Startup Grind in Redwood City today, and I got to meet Jason Fried in person.
He is one of my favorite people in this community, and has been for a long time. Not because of the contrarian takes he is known for, though those are fun, but because Basecamp is the rare company whose strategy you can actually read off its behavior. Nothing about it is accidental.
That is the part that never stops interesting me. Most companies scale by adding: more people, more features, more funding, more surface area. Basecamp has spent decades doing close to the opposite and still reaching an enormous number of people. Deciding what not to build, staying small on purpose, and being profitable instead of being big are all choices, and they are choices most companies never seriously consider because the default is so loud.
You can agree or disagree with any specific call they have made. What I find worth studying is that they made the call deliberately, wrote down why, and then lived with the consequences in public.
Meeting someone whose thinking has shaped how you work is a strange, good feeling. Mostly it left me wanting to dig further into how those decisions actually get made day to day, not just how they read in a book afterward.
More of this. Fewer conference talks I forget by the next morning.
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