Why meetings are toxic

`2:58:01`

we'd be better off and we'd have more stable business relationships as well because folks would get that nurturing human relations somewhere else. Now when I say all of that, I also accept that there are plenty of great businesses that's been built over the years that have not been built remote, that have been built by a gang of hooligans sitting in an office for immense hours of time. I mean, both John Carmack and Tim Sweeney talked about that in the '90s with their careers that that was just basically work, sleep, hang out with the guys at the office, right? A totally fair. That never appealed to me. Both Jason and I saw eye to eye on the idea that 40 hours a week dedicated to work was enough that if we were gonna go to distance for not just the five to seven years it takes to build a VC case up to an exit. But for potentially 10 years, 20 years or further, we needed to become whole humans. Because the only that whole humanness was gonna go to distance,

`2:59:02`

which included building up friendships outside of work, having hobbies, finding a mate and having a family. And that entire higher existence, those legs of the stool that work is not the only thing in life is completely related to the fact that we've been around for 25 years. There's way too much, especially in America of false trade-offs. Oh, you wanna build a successful business? Well, you can either have money enjoyment or family or health pick one. What? Why do we have to give up all of this? Now again, I'm not saying, and there are moments of payers in life where you can sprint. But I am saying if that sprint turns into a decade, you're gonna pay for it. And you can pay for it in ways. I've seen time and again seem like a very bad trade that even if it works. And by the way, most of the time it does not.

`3:00:03`

Most of the time startups go bust. Most of the time people spend five, seven years or something that does not pan out and they don't get the payout and then they just sit with regret of like, what the fuck happened to my 20s? Early on, Jason and I basically made the pact that working together was not gonna lead to that kind of regret. That we were gonna allow ourselves and each other to build a whole life outside of work. And the fact that that worked is something I feel is almost like forbidden knowledge, certainly in technology circles in the US. It's something that we've tried to champion for 20 years and we still get slack. For just two days ago, I had another Twitter beef with someone saying like, "Oh, well okay, maybe it worked, but you didn't turn into Atlassian. So you're a failure. Basecamp isn't Jira, so why are you even bothering?" And it's such a fascinating winner- takes-all mentality that unless you dominate everyone else

`3:01:04`

in all the ways you've lost. When so much of life is far more open to multiple winners where we can end up with a business that have made hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, and we've kept much of that to do whatever we want and that's enough. That's good, that's great. That's actually something worth aspiring to. Certainly it should be a path for someone to consider choosing rather than the VC unicorn of bust mentality that dominates everything. — Yeah, I'd love to ask you about this exchange so you can explain to me the whole saga, but so just to link on that a little bit is I think there's a notion that success for a tech founder is like work for a few years all out and then exit, sort of sell your company for, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars. That's success. When it seems in reality,