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`0:10:18`

You have, I think you said, 70 something employees? Yep. You have similar numbers of customers, about 100,000 to 150,000, and you make a lot of profit and they generally don't. How is this possible? We run a very different kind of business. We are focused on efficiency, we're not focused on growth…

`0:11:05`

infrastructure required to service customers like that, and customize this and customize that to keep a whale happy who's paying you $300,000 a year. We don't have any of those things. We have one price, basically. Well, we have two prices on Basecamp, one price on HEY. Actually, two prices on HEY. Two, basically…

`0:11:53`

points and different expectations. That's why these companies tend to get bigger and bigger and bigger. They also, frankly, build products just differently. We build products with two people at a time. So every feature we work on in Basecamp, or HEY, or whatever we're building is two people, one programmer, one designer, and they…

`0:12:43`

Valley's gotten quite good at, but we're quite bad at intentionally. I don't want to spend money on things we don't need. So we think that constraints, simplicity, small teams actually are where it's at, and keep us honest, and allow us to do great work for our customer base that we…

`0:13:28`

amount of complexity organizationally that they must have to... The latticework they have to build up to support all that weight, is just remarkable and it's foreign to us. Okay. I definitely want to talk about how you operate in your way of working, 'cause it's really interesting and there's a lot companies can…

`0:14:14`

Then there's one more. "You don't need to outdo the competition, it's expensive and defensive. Underdo your competition. We need more simplicity and clarity." I think a lot of these things point to, there's a few paths to success and goals for people. One is build a massively scaled, everyone's using a…

`0:15:00`

If the answer is, "Yeah, that was enjoyable. I enjoyed that. That was worthwhile. I'm glad I did that. I'd like to do that again," then it was successful. Now you could carve out some extremes there. I'm sure someone who's addicted to drugs might go, "That felt great, I should do that…

`0:15:51`

looking at them very carefully. It's in total, collectively, are we making more money than we spend? That's the only thing we ultimately look at, whether or not this product is more profitable than that product, and this is behind that, it's all the things we do. It's all the things we do…

`0:16:38`

As long as we can, at the end of the year, look back and go, "Well, collectively, more worked then didn't work," then we're okay. That's how we look at it. We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have…

`0:17:25`

very short. It espouses, you want to be playing infinite games to be happy in life, games that never end versus games like, I'm going to build a business and sell it. Or, I'm going to go public, that's my goal. Or, I want to achieve this promotion. You get most joy out of…

`0:18:14`

I could sell them to my friends for retail, which is almost 2x wholesale. Even though I'm not selling electronics equipment today, I'm selling software instead, I feel like I have the exact same job as I did when I was 15, that this is a long continuum of finding stuff that I like. In…

`0:19:01`

This is my job, so I want to create the company that I want to work at, and I want to keep doing this job for as long as I can. As long as I'm useful, I'm good at it, I enjoy it, I want to keep doing that. So to get in bed with…

`0:19:47`

It's this vehicle, more so than it is a software business. It happens to be, of course, what it is, but it could be something else as well. There's no limits to what it could be, and that's a fun way to go through life too, in this all-terrain vehicle which can anywhere…

`0:20:34`

But they should know that that's actually not the hard part. Literally tomorrow, I can start a new business. You can come up with a name, and you can make a thing, and you can put in the app store, and you can sell it for two bucks, and you've got a business going. But…

`0:21:19`

It's hard to build a podcast audience. It's hard to build a newsletter audience. So yeah, starting something is really easy, but then most people end up in this plateau area, 'cause they get some initial growth, the word gets out, and they end up with 6,000 somethings, and then you're stuck there…

`0:22:07`

But I just, "What do we want to keep doing?," and then we're in it to stay in it. Speaking of enduring, you've been at this for almost 25 years now, I believe? Yeah. Have there been periods where... I like that sigh that you just had there. It's a long time. So maybe…

`0:22:56`

what was it like in the early days? What's it like now? All the new things that are harder weren't harder before, and now they're hard today. Do I like doing this kind of hard work, or would I rather do...? You just amass this history, and so you tend to just call back…

`0:23:41`

years. Launching this new thing called ONCE, which hopefully we're going to build three or so products next year under that category. I would like to write another book. We finally have another idea for another book. So there's just, right now, this outpouring of energy. I'm trying to be very conscious of my…

`0:24:27`

What if someone else could just step in tomorrow? How would they run it? No one's ever had a chance to run it but me. What would they do differently?" I'd have to be completely detached from it to let them really run with it. But, what would they do? I always have this curious…

`0:25:15`

a lot more products than we're making today. Maybe resurrect a couple of things that we did in the past. Probably spend a lot on advertising, a lot of marketing, probably take our margin way down and try to focus on growth. What if we spent 70% of our margin on growth? What would that look…