#74 – Jason Fried: Optimizing efficiency and work-life balance

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Luck and timing explain more success than founders admit

  Fried, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, says he used to believe everything he did was intentional. Now he thinks that if he started the business today, there's a good chance he couldn't do it at all. Timing has many dimensions: personal, market, competitors and public appetite. He also says business only gets harder over time, with more customers, staff, expectations and competitors, and the risk of becoming blind to new ideas.

• 02

  Profit is a skill you have to practise

  Fried compares companies that claim they can 'pull the lever' on profitability whenever they want to someone claiming they could walk on stage and play guitar without practising. Profit is the business making 'its own fuel'. Relying on outside money puts undue pressure on founders.

• 03

  Uber, Lyft and WeWork are 'terrible businesses'

  Fried says Uber lost about $1.8 billion on roughly $11 billion in revenue, though he isn't sure whether that was a year or a quarter. He points out it had raised over a billion dollars and been in business about a decade. He says WeWork's IPO filing admits it may never be profitable, and calls Uber's ethics a 'dumpster fire' driven by growth pressure. The corner dry cleaner, he argues, is a better business.

• 04

  Amazon is the exception, not the model

  Attia recalls a hedge-fund friend in 2013 arguing that Amazon's share price was entirely explained by AWS, its cloud business, so the retail business came free. Fried's answer is that outliers don't matter for real businesses. A pizza shop that loses money on every slice to sell more would obviously fail.

• 05

  Fried doesn't set goals

  In high school, Attia rewrote a long list of fitness goals every day. He changed one, five miles in 25 minutes, to five 6-minute miles when he saw his long, slow training would plateau. Fried says goals end in disappointment or an endless treadmill of new 'fake numbers': running a 6:06 instead of 6:00 says nothing about whether the run was enjoyable, got him outside and moved his body. He just wants to do his best work. Attia pushes back that 'objectives', like what the 85-year-old Jason should be able to do, are still goals.

• 06

  A calm workday means eight uninterrupted hours

  Fried argues long hours aren't caused by more work but by days chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. You need contiguous blocks for creative work. At Basecamp, the theme of his book It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, people get eight hours to themselves and nobody can see others' calendars or take their time. He compares eight hours to a flight to Amsterdam: a long time when it isn't interrupted.

• 07

  Small teams, six-week projects and few dependencies

  Every feature at Basecamp must fit in six weeks or less, many in two or three, with at most three people, typically two programmers and a designer. Three can self-manage without ties; a fourth creates sides. Teams work like 'glide wheels, not gears' so they rarely wait on each other. Progress is shared through automatic daily check-ins and a six-week summary instead of presentations.

• 08

  Find the 'epicenter' and accept trade-offs

  A hot dog stand without ketchup or a bun is still a hot dog stand; without the hot dog, it isn't. Fried's team asked what customers really wanted from a calendar: to see which days have something on them. That took far less work than a Google Calendar clone, which he says can't be built in six weeks, but a version solving 80–90% of needs can. Rougher screen transitions or cutting his book from 40,000 to 20,000 words are accepted trade-offs.

• 09

  Saying no is precise; saying yes is a shotgun

  Fried says agreeing to one thing rules out a thousand others, while declining removes one and keeps options open. Attia notes a one-hour talk can cost 48 hours. Fried cites a story, which he isn't sure is true, that Warren Buffett books meetings only a day ahead. His point: 'we block our future with present obligations'. He values flexibility, which is also why Basecamp will stay independent.