. But on the product side of things, basically 2-to-1. The way a typical team is structured here at Basecamp is there's 3 people working on something, 3 or 2, never more than 3. At a time. And when there's 3, it's usually 2 programmers and 1 designer. When it's 2, it's 1 programmer, 1 designer. And then of course sometimes there's some things that a designer can do on their own, and sometimes there's some stuff that a programmer is going to do on their own.

I'm going to toot your horn a little bit in that in your latest book, Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, there's an excellent chapter on the 3-person teams.

Oh yeah.

I do think something that's interesting, you know, a lot of the listeners here get kind of obsessed about like the 1,000+ person distributed companies, and people sleep on Basecamp a little bit. But I think that would be incorrect because Y'all are an amazing example because of your culture, your retention, everything, where you move really fast and do quite a bit for your size. And that's where I think there's a lot of learnings for companies of all sizes.

Well, thanks. We try. I think one of the reasons we're maybe able to do that is because we don't do a lot of other things that most companies do. We don't have a lot of meetings. We don't share calendars. It seems like a simple thing, but it has such a huge influence when nobody can take anyone else's time. Through a system, people end up with more time to themselves. When you have more time to yourself, you end up doing better work and more work. You can get a lot more stuff done in a given day than maybe you could another organization that has 6 times as many people, but, uh, you know, 20 times as many meetings, 30 times less time during the day to yourself, that sort of thing. So we try to avoid anything that breaks days into smaller and smaller chunks. So we're pretty anti-chat for work. We use chat internally in Basecamp for mostly social stuff, but anytime there's anything really going on at work, we write it up in long form and we post comments and let people discuss it over a matter of days on dedicated pages inside Basecamp. So that's the kind of stuff that we're able to do, and it gives people a lot of their time back.

What are your favorite meetings? Like, what do you look forward to? What's a meeting you love?

2 or 3 people might get together in a room. Typically it's 2. Or on a Zoom call or something like that to work something out, hash something out like that. I enjoy that. I enjoy really working on a problem, like a design challenge, or, or, God, how are we going to figure this out? Or this, this just seems complicated, like, how can we simplify this? Or, you know, what's the best way to write this sentence? Or this headline just isn't quite there. What do— like that, those productive moments when we're actually making something versus talking about making something. I don't like talking about making things. I like the making of things. And so whenever I'm together with somebody or working on something real, love those all the time. And I'll do that many times a week. But just to like sit around a table and have people go around a table and talk about stuff that isn't actually the work, I think it's important to have those discussions, but I don't think they need to be happening in person. Or via video. I think most of that stuff is better off written down. It allows people to really present themselves, a full idea. We call it forcing the floor. The idea being that if you're standing up or sitting down or whatever in front of a bunch of people and you're talking for a while, there's a good chance someone's going to interrupt you and ask you a question or whatever. And there's nothing wrong with questions. And this is especially bad in chat rooms. Like, you can't possibly own a chat room for a while while you make a case. Like, you just simply can't. People will chime in, and that's kind of a problem. Now, I'm not a big fan of chat, but there should be a pause button when you chat. You should be able to hit pause, which would prevent anyone else from saying anything while you're talking.

Hi.

The reason that should exist is because you need to have the floor. You need to make your point. That allows you to work your thoughts out yourself, get your thoughts together, and put them out there in the world as a single unit. And then allows other people to read that single unit uninterrupted and take their time to respond back to you. If you've taken 3 days to think about something and you say it in a meeting and people start just throwing stuff right back at you, in some ways you're asking them to because like you're sitting at a table, what else are they gonna do? But it seems unfair to them, in fact, for them to have to react to this thing that you've thought about for 3 days or 3 weeks or 3 months. For them to have 30 seconds to say something back seems unfair. By writing things down in long form and publishing them and giving people a chance to get back to you on their own schedule, I think you end up with much deeper and fairer discussions and better discussions. So that's why, like, we do have, quote, meetings in a sense, but they're not meetings in time, like around a room physically or even on video. They are written down and people respond over a number of days on their own schedule. And those conversations, I think, are much richer.

But that emphasis on writing and the well-written word. How does that influence your hiring process?

It plays a big role. Aside from somebody being able to do the job, obviously the, the fundamental job, beyond that you've got to be a great writer. If you're not a great writer, you will not get the job. The first thing we look at whenever someone applies for a job is the COVID letter. We don't look at the resume first, we look at the COVID letter first, and the COVID letter is the first filter. Can this person explain themselves well? Are they clear-minded? Are they clear writers? Are they clear thinkers? Do they want this job? Are they just applying for any job? Typically, a resume is going to be sent to every job the same way, for the most part. You'd hope that cover letters are not. You'd hope that cover letters are customized for the job.

You would hope.

You would hope.

I can tell you've done a bunch of hiring yourself.

Yeah.

So most of them are not. And those are immediate no-gos for us. If you want to work here, And if you want to work at any job, I would say you need to write down why you want to work here, not just why you want a job. And from that, you can derive a lot of things. As, like, a hiring manager, someone who's involved in the process, you can really tell where someone's head is. So writing is very important. And then we often give a lot of writing exercises through the job hiring process, depending on what it is, and just continue to double down on that. And every time we've been sort of hesitant about someone who their skills have been great, but they weren't great writers. It turned out that we probably shouldn't have hired them. And the main reason why here is because most of our communication is written. Almost, I'd say, 95% of it's written.

Let's say I was a colleague of yours at Basecamp and you were going to coach me or give me pointers to resources or something to become a better writer. How would you do that?

My favorite book on writing is a book called Revising Prose. And the COVID I think it's in the 5th edition now, the 5th edition cover is horrible. It's like this, it's a CD-ROM. It's like, what? I don't— It's a picture of a CD-ROM. It's the strangest cover of a writing book. But Richard Lanham is the author, Revising Prose, 5th edition. It's outstanding because it's a book about writing sentences. It's not about grammar, really. It's not about, you know, elements of style or rules. It's about how to hone a sentence, how to get a sentence right. How to Make Your Point. Very, very good book. So I'd recommend reading that first off. Then I would write and write and write and write. And I'd like, would work with you to review your writing, your headlines, your sentence, or whatever you're gonna do, and talk about like, we could say it this way, maybe you could say it this way. And if you said it this way, it'd feel like this. And if you said it this way, it'd feel like that. I like to talk about feeling when it comes down to writing. So how does this come across? What does it make the reader feel? What does it elicit in them? You know, that kind of stuff. But it's the process of whittling something down and not losing any detail as you go. Maybe even picking up detail as you go until of course you hit a certain point and then it's more of an academic fun exercise to kind of whittle it down to one sentence and one word.

You know, Basecamp has a pretty unique structure. Do you look to other, any other tech companies or outside of tech or companies in general that has inspired you to the structure of how you do things there?

Yeah, I tend not to look at tech companies, mostly because I think it's healthier to look outside your own industry most of the time. And that's not to say, like, we're inspired by what you guys are doing, Automatic, because you're fully remote and you've done a lot of— you've been around for a long time. I kind of, in broad strokes, I like to look at people who've been around for a long time because I feel like if you've been around for a long time, it's not a fluke.

I know you follow the watch world and I know you like— I think you like Cucinelli, actually. Are there any examples in that? Realm that you like?

Yeah, Brunello Cucinelli. I don't know him, but I admire his, his ethos and how he runs his business. I consider him a mentor because of the way he runs his business and how he's all about integrity and dignity. And there's a lot you can learn from that. You don't need to talk to anybody to learn that from him. So I think that there's a lot of really wonderful examples in the watch world, the mechanical watch world, which I'm a bit too absorbed in these days. There's a lot of old businesses. I mean, some of them are hundreds of years old. Many of them are family owned and have been passed down through generations. I just find it fascinating. It's to see how different generations do different things is fascinating to me. And to see how something can last beyond a generation. Like, I always often think like, well, we've been in business 20 years. I'm 45 now. Like, if we're going to last another 20 years, which I hope we can love to, I'll be 65. I probably shouldn't be running a software company at 65. It's just probably not the right thing to do. So like, what's going to happen? Who's going to take over? How are we going to do that? Like, We haven't really thought about succession planning, but at some point you kind of have to. It'd be sort of a shame for a business to die with its founders just because they didn't think about who else could do the work or anything like that. So it is interesting to think about how something can last beyond you, beyond your own generation. Also how it should change or shouldn't change. Like, for example, you know, in the watch world, the watch world's a very traditional world of with, with with arts and crafts and science passed down from through generations. And a lot of that is very traditional, doesn't change very much. But then you have these upstart independents and they're the ones who actually change things for the most part. And so sometimes it takes someone brand new to change something. Other times you don't want to change things. You kind of, kind of figure out like, can a software company not change? Probably not. Like a restaurant probably could not change.

I get super fascinated with companies or businesses that are able to do that multigenerationally. So where there's like different leaders over time, because that, that gets even harder, right? Like it's one thing to have this passion yourself, but to be able to pass that on and have it maintained or hopefully improved is really, really hard. All great companies, I think, are fractal. So how do I make, you know, a division within Automattic have what was great about Automattic when we were 30 or 40 people? And that division can operate just like we were at that point.

So.

That's one way I think about scaling as well, is like, it doesn't all— it doesn't have— the whole thing doesn't have to be big because most people don't have to keep the whole thing in their head. They just really work with their team or division or area.

Yeah, it's so true. And the other thing that's great about the fractal viewpoint is that you don't have to change your entire organization to have an effect on it. You can change a corner of it, an edge of it, a branch of it, and then those other branches and those other corners and those other edges can look back at that change and go, ooh, I want some of that too.. And that can carry through. It can sort of bleed into the rest of the business, which is great.

There was a point when we started to scale a little bit in terms of number of people and also breadth and depth of what we were covering. That's when I started to think about it a lot because, well, one thing, it's amazing how many companies will experiment and do a ton of A/B tests with their product or their customers, but never really test internally how they work.

Yeah.

You know, have two teams have the autonomy to work completely differently and then just judge it by the results. We even had a division which tried holacracy once. Oh yeah. Which was kind of the rage at the time. And I'd read about it. I'm like, I don't know if I buy all this, but I don't know, maybe. Yeah, let's try it. And so they had to maintain their interface to the rest of the company, which is fine because they were relatively self-contained. But internally they did a pretty substantial, maybe 6 or 9 month experiment with holacracy. And it was actually really cool because coming out of it, they decided not to continue it, but they said, but this really worked well. And this is what we're actually gonna bring back, kind of cherry picking what they found to be the most effective part of it.

What was that part?

Part of it that we've adopted pretty much throughout the organization is this idea of like a DRI or directly responsible individual. So like someone owns everything where people wear different hats, but those hats are clear. I think it can be tough when those hats are not clear or when someone has too much. If they're not explicit about what they're doing, they take on too much and then become a bottleneck. So when you can just be more explicit and transparent about those things, you can generally avoid those problems. Not always, but at least it's apparent where it is.

We've even struggled with that for a long time. We didn't have titles here, you know. We thought titles were what you do at big companies. You had titles. And then for a while, we allowed everyone to make their own title, which was stupid, but we thought it was cool, you know.

And then eventually we said Do the own title thing.

Okay, well, stupid maybe is, is unfair, but, but let me say the reason we discovered the titles matter is actually people have careers after Basecamp, and it's tough when you don't have a title that matches up with the rest of the world, in a sense, when, you know, someone else can look at your title and go, I know where they are and what they've done and what position they're in and where they've come from and the whole thing. So we decided to get extremely boring with titles. It's like junior programmer, programmer, lead programmer, senior programmer, like boring titles. And we also made sure everyone has one or had one for a while. People are like, I'm just, I'm just a designer. Well, no, you're actually not. You're senior or principal designer. Like other people should know where you are in the organization as well.

Well, it sounds like you combined leveling with titles as well.

So we did.

Did the leveling process always line up with where people thought they were?

No. And that was the other thing. Is that when we ended up switching to standardized salaries across levels and across roles, we had to make a lot of things clear for everybody so everyone knew where they stand and what salaries attached to each level in each role. So there's no salary negotiations at Basecamp. If you're a senior programmer, you get paid X. If you're a lead designer, you get paid X. And that way you know that everyone else who's a lead designer who does the exact same work you do same skills, same experience, gets paid the exact same.

And that's regardless of geography.

Regardless of geography. So we pay everybody 90th percentile San Francisco rates, even though we have nobody who lives in San Francisco. We basically want to pay the highest salaries in the industry. I mean, of course, 90% means there's 10% that it might be higher than you, but that's pretty high. So that way, like, you never have to wonder, you know, you never have to hear because things leak in a sense like Why, why, why does Bill get paid $172,000 when I get paid $164,000? I thought we were both senior designers. It's like that stuff happens. People talk and that's where discontent begins to foment. And it's— it gets dangerous because people then don't want to talk about it and they hold resentments. And also the other thing is, is that there's no reason why you have to be a great negotiator to get what you're worth. So it's hard enough to be good at your job and then to also have to be an ace negotiator. Doesn't seem fair. People don't like to negotiate for their, for their cars, for their houses. Like, people—

I mean, some people love it most too, because you know everyone's salary and you do this all the time, where they're going to only do it, you know, once every time they change jobs or once a year or something. Yeah, yeah.

Like managers— think about a manager who manages, you know, has like 12 direct reports. Well, this manager gets to practice a lot of salary negotiations while each individual person barely ever does. Once every couple years, once every— like, whatever it might be. Like, and they're going to be nervous, and, and you're going into someone else's office— to— it's hard. It's— and so we want to eliminate all that. And with all that, so this is kind of a bigger systemic change, which was unified salaries, leveling, and titles were all tied together. Just eliminated a whole bunch of questions and unease and disease, I should say. And some people— a few people didn't like it because a few people thought they were worth more than the role or the level that they were at. And I understand that.

Did some people get adjusted down or—

No. So our policy was nobody got adjusted down. What would happen was if anyone was— salary was above the level that they were placed in, their salary would be higher than everybody else's, but they would never get a raise until everyone else caught up to them, basically. So it's kind of like, here's your number, here's where you're at. Maybe you're $6,000 more than someone— I'm making up numbers here— but $6,000 more than someone else. You're at $156,000. Everyone else is at $150,000. Other people are going to get raises as the industry moves and as standard of living increases. You will not until they catch up to you, and then you'll all move in unison again. If the industry moves down, we will not move anybody down. We've made that promise as well. So you might not get a raise for many years until the industry catches back up again, but that's kind of how we've set that up. So no one ever loses salary.

How do you deal with foreign exchange? Because you must have people outside of USD.

Depends on the role. And I should say the country, not the role, the country. Since exchange rates do fluctuate, basically they submit invoices every few weeks. And some of that's adjusted based on, like, if there's a significant fluctuation. And the other thing that's tricky is benefits, because in some countries, for example, in most countries, pretty much every country, healthcare is included essentially. Here it's not. So, you know, so we pay people's healthcare, or most of it, we pay 75%. So we do basically cash equivalency benefit to people who live in Canada or who live in Spain or something like that. So the numbers can't be exact, but they're really, really, really close. And we do our best to make them as close as is reasonably possible.

As we wrap up, we're coming up on 10 years since Remote was published.

Yeah. Wow. Which is kind of wild.

Now there's a ton of companies doing remote too. So I would say, uh, not mission accomplished, but like you've really, it's really shifted now where there is a lot of companies. And I'm hearing now from my investor friends that it's actually the default now, even in the Bay Area, like new companies are being built this way. What do you feel like's changed the most and what do you really want to see change for companies operating in a remote or distributed fashion?

I'd like to say it's technology and whatnot, but I really actually don't think it is. I think what, what ended up happening is that cost of living got so high in San Francisco and continues to get so high in San Francisco that it just doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people to live there anymore. And so at some point, if you want to find great talent, you're going to look outside the walls of that city or in that region because a lot of people just simply can't afford to live there. And so you begin to realize that, hey, there's great people everywhere, all over the world, amazing, amazing people. And I think it just takes a few companies like Stripe is a good example now, right? They're opening up that— what, the remote HQ or whatever they're calling it, like companies that are widely respected. I mean, of course, like Automattic is widely respected, but you've always been kind of this way. So it's more about the companies that have been all about everyone's got to be together. Those are the ones I think that people are looking to and go, oh, wow, they're even considering going remote. That's interesting. Meanwhile, like, I think what you guys are doing is incredibly interesting, but you've been doing it for so long that things don't become interesting anymore after it's been— this is what we do. But yet to see someone like Stripe and other companies doing that, and I think that gives other companies cover and investors cover to go, you know what, this can— if they can do it, if they think it's okay, if they're going in the opposite direction of what they believed 5, 6 years ago, like, then maybe this is okay. And guess, you know, you know what, like, um, we can find some great people. And guess what, there are great people. And wow, they're finding great people. There's a whole world of great people where there's a lot less competition out there for great people, and you can look at the whole world. And so I think all those things are finally beginning to happen.

I don't—

like, video conferencing has been around forever, text messaging has been around for— like, this isn't really— it's not like some new tech came out. It's really, I think, just an economic reality. And then of course, just people getting more used to things, and it's sort of a new generation coming up that feels very comfortable with it. And some of the people who were very opposed to it are just kind of going away in a sense, and they're realizing like, well, there's other people can do it, and you know, let's, let's give it a shot. So I hope to see it more and more and more. I think it's wonderful for everybody involved. It's, to me, the most respectful way to work. I mean, I've always found it borderline offensive that someone would have to lose their job because their partner that they live with had to go somewhere else to get a job. So you're living with someone and they have to go move to Madison, Wisconsin, because that's where the work is. And you're working for a company in Chicago, but you've got to move because your partner has to move. And all of a sudden you have to lose your job. Like, why? That just seems so horrible for everybody. It's bad for the employer because now they lost someone who was great, and now they have to find someone new and train someone new, and all that institutional knowledge is gone. It's bad for the employee who feels like they have to be chained to a city and/or things far outside of their control can cause them to lose a job that they might absolutely love. They might have spent their whole life trying to find this job, and they got it. Now they have to leave because someone else in their family has to go somewhere else. It feels so unfair. So I think remote is so fair. I think it's important, really important, and I'm glad to see things changing.

Jason, thank you so much.

Thanks so much. Great to hear from you again and catch up in this way, and hope to do it again soon.

That was Basecamp's Jason Fried. You can find him on Twitter @JasonFried. That's Jason F-R-E-D. He's on Instagram at the same, but I believe he's trying to quit both networks. So if you, uh, probably Basecamp's website and their Rework and Remote podcast are the best place to find them. Basecamp has been building productivity tools for 20 years, which makes it pretty advanced for an independent tech company. In a world where many startups race to make it to the next funding round, sale, or IPO, refreshing to see leadership that see themselves as long-term stewards of a company, mission, and most importantly, their users. I'm grateful to learn from folks like Jason who've been at it a lot longer than I have. On the next episode of The Distributed Podcast, I'll be talking to Merit Anderson, an HR veteran who advises companies about distributed work, among other things. She spent over 4 years in HR at GitHub helping to build out their distributed teams and the policies that facilitated the work, and at really interesting hybrid model with a ton of success from both a user point of view and of course an outcome point of view. Thank you for listening and see you next time.