Jason Fried Quotes

A diverse customer base helps insulate you; a few large accounts can leave you vulnerable to their whims.

I live in Chicago but own some property up in Wisconsin.

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, ‘Our products are like everyone else’s, too.’

I’ve seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn’t matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.

People pulling 16-hour days on a regular basis are exhausted. They’re just too tired to notice that their work has suffered because of it.

The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. In fact, offices have become interruption factories.

When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.

I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn’t enough.

It’s easy to forget, as a leader, that when employees don’t get the wide view, not only does the point of their work escape them, but it can also lead to real frustration. It’s hard to feel pride and ownership when you don’t understand where things are going.

A company gets better at the things it practices.

I’d love to see more businesses take this approach – intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, ‘Let’s stick around here.’

A computer doesn’t have a mind of its own – it needs someone else’s to function.

By rationing in-person meetings, their stature is elevated to that of a rare treat. They become something to be savored, something special.

You have to live with your decisions every day. Why live with one you’re uneasy with? ‘Because it’ll make you money’ is a common reply. But I don’t think that’s good enough.

Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they’ll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they’ll bring you down.

If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond ‘the office.’ If they do say the office, they’ll include a qualifier such as ‘super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,’ or ‘I stay late at night after everyone’s left,’ or ‘I sneak in on the weekend.’

I’ve run into a lot of companies that invent positions for great people just so they don’t get away. But hiring people when you don’t have real work for them is insulting to them and hurtful to you.

A fixed deadline and a flexible scope are the crucial combination.

I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren’t the complicated things. They’re the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.

These two staples of work life – meetings and managers – are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. In fact, the further away you are from both meetings and managers, the more work gets done.

It feels good to be productive.

If an employee can demonstrate results produced in a way that the company didn’t think possible, then a new way forward can begin to take shape.

When it’s all about the work, it’s clear who in the company is pulling their weight and who isn’t.

When you spend time with potential customers, you get to hear about their struggles firsthand. You see their eyes light up with excitement or darken with confusion. You learn things you would never find in a survey, database, or questionnaire. You learn why people buy.

I’m not sure a lot of companies know their story, or can explain why they exist and who they are, without just spewing just corporate speech.

When meetings are the norm – the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem – they no longer work.

Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.

In almost every case, cutting things back is a way of favoring what is left.

Like many entrepreneurs, I started out in sales. I began at 14, when I got a job selling shoes and tennis rackets at a pro shop, and I’ve been selling one thing or another ever since.

I’m a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own without having to bother a programmer.

Give your employees a shot at showing the company a new way, and provide the room for them to chalk up a few small victories. Once they’ve proved that their idea can work on a limited basis, they can begin to scale it up.

If you tell your story well, it can help attract customers; it can help people understand your business better, and you are more approachable as a business and a company.

Being a salesperson prepares you for just about everything in business: how to listen, empathize, and persuade; when to back off and when to step in; and, of course, how to close.

Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.

Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that’s important – speed.

When you’re short on sleep, you’re short on patience. You’re ruder to people, less tolerant, less understanding. It’s harder to relate and to pay attention for sustained periods of time.

A lot of people relate leadership to formalities. They believe that leadership is about being professional and strong and always right and being a booming voice. I just don’t buy that. I think that leadership is a soft skill; it’s a people skill.

Your employees have lots of opinions about everything – your strategy and vision; the state of the competition; the quality of your products; the vibe in the workplace. There are tons of things you can learn from them.

What’s bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing.

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it.

Whenever you need something from someone else before you can move forward, it’s a dependency. We believe dependencies slow people down. We want people to be more independent, because that will keep them moving forward.

Since your company is the product that makes all of your other products, it should be the best product of all. When you begin to think of your company this way, you evaluate it differently. You ask different questions about it. You look at improving it constantly, rather than just accepting what it’s become.

The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you’re at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer’s specific needs.

The owner of a company with supertight margins – say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods – would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

It’s like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you’re pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it’s lunch, then you have something else to do.

When time, money, and results are on the line, it’s easy for tension to build.

The reality is that companies are full of things that are left unspoken. And even when they are out in the open, the CEO is almost always the last to know.

We don’t want to bank all our risk on a small collection of big companies. We don’t want to lose 20 percent of our business if one big account goes away.

Many of the things we do at Basecamp would be considered unusual at most companies: paying for employees’ hobbies, allowing our team to work from anywhere, even footing the bill for fresh fruits and veggies in our staff members’ homes.