Jason Fried Quotes
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Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they'll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they'll bring you down.
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If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond 'the office.' If they do say the office, they'll include a qualifier such as 'super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,' or 'I stay late at night after everyone's left,' or 'I sneak in on the weekend.'
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As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.
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When you're short on sleep, you're short on patience. You're ruder to people, less tolerant, less understanding. It's harder to relate and to pay attention for sustained periods of time.
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I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.
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We like to bully deadlines. Pick on them; make fun of them; even spit on them sometimes. But what a terrible thing to do. Deadlines are actually our best friends.
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A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.
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Like many entrepreneurs, I started out in sales. I began at 14, when I got a job selling shoes and tennis rackets at a pro shop, and I've been selling one thing or another ever since.
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I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.
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Since your company is the product that makes all of your other products, it should be the best product of all. When you begin to think of your company this way, you evaluate it differently. You ask different questions about it. You look at improving it constantly, rather than just accepting what it's become.
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I've seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn't matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.
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The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.
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Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.
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Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.
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Respect the work that you've never done before.
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Deadlines are great for customers because having one means they get a product, not just a promise that someday they'll get a product.
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It's incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.
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To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
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Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
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You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.
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You have to live with your decisions every day. Why live with one you're uneasy with? 'Because it'll make you money' is a common reply. But I don't think that's good enough.
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Fix a few things here, improve a few things there, launch a new feature every so often. That's coasting. And I don't want Basecamp to coast.
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We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.
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Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale - the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.