Writing company updates (“Heart beats”)

`1:10:42`

And we would never have AI do this this is not a summary of tasks or a summary of output it's someone's own words this is very important to us so it's someone's own words and so there's a lot of that kind of writing and there's shorter writing too. A lot of commentary and whatever but but it's the long for if you can't write long form you can't work at Basecamp. Yeah. Yeah. What makes one of those heartbeats good? Usually that's a that's a really good question cuz there's a few people who write really really good ones and I'm like why why are these so good? First of all there's personality in them. It's not just a summary like it's not like a computer summary of things it's like this person worked on this this was really hard we were trying to break through this idea we couldn't get there

`1:11:28`

they really nailed it or they put in some extra effort to make this better for someone else there's a lot of things that are about helping others whenever I read heartbeats and it's like this person helped this person solve a problem I'm just like it just inspires me it's great and it feels like the writing is better. and usually they're short they're short summaries but they get to it in a way where like I'm like I know exactly what happened I wasn't paying attention this thing at all for 6 weeks and in this amount of writing with these people who are referenced in it I know what happened. That's how it has to feel and there should be some personality like I should know who wrote this like I can tell Rosa Rosa writes these incredible Her writing is so good and and like I go that's yep Rosa wrote that I don't even need to see who wrote it like I know Rosa wrote that or Brian

`1:12:13`

wrote this like I can just tell so there needs that needs to come through. Um we're very anti internally very anti AI style writing like I don't I don't want convenience right I don't want convenience I want people's own words the people who I work with who I talk to every day I want their words. In the in their choice of words there is more meaning because I know it came from them so there's there's something to that that's really important to us the other thing that's great about writing internally especially long form this is I think lost in so many people is that when you do things orally so if you're if you're having a meeting which is how most companies communicate it's only good for the people in the room and someone say well you can have a transcript well okay maybe or you can record it like it to go back if you're a

`1:13:00`

new employee joining the company 8 months from now and you want to go back and like understand how this company runs to watch like to try to watch 40 hours of boring ass video from a meeting it's you're not going to do it but you might skim and read some things and see some things catch your eye. The institutional knowledge that's built up in long form writing is wonderful for the future. It's good for now but it's so useful for new employees to get up to speed quickly on how the company communicates writes shares by looking at the evidence of past people doing that versus if you weren't there you missed it or hey watch this 45 minute video what with like you know 3 minutes of good stuff in it who's going to do all that you know so I I think it's so valuable and it's