42: Jason Fried - Finding yourself in business

54 min • 4 november 2023

Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals (Basecamp with a valuation of 100 billion, no really ;D), is one of the most positive, successful, forward-looking people that I got to know. He doesn’t care about retros and dwelling on the past and constantly pulls forward without looking too much at what others might think.

This amazing episode ended up being a look into the mind of a successful contrarian who appreciates the beauty of simplicity in business.

* Don’t overcomplicate decisions in business

* Being confidently wrong about reality is easy when there is no reality to check it against

* We’re doing more and more of what we don’t necessarily need

Timestamps:

06:00 Having a public opinion on things that are not mainstream even if it’s uncomfortable.

09:00 Figuring out yourself, and who you really are is never done.

12:00 Don’t overcomplicate it, there are fewer wrong or right decisions than you think. Decide and run with it.

17:45 Double down on whatever works, don’t do post-mortems, retros…

20:55 Is developing faster and faster really what we need?

28:15 Culture and bad goal setting

36:33 Most decisions are based on intuition

46:25 Customers are always trying to make progress and that won’t change

49:30 VC money vs. Bootstrapping

Jason Fried’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-fried/