David Heinemeier Hansson

Tesla wins

2023-09-11T16:56:39Z

When we first got our Tesla Model X four years ago, I wasn't the biggest fan. Build quality was spotty, brakes didn't match the performance, and handling was at best so-so. But it could carry seven, including luggage, was electric, and the dual-motor acceleration was a hoot. So it stayed in the garage, pending competition on these criteria. Well, now we got a Mercedes EQS SUV, which also carries seven, is electric, and is fun-fast for its size. But the Tesla still wins!

At least in judgement of the rest of the family. Their verdict was unanimous. The Tesla is "less fuzzy", "more fun", "has games", and even is "more comfortable". Now, personally, I appreciate the German build quality, prefer CarPlay over Tesla's UI, and love the quieter cabin. But I'm clearly in the minority. Even though the Mercedes is considerably more money, and brand new, the rest of the family would rather keep the Tesla.

This is what the legacy car industry is up against. Most of its traditional virtues under attack by a huge portion of the market who just don't give a damn. To whom the fact that, for example, Tesla has a sense of humor trumps the minor niggles it might still have compared to the legacy competition. It's fascinating.

And even for people like yours truly, who absolutely do appreciate those traditional virtues, it's becoming harder and harder to hate on Tesla. I mean look at the performance of the Plaid, with its 1,020 horsepower, and compare the fact that it's now a mere $90,000. For a car that'll beat a Bugatti Chiron, along with virtually every other car on the planet, in the quarter mile. That's just ridiculous.

So the Model X is staying, and I've put down an order for a Model S Plaid. GG, Elon.

Open source hooliganism and the TypeScript meltdown

2023-09-07T19:22:08Z

I've seen a lot of true believers argue for virtues of their favorite paradigms and methods over the decades working in software. And mostly, I look at people with a passionate preference and smile. Isn't it great that people care so much about their craft that they volunteer to extol the benefits of their favorite tools! Yes it is, but there's also a fine line between being a passionate evangelist and becoming a dogmatic crusader. And a sad but critical mass of the TypeScript faithful chose the latter in response to our decision to drop their beloved compiler from our project yesterday. It was at times a full-on meltdown. Yuck.

Now before we go into the particulars of this meltdown, it's worth stating that there were also people with completely legitimate objections to dropping TypeScript from Turbo. Mostly people with standing as active contributors or users of the framework. I'm always happy to have technical discussions in good faith with such individuals, and they're certainly entitled to their opinion on a move like this without getting tarred by association with the hooligans who showed up spoiling for a fight.

But the brunt of the debate was carried by people with absolutely no stake in the particulars of Turbo. People who showed up to crusade for a narrative that tells them only the incompetent or the malevolent would deny the divine glory of their superset. To defend the honor of TypeScript, which they had somehow found besmirched by someone on the internet not being as enthusiastic about the language extensions as they are.

This lead to several ridiculous pull requests for "adding TypeScript back!", complete with the pile-on rush resembling those trashing the streets after their favorite sports team lost a match. The jeering and the emojis and the rockets and the LGTMs!!! There was even a pull request for deleting the Turbo repository altogether. And an issue to have me, personally, removed from the project that 37signals founded, funded, and continues to be the primary maintainer of. Alongside other issues just chanting slogans. Just absolutely unhinged open-source hooliganism.

Now maybe you could have argued some sliver of a justification for this, had it been in opposition to a tirade against the evils of TypeScript, the wholesale denigration of its users, or perhaps a petition for Microsoft just to shut the whole thing down. But this was none of the sort! This was one project, mostly overseen by one company, that removed TypeScript from their own project, and explained why, while allowing amble room and spirit for others to reach different conclusions for their own work.

As I said, dogmatic crusading on behalf of pieces of technology isn't exactly new. And it isn't restricted to programming tools either. I remember some epic flamewars all the way back in the old Newsgroup days on the virtues of owning a Sony PlayStation or a Sega Saturn. Equally conducted by overzealous nerds marshaling The Facts as to why one would be absolutely idiot to pick one instead of the other.

It's also not like I hold myself above the fray in all regards. I certainly used to dance the line between evangelist and crusader, particularly in the early days of Ruby on Rails. But even so, would have found it absolutely inconceivable to show up in someone's open source repository to deface its collaboration organs. This is a new variety of open source advocacy that, as I said, resembles hooliganism more than it does even 1990s newsgroup console superfans and their flamewars. And it's entirely unbecoming for a profession like ours.

I expect that most anyone with a genuine care for TypeScript will in a few days or weeks be able to look back at this meltdown with more than a little ambivalence, if not shame. To have so many key advocates engage or encourage this kind of behavior, this kind of slander, and this kind of hooliganism against those who don't share their team colors is frankly embarrassing.

It's also a weird exhibition of self-loathing in the choice of technology. TypeScript is JavaScript! It's a superset that sprinkles an appearance of type safety on top of a weakly- and dynamically-typed language. To muster such rabid animosity towards anyone celebrating the use of the subset is but an illustration of the ferocity and visciousness of minor differences.

That's the eternal wisdom of bikeshed parable. That when the stakes are low, the debate more easily becomes nasty. Showing up for a fight on something so ultimately unresolvable as whether to use compiler-based type checking or not offers the thrill of hooliganism. An opportunity to let the inhibitions drop and the freak fly, for a moment, for a single match, which will be repeated in season after season until the end of time. It's the exercise of the Id.

Look, I'm happy if you found your true calling in TypeScript. I really am. I'm an unapologetic superfan of Ruby. But please, for the love of open source culture, find another way to express your enthusiasm than by defacing collaboration organs or slandering those who JavaScript differently with accusations of incompetence or malice.

Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript

2023-09-06T14:18:25Z

By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can announce we're dropping TypeScript from the next big release of Turbo 8.

The fact is that I actually rather like JavaScript. I'd go so far as to say it's my second favorite language after Ruby. Yes, a distant second, but a second none the less. This wasn't always the case. But after we got proper classes in JavaScript, and all the other improvements that flowed since ES6, it's become a real joy to write.

I still don't think JavaScript is well-suited for most of the work we do on the server side of the web-app equation, but fully respect and appreciate that others feel differently. To me, it's simply our good fortune that we now have such a capable JavaScript, which browsers are able to interpret without any need for a compiler at all.

TypeScript just gets in the way of that for me. Not just because it requires an explicit compile step, but because it pollutes the code with type gymnastics that add ever so little joy to my development experience, and quite frequently considerable grief. Things that should be easy become hard, and things that are hard become `any`. No thanks!

This isn't a plea to convert anyone of anything, though. As I discussed in Programming types and mindsets, very few programmers are typically interested in having their opinion on typing changed. Most programmers find themselves drawn strongly to typing or not quite early in their career, and then spend the rest of it rationalizing The Correct Choice to themselves and others.

That's part of the magic of this JavaScript v TypeScript dichotomy, and full credit to the TypeScript gang for realizing that a full take-over of JavaScript was never going to happen, so complete compatibility had to be baked in from the start. Just because Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript won't mean you can't write your client code in it, or use any other library that employs it. We get to mix and match, which is wonderful.

It's also necessary. Because unlike languages like Ruby, which are languages of choice when it comes to the server side, JavaScript is a language of necessity when it comes to the client side. While you may compile dialects into it, you still have to accept the fact that running code in the browser means running JavaScript. So being able to write that, free of any tooling, and free of any strong typing, is a blessing under the circumstances.

So farewell, TypeScript. May you bring much rigor and satisfaction to your tribe while letting the rest of us enjoy JavaScript in the glorious spirit it was originally designed: Free of strong typing.

You can't fix core competency with a stern conversation

2023-09-01T18:22:23Z

When things aren't going well with a new hire, the problem usually falls into one of two categories: competency or engagement. If it's a problem with engagement – their style of collaboration, their communication, their approach – there's a good chance you can fix it with some clear feedback. But if the problem is with core competency – their technical skills – you can't expect to solve that with a stern conversation.

It's true that it might not be entirely clear in the early days of a new hire whether problems fall into one category or the other. But eventually it will be clear, and when it is, you have to act accordingly.

Problems with engagement are often simply due to unstated assumptions. You expect someone to act a certain way, but they don't realize that, so they don't, and you're disappointed. If they knew what was the bother, they'd be able to correct. And you do neither you nor them any favors by sugarcoating or delaying the feedback. This is the essence of radical candor.

But if the problem turns out to be core competency – that they're simply not good enough at what they've been hired to do – you can't feedback your way out of that in any reasonable amount of time. At least not when the problem is with anyone but those in the most junior positions.

If a programmer or a designer or a writer, or anyone else really, spent the last four-five-six years of their career getting their skills to where they are now, it's delusional to think that they can lift them to an entirely new level in just a month or two or even six just because you asked them firmly.

The only time I've occasionally seen it pan out well is if the new hire was merely misclassified on the seniority ladder, but they actually do have solid chops to qualify for a lower level, and thus have a chance to (relatively quickly) grow into the expectations of the position they've been hire into. Say a lead developer who's actually more a senior, but with a couple of challenges could quickly get the last bit.

It's still awkward, though, and one of the reasons why you rarely do anyone a favor by hiring them into a level of seniority that requires a big reach. Better to have them come in where they're solidly qualified, can dazzle against the expectations they can surely best, and then push a promotion from a surge of confidence and goodwill.

Other than that, problems with core competency is the pit where good intentions go to die. It's the kind of issues that give performance plans a bad reputation. The impossible walks in the desert that don't have any realistic chance of leading out. Motions of bureaucracy conducted to produce a paper trail. The worst.

So when that new hire isn't working out, make a point to distinguish whether the trouble is with core competency or engagement. Then make your best effort to turn around the relationship when it's engagement, but look for a quick end if it's competency. Don't waste your time or theirs asking for the impossible.

Learning to accept defeat against reality

2023-08-11T10:53:48Z

A great many smart people terminably hamper their ability to better understand the world by refusing to accept defeat when reality proves them wrong. Armed with an intellect that's at once both too proud to recognize it's own failings and cunningly capable of producing sophisticated excuses, they're adapt at spotting this failing in others but not in themselves.

You see this all the time in the realm of public policy. Someone presents a plausible thesis on how to deal with a given problem. They drum up support for an attempt that follows their ideas, but when the attempt is defeated by reality, they can't retreat, and become stuck trying to defend the path in ever-more creative yet ludicrous ways.

Watch the cadre of "harm reduction" activists attempt to defend the increasingly decrepit state of San Francisco, for example. I don't actually have a problem with the genesis of the original thesis. That maybe you could indeed help people off the streets and off the drugs by refusing to forcefully intervene and by only offering help where it was wanted. Maybe the problem was indeed just that there wasn't enough money going into these programs.

Except, no. As Michael Shellenberger originally documented so well in San Fransicko, that thesis has just not panned out. Reality has revealed something very different, and anyone who've paid even casual attention to the state of that once proud city can attest to the consequences. It just didn't work!

This is where the fork in the road is usually met. Lots of average people without PhDs in a social science subgenre is able to believe their own eyes when reality puts on such a vivid show. While plenty of very smart people, as defined by academic credentials or political prowess, can't seem to do the same. Believing your own eyes is a skill that actually appears less reliable the higher up you go the intellectual tree of knowledge.

Isn't that curious!

But we don't even have to swim into the hot waters of politics and social policy to see the effects of this syndrome. It's all around us in technology and in business too. People falling in love with their favorite thesis or falling into hate of their most despised character. Then blocking out any ability to correct course in a timely manner when reality reveals the truth.

We're all liable to this. The smarter we are, the more creative we can get at coming up with those self-deceivingly compelling rationalizations for why, actually, in this one case, the world is not what it appears.

The best way I've found to break out of this loop is to look at the longer game. There is never one single policy, one single business experiment, or one single technical argument so worth saving that you want to risk not learning from reality. And rolling those learnings into the next thousand decisions and analysis you have to do before you get to the end is worth far more.

Going the distance means eating your intellectual losses. Accepting that reality is the referee. And the prize is that you get to keep playing, and keep getting better.

Turns out nobody cared about panel gaps

2023-08-10T11:55:28Z

One of the most fascinating aspects of Tesla's rise to dominance has been how they discarded many of the traditional values of car making. While the rest of the industry was stuck competing on the size of their panel gaps, and other aspects of precision and quality assembly, Tesla didn't even show up to participate. Their cars are legendary for being delivered with shoddy paint jobs, rattling interiors, and even mismatched doors. But it just didn't matter! Consumers voted with their wallets for poorly built EVs because well-built gas-powered cars were deemed irrelevant in comparison.

There's tremendous wisdom for product makers of all kinds in this lesson. It's the epitome of Blue Ocean Strategy. To find a breakthrough angle in commerce, it's as important to decide where you will not compete, as it is to decide where you will compete.

Tesla decided not to compete in quality assembly, and instead focus on breakthrough ideas like owning the charging infrastructure for EVs. The former is a red-ocean realm of competition against legacy car makers who've had a century to perfect their panel gaps, the latter is so blue-ocean as to appear preposterous to anyone from the gasoline past.

Another good example is platform evolution. The basic Model S platform and design is over a decade old, and Tesla is proudly selling it just the same. Most legacy car makers, with a few notable exceptions, wouldn't be caught dead pushing an old chassis in a highly competitive, mainstream category past half a decade. But it just didn't matter.

Figuring out what consumers truly care about is hard. Deciphering what they don't actually care about is harder still. When faced with nearly identical products in the same genre, they'll seemingly start comparing ever-more minute and subtle differences. But give them something entirely different, and suddenly half the shopping parameters go out the window.

If I was starting a new business tomorrow, that's where I'd focus first. Build a thesis around which aspects of the competing products – even if they aren't directly in the same category – you could probably do without, and you'll be carving out opportunity to do something else with that liberated energy. Then plow this energy into excelling on the underrepresented axis left unattended.

Easier said than done, of course. But starting to see the world through the lens of the Blue Ocean Strategy, as Tesla has done to perfection, is the way to learn how.

The curing value of creation

2023-08-08T09:52:21Z

It's hard not to see your spirits lifted when you're part of bringing something to life. Be that a product, an organization, or a community, or all three at once. Like exercise, it's one of those rare avenues of human endeavor that almost invariably will make anyone feel better. And, also like exercise, the hard part is getting started when you need it the most!

That's the curious chasm between knowledge and action. As much as you may know that regular, high-intensity training of the body does wonders for the mind, summoning the motivation to follow through with a commitment to working out only gets harder and harder the more you need it. I've had periods in my life where being removed from meaningful acts of creation felt just the same way.

Those periods were especially depressing when they felt like a simulacra of creation. Being in a situation designed to mimic the motions of making, but bereft of any meaningful progress towards that end. The pretending of purpose. The appearance of collaboration. Without any thrust towards completion.

And just as how getting a positive streak of accomplishment going provides its own momentum to keep at it, so too does a negative streak of performative busyness. It pulls you back into the comfort of the mental couch, and hands you the bag of chips to soothe your nagging sense of uselessness. For every day you stay there, the harder it is to get up, so best to muster everything you got to escape the dulling inertia now.

Make something. Participate in something. Engage with someone. All of it might feel as unnatural as strapping on those running shoes after too long of a break, but once you're back to creating, the energy comes by itself.

Et tu, Zoom?

2023-08-07T16:30:48Z

The corporate cause for return-to-office just claimed its perhaps most ironic victim: Zoom! The company that literally lives to sell us all on the wonders of remote collaboration wants its own people back into the office again. Which I guess is just a regression to the mean of productivity tool makers failing to believe their own marketing, but it's a bit sad none the less.

Not the least because this push for return-to-office has now been proven completely safe for large tech corporations. Thanks to the mixture of mass layoffs earlier this year and the now numerous proclamations that remote-first is over at the majority of big companies. Safety in sentiment, safety in numbers.

This is an opportunistic squeeze, because what's most tech workers supposed to do? The option of simply hopping to another company has been severely limited. Outside the small realm of AI experts, most other domains just aren't anywhere nearly as contested in hiring as they once were. So this is happening now because it can happen now.

I just hope that people who really did enjoy that remote work-lifetyle don't forget what it was like. The balance of power will presumably turn around one day again, and when it does, voting with your feet will be an option again.

Until then, I suspect that the likes of Shopify, Automattic, and other stalwart defenders of remote work will continue to see their openings become increasingly oversubscribed. Just like we've had at 37signals for going on two decades.

Remote work might be receding, but it's simply too compelling an option for too many to ever disappear. The long-term trend line ain't going anywhere.

Not everyone can be the best

2023-08-04T09:59:59Z

Many software developers seem to have a uniquely hard time accepting that not everyone who just tries real hard will become so good as to be among the best in this field. That there really is a discrepancy of talent that leads to a discrepancy of competence. That not everyone can or will become equally good at this job.

In contrast, nobody seems to have trouble with the fact that not every soccer player who loves the game and trains their best will become eligible for the Premier League. Or that becoming a brain surgeon might indeed really be harder than making it as a general practitioner, which in itself is hard enough too!

But becoming a developer can happen without ever really having to face an adversarial examination of your skills. There's no 90-minute clock that ends with a look at the score of goals to determine the winner. No grueling medical licensing examination to bar entry to the profession.

And in most ways, this is good! Just like there's no bar exam to become a writer or an artist. If you can make it commercially, convincing others to pay you for your services or products, you get to do this full time. That's wonderful! The world is a better place because the art and science of instructing computers to do our bidding isn't gated by guardians of a guild.

The mistake comes from inferring that because there's no barrier to entry, it's within the capacity of anyone who keeps at it to ascent to the highest levels of competence possible. Or, even worse, poo-poo the idea that there is a difference in competence at all, and that it's different from the measure of years of experience. Hogwash.

In our eagerness to appear as welcoming and encouraging to the next generation of developers, we've often accidentally or intentionally debase the achievements of merit, and in the process help nobody. Celebrating those who do this job well, nay, better, than most is not in opposition to attracting new talent. On the contrary. More kids start playing soccer because we cherish the unique talents of Messi or Ronaldo, not fewer.

Part of the problem here is that in their eagerness to polish their humbleness, the best software developers seem overly keen to downplay their own talent, competence, or achievements. You don't see Messi or Ronaldo attribute their wins to "just getting lucky" as a matter of course. Or the star surgeon point primarily to coincidence to explain their mastery. All commonly embrace their talent, their competence, their success.

This is very different from being a braggart and a bore. And, again, perhaps part of the explanation is simply the presence of objective standards. The discerning nature of soccer ensures that anyone who joins the field at the World Cup really is an exceptional player, and we all just have to accept that. But I think it's more than that. It reveals an unappealing insecurity about whether software development is domain where being better is even important. We must reject such nonsense. Of course being better is important!

What the easy entry to software development affords is a chance at the pursuit of competence, not it's inevitability. Like soccer, you really can become very, very good exclusively on the basis of your own talent and time investment. It doesn't take years of formal and expensive schooling to get there. It doesn't require fancy, unobtainable equipment. But none of that means you'll be assured success.

That's both liberating and intimidating. Good. Little worth having is not hard to get. So get at it, stick to it, and may your talents take you as far as they can.

X marks the motivated reasoning

2023-07-27T09:16:53Z

I’ve lost track of all the things that Musk has done to Twitter that ought to have brought it down by now. Scarcely a month goes by without some action triggering the incessant bells of doom, ringing from the bellies of bloviating ding dongs. And the ringing seemingly never stops long enough to allow for some basic contemplation or correction, as reality wrecks another prediction of peril.

But the obsession with all things Elon is so strong that there’s no room or time for introspection of any kind. It’s just on to the next faux outrage of tomorrow. Make sure you never miss a chance to be an expert on social media, advertising, team building, economics, or branding so you can tell the world’s most successful entrepreneur what a total idiot he’s being, and how much smarter, wiser, and kinder you’d be in his shoes. It’s all so fascinatingly interesting! Please keep telling me more and more until we both die of boredom!

This isn’t a verse from Stan, scribbled on a starter cap. Just an all-singing, all-dancing plea to escape this colosseum of competitive catastrophizing. However passionately you wish for the man to fail, he’s not going to do so on account of your feeble bleating. I say this as someone who has bet against his antics plenty of times in the past, only to come to the realization that it’s best to cover my losses, and accept the man’s propensity for eventually getting it right.

Sure, he may very well not get it right with Twitter, but his odds are actually increasing. When you’ve survived so many supposed catastrophes, and you’re still playing, you’ve at the very least shown tremendous resilience. That’s one of the absolute key ingredients in success.

So forgive me if I can’t even get marginally excited for this latest kerfuffle over the new X branding. Primarily because of just how utterly removed the discourse around it is from a good-faith assessment of the merits of the particulars. It’s all turned into an endless proxy war, and every argument is wielded only in service of yet another petty ideological skirmish.

Musk could double the revenue and users of X, and his perma detractors would still find a path back to a prophesy of imminent ruin. Likewise, he could lose half the revenue again, and his most ardent boosters would position the setback as merely part of an even grander master plan. This is 5D chess being played by two parties shuffling pieces around in isolated realms of reality, each cheering every move as but two removed from checkmate.

Are you not entertained? That’s perhaps the only real question here. Either embrace the absurdity of it all with the casual demeanor of Camus, and chuckle at the ever-grander spectacle, or tune out of the whole endeavor altogether. But for the love of all that’s holy, stop acting as though the every whim of Elon carries the weight of the world.

Working remotely is a competitive hiring advantage again

2023-07-26T07:44:14Z

As more and more companies, especially large ones, have started demanding remote workers return to the office, the competitive hiring advantage for remote-first companies is back. And it's even bigger than before the pandemic, now that so many workers have had a taste of what life can be like when you don't have to commute to the office. This is great news for smaller companies and startups in particular.

Let's face it, if you're trying to compete for talent with the likes of Google or Apple, you need all the help you can get, and these companies forcing everyone back into an office might just be your biggest lift. Because for quite a few people, working remotely or not has become the defining characteristic of a job. To the point where many remote workers won't even consider a position that involves a corporate office.

This is doubly so for workers who don't live in the few big cities, which most major tech companies settle in. For whom taking tech job with a big company that insists office attendance would require leaving life, family, and their preferred location behind. The world is full of wonderful, talented people who won't do this.

Right now job seekers might not have a choice, of course. After half a million tech workers got fired recently in the US, I'm sure the big tech companies aren't wanting for applicants – even if they force them into an office against their preference. But that won't last forever. Eventually the tech job market is going to tighten again.

Now don't take this the wrong way. I remain committed to the idea that it's actually good we see some bifurcation here. That some companies should double down on the office. But I'll admit a fair delight to the fact that this is mostly happening with older, bigger companies, and that it's granting an advantage to smaller, newer ones.

Remote work is an enabling technology, like free open-source software, which lowers the cost for new-company formation. Granting more entrepreneurs more opportunities to take on the stodgy establishment without the need for other people's money. Happy to see that turn back into an unfair advantage for the rebels!

Pick promise over proof

2023-07-25T08:49:19Z

After hiring people for twenty years, I've come to accept that it's impossible to know up front what someone is truly capable of. Sure, we try our best to make good, educated guesses during the hiring process, and this is why asking finalists to do sample work projects is so crucial. But it still remains just guessing, and the truth doesn't emerge until you afford the hire a full attempt on a real project.

That's why I'm such a fan of starting new employees in the deep end. Putting them to work on a real project right away. But this is only half the commitment you ought to make to their potential.

It's just as important to retain the possibility of rapid progression by continuing to test their promise against harder and bigger challenges. I can't tell you the number of times I've been positively surprised by what someone is capable of when they've only been given a chance to prove it.

But it is a gamble. You simply don't and won't know how fast someone is able to advance unless you're willing to risk letting them fail. The only way to play it safe is to wait until you're convinced they're capable of that bigger challenge, but by then you've waited far too long. Spoiling precious months or years of their potential.

The truth is that most projects can afford to fail. Much of the work we all do most of the time is far lower stakes than we all care to admit. It's rare that a single project has the power to put your business at serious risk, and if so, just don't use that one as an opportunity to validate someone's untested promise.

Besides, even if someone fails to rise to the occasion on a given project, there's usually plenty of time to step in with corrections or even a reassignment before it goes down in flames.

The trick is to think of all your projects as a series of games. Whether you win or tie a few early ones matters far less than building your capacity to crush them consistently later. Giving everyone on your team the chance to be their absolute best as quickly as possible is how build that crushing capacity.

This is hard to do consistently. It's much easier to tap your most trusted and proven employees when assembling the team for a challenging project. But every play you give to someone you know can do it, is a play you've kept from someone who might have been able to. The rate of improvement for your team as a whole is a function of how many promising members you can convert into proven contenders.

Take more chances on promise.

Clear the barnacles

2023-07-24T08:42:45Z

The easiest way to squander your focus is by paying attention to a million inconsequential things at once. These little mental barnacles add up in imperceptible ways until you suddenly feel like you're getting nowhere, no matter how hard you push. You must keep scrubbing your mind clear of such attention-sapping colonies to remain capable of making smooth, swift progress.

These barnacles can accumulate from middling marketing initiatives, process theatre, and tolerance for mediocre performance. All individually presenting as more hassle to deal with than to dismiss, but combined killing the efficiency and focus on progress.

But they can also be things that actually appears to be working well enough, just not up to the bar of your very best. Those are the tricky ones. The base hits, the modest accomplishments, the things you might even have celebrated once. The past darlings.

It just doesn't matter. You can't keep stuffing your head with ever more things to pay partial attention to every month and expect to keep a clear eye on the horizon and the future. There's only room for so much.

The hardest part about this is not to wait until it's too much, until the drag is actually there. Keep your mind below carrying capacity, such that there's room for serendipity, at all times.

In short, be decisive about what you'll no longer do. Summon your inner Jack Welch to cut at least the bottom 10% of the stuff dragging your attention every few months or so.

Don't lose your unreasonable sense of urgency

2023-07-20T15:33:29Z

Getting anything new off the ground usually requires a tremendous amount of urgency. It's hard to launch something from nothing into reality without being incredibly impatient for progress. Thus most founders begin 🎶Their Journey🎶 sprinting from one pressing problem to the next in rapid succession to achieve their lift off. But reaching escape velocity doesn't guarantee you'll keep going, unless you retain the propulsion from an unreasonable sense of urgency.

Yet the irony of being successful in business is that it'll invariably attract smart people who can tell you all the good reasons for why you can no longer go as quickly as you once did. Why it's actually natural, perhaps even good, that a company ten or a hundred times the size of what it was when it first became successful now has to travel at half the pace to be prudent.

Don't listen too closely. Not because they'll be wrong in any narrow technical sense, but because they're wrong in the broad directional sense. The risk of succumbing to the rigor mortis of success is usually far greater than the risk of making a mistake by not considering and mitigating all possible bad outcomes up front.

It's the risk of mandating everyone put on a bike helmet, only to realize that doing so means fewer people will bike, leading to worse health outcomes for all. Being obsessive about specific, short-term risks often sits in opposition to worrying about fuzzy, long-term risks.

And nobody will be as motivated as a founder to inject risk into the business. Sticking with an unreasonable sense of urgency undoubtedly comes with clear and immediate risks. But giving up on it with even worse, less defined ones.

So don't give up. Every company needs to have someone asking why we can't launch next Monday instead of next month. Willing to accept and underwrite the risks needed to make it happen. And with a stomach for occasionally being wrong, eating the loss, but keep playing.

There's no rebound in sight for unprofitable SaaS

2023-07-19T17:42:50Z

Anyone reviewing their S&P 500 retirement fund these days will do so with a broader smile than last year. The market as a whole is up, and if you're in the whole market, you're benefitting. But all of that upside, basically, belongs to just a handful of mega tech companies.

This is not a general turn-around, and it's barely a turn-around at all for the unprofitable SaaS companies that saw their bubble burst last year. In software, only cash spigots like Apple and Microsoft are able to set fresh all-time highs. Investors who bought into money pits like Asana, Monday, or Smartsheet are still likely to be in despair over their evaporated values.

+ + + +
(Analysis by Coatue from 6/30/2023.)

This is an important change from the marathon bull run that lifted all tech businesses, no matter how unprofitable or far-fetched, in the time from the Great Recession and until the peak at the end of 2021. We're now back in world where the actual business metrics and mechanics of individual operations determine the value assigned to their stocks and startups.

But it also means that there's probably a lot more pain in the pipeline for unprofitable software startups, almost all of which are now SaaS, which raised money in the late go-go days. If a company raised a wallop of cash in 2021, they're soon coming up on that 18-month anniversary when it's supposed to be all spent. Now that runway has likely been extended by early cost-cutting, but those cuts won't last forever, and when fresh capital is inevitable needed, it'll be murder on the cap tables. Potential victims here include ClickUp, Airtable, and Notion. All who raised hundreds of millions at the peak of the market at insane valuations that'll be extremely difficult to live up to.

For unprofitable SaaS companies that have already gone public, it'll perhaps take longer before the pinch becomes precarious. Asana, for example, has about $530m in cash on hand. But also managed to lose $400m in the last fiscal year(!!). Monday sits with $885m in cash, against a loss last fiscal year of $152m. Smartsheet has $456m on hand against a last-year loss of $230m. It's hard to know whether or how that'll all come to an end, but those aren't pretty numbers now that capital is no longer free.

But it's true that you can indeed continue to run a loss-making tech company for an impressively long time, once it's sucked in enough investment capital or exists in the public markets. Groupon, for example, was once valued at a staggering $25 billion. Now their market capitalization is down to $200m, and they're warning about the risks to being "an ongoing return", but the doors are still open – twelve years after they went public!

Point being that, at a large enough scale, there's substantial lag between the infliction of a mortal financial wound and the final burial of the bleeding company. But you'd be silly, as an investor, employee, or customer, not to pay attention to the red drain once it's begun.

Unless there's a sudden, swift turn-around in investor sentiments, and nothing is currently pointing to that for unprofitable enterprise SaaS in particular, I don't think we've seen anything yet. It's a truism that if you bleed long enough, you will eventually die, though, and boy has there been a lot of bleeding already!

The law of the land

2023-06-30T17:26:00Z

Affirmative action is right up there with abortion and gun control among the highest-profile, longest-running social fissures in America. So of course the recent ruling from the Supreme Court making its use in college admissions illegal was going to light a political fire. The surprising thing is just how contained the burn has been within the tech industry.

But perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising. As I argued last year, we're now in the waning days of DEI's dominance within the corporate world in general and tech in particular. I don't know exactly when future historians will pin the peak, but it'll be sometime in that 2020-2021 period. The only thing that's clear today is that things have calmed down considerably since the ideological crusade reigned supreme.

Good.

It really was a crazy time. And I think we're only beginning to appreciate just how bananas it was. Like I can imagine Americans coming out of the 1950s Red Scare must have felt. But the fact that it's undeniably a different time already was illustrated when Facebook banned many forms of political discussions inside their company late last year, and basically nobody gave a damn.

But let's not forget that it isn't over everywhere yet. It's just waning rapidly within the corporate world. As Heather Mac Donald has documented in When Race Trumps Merit, institutions within academia, the arts, and even branches of science are still in the throes of this ideology, with disastrous effects.

Such are the swings of the pendulum. It's not everywhere all at once. The turn will always happen faster in some circles than others. I'm just glad the turn has happened within tech first.

Correcting past injustices with present-day discrimination was never going to be a long-term stable project. You just can't get a majority of Americans to stick with a premise that discrimination is the key explaining variable for disparate educational attainment or outcomes forever. And when you attempt to rig the rules to achieve such "demographically proportionate" outcomes, you invariably end up penalizing better candidates on the basis of having the "wrong", "over-represented" racial background. That's not right.

Reasonable people can, of course, disagree on this sentiment (as shown by the 1/3 of Americans supporting affirmative action!). But we all have to look at the same set of facts, regardless of opinion. And the facts are deeply uncomfortable in this case. Especially when they illustrate the challenges faced by Asian Americans, the original plaintiffs in this case, when compared to other minorities in terms of college acceptance. No wonder the ideological hand-waiving required to confuse this fact has been so frantic.

But the handwaving didn't convince the Supreme Court, and the repercussions of this case will extend far beyond colleges. Corporate legal departments are already busy course-correcting and bracing for a slew of lawsuits based on the same premise: Using race, and other protected identity markers, to advantage some candidates over others is illegal.

Now it'll be interesting to see whether universities who've been operating on this illegal model will actually comply with the ruling. There's good reason to believe the bureaucratic commitment to racial preferencing isn't going to be discarded this easily. But it's a monumental ruling nonetheless, and now there's no longer any doubt as to what the law of the land is.

That alone, a clear ruling on the illegality of affirmative action, will undoubtedly help accelerate the waning days of DEI. With the legal basis drained, the ideological nature of this push will become all the more apparent and niche at the same time.

The original American promise that this is a country where you can make it regardless of where you came from has always been challenged in practice, but it's a beautiful ideal, and it'll shine just a little brighter now that the Supreme Court has dismantled one of the few remaining systemic impediments to its realization.

Toward a more perfect union!

Design for the web without Figma

2023-06-29T14:38:54Z

By all accounts, Figma has been an amazing tool for designers. We've used it extensively at 37signals, and I'm sure most every other software shop has too. Adobe didn't pay $20 billion for nothing. But we don't do the bulk of our design work with or in Figma when developing Basecamp or HEY for the web. That's all done directly in HTML and CSS, as it should be.

Because no matter how good Figma is, it's an intermediary abstraction, like Photoshop before it. If you're working with the web, you'll work faster without such an abstraction layer in the design process filtering the collaboration between programmer and designer.

This is perhaps the biggest, open secret to the productivity and viability of our two-person teams at 37signals. All our web designers work directly with the native materials of HTML, CSS, and usually even a fair bit of JavaScript and Ruby. The design process and its iterations flow through updates to the real code that runs the real app, and, as quickly as possible, against real data.

It seems that this isn't the common path for many software companies. I frequently hear about processes where designers work like did they when I first started out with the web. Designs happen in the abstraction layer, and are then handed to programmers to "make real". Occasionally justified with the same argument I heard back in the late 90s for throwing Photoshop files over the wall for programmers to implement: You can be more creative if you're not constrained by what it takes to make it happen.

I think that's exactly the wrong conclusion. Creativity thrives on constraints. Knowing how to cut with the grain makes getting the most out of the material much easier. While we've thankfully moved on from the pixel-perfect nonsense, with its spacer gifs and rounded corner images, the no-constraints thinking of today still exists in that mind space.

Having your designers become proficient with the materials of the web needn't require they become oracles of front-end development. But they should aim to become self-sufficient in wielding the tools of the trade. And treat improving their skills with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and perhaps even the backend language as a key plank in their career progression.

In a web world that's increasingly been subdividing its expertise into ever smaller specialities, that might sound like a bit of a unicorn quest: Great designers that can also make their creations real? Good luck finding THAT! And yet we have, repeatedly, at 37signals, and we're drawing huge dividends in productivity from doing so.

Leave Figma to the early conceptual stages of web design. Or put it to good use for native mobile development, when you rarely have a choice. But embrace doing the bulk of the design for the web directly in the core elements of its periodic table.

Staying in the arena

2023-06-27T12:26:41Z

One of the things that can seem difficult to understand for people who merely tolerate having a job is why anyone would continue working if they didn't have to. You often see a version of this incredulity when the peanut gallery weighs in on the choices of billionaires. Why do these Very Rich People continue to do things – especially things I disagree with! – when they have enough money to live forever after on a beach sipping mojitos and taking pottery classes?! I WOULD NEVER.

It's a curious contradiction in the conceptualization of ambition. On the one hand, the "I WOULD NEVER" sentiment is drawn from a longing desire to have financial freedom. Fantasizing about what life would be like without a boss, without bills to worry about, and without the other obligations of modern life carried by most. And at the same time, it represents a death of imagination to be unable to visualize how someone who've secured the material success needed for life of quiet leisure could intentionally choose a path of continued work.

But these two things are connected! I've never met anyone that made it big who merely tolerated having a job, and who secretly wished they never had to work again. I mean, I'm sure such people exist. It's a big world, it's full of folks with all sorts of different motivations. But stereotypes are drawn for a reason, and that reason is the recognition of common, shared attributes.

I'll go out on a limb here and posit that most successful people actually like what they do. Not in the sense that every moment is met with a big happy grin, but in the sense that The Journey brings purpose to their life. That a destination of financial freedom might well be part of the mosaic of motivating factors, but that it doesn't capture all the light of their spirit.

I've never had big yacht or private jet money, but I've long since stopped having to worry about the material upkeep on a comfortable life. And yet I keep working. In almost the exact same way I did before finances allowed me not to. Sure, maybe the hobbies are a bit more extravagant, but the eight hours a day in front of the computer are virtually identical.

I can thus completely understand why the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg continue to show up for the daily cage match of running high-profile companies. Why the appeal of sitting on a beach is limited to that of the occasional break, not a permanent arrangement. It's because the drive that got them to where they are isn't extinguished by achieving personal, material wellbeing.

There's something provocatively counterintuitive about the fact that the biggest winners in the game of capitalism aren't actually defining their ambitions in terms of money. While many of the most ardent critics of this economic regime can't stop themselves from doing so, even if they aren't exactly hurting for their daily bread. And maybe that discrepancy explains part of the difference in outcomes.

But above all, I just respect the hell out of people who stay in the arena. Who when given the choice by their good fortune refuses to settle for a lesser burden. There's something deeply inspirational to me in such dedication to The Journey, but I can also appreciate what a potentially infuriating mirror it presents to the meager ambitions of others.

None of this should read as a paean to billionaires or other über-successful people. They are as humanely fallible as the rest of us, and their capacity for malice and cruelty easily supercharged by their resources.

But sometimes what appears to the peanut gallery as, say, pure greed or pure evil is but a shallow projection, which fails to account for the fact that some people simply live to stay in the arena. Even after all the victory wreaths have been collected. And thank Zeus for that!

Wisdom is not what you know

2023-06-26T07:24:52Z

The hallmark of great wisdom is not what you know, but what you know and can put to use. The globe is full of learned idiots, unable or incapable of following the wisdom they have accumulated. There's no prize for a closet full of axioms or insights, if you leave it all in there, and venture philosophically naked into the world.

Ironically, this was a lesson I had to learn late in life myself. I used to find it silly when people would read the same book twice. With so much more knowledge to discover, why waste your efforts on what you've already explored?

Because wisdom doesn't stick just by reading it once.

All the most valuable lessons in life require repetition. You don't get in shape by knowing how to do a push-up but by doing a hundred a week. Accept that wisdom is a form of mental exercise.

This is why I love the Stoics. They produced an exercise program for wisdom that is as counterintuitive to our emotions as it is commanding when mastered. Chief amongst the insights are the ideas that we suffer more in our imagination than in reality, and that it is folly to focus on what you can't control.

Or, put a different way: This too shall pass.

Those four little words can take a lifetime to live up to. Even when you know, from first exposure, that this ought to be the way. As soon as you actually need this pithy little reminder, it's usually nowhere to be found. To have it emerge top of mind in a time of need requires immense training.

I've tried to remember this strength of repetition when I find myself saying the same thing for the sixtieth time in writing, on a podcast, or during an interview. Yes, there'll undoubtedly be people who've heard it all before, either from me or someone else, but that doesn't reduce the value of the exchange. We're just doing the reps!

It's also why I try to read The Manual by Epictetus at least twice a year. It's a cognitive double espresso. Such punch in such a small cup. You could consume it in half an hour on a sprint, but I usually like to take twice that to savor the timeless wisdom.

You are what you think. Become better by thinking better. Think better by repeating the few hard lessons you know you need the most.

Back to America

2023-06-25T09:17:54Z

After spending much of the past three years in Denmark, our family is returning to America full time this summer. The original reasons for temporarily emigrating – the prolonged school lockdowns and other pandemic madness – have long since evaporated, and we've had a solid chance to taste all that Copenhagen has to offer. And that's a lot. This is a wonderful country and a wonderful capital.

In fact, if you were to make a pro/con list contrasting family life in Denmark vs America, I think even fairly conservative parents from the US would find it difficult to compose a slam-dunk case for God's own country. I have perhaps never spent serious time in a major city so well-designed for children as that of Copenhagen. Just the idea of giving up on letting our pre-teen zip around the city on the metro by himself seems like a big loss.

But life isn't just a set of rational arguments for or against. As Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground puts it:

Reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

Reason as "simply one twentieth of my capacity for life" is one of those insights that immediately and permanently marked my soul after I first read it. And it squares perfectly with recent interest in the "little brain in the heart", and the concept of the second brain of the body, which encompasses our gut as well.

You can draw a connection to Sowell's exposition of "unarticulated wisdom" too. Just because we can't quite put words to the argument doesn't make it invalid.

But the best articulation I can make is that Denmark works so well as it does because it's a small, homogenous society with strong norms that force a stringent cultural conformity. This has a world of benefits, and presents perhaps the most compelling case for the kind of capitalist-collectivist hybrid that the ideal image of a socially-democratic state possibly could.

It also breeds a small box for acceptable manners, thinking, and being. How could it not. If we realize that our benefits are reaped by our collective sameness, then any material otherness is a threat. And because the monoculture, to its credit and celebration, is so strong, it also means it's full of implicit sink holes for the uninitiated to fall through.

Americans and Danes share such a grand overlap in popular culture that it's easy to miss this at first. And we sorta did, when we lived the first part of our time here in the cozy comfort of the expat bubble. It wasn't until we gave the promise of long-term integration a proper go that the fault lines emerged.

Again, I can't fault the Danes for guarding the intricate, delicate web of norms, customs, values, and appearances. We've seen how fragile the social contract can be around the world. So when you have something good going, and as always find it hard to pin exactly why it's this good, you're naturally loathe to tinker too much with the recipe. I salute that!

But it's also meant that in important ways, this country had a hard time becoming home, deep in our hearts, however persuasive the argument was to our heads.

Maybe we'll be back at some point, but for now, I'm just ever so grateful that we got an amazing three years. And now I'm looking forward to being back in the whirlwind of America. Tickling many of the other nineteen tenths of our capacity for life.

Rails World sold out in less than 45 minutes

2023-06-24T12:05:05Z

There hasn't been a major, dedicated Rails conference in Europe since 2008, so perhaps it's no surprise that there was pent-up demand. But I was still shocked to see the forthcoming Rails World visit to Amsterdam sell out in less than 45 minutes yesterday! What an awesome reception to the first major project undertaken by our new Rails Foundation.

And what an awesome validation that companies like Cookpad, Doximity, Fleetio, GitHub, Intercom, Procore, Shopify, and 37signals were right to back a new institution, as core members, with a clear mission to improve the documentation, education, marketing, and events for Ruby on Rails. Same too for our contributing members, like AppSignal, Cedarcode and Planet Argon.

To have all of this come together, with Rails World, with the Rails Foundation, in the year we'll celebrate the 20th anniversary of the framework, is just icing on the birthday cake. This is an exciting time to be part of the Ruby on Rails ecosystem.

Especially because this feels like just the beginning. Amanda Perino, our executive director for the Rails Foundation, now has a solid mandate for the choice to work on a new conference series first, and can carry that momentum into all the other exciting projects we have planned to support the foundation's mission.

Personally, it's gratifying to see that we've been able to leave old squabbles behind, route around the nonsense, and get back to the joyful collaboration on this fantastic framework. I can't wait to keynote at Rails World in October, and to share all the many new developments for the framework we've been working on lately.

It'll also be a delight to see the lucky 650 attendees who managed to score a golden ticket to Rails World in person. It's been too long! (And for those who didn't manage to snatch a ticket this time, don't worry, the Rails World conference series will continue in 2024 at a much bigger venue, so even more people can enjoy the new momentum we're building here.)

I seriously feel #blessed to continue working with such an incredible ecosystem of developers after having spent literally half my life in its service. Bring on the next twenty years!

We have left the cloud

2023-06-23T08:24:37Z

Since it took us years to get into the cloud in the first place, I originally imagined it would take us years to get out as well. But all that work to containerize our applications and prepare them for the cloud actually turned out to make it relatively easy to exit. And now, after six months of effort, it's done. We're out. The last application was brought home to our own hardware on Wednesday. Hallelujah!

In those six months, we brought home six heritage services that we're no longer selling, but have committed to support for existing customers and users until the end of the internet. Basecamp Classic, Highrise, Writeboard, Campfire, Backpack, and Ta-da List are all over a decade old, but continue to serve tens of thousands of people, and generate millions of dollars in revenue. But now we'll be spending far less to operate them, and as a bonus to those users, provide a considerably faster experience due to the powerful new hardware.

But the big move was HEY. This is an application that was born in the cloud. We'd never run it on our own hardware before, and as a full-featured email service, it had a lot of moving parts. But the team pulled this off without a hitch by doing the move in several stages, with different databases, cache servers, mail services, and app instances moving independently over the course of a few weeks.

Our stack for bringing home all these applications is entirely open source. We use KVM to slice our new monster 192-thread Dell R7625s into isolated VMs, then Docker to run the containerized applications, and finally Manage Remote Server Kontainers with MRSK to do zero-downtime app deploys and rollbacks. This setup helped us dodge the complexity of Kubernetes, and avoid any sort of enterprisey service contract entanglements.

The back of the napkin math is that we'll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we've been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.

This is possible because the way we operate our own hardware actually isn't too dissimilar from how people use rental clouds like AWS. We buy new hardware from Dell, have it shipped directly to the two data centers we use, and ask the white-glove service hands at Deft to rack the new machines. Then we see the new IP addresses pop online, and can immediately put them to work with KVM/Docker/MRSK.

The main difference here is the lag time between needing new servers and seeing them online. It truly is incredible that you can spin up 100 powerful machines in the cloud in just a few minutes, but you also pay dearly for the privilege. And we just don't have such an unpredictable business as to warrant this premium. Given how much money we're saving owning our own hardware, we can afford to dramatically over-provision our server needs, and then when we need more, it still only takes a couple of weeks to show up.

Look at it this way. We spent about half a million dollars buying two pallets of servers from Dell, which added a combined 4,000 vCPUs with 7,680 GB of RAM and 384TB of NVMe storage to our server capacity. This hardware was more than adequate to run all the heritage services we brought home, together with HEY, and give our other Basecamp operations a hardware refresh. And it was less than a third the cost of what we predict we'll be saving EVERY YEAR! This is hardware we'll be amortizing over five years.

No wonder that sharing our experience with this cloud exit has made a lot of companies think twice about the insane cloud rental bills they're incurring every month. Our collective cloud budget last year was $3.2m, and this was incredibly optimized, with long service commitments, scrupulous right-sizing and monitoring. There are lots of companies paying many times what we did for even less benefit. The potential savings are as large as the AWS quarterly results are staggering. AWS generated over $5 billion in profits for Amazon just in 2022 Q4!

As I've mentioned before, I still think the cloud has a place for companies early enough in their lifecycle that the spend is either immaterial or the risk that they won't be around in 24 months is high. Just be careful that you don't look at those lavish cloud credits as a gift! It's a hook. And if you tie yourself too much to their proprietary managed services or serverless offerings, you'll find it very difficult to escape, once the bills start going to the moon.

I also think that there are probably some companies that have such high variance in their loads that renting makes sense. If you only need a plough thrice a year, it doesn't make much sense keeping it in the barn unused for the remaining 363 days.

But most established companies that can amortize capital investments over a few years should seriously reconsider the cloud craze. The benefits have been vastly overstated. The cloud is often just as complicated as running things yourself, and it's usually ridiculously more expensive.

So if the money matters – and when does it not? – I urge you to do your own math. Consider whether you have a service that really benefits from constantly scaling the capacity up and down. Then have a serious look at what your own cloud exit could look like. We pulled out seven applications in six months. You can do that too. The tools are there. They're free. So don't just stay in the cloud because of the hype.

Breaking the inertia of mediocrity

2023-06-22T08:47:24Z

It's rarely the terrible decisions, processes, or even people that'll sink your organization. It's the accumulation and inertia of the mediocre ones. Dealing with the truly bad is easy. It's painfully obvious to all that change is required. The danger is imminent. It's much harder to find the will to act when the danger lurks in inadequate urgency, cumbersome collaboration, or just a missing spark. But act you must, before inertia sets in to devour you whole.

The insidious nature of inertia is in its ability to compound the cost of action as time goes on. Letting go of an employee that just didn't meet the bar after three months is endlessly easier than doing the same after three years. Same with reverting a bad organizational restructuring or poor development practices or awkward reporting protocols. Every additional month you let mediocrity fester, you make it harder to undo.

Because hitting undo usually means at least one difficult conversation, some amount of disappointment, and a recognition that you get this one wrong. All factors that most mortals are loathe to face! It's so much more comfortable to punt. Come up with excuses of why it just hasn't worked yet. Why just a bit more time is needed to turn it around. Any argument will do, as long as it postpones the requirement to move.

And if mediocrity dwelled in isolation, you'd probably get away with it. That's exactly why it's so difficult to counter. It's rarely the one mediocre employee, process, or decision that conspires to take you off course. It's the accumulation of all of them together.

The sad truth is that most of us are cowards whenever we can be. We usually know what needs to be done, but we shrink from the responsibility to do it. Unless occasion calls upon us without a choice, we'll find a way around.

Whenever I find myself looking at a coward in the mirror, I remind myself: Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. Make the hard choices. Even when it's possible to punt. The inertia of mediocrity will not break unless you break it.

Europe is half the cost for our company meet-ups

2023-06-21T06:34:56Z

Since the pandemic ended, we've had the pleasure of organizing three different company meet-ups for 37signals. We got going again in Miami, then hopped to Amsterdam, and most recently we went to New Orleans. Next we're going to Barcelona in the fall. Would you have guessed that hosting a company meet-up in US was almost twice as expensive as Europe? I wouldn't!

I feel like Americans often complain about how expensive things are in Europe, but looking at our expenditures on meet-ups, that just isn't so. Here's what we spent per person in the three most recent locations, all-in:

Miami: $6,200
Amsterdam: $3,500
New Orleans: $5,700

And as much as I liked both Miami and New Orleans, I felt like we ate far better in Amsterdam! Accommodations were of comparable quality. Perhaps, again, a tad more charming in Amsterdam than Miami, but New Orleans was pretty nice too.

One of the surprising expenses in the US was just getting around. In Miami, we spent well over $10,000 just on cabs and Ubers. Whereas in Amsterdam, the cost was a fraction for the public transit options. (Although I guess neither could match the fun of a New Orleans marching band with full police escort 😄).

37signals is pretty evenly split these days between the US and the rest of the world. About half and half. So on that factor alone, I would have expected us to save a bunch on travel by staying within the US, but that just wasn't so.

Either way, doing these meet-ups isn't cheap. We do them twice per year. But then again, we no longer have any expenses for an office, so that offsets quite a bit. We used to spend a good $25,000/month on the Chicago lease and associated bills. That was an office used by less than a handful of people on a regular basis!

But one thing is the cost, another is the value. These meet-ups leave such a lasting impression on everyone who participates. It's a super dose of human connection, combined with a fun trip, and some excellent eating.

We plan every single one of our company meet-ups in Basecamp. It's a lot of work to pull this off for just under 80 people, but with Basecamp making sure nothing falls between cracks, it's a lot easier than it would be with a tangled mess of chat, emails, and google docs scattered to the wind.

If you're running a remote company, especially an internationally remote one, I strongly recommend finding a way to fit meet-ups into the budget. If not twice a year, then at least once. The human dividends are huge.

Until the end of the internet

2023-06-20T07:49:34Z

It's hard to know what'll stick around when shopping for software online. Popular services and crucial products get shut down all the time. You can't even trust that major conglomerates like Google to provide something you can count on two-five-ten years from now. And if you're betting on something backed by venture capital, well, you know that the odds of permanence are as long as can be. It needn't be this way.

Look at some of the most beloved brands of the 20th century. The Leicas, the Rolexes, the Porsches of the world. Companies that proudly embrace their legacy, and ensure that enthusiasts can still service their camera, watch, or car, even if it's fifty-plus years old. What a beautiful model, and what a contrast to what passes for product dedication these days in the digital realm.

If anything, it should be easier for companies like Google to honor their legacy than the likes of Leica, Rolex, and Porsche. The latter have to keep generations of old spareparts in warehouses, just in case that 1959 Leica M3, 1967 Rolex Daytona, or 1974 Carrera needs a replacement bit. Software services look comparably trivial to maintain in contrast.

Not that it's entirely free, mind you. We've been keeping virtually every single service we've ever sold or offered running over the past twenty years. There's the occasional security updates that need applying, the relocation to new servers, and the continued monitoring of uptime. It's an expense, but an oh-so-worthwhile one.

Take Basecamp, for example. The original version went live back in February of 2004. That's before the iPhone! Before SaaS was even coined as a concept! It built the business we run today, but by 2010, we decided to do a full rewrite, and from 2012 onward sold a totally new version of the software to new customers. Yet, we kept the old version running for all who enjoyed that.

That's the nasty secret of SaaS. Even if the service doesn't just disappear entirely, like it often does, it might well "evolve" in a direction you don't care for one bit. But what choice do you have? Almost all companies will simply tell you to get with the program, find where they hid the cheese now, and just be grateful that updates are even rolling out.

We choose a different path. That original version of Basecamp, developed from 2004-2010, continues to exist for the customers who are happy to use it. And there are thousands of customers, generating millions in revenue, who are just that, happy with what they got. Not in the market for something new. And we are thrilled to serve them! Like I imagine a Rolex executive feeling a pang of pride when spotting a Daytona 6263 in the wild.

What we've done with the original version of Basecamp, we've done with all our major services that are no longer for sale to new customers. Highrise, our beloved CRM, is still also used by thousands of companies, generating millions in revenue. Same too with Campfire, our old chat tool. Backpack, our old personal information manager. The revenue we make continuing to offer these services would never interest the likes of a Google, but so what? It makes us proud and our customers happy, do we need any other justification?

This is exactly what I mean when I say marketing is everything we do. Keeping even free services like Ta-da List around might not make strict financial sense in isolation, but it sends a signal to the market that we're here for the long term. That if you sign up for Basecamp today or HEY tomorrow, you can count on those services being here for probably decades to come. That means something, that's worth something.

We're here until the end of the internet.

You can't trust Google

2023-06-19T15:54:47Z

Google will eventually kill every single service you care about, if they can't find a way to directly monetize it with ads at a scale of billions. They're institutionally incapable of being in the product or service business, because neither products nor services butter Google's bread. Advertisement does.

You can see this emphasis in a myriad of ways, but my favorite lens is customer service. Google has always been uniquely awful when it comes to customer service, because helping someone with a problem on Workspaces or even the Google Cloud Platform was never going to be as profitable as helping an advertiser carpet bomb your attention span.

This is an evergreen observation, but I'm bringing it up in celebration of Google killing their domain name registrar Google Domains just now. After nine years in business, it'll unceremoniously get obliterated in just three months (and the shrapnel sold to Squarespace). That was a $180m/year business, servicing 10 million domains!

It's no better in the dead-business-walking department of Google Home / Nest. Google bought Nest almost a decade ago, and has managed to do worse than nothing with its product portfolio since. Just a few years ago they killed Nest Secure, leaving anyone who bought into that system with a bundle of bricks next year. And the Google Home app that was supposed to take over from the superior Nest app has been a multi-year stumble of embarrassment and neglect.

With a history like this, why would anyone trust Google on products and services outsides of the ad space? This goes from Workspaces to Gmail for Domains to even the Google Cloud Platform. This company is one major reorganization or recently promoted executive away from murdering any of these.

All I'm saying is you better have a backup plan. Be that for your collaboration, your email, your home security system. Anything that reads "Made by Google" implicitly has the subscript "until we don't give a fuck any more" printed below.

Turn down the volume on the world

2023-06-19T09:26:52Z

It's hard to think original thoughts if your senses are being perpetually flooded with everything from everyone all the time. And it's hard to protect your senses against this if you're constantly in close mental proximity to those who've had success running the established script. To escape back to first principles, you need to consciously turn down the volume on the world.

I credit much of the novel work we've done on product development, organizational design, and software tooling at 37signals with being far removed from the centers of Silicon Valley. Physically, spiritually, and mentally. Right from the start.

Being in Chicago in those early years of the post-dot-com-bust internet was like living in a monastery. We knew there was a party going on a hundred miles inland, but the debauchery was never so close as to color our thinking or tempt our aspirations. We were geographically destined to see the world in a different light.

This was before social media. When much of Silicon Valley's propaganda had to be carried by monthly magazines and the occasionally breathless mainstream story. Which made it so much easier to tune out. Now it's more work.

It takes concerted effort these days to escape the AI FOMO fest, say. Like it required fortitude to resist the fear of missing out on the latest coin hype before that. Every feed is there to homogenize your thinking into a preconfigured camp. For or against, hype or denounce. These are all just plusses and minuses in front of the same thinking.

If you want more than this, you ought to embrace the paradox that there are times when the less you know raises the bar for what you can do. Don't drown out our inner drumbeat by living all your days inside the permanent intellectual festival of your profession.

Acting your wage will atrophy your abilities

2023-06-15T08:58:57Z

Abilities unused will atrophy, so putting in anything less than your best means giving up on what you’re capable of. You can’t save talent or energy for better days, only watch it go to waste. This is a hard truth to accept if you don’t think your company has earned your best.

And companies make employees feel like that all the time. This is part of what drives the whole “act your wage” rebellion. Why should you put in your best if work never seems to return the favor? It’s a perfectly human response of spite in the face of unfairness, but you can’t avenge your grievances by squandering your potential.

The years will wash away quickly. If you wait for the perfect company to reveal your peak potential, it may never come. Or by the time it does come, you’re not ready, because you’re no longer who you were. You let it slip. That’s a tragedy.

Whatever the situation, whatever the company, you should show up with your very best. Not for them, but for you. Use the discontent to become better, then bolt to another camp when the opportunity presents itself.

Besides, you’ll appreciate a good place so much more if you’ve made it through some bad places.

Don’t play yourself by living down to their expectations. Show yourself the path out by shining bright whatever the weather.

The Le Mans Centenary

2023-06-13T10:48:25Z

I didn't get into the race car until two in the morning. By then, the rollercoaster that is the 24 Hours of Le Mans had already been going for ten hours. Oh, and we were a lap down on the leaders in our class. Doh!

I've never had the race go that long before getting into the car. Usually by midnight, I'll have driven at least a good two hours of the required minimum six. But this edition of Le Mans also had more drama than any of the previous nine attempts I've been part of. At the end of the race, 22 cars had retired from crashes or mechanical issues, and several more were limping home many laps down. It was mayhem.

Which started right from the words green, green, green. By the first chicane down the Mulsanne straight, a Cadillac in the class above us crashed hard immediately in front of my team mate Pietro Fittipaldi, who had to brake and swerve to avoid the carnage, dropping us from first down to fourth position in class.

Not that the position really matters that early in the race, as long as you have the pace of the leading cars, which we did (at least in the beginning). We ended up completing 316 laps, or 4,305 kilometers, across the full 24 hours, so where things stood at lap 2 was never going to matter that much.

But you still like to be out in front. It's good for morale. So of course we all cheered breathlessly when Pietro, as one of the only drivers, dared stay out on slick tires when the monsoon rain fell a few hours into the race. That allowed us to jump right back up to the front, as everyone who'd (sensibly!) gone to wet tires had to pit again to go back to the slicks.

Running out front, my other team mate, and fellow Dane, Oliver Rasmussen, made it look easy. With a solid 10-second lead over second place, Oliver just kept clocking in the laps, as the track got drier and quicker. And for over two hours, he kept the lead. Things were going almost too well!

That's the danger of Le Mans. The race is so long that it's easy to start dreaming about results well before it's prudent. Given the fact that our car had been so fast during the test day and practice sessions, and given the fact that Oliver was cruising out in front, I foolishly did let in those intrusive fantasies of victory before I'd even gotten in the car.

Never do that at Le Mans.

Because after six hours, our troubles came. First, Oliver probably ran over some carbon-fiber debris on track, which delaminated a tire, and forced an unscheduled pitstop. That turned the 10-second lead into a 20-second deficit, but hey, that's what happens.

Worse was that rain once again swept the track just two laps after we pitted, and it caught Oliver out. He crashed the car coming out of Tetre Rouge, but managed to keep the main damage squarely on the nose, which didn't take long to change. It still meant another pitstop, though, and now we were three minutes down.

Freaking Le Mans!

And that's why I waited so long to get back into the car. With conditions this treacherous, and now with the sun having set, I had absolutely no desire to hop into the car for the first laps then. Le Mans is a tricky track in the best of conditions. Pro drivers had already crashed plenty of cars in the light and the dry, and they'd crash many more in such ideal conditions before the race was over. So I didn't fancy my odds going out in the dark and the wet for the first run, which meant Pietro had to go back in.

That was clearly the right call. Not only did Pietro make quick progress, which crucially kept us from turning that three-minute deficit into going a lap down. So when a safety car was finally called to deal with a myriad of simultaneous track incidents, we were brought right back into the fight. As the track went back to green, we were running fifth or sixth, just a few seconds behind the leader, and Pietro was poised to pass at least half the cars in front easily, as they had their amateur drivers in.

Le Mans wanted it differently.

Barely had the track gone green, and barely had our excitement of being back in the game subsided, before an overly-ambitious attempt at a pass into the first chicane landed our car in the gravel trap. Boom. That was it. Now we were a lap down for real, and any shot at a win essentially gone.

That's the margin that makes this race so interesting. You can do literally hundreds of laps across the French countryside with perfect poise, and then you make one tiny mistake, in a split second, and it all goes away.

Maybe it was knowing that we were already out of the running baring a miracle, maybe it was jumping in while the track was still very damp in places, and dark in all the others, but I didn't have a good first run. Sometimes you click with the car at Le Mans. Everything flows just right. The traffic comes just as you're able to make the key passes without losing anything. This wasn't one of those times.

So I handed the car back to Oliver rather deflated, after that first run. You never know whether you're going to get another shot at running at Le Mans. This track literally only exists twice a year, the rest of the time it's mostly public roads. And if this was going to be my last impression, in case of a race-ending incident, that would have been a real bummer. Thankfully it wasn't.

Now given the fact that I had waited nearly half the race to get into the car for the first time, I ended up having to do almost half of what was left in the race once I got going. So at 7:30 in the morning, I got back in the car for another two-hour run, and this time the car and me did click.

It's a strange sensation, but in some ways it can be liberating to drive at Le Mans when you're no longer in it to win it. All the pressure is gone. It's just you and the track and the commitment to go flat out, damn the risks. That's what this middle set of stints felt like. Car was starting to wake up from its slumber during the night, where we seemingly just didn't have the pace of the leading pack due to the lower temperatures. So I was going a good two seconds per lap quicker than in the night.

Pietro hammered home that point after me. After going no quicker than a 3:40 minute lap in the night, he set the fastest time of our race with a 3:37.3. That was still a ways off the quickest lap in our class, which was a 3:36.0, set by Robin Frinjs in the #31 WRT, though. Showing that in the race, we just didn't have the ultimate pace. But it was still quick!

With three hours to go, I was due to complete my final set of triple stints, but not before Le Mans showed us twice that even if Oliver and Pietro hadn't set a foot wrong, we probably still wouldn't have been able to taste the podium champagne. First we lost eight minutes to an overheating engine issue (which required putting in 4.5L of water that had evaporated!), and just before the end of my runs, we lost half an hour changing a dead starter motor.

On the positive side, I banged out my best laps of the race in those final three runs. Managing a satisfying 3:38.9 fastest lap. Cementing a top 40 fastest laps average of 3:41.1. Good enough to be the fifth-fastest silver driver (in a classification stacked with professional drivers half my age!). A small consolation, but a consolation none the less.

Such ended my tenth participation in the 100th year of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. With another result far off the potential of the effort. Maybe Le Mans is trying to tell me that I've already had more than my fair share of luck at Circuit de la Sarthe.

In the first six attempts, I managed to finish on the podium four times, including winning with Aston Martin in 2014, and gracing the overall podium in 2017. But in the last four attempts, the efforts have been foiled every time by mechanical issues. Blown engines, blown gears, blown starter motor.

I'd probably be wise to take the hint and hang it up. But when the pace is still solid (I had over a second on the winning silver driver on the top 40 average fastest laps!), it's hard to commit to calling it quits.

We'll see where it goes. But in the meantime, my greatest gratitude to the JOTA team for giving me the best chance at a result since 2017, to my team mates for being gracious with my gentleman-driver ways, and to Le Mans itself for being the greatest motor race in the world.

+ + + +

Hybrid combines the worst of office and remote work

2023-06-08T10:07:50Z

The honeymoon for remote work is over, and managers who never liked the concept to begin with are plotting its complete reversal, so that things may return to how they were before The Great Remote Experiment. This experiment convinced millions of employees of how much better life could be without a commute or even having to live by the office, but also left uneasy the legions of managers whose skills and mindsets were anchored in the office.

This reversal plot is know as hybrid work, and combines the worst of in-office and remote work worlds. The shrewd – but likely temporary – concession here is starting with three days in the office, two from home. By starting like this, managers who have no interest in remote work at all can claim to have "compromised", dulling the urge to revolt. Then once resistance has worn down, the last two days can be dropped, and a full-time office reality can once again reign supreme.

The hybrid arrangement kills many of the key benefits of remote work, like that all employees must again live within a commute's distance of the office. In the US, that often means either dealing with a soul-crushingly long rush-hour journey by car or a life in the center of cities that are struggling with both high rents and high dysfunction. And it means hiring is again restricted to that small circle of people within a commute's distance of the office.

It also makes the interruption factory the norm once again. While there are undoubtedly benefits to meeting in person, you needn't do so every day – or even every week or month! – to reap those benefits. And forcing everyone to do so, including those who need long stretches of uninterrupted time to unleash their creativity, will be very hard for anyone who flourished in a calm home office.

Amazingly, hybrid also kills several key benefits of in-office work. Perhaps much importantly that unless both time and days are mandated, you often end up with employees going to the office, only to realize that they'll have to do a video call anyway to collaborate with someone who isn't there today. A long commute can be crushing on the best of days, but it's twice as bad if it's in service of the same zoom fatigue you could have enjoyed from home.

But also that when work straddles the gap between asynchronous and real-time throughout the week, you can easily end up with half-assed version of both. When some of the information you need is written down and discussed online on the out-of-office days, and the rest lives only in the minds of people from oral tradition.

I say, do or do not. Hybrid is a cop-out. Commit to the office, if that's what you want. Or commit to remote, and enjoy all the benefits it brings. Don't fiddle this Machiavellian middle.