Small teams

`2:35:38`

that emerges from the code, from the product, from the thing you're working on in the moment. You know far more about what the great next step is, when you're one step behind rather than if you try 18 months in advance to map out all the steps. How do we get from here to very far away? You know what? That's difficult to imagine in advance because humans are very poor at that. Maybe AI one day will be much better than us, but humans can take one foot or put one foot in front of each other. That's not that hard and that allows you to get away with all that sophistication. So the process has become much simpler. You need far fewer people, it compounds. You need much less process. You need to waste less time in meetings. You can just spend these long glorious days and weeks of uninterrupted time solving real problems you care about and that are valuable and you're gonna find that's what the market actually wants. No one is buying something because there's a huge company behind it. Most of the time.

`2:36:38`

They're buying something because it's good. And the way you get something good is you don't sit around and have a meeting about it. You try stuff. You build stuff. — It really is kind of incredible what one person, honestly one person can do in 100 hours of deep work of focused work, even less. — So I'll tell you this, I tracked exactly the number of hours I spent on the first version of Basecamp. And I was doing this because at the time I was working on a contract basis for Jason, he was paying me, I was gonna say $15 an hour. That's what I got paid when we first got started. I think he had bumped my pay to a glorious 25. But I was billing him and I know that the invoice for the first vision of Basecamp was 400 hours. That's what it took for one sole individual in 2004 to create an entire system that has then gone on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars and continues to do extremely well. One person just me setting up everything.

`2:37:38`

Part of that story is Ruby. Part of that story is Rails. But a lot of it is also just me plus Jason, plus Ryan, plus Matt. That was the entire company at the time. And we could create something of sheer sustaining value with such a tiny team, because we were a tiny team. Not to spite off. Small is not a stepping stone. This is the other thing that people get into their head. This is one of the big topics of "Rework." That it gave entrepreneurs the permission to embrace being a small team. Not as a way point, not as like I'm trying to become a thousand people. No, I actually like being a small team. Small teams are more fun. If you ask almost anyone, I'm sure Tobi would say this too, even at his scale, the sheer enjoyment of building something is in the enjoyment of building it with a tiny team. Now you can have impact at a different scale when you have a huge company. I fully recognize that and I see the appeal of it. But in the actual building of things, it's always small teams, always.