Choosing the right path for your business

`0:31:34`

But you could imagine it could have been swapped. So it's not that Basecamp couldn't be this big venture scale, whatever you want to call it, although look, hey, we have the same number of customers roughly than they do. Are we? I guess we are venture scale in that respect. But again, point is is that depending on how you approach it, you can take anything in any different direction. So it's more of a mindset, what are you after? We're not after that and they are. So that's what they do. And we do it a different way. So I don't necessarily think... There's things like Airbnb is a great example that that has to have a certain degree of scale to really be something that no matter where you go in the world, you're like, I can get an Airbnb there. And that's probably going to take money to get there.

`0:32:21`

Same thing with Uber. Uber's another example, and these are easy to pick, but they're great examples really. When Uber was getting started and they had to proliferate all over the country to begin with and all over the world. So it was this reliable thing you could think of just you would think of a cab. If I went to New York or Chicago, I knew there'd be a cab. Was there going to be an Uber? I don't know. Well, you have to know that there's going to be one to begin to trust us. So in order to do that, you have to expand rapidly. So there's that kid of, those kind of businesses exist and those are great examples of venture-backed companies that kind of need that massive initial push to be available in all the different places because they're actual physical products. Airbnb's a physical product, Uber's a physical product, Basecamp, Monday, Asana, they're available everywhere instantly anyway.

`0:33:08`

I don't know what you need the money for other than marketing. And it's interesting because marketing's losing them a lot of money. So it's an interesting thing. But anyway, you can talk to them about that. I want to start chatting about your ways of working, how you operate at 37signals. There's a lot of really unique approaches. One is you mentioned that every project is, I didn't know this. It's two people, a designer and engineer, and then two to six weeks of work. Can you just expand on how you actually do that, how broad development works there? Yeah, so we have framework development framework we invented called Shape Up, and if you go to basecamp.com/shapeup, you can read the book, it's free. You can also get a print version if you want. Shape Up is our methodology for actually building products. And part of this is this idea at the root of it is this idea of the six-week cycle.