It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work

Chris Ronzio (01:46):

Hey everyone. And welcome to Organize Chaos. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio. And today we're talking with the one and only David Heinemeier Hansson. DHH, as he's known online. If you've followed his videos, his podcast, use his products, read his books, you probably already know who this guy is, but we're gonna dig into his story. And some of the principles that have made Basecamp and his other projects so successful. So David, thank you for being here.

DHH (02:11):

Thanks for having me on.

Chris Ronzio (02:13):

This is great. Okay. So today we're gonna dig into some of the principles in your New York times bestselling book Rework. It was the first one I bought personally, and I gotta show you, it still says 37 signals on the cover. So this is like original copy. Remote, which is more relevant than ever. And I've got it on my iPad so I can read it remotely, wherever I am, and then It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. So all of these books are incredible and I want to dig in, but first let's give our listeners a little bit of background. You are a developer at heart, right? A programmer and creator of Ruby on Rails, the programming language. Also for any listeners here, that is the language that Trainual, my business, is built on. So thank you for that. You are the co-founder of Basecamp, which I'm sure millions of people have used. If it wasn't for that product, my first company wouldn't have existed. And then you're also co-founder of HEY, which is kind of disrupting email. So we'll talk about that. And in your spare time, you've won your class in the 24 hours of Le Mans the race, which I've only seen Ford vs. Ferrari. I don't know how relevant that is, but that's what I'm aware of. Is that, is it close at all?

DHH (03:28):

That is the track. That is the history of that event. Is it fully realistic? No, not so much, but it's still a great movie. I enjoyed it a lot. And, uh, that is the streets of Le Mans that I'm gonna go back to racing on this year.

Chris Ronzio (03:41):

Yeah. I just saw your announcement about that. So did you take a year off? Is that what it was?

DHH (03:46):

I took essentially two years off from Le Mans. I'd been doing Le Mans for eight years straight. And then when the pandemic kicked into gear, things got pretty weird and no spectators were allowed in Le Mans, usually 300,000 people descend on the city to watch the race. And it's just this electric atmosphere. And now it was almost like it was a virtual event. You just had a bunch of cars driving around with no spectators, none of the magic of that event. And I thought like, you know what, now's a good time for me to just sit on the sidelines for a while and enjoy the couch, but the couch got boring and I got interested in getting back into the car, so I will be doing that for this year.

Chris Ronzio (04:26):

So, where is the adrenaline flowing more for you when you're in the race car at that race or when you announced, HEY, or any of the other projects that you're, that you work on?

DHH (04:37):

Yeah, that's a good question. I actually often compare, race car driving with programming because both of those two activities provide me with this gateway to flow. This magic state, where you're really engrossed in an activity to the point where you forget time and space. If I'm working on a hard programming problem, sometimes I'll get so into it. I'll look up and I'd go like, wow, an hour and a half has passed. Two hours have passed. Much the same actually as being in a race car. I've been at Le Mans many times where you're through your second stint and you're like, wait, it's been an hour and a half, two hours already in the ca? It felt like just 10 minutes. So I love that state of flow. And sometimes you get that in business too. And the launch of HEY, I both got some states of flow and some states of extreme stress and anxiety because when we launched HEY, not only was it a product launch for something we'd been working on for two years, spent millions of dollars doing. This was a huge new project and product for us.

And I was super excited. I'd been working on myself for two years and just wanted to show the world. But then on day two, Apple showed up and essentially threatened to shut the whole thing down before we even got going. So I spent the next two weeks in a suspended state of extreme stress, anxiety, excitement, all the emotions mixed into one to both manage this incredible launch we had where we signed up tens of thousands of paying customers in about no time at all. Yet, didn't know whether we even had a business, whether Apple was gonna squash it all by kicking us off the app store. And that was a bit of a rush. Usually those flow states and those stress states are like, you get two hours here, one hour there. To go through two weeks straight. I think it was, that was how long it took before we knew we were safe from Apple's threats was really quite something.

Chris Ronzio (06:36):

Crazy. Did you know when you pushed the button that you would be, become a part-time lobbyist basically, and learn so much about antitrust, all these kind of things with Apple?

DHH (06:48):

No. I mean, the funny thing is actually earlier that year I delivered a testimony to Congress on their series of inquiries, into big tech. And I had just done, so as an industry observer, let's say. Someone who kind of cared about the topic of antitrust and thought like, yeah, do you know what we're not heading in the right direction here? Someone should do something. So when I got invited to testify in front of Congress, I was like, yeah, that sounds great. But it wasn't really like in my soul in the sense that it is when you faced a existential threat yourself for your business. And that was what Apple delivered me. They truly did radicalize me during those two weeks where I thought like, do you know what this is just outta control. We gotta do something. We gotta level the playing field.

We gotta protect access to markets. It can't be that these computing platforms that are so important are gate kept by two companies for the entire world, for every user, for every developer. That's just not right. And I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's necessary. I really got pulled into that, uh, struggle and have spent the last two years, basically showing up to every invitation for testimony that I could find. Two weeks ago I testified in front of the Illinois State Senate committee on this topic and the Illinois House committee on this topic, just continuing to push wherever we can to get legislators and lawmakers to address the problem of monopolies, which is really a problem that only they can address. That's the insidious thing about monopolies is that they're not responsive to normal market powers.

That's why there are a problem. That's why all the way back to Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations in the 1600's. He's like, Hey, this is a problem, like commerce, good. Capitalism, good. But be careful, monopolies might develop, and you gotta do something about that because if you let it fester, then the markets just break down. So really got into that. It's just, it's one of those interesting struggles where you're like, you don't know whether you're really making progress. You're like, I've testified, I don't know, 5, 6, 7, 8 times now. And you're like, I show up prepared to give my sort of speech about why this is important. And then you go like, is anything happening? It is a bit of a frustrating activity compared to product development, right? Like, I'll sit down in front of the computer, I'll program it up a new feature and we'll launch it like two days later for HEY or whatever. And you're like, you see that immediate feedback.

Chris Ronzio (09:26):

Tangible, yeah.

DHH (09:26):

Race car driving, right? Like you go around in the circle and at Le Mans in, uh, three minutes and whatever 30 seconds you'll know, did we do good, did I do good? Was that a good lap? Um, it's a really long term game when it comes to antitrust. That's really measured in years, if not decades.

Chris Ronzio (09:43):

Well, that long game is kind of the story of a lot of your career where there's not so much force on progress, but it's patience and things develop over time. So I wanna dive deep into the work culture stuff and, and we'll get there. I know you also visited Arizona though. And I read through the dialogue, the statement that you made there. So I appreciate that you're doing this kind of work. And for anyone that wants to, you know, get an education on this, I encourage you go look up everything that David's done. So he's trying to make a mark here in this stuff. All right. One more question about, HEY while we were kind of on the topic. I'm curious, when you set out to disrupt email almost, a lot of people think, oh, Gmail, and that's as good as it's gonna get. So what were some of the maybe perceptions or assumptions that you had that have been harder to move the needle on than you thought?

DHH (10:31):

Oh, that's a good question. Well, I think first of all, just the task itself seemed almost impossible when we took it on. Gmail has been the dominant force in email, basically since it was launched and they know it. And that is the reason why it's both this exhilarating challenge, but also this almost insurmountable one at the same time, because Gmail has sat fatly on email as the default option for almost everyone since 2004. And the client shows it. They have not had any serious competition when it comes to sort of whole platforms. There's been all sorts of interesting apps that have tried different things, but they've all built on top of Gmail. They've never tried to challenge the email service dominant power that they have. And here we come along with this crazy idea that private individuals should pay for email. Like first of all, head exploding, right?

What do you mean pay for email? I've been getting email for free for 15 years. Well, quote, unquote free, right? Like you've been paying all along. You just haven't been paying in cash money. You've been paying with your attention. You've been paying with your data. You've been paying with your dignity and your receipts and everything else that Google is rummaging through. Right. So I think, first of all, that has changed on its own. I mean, if we had tried to launch HEY in 2010, it would just have been crickets because everyone at that time just thought like, oh, Google is this benevolent wonderful company that just gives away email for free. Aren't they just nice. They're doing it for the best of our interest. None of the awareness and sort of skepticism that we've seen develop over the past decade was there.

But now when we launched in 2020, there actually was a market. There actually was a large group of people who had thought about these issues. Who had thought, do you know what, I don't like it. I don't like the way I'm paying for Gmail. I don't like paying with my attention, my dignity and my private data. I would like to just pay with money. And that was who we sort of appealed too. It's still an uphill battle. And when you look at the fact that Gmail has over a billion users, I mean, we're never ever going to get that. And it's not what we're trying to do either. Right? Like we're trying to offer a premium, but niche product for the kind of person who uses email enough that a hundred dollars a year is not sort of totally out left field, right?

DHH (13:06):

Like they can imagine spending money on something. They spend a lot of time on. And that was the whole reason we built, HEY in the first place. There's basically two activities where I spent my entire day in terms of communication. It's am, we'd already built that. And we already used that like all the time. And then the other one was email and I was using Gmail and I was spending hours a day because I write a lot of emails. I receive a lot of emails. It's the main way I communicate with the outside world and Basecamp is the main way I communicated with the inside. Well at our company. So I knew quite quickly after we started developing, HEY, that we had something here because after having worked on this for a few months, I thought to myself, there's no way I'm going back to Gmail.

There's just no way I cannot go back. And a lot of it came from managing that flow. One of the things that always really just annoyed me with Gmail and most other traditional clients was the concept that anyone who got a hold of my email address and hat wasn't exactly hard. I plastered it all over my damn homepage and a bunch of other places, they could get access immediately to my brain on their account, on their timetable. They send me an email. And if you use a standard email client like mail app on the iPhone, like it literally buzz your pocket. Like someone in the world could buzz my pocket whenever they wanted, just because they had something to say. And maybe that was something I was interested in. That happens some of the time. But a lot of the times it was not. A lot of times I was not interested in hearing about what they had to sell or what they were following up or whether I wanted to buy a list of customers from some competitors, some other bullshit that I get a absolute infinite amount of email about.

I felt like, do you know what I was not in control of my inbox? I mean, literally my inbox was being filled up and my inbox as for a lot of people, it's kind of like my, part of at least, my to-do list for the day, for the week, for the month. This is what I'm working on. This is what's important. And I just have all these people just putting stuff in there. I didn't say yes to that. One of those features that just really made a huge difference for me and my tranquility, my calmness and my sanity to be frank, was the screener. This simple idea that no one gets to reach my inbox in HEY when they write me for the first time until I give them permission. And it's one of those insights where you think like, well, I don't know, that sounds kind of obvious or whatever. And then you use it and you go like, oh, there's a before. And then there's an after.

Chris Ronzio (15:51):

Yeah, how did I live without this?

DHH (15:54):

Yeah, exactly. And it just one of those ideas, we kind of got inspired by one of the big changes in online dating. Which was Tinder's idea of the Swipe. That you had to have a two way connection where like this person says, yeah, I wanna hear from this other person and the other person also says, I wanna hear from them. And now you have sort of two-way consent. Before that, online dating was not like that. I did online dating before Tinder, and it was a very different thing. And particularly women had a very different experience when they were just hearing from a bunch of people they were not interested hearing from. I felt it was a little bit like that, of what we kind of discovered with HEY and this screener that like all of a sudden, now my inbox is full of people. I want to hear from like that in itself is just like, oh yeah. Why wasn't it always like that? Why was my inbox full of people I did not want to hear from.

Chris Ronzio (16:53):

You think back, it's almost, it's almost like the yellow pages kind of gave you access to everyone's phone number a long time ago, right? And you could call anyone and then now all of a sudden there's, you know, it's, it's screen, you screen it with your phone, you can block unknown callers and that sort of thing. It's so interesting how, you know, you see a trend like that. You see a trend, like, you know, people paying to have no ads on Hulu or something. You see a trend of, you know, the Tinder with the swipe in and the opt-in. So did you just see all these things happening and it sparked the idea for HEY or what was the moment that you said, oh, we need to make a product for this.

DHH (17:31):

It was really, I wanted those things. That's how we drive most decisions about product at Basecamp is like, we want those things. I've been doing emails since 94. Is that right? 93, something like that. I've been doing email for a long time and I'm a software developer. I'm a product person. Like I can't use someone else's product without developing an idea of what I would change if I was in charge. And now we'd literally had almost 30 years of experience with someone else's product. With something as crucial as email and realizing, you know what, I'm not happy with what we've got. I am not happy with Gmail as it exists, this frozen pocket of innovation from like, why am I using a system from 2004? That's barely changed in 2020. That just doesn't, that doesn't make sense with me.

And, and Jason and I, we sort of, we kind of almost like looked at each other and like, where are we spending our time? If we're gonna invest all of this resources into something, there's a little bit of selfishness to it. We wanna make our own days better. We wanna work with through products that we really love doing. And I mean the best, or at least the selfish way of doing that is to build your own thing. So we drove the first version of, HEY, more or less exclusively from what is our ideal email client? What does that look like? Now? You still gotta listen to customers, but for us, at least that's something you do after V 1. V 1's gotta hit with a vision that is tight. That has not been corrupted by a thousand voices telling you, oh, you should do this and you should do that.

And you should do this. It is just this tight focus on, okay, we're gonna solve our own problems and the knowledge and the faith that there are gonna be other people like us. There are gonna be a bunch of people out there who want and would use what we have, um, once we've come up with it, but could not necessarily articulate it. That's the other thing, right? Like when HEY hit, it was full of things. People would never in a million years have asked for. That is the magic of sort of product development, right? When you address someone's needs and problems in a way they could not articulate themselves, they would say like, oh, well I want more filters in Gmail. Or could you make... they envision, most people envision things in the context of something they already know. That's the old adage of Henry Ford. Right? What would people ask for, a faster horse, not a car because they can't conceptualize out of it. The world needs product. People who think not how can I do what someone asks for, but how can I do something that's good for them?

Chris Ronzio (20:22):

Yeah. I love that. And so kind of a thread that goes through both, HEY and Basecamp. And it's also one of the principles in this book is scratch your own itch. So I kind of heard you almost say that right there, build something for yourself. And so for anybody that doesn't know, the beginning story of Basecamp, was it something similar? Like you built something you needed.

DHH (20:41):

Exactly, exactly the same. In fact, when we started building base camp, we didn't even have the concept that this was gonna be a product we were gonna sell. The company was simply a web development design shop at the time with clients. And we were coordinating in projects like everyone else does over email and dropping balls, right? Like people didn't get the right version of the file. The right people weren't included on the email and someone joined the project after it's already been kicked off, you couldn't easily catch them on. There was no single source of truth. Everything was just scattered. Right. And we were like, you know what, Hey, we know software, we could fix this. So we started working on Basecamp just for ourselves. And it just didn't take very long until we were like, oh, this is better.

I'm not going back to organizing our projects on email ever again. And if it's that same feeling we just talked about with, HEY, too, right. Where you get to this point of no return, I'm not going back. I will not go back to what we used to do. And when you feel that point, I think in a lot of cases there's something there. Sometimes you feel that point and you just weird and there's no one else like you and your product will fail. That is totally possible. Um, but for Basecamp, we thought, Hey, maybe there's something here. So we showed it to a few people. We knew in the industry and they were like, Hey, can I give you my credit card? Can I pay for this?

Chris Ronzio (22:01):

If you were customer number one, who was customer number two? Friends, clients?

DHH (22:06):

Actually Coudal Partners. It was an ad agency. And they do a bunch of other things beyond ads, but a company in Chicago, we were sharing an office with and Jason showed Jim Coudal Basecamp. And he was like, I'll pay for this. And we're like, oh, cool. I mean, this should, this should, I guess this should be a product then? And then we spend a few more on turning these ideas and this solution we'd made for ourselves into a product. We slapped the price on it. And boom, February 4th, 2004 basecamp.com. Actually, not basecamp.com, basecamphq.com because we weren't gonna squander a bunch of money on a fancy domain. Went live and the rest is sort of history.

Chris Ronzio (22:50):

So for anyone that's on websites that have an HQ in them, that's kind of the genesis of where the HQ websites came from. Right?

DHH (22:58):

I was quite sure I hadn't seen it before we did it. And then we kind of even documented that to, I think it's even a chapter in getting real, our very first book that we self-published. Don't squander a bunch of money on a fancy domain. Don't even think that much about the name. It's not that important. Um, and I mean, it's funny because then we spent money later buying basecamp.com and it was sort of expensive domain, but not exceedingly so. But then imagine what, hey.com was, this was not a domain we had owned since 95. We had to buy that from the people who owned it and they knew what they had. So that's also sometimes just the evolution of a company. That's a thing we could never have done in the beginning. When we started working on Basecamp, we were four people, no backing, no capital, no nothing. Right. By the time we bought, hey.com, we'd been in business for almost 20 years selling a profitable software/service solution. So we could do that, right? Like sometimes you can do those things. I would never otherwise advocate. Like you're just starting out, oh, spend all your money on a fancy domain. That is pretty much the opposite of what you should do.

Chris Ronzio (24:10):

Right. So part of what made you so resourceful in the early days was that you could code and, you know, you invented this language, Ruby on Rails to create Basecamp, right. Or, you know, around the same time. So a question from some of my engineer, friends is you see all these low code, no code solutions coming out. But for years, Ruby on Rails has been the go to for startups that just wanna build, uh, a prototype, wanna build something that works. So how do you think that's gonna change over the next five years, let's say?

DHH (24:38):

Well, I'm dating myself here, but I'm now old enough that I've been through, I think, three cycles of no code. Um, it used to be called, fourth generation languages. This was in like 95. Then in 2005, 2006, there was another round of it. I forget what it was called then. And then there were kind of like a couple years back was another wave of it. But that one seems to have already Crested. Every single time, people believe that they have invented the shortcut where programmers are no longer needed and we can just write code by imagining it they've been wrong. And they've been wrong because we're already at the level of abstraction with Ruby and Rails where the decisions you're forced to make as a programmer are the consequential ones. The ones that determine are we making one thing, are we making another thing?

Ruby and Rails is a toolkit that lives underneath the surface of what you want to do. It sets no limits of what you want to do. It sets no prescriptions on how it should work or what it should feel like or what the UI should be. And no code environments always dip above that line. They always go like, Hey, we make it easy because it looks like this way and, and so forth. I mean the most successful, no code environment of all time is of course, Excel. Excel has been the birthplace of millions of applications that have been highly profitable and run around the world. And why, because it's a constrained domain. You can't build everything with Excel, but you can build an awful lot. You can build a lot of information systems with Excel, but as soon as you get beyond those boundaries, you need a quote unquote real programming language, right?

So I love the fact that no code environments exist. And sometimes you pick out this, this sort of segment of the market like Excel did, and like, Hey, we can make things easier here. And if you're making this kind of thing, then it gets very easy. I think you look at something like Shopify, Shopify is essentially a no code environment for building an e-commerce store, right? They take that problem that used to create or require dedicated programmers in a very expensive way that required them to build all those elements for... we gotta build a shopping card system. We gotta build an inventory system. And then they built all that stuff. So if what someone wants is just an e-commerce store, they can basically use that no code environment. And they can either say entirely no code, just pick the templates and boom, off you go, you're selling stuff. Or you can build on top of it and add a little extra. Those are the kind of no code environments that I think really have legs. And then the thing though is if you wanna build the next Shopify, yeah, you gotta use Ruby on Rails. You gotta start at the that, right? You can build on top of the platforms, you can do all that stuff. And that's great for certain number of businesses. But if you wanna be the next Shopify, you gotta use something like Ruby on Rails.

Chris Ronzio (27:32):

Makes sense. Makes total sense. Yeah. Our director of engineering, who was our first programmer and started us with Ruby on Rails, his daughter's name is Ruby. So if that shows you the dedication to the language... I've got a copy of the book. It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. And so I love this and I wanna pick it apart a little bit because especially right now, there's a lot of conversation around just craziness, burnout, the culture of a lot of businesses, especially with the great resignation as they're calling it and people looking for better environments to work in. So the question for you is what is this? Self-induced craziness all about? What is the problem that the book is addressing?

DHH (28:12):

I think the key thing, is really two things. One is a maniacal level of ambition that a lot of people sit with at an entirely too early and inappropriate state. They just gotta started. And they're in such a rush to become a unicorn, to become a mega success that they feel like they have to pour in everything they've got. And then another 20% on top, right? That this is this notion of hustle culture, that unless you simply just kill yourself trying to achieve your goals, you're never gonna amount to anything. First of all, we wanted to debunk that. In 20 years of running running Basecamp, we've never worked like that. We've never worked the 80 - 100 hour weeks. It's just not been a part of our culture. And we use that as one example of it, doesn't have to be like that, right?

Because part of this appeal of the hustle culture is this belief that you can't succeed unless you do. I think a lot of the ambitions are simply flawed. They're also flawed from just a human perspective. Even if you are an ambitious entrepreneur who wants to succeed, I have had so much fun running Basecamp when we were seven people, when we were 12 people, those were great moments. In some regards, they were the best moments. In other regards now is good too. But like there's magic at being a small company that you don't wanna dismiss. And for some companies and for some people, 12 is the magic number. That is the size. They should stay at forever because that's where things just gel and they work. And you have nothing to apologize for that. Small is not a stepping stone. You don't have to get to whatever this cover of magazine level of success because most people don't right.

That's the other thing, stack the odds in your favor. What are the odds that you could build a sustainable, healthy, profitable business with four people, 12 people, you know what? There's still difficult. It's difficult to do anything. It's difficult to succeed with anything, but it's so much easier than trying to become a unicorn, right? Like how many companies that start tomorrow will become a unicorn 10 years from now, what one out of 10,000, whatever, right? What would the odds be of you becoming a successful company with four people, 12 people, 20 people, infinitely better than that. That's the ambition level. Then the second part of it is, it doesn't even work. Even if you go that path. And even if you think I'm gonna pour in 80 hours, I'm gonna pour in a hundred hours. I'm gonna just kill myself over the next five, 10 years.

It's a shitty way to work. You can work much better and be more productive. And in fact, have better access to fulfill that ambition. If you work in a way that works. And for us, that's a whole lot about uninterrupted time. A lot of these people pouring in 60 or 80 hour weeks are just thrashing their working on 10 things. At the same time, constantly jumping back and forth. They're constantly in meetings. They're constantly getting interrupted. They're not really getting traction. They're just spinning their wheels really fast and creating a lot of smoke. That's not how you move forward. That's not how you go fast. So we advocate that 40 hours is enough and eight hours is plenty. 40 hours for the week and eight hours for the day. That's all you need. If you can convert that into having 2, 3, 4 hours of uninterrupted time, you'll run circles around people who are working twice as long, just thrashing all over the place and spinning their wheels and producing a bunch of smoke. So we have a lot of techniques and tactics and ideas for how you can actually do this, spend the time you have better.

Chris Ronzio (32:14):

It's it's funny, you know, you say a 40 hour week and eight hour days, which sounds like what was intended from the beginning. It's the novel idea, kind of like people not being able to email you and get in your brain themselves. It's, it's simple. And it's just going back to a simple, calm way of running business. And I love the phrase is 'maniacal ambition.' I think that's so true. I remember being in an incubator kind of thing when I was starting out and the facilitator stood in the front of the room and said, I wanna show you what it takes to have a million dollar company. And if a lot of you don't want one, that's great too. That's what we're trying to figure out here is what it takes to run the right business for you. So such a great point. Now, was it always that way at Basecamp from the beginning, or did you suffer from of this ambition when you were first getting started overworking as a startup?

DHH (33:04):

Well, that's the funny thing is that both Jason and I sort of came of age in the industry during the.com boom. And we saw the.com bust. So we had already got inoculate with, against this kind of working, because that was very prevalent in the late nineties, all the way up to essentially 2000 or whenever the.com boom burst. So we started our company or set our direction, Basecamp actually used to be called 37 Signals and I was starting at this design firm in 99. But the time that I joined and we started focusing on software in 2003, we were both very clear that those scars that we had accumulated during.com boom and bust, we were not gonna repeat that. We were gonna work a different way, and we were not gonna repeat these maniacal ambitions. We were gonna run a profitable, sane, calm business, because that's where we wanted to work, that this wasn't about some get rich, quick scheme, where we were looking to flip it in 18 months or two years, we were trying to build a company we would wanna work in or work at for the long term.

And there is no better time to develop the habits that you want to have 10 years from now, today. You need to start working on those healthy habits in the early days, because it's very, very difficult to get out of this hustle, mania and maniacal ambition mindset, 10 years into some path that has been paved with those ideas. So from the beginning, we were very much on the same page. We worked actually less than 40 hour weeks. That's the other thing Basecamp was forged as a side project as a side idea. When we started working, I had 10 hours per week, not per day per week to work on this thing from a technical perspective. And Jason at then, the other two people at the company was treating the development of this product as a side thing as a third or fourth or fifth customer.

And we had these other customers who had to pay the bills first, right? And even after we launched, which was a very successful launch for the time we beat our sort of ambition for where we wanted to be in a year in about three weeks, we still waited over a year before we went full time, because we wanted the business to be so secure that it could easily pay our salaries. And even if we had a dip in business, we weren't gonna suddenly be maxing out our credit cards. So the whole story of Basecamp from day one have been seated in these ideas that we now present to you 20 years later. And I think that's why they have credibility because these aren't speculative ideas. These aren't things that we think, oh, I don't know. It'd be interesting if a company tried to run like this. This was how we've run the company for 20 years.

We've seen what worked and what didn't work along those path. And that's not to say it's the only way to run a company, but it surely is a way to run a company and outside of the tech world and outside of the U.S., it's actually a quite common way to run a business. There are plenty of businesses around the world were 40 hour work weeks are totally normal. And asking people to work on weekends and whatever is actually not normal at all. They are happy, healthy people. So it's not like we're, we're inventing some deep dish here. We're taking some fundamental ideas and just bringing them to a domain where they're kind of foreign or a little rare. And we're saying, why are they foreign? Why are they rare? Let's revisit our fundamental principles here. And Hey, here we are. One example, one company, that did very well over the past 20 years living this. And let me tell you how we did it.

Chris Ronzio (36:51):

So, let's say that somebody listening, here's the message they wanna embrace the calm company, and they're not putting these kind of crazy ambitious expectations on people, but then you've got the employees that are working at the business and they may have their own personal ambition to wanna just work crazy and work on the weekends. And so how do you balance a company that has a calm culture with employees that are wanting to leapfrog in their career?

DHH (37:18):

First of all, I say, the way you leap frog in your career is to do excellent work. The way to do excellent work is to work long stretches of uninterrupted time with a well rested brain. So in many ways, I think you're doing yourself a disservice, at least in creative endeavors, where you rely on the maximum brain power, or you can squeeze out the maximum creativity that you can come up with. Those endeavors are not served at all by trying to pull all nighters by trying to work every weekend. In fact, it leads straight into the abyss. You will not have a great illustrious career that way, in my opinion. But we do see that. We do see that people come in and they think like, well, I mean, I'm trying to prove I'm trying to come up here.

And we tell 'em like, don't. When was the last time you took a vacation, vacations are important. When's the last time you took a sabbatical, we offer a month of sabbatical every three years. Did you take yours yet? Like you should really take it. They're great. And then we set the example ourselves. I take vacation. I have hobbies. I rarely work on the weekends, unless it's something I consider a hobby, like open source software. We have a crisis, which is also rare. I take sabbatical and I do all the things. I think a lot of it comes to from just setting a culture that this is not just permitted, but it's expected. This is how we work here. We don't work here by constantly burning the midnight oil, just to push through something. Again, there's always going to be occasionally the crisis.

There's always to be a squeeze. And for some time, I mean, show up, do that, be dependable, be reliable. That is one way to stand ahead. But that should be the exception, not the norm. If it is the norm, it's deeply unhealthy. I don't think it actually works. This is what I keep coming back to. Even if you think like, oh, I could do this, right? I'm at a place in my life now where I could put in 80 hours, I think you get less out, right? This is the irony of this. That when you put in twice as much, you might get out half as little. If you simply focus for those 40 hours, I'm gonna make those hours damn count. I'm gonna solve the hard, difficult problems. I'm gonna think deeply about things. I'm gonna get to the root of it. I'm gonna get to the bottom of it. ..

I'm not just gonna skate on top. I'm not gonna be involved in a thousand things at the same time. I'm not gonna let interruptions run my day. I'm not gonna let meetings, puncture my calendar. I'm going to do great work. That is one of the most satisfying ways... I was about to say to work, but it's even grander than that to be a human. We spend so much time at work. And that is only paid back in a sense of meaning, if we're truly making progress. If we're truly cracking hard nuts, right? Like this needs to be something that has something to show for it. And there's so many people out there there's just thrashing 80 hour weeks, and then it becomes Friday afternoon and they're like, what did I get done this week? I don't know. There was a lot of meetings, bunch of emails, I guess. Better luck next week?

Chris Ronzio (40:29):

Yeah. So I've gotta ask you. This will be the last question, because I know I promised you that we'd stay on time. If someone's working those crazy 60, 80 hours, and you could give them advice on how to trim back to the 40 most productive hours possible. What are just some tips that you'd give them to look and to rip out of their schedule?

DHH (40:49):

Well, the first thing I'd say is it almost happens automatically. If you put down the barrier. The brain is actually quite good at picking the most important things when it's set a boundary. The problem is when you feel like there is no boundary, because there's always unlimited amount of work at almost any company, particularly if you're the entrepreneur or the founder. Why 80 hours a week, why not 200 or if it was physically possible 300, right? Like there's unlimited amounts of work. So you have to sort of set this quote unquote arbitrary boundary, I think is not that arbitrary. We found over decades of views that like a 40 hour work week is a good compromise. So that automatically cuts it down. And then I'd say the other thing to start dropping right away is meetings. Meetings is probably the most toxic time sync that most people waste their attention and creative energy in on a weekly, continuous basis.

DHH (41:44):

And you can replace the vast majority of meetings with written asynchronous communication, here you communicate pitches of new ideas, analysis, write ups, in writing and what you spend those much fewer meetings you'll now have on is the debate over where do we go from here? If you can't even agree? The vast majority of the time Jason and I work together for 20 years, right now, we probably spend, I don't know, an hour a week in a meeting together and that's about it. But we communicate every day. We have all this information that goes back and forth. He's even living on the west coast of the us right now. I'm living in Denmark at the moment. We only actually really have an hour or at most two of overlap during a normal day. But we're constantly collaborating because we're not into this synchronous way of thinking that you have to sit at your computer at exactly the same time I'm sitting at my computer.

And then we are together here on zoom. You write something down. I read it tomorrow. Most things are not that urgent. Most things are not ASAP. Most things are better when you give them five minutes or a day to think about it. And you could be more cordial and you can be more insightful if you respond to something after a bit of a break. And when you collaborate like that, it's just so much easier. And you have so much time. This is one of the things that people often ask me is like, oh, how do you get so much done? And I'm like looking around, what do you mean get so much done? I don't feel like I'm stressed out at all. I don't feel like I'm working that hard at all. I just take my work in those chunks when I can get 'em. Boom.

I just spent three hours, four hours trying to solve a hard problem. Okay. I solved it. You keep doing that week after week. Hey, now you've solved 40 hard problems in a year. That's a lot. In retrospect, it looks like a lot. And this is the sort of, um, one of these other ideas from racing is that to go fast, you gotta go slow. You gotta have slow hands. You gotta be measured. You're not expending all this energy that going fast often feels like going slow, right? Like it feels fast to be spinning your wheels. It feels fast to have a lot of smoke around you, a lot of activity and a lot of interruption, a lot of meetings. Oh man, I'm so important. I gotta chime in on everything. It's not fast. It's not productive. The productive fast way is when things seem like weirdly almost boringly calm. And you're like, all right, six o'clock, having dinner with the family, close the laptop. I'll see you tomorrow.

Chris Ronzio (44:19):

That sounds like success right there. To summarize here, I mean, I could listen to you talk all day. I've got four pages of questions I didn't get to ask, but what I want everybody to hear is that you've gotta set a boundary. You've gotta tell yourself that you're gonna work within that boundary and be disciplined to actually respect that boundary of however many hours you're gonna work and then have that focused time. A lot of great tips from you on how to get that focus time. Tons of them in your books. Of course you can communicate async through Basecamp, through, HEY, great tools for people to check out if they're not familiar. And another important point is people should be making their companies calm today and not thinking someday when we hit some milestone, that's when we'll really invest in the culture.David, so many incredible lessons here. Again, I wish we had hours more to talk, but thank you so much for being here. If people wanted to follow along, I know they've got a lot of places they could go, where is the one place you'd send them right now.

DHH (45:15):

Dhh.dk. That's my personal website. It has links to everything, including links to the newsletter, where I spent the majority of my time writing these days on HEY world, which is directly at world.hey.com/dhh. But if you just go to dhh.dk, You will find links to everything. All my books, products, things I'm involved with and writing

Chris Ronzio (45:34):

Well, David, thank you for everything you're doing to influence the next generation of modern businesses that are not burning themselves out. I appreciate it.

DHH (45:41):

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

‍

‍

‍