Planning in 6-week stretches and figuring it out as you go

`1:03:11`

It's funny because there are some principles I hold, perhaps, or some direction I'm headed, but I don't think about any of this ahead of time, including the company. We don't have a multi-year plan. I don't even have a one-year plan. I don't even have a six-month plan or a quarter. We think about everything we're going to do every six weeks. Every six weeks, we rethink what we're going to do next. We're very much an in-the-now company, making it up as we go. And this is true for me, personally, my career, the whole thing. I didn't have any of this planned out. I didn't decide I wanted to be like this or like that. I just figure out what works and keep doing that until it doesn't. And then, maybe we do something else. But it's very much, I'm not on a path. I can't see the path.

`1:03:57`

I'm on a path. We're going somewhere. I don't want to stand still. But I don't know where I'm going, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that. For me, it is really much about making it up as you go, based on, again, being in touch with how things feel to you, what your intuition is, what your gut tells you, what makes you happy. What do you want to do? What can you do? Sometimes, it's things that make you happy and you can't do, just because life is what it is. So, understanding that and figuring out what the trade-offs are. But really, it's figuring out as we go, and I think, frankly, it's the best way to run a business. I think it's the healthiest, most honest way to run a business, which is, to figure it out as you go. I think the further out you plan, the less you know about the decisions you're making. And by the time you get there, you're probably going to be wrong, or you're going to want

`1:04:45`

to do something else. And then, if you're like, "Don't do those things," then what's the point of planning? People end up doing things they don't want to do because they said they were going to do them. Obligations in the future, I think, are quite dangerous, and I think they send people down a path of unhappiness, actually. I think just staying closer to now is probably the best way to do that. A lot of this trickles down from the biggest decision you made, which is, don't raise money, keep control of this business. You're the boss. There's no boss above you. Yeah, the independence. If you go to 37signals.com, there's 37 ideas. And the first one, there's a 00, which is start here, which is like a read me. But 01 is independence. Independence is the root of all the things we're able to do, and we did make that intentional decision.

`1:05:31`

We didn't know all the tentacles that come up from that and what it's going to impact and touch, but we knew principally, we want to be able to do what we want to do. We want to be entrepreneurs and to me, that means working for yourself. The moment you go out and take money or have these big obligations, you end up working for someone else. I do understand why some companies do it, but I don't understand why a lot of people do it, who probably shouldn't do it. I think staying independent is a wonderfully fulfilling experience, and it's very hard to do when you're beholden to someone else's timeframe and expectations. Another thing we rarely have here are expectations. This is the point.

`1:06:16`

We launch a new product, I don't know what's going to happen. We launched Basecamp, I didn't know what was going to happen. We launched HEY, I didn't know what was going to happen. We're going to launch some new stuff soon, I don't know what's going to happen. We don't say, "If this gets 20,000 users, then it's a success." I don't know. We don't care. It doesn't even matter. We're making it anyway, and we're going to see what's going to happen. The market will tell us what happens. I'll just wait to find out. There's no sense in spending the time thinking about what could be. Just to push back, I imagine there are expectations of like, "I hope this works out. I hope people adopt it. I hope it becomes the best email client in town." There's a sense of like, "We want this to succeed"? That's pride, though. That's a matter of like, we want to be proud of the work that we did. We really hope people like it, and we want to keep doing it.