Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1692: Rethinking Entrepreneurship With Basecamp Founder David Hansson

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Basecamp Co-Founder David Heinemeier Hansson about what’s wrong with the popular model of entrepreneurship. The terrible myths surrounding entrepreneurship. (1:50) The differences between Danish and American cultures. (5:41) How there are people who are more efficient with their time. (9:16) How he got started and the inception of Basecamp. (13:32) The value of efficiency. (20:25) You have to learn how to build it yourself. (24:04) The misleading concept of ‘running lean’. (28:24) The false dichotomy entrepreneurs fall prey to. (34:49) Was there a pivotal moment with his relationship with money? (42:44) Why are people paying for something they can get for free? (48:09) Why do so many entrepreneurs miss the obvious? (59:10) Hacks to improve your personal efficiency. (1:04:06) Do what makes you happy. (1:06:58) Why he is skeptical about the Metaverse. (1:11:20) His philosophy on screen time with his kids. (1:15:33) Related Links/Products Mentioned November Promotion: MAPS Anywhere and the Fit Mom Bundle – Both 50% off! **Promo code “NOVEMBER50” at checkout** Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Ruby on Rails Rework – Book by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried Marissa Mayer says the secret of success is working 130 hours a week Basecamp: Project Management & Team Communication Software Remote: Office Not Required – Book by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried HEY - Email at its best, new from Basecamp Free-Range Kids Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh)  Twitter Elon Musk (@elonmusk)  Twitter Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)  Twitter

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In today's episode, we interviewed David Heinemeier Hansen. He's the founder of Basecamp, Ruby on Rails. He's the author of reworked.

This guy's a tech entrepreneur, very, very successful, but he does things very differently. In fact, in today's episode, we talk all about the myths surrounding entrepreneurship and why finding balance is probably the key to success. You're really gonna enjoy this episode. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Viori. Viori makes some of the best at the leisure

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You heard me right, 60%, 60% off. It's the biggest sale of the year by far. So if you're interested, head over to mapsfitinistproducts.com and then use the code Black Friday with no space for that massive discount David you are for all intents and purposes a very successful entrepreneur, I would you I would say obviously a tech entrepreneur having started Ruby on rails and you know helping with base camp and you've written some really great books like rework, but the way you've done it doesn't fit at all with the stereotype of the tech entrepreneur avatar.

I would like to hear from you, and I love when you talk about this, I've heard you talk about this many times, I would love for you to talk about the most, I guess, dangerous or terrible myths surrounding entrepreneurship, especially in regards to tech entrepreneurship. Yeah, no, it's a topic I've been ranting about for a damn near almost 20 years. And so much of it is just this hero creation myth that it seems like every tech entrepreneur needs an origin story fit for Superman that they went through all these amazing challenges and then they worked 80 or a hundred hours a week for 20 years and then boom this is why they deserve to be at the top of the mountain. And I never had a relationship with that way of working. I think perhaps partly because I'm Danish

and that was just not a part of Danish culture. And by the time I arrived in the US, those things was set in me pretty well. I'd already achieved certain things, just working from Denmark, working part time, we created Basecamp, the project management app that we're still running almost 20 years later on 10 hours a week, not 10 hours a day, not a hundred hour weeks. So I just, I encountered

this incredible disconnect with what I was experiencing with the way we were building our business and what everyone else in the tech community seemed to be banging on the drum about. And for a long time, I thought like, this is just so puzzling. Why is this? Why is it that we can work normal hours, have 40 hour work weeks, and still create what we're creating that seems to be resonating pretty well and compare very fairly, very bleed to all sorts of competitors.

And then everyone else in the tech industry seems to be banging on like, oh, you got to work the eight hours, you got to work the hundred hours. I remember reading an article by Marissa Mayer saying, you can actually work 130 hours a week if you're strategic with your bathroom breaks. And I was like, strategic with your bathroom breaks. Are you in prison? Are you or your CEO? Like what's going on here?

Why is it that the most successful people in the industry are talking about their job as though they were a slave somewhere? This doesn't fit at all. So I eventually realized together with Jason, my business partner is that, do you know what? We have an example here, and it is our damn obligation to share that example to provide a counter melody to all this that's just coming out

constantly just being pumped out 80 hour weeks a Risk everything a third mortgage on the business. We were all the way and we're like We took no risk starting this thing. We piggybacked base camp of a consulting business. We didn't go full-time with it until it could pay all our salaries without any risk at all. We didn't raise any money. So we were definitely the odd ones out. Part of that from me coming from Denmark, part of that adjacent to my business partner coming from Chicago. And a big part of it was we were never on the West Coast. I've since enjoyed the West Coast and an awful lot living in Malibu for about 10 years.

It's a wonderful place to live, but I think in terms of entrepreneurial myths, it's probably ground zero for all the worst stuff that comes out in tech. Can you go a little bit further into Danish culture and maybe why that workforce is a little bit different the way it's structured and also you brought up Chicago as well. Cause I mean, I totally agree with the way that everybody thinks like we have to get all this venture capital to get something going and get massive debt right away. I mean, what were the differences?

Yeah, so I think the one thing with Danish culture was I grew up working class. We didn't have a lot, but it didn't matter in many of the most consequential ways. I had some health issues as a kid. I needed some ear surgery, never in a million years until I was probably like 16, 18. Did I even realize that there existed a universe where you had to pay for healthcare? That was the thing and then if you didn't have enough money, you didn't have to write insurance There were certain things you couldn't do so I grew up in a system where a bunch of the basics would just taken care of which created this

Nice pillow Incent of like you know what I'm not in a fight for my life here Like if the worst thing that comes out of my career is that I end up working some nine to five jobs somewhere, you know what, that's also all right. Denmark is full of people who are very happy and take care of their kids and enjoy their hobbies and vacations, working nine to five in a completely mundane job.

In a way that when I moved to the US in 2005, I quickly realized, wasn't quite the same, that the consequences for, quote unquote, not making it, were quite a lot steeper. So I think that impression just that, like, do you know what, if this doesn't work out, like it's not like I'm gonna end up on the street, right? Created a substantial sense of,

we can take it a little more easy. And also perhaps in part, the role model thing, one of the things with the American tech industry, you just, you hear it's over and over again. Everyone is looking to like, oh, Elon Musk is telling you, oh, I was sleeping on the factory floor for three years or whatever when we were building these cars

and you hear this, and the other story, and the other story, there were all stories about these heroic sacrifices. And I grew up in a country where like, there were all stories about these heroic sacrifices. And I grew up in a country where like, I didn't hear any of those stories. I didn't know anyone who worked more than 40 hours a week. So, I think some of that fuses into you, and you just get a sense of like what's normal,

and what's reasonable, and then you encounter a foreign culture, which is what I encountered with the tech industry, and just like, do you know what? No, this feels wrong. But I'd also say though, even within the US, it's not evenly distributed. The fact that our company was founded out of Chicago and not out of Seattle, not out of Silicon Valley, not out of New York, not out of any of these tech hubs gave it a real sort of earthy Midwestern, just cut the bullshin, let's get to it, vibe. And part of that is of course out of necessity. They're just 2005, they just

weren't a lot of other companies racing a bunch of money in Chicago. Chicago didn't have a strong text scene in the way that the West Coast hasn't. So those opportunities were never there truly to tempt us. So we were just like, well, we got to build our own things with our own ways and bootstrap it to where we want to go with it. Yeah, the irony is that you had no fear of living in the streets. Yet you took a more what some people would say, conservative approach versus maybe the culture here where if you screw you know, living in the streets, yet you took a more, what some people would say, conservative approach

versus, you know, maybe the culture here where if you screw up, you're on your own, and yet they take these massive risks with their business. Do you think some of that has to do with the, the way that sacrificing your personal health, your family, your body, your everything for a pursuit. Do you think that maybe has to do somewhat with how we glorify that and kind of almost like create this glorified character? Huge. Huge. There's such a work of holism as a point of pride in the US that when we talk about those 80 hours, we're not even talking like, what are you actually doing for those 80 hours?

Is it valuable stuff or do the last 40 count for something good? No, no, it's just that metal. Hey, I'm working so hard. I'm sacrificing everything. And that is part of the sort of mythology that goes into this. And this is part of why I feel good and why I feel worthy of all these spoils

that I'm receiving is because I put in more. And this is how I perhaps described to myself that like, this was worth it. And then I also think it's just a mimetic culture. We look to each other. We look to each other's role models and like, what are they doing? Oh, they're, they're still in the park. Like the cars are still in the parking lot at 9 p.m., right? That used to be the, the mean for I think both Microsoft and other places where the CEO

and other executives they look at the parking lot like how many cars are there still here at 10 pm at night. And that was a metric of success in and of itself, which I always found just so bizarre because I've worked with plenty of people who were very good at wasting 40 hours and even better at wasting 80. That wasn't just the value didn't come from squeezing every last sour drop out of that lemon. And I've worked with other people where you'd go like,

do you know what, they can accomplish in 10 hours what it would take someone mediocre 100 to get through. In the tech world and the programmer, we have this idea of a 10X programmer, which is a pretty disputed concept these days when meritocracy and so forth is sort of falling out of favor in certain circles, but I think it's absolutely true.

I've seen it over and over again, that there are just people who are more efficient with their time. And in part, I think that efficiency comes from running some degree of slack. One of the things I think is so funny is that so many tech entrepreneurs like to liken themselves to like serious athletes. They're like, oh no, if you want to be Michael Jordan, you got to work, like, work out 18 hours a day, 365 days a week. What are you talking about? No athletes are

working out 365 days a week. You need time to recover and recoup. You need days off. Otherwise, you're not going to rebuild. You're not going to do all these other things, right? They all miss that when they try to draw these parallels. No, now I'm actually Michael Jordan of whatever health care management systems. OK, first of all, come down, right?

Like, it's a self-grantization that I think is just entirely unhelpful and untrue. As we say, you look at all these athletes, that's just not how that works. It's why we have off-season, that's why we have all these other things. No human being can run 365 days a year on full throttle. That just doesn't work. You're going to pop every gasket in it,? And even more to the point as you brought up with a, I'm sacrificing my health,

I'm sacrificing my relationships, I'm sacrificing all these other things. I've seen countless articles essentially glorify that as like you can either have friends, success, health, pick two or something like that, right? And you're like, no, that's just not true. And we use ourself-sounding sample, hey, I've been in this business for 20 years,

build a very successful business. I had time to work out. I had time to have friends. I had time to have hobbies. I confined work to 40 hours a week. And I think I was a better executive because of it. I think it was a better programmer because of it. I think it was a better business person because of it

because you had sort of a broader perspective. And also I was just healthier, right? Like when you see these people who've been in this slok for 10 years, right? Where what they've been doing is staying at the office for 12, 14 hours a day. They don't look like happy healthy humans. This is when they start talking about strategic bathroom breaks

And you go like do you know what the chain popped up here? That's some Point along the way now David We jumped right into talking about scaling and working the hours and stuff But for the audience that is not familiar with base camp now. We use it every day. I love it's been who life changing So was rework for me But for the audience that doesn't know give us a little bit about how you started and then the inception of Basecamp. Sure, so I started working with Jason Frieden,

my business partner on the back of a stray email. I sent to him, he didn't know who I was. I was a fan of the company. He was running at the time, which was called 37 Signals Back then. It was a web design company. And he was turning to learn how to program. They were doing web designs and they were moving into building more things for clients. And he posted a question on the company blog,

hey, do you know how to solve this pagination or some issue? I sent him an email. He quickly decides it's easier to hire me than it is to learn how to program. We start working together. And a couple of years later, when we had worked on a couple of client projects together, we had an experience that I think is very familiar to a lot of people. You start by organizing your project on email, you add a couple of people to it, it goes over a few weeks and all of a sudden,

a ball is dropped and it's dropped because some person didn't get the right information or the accurate information or the up-to-date information at the right time and you go, damn, we need a system. We need a system. We can't just shoot emails back and forth. It does not work. We have too many people on this project.

This project is too important. And if we drop balls like this again, we're not gonna have any clients. So we started building base camp and asked that one place where the balls wouldn't be dropped. One place we could put all the to-dos, all the messages, all the files, all the milestones, everything that goes into managing

basically any kind of project in one place on a website. And we were building it just for us. And then halfway through the process, we're like, do you know what? Maybe there's some other people too who are dropping balls when they're sending emails back and forth. We showed it to a few people through the process, we're like, do you know what? Maybe there's some other people too who are dropping balls when they're sending emails back and forth. We showed it to a few people in the industry

and they're like, yeah, I totally buy that. So 2004, we launched Basecamp, initially targeted just that client services firms because this is what we knew. We knew people who worked for clients and we quickly realized, oh, we're getting all these signups from architects, from churches, from gyms, from all these other places

where you're like, oh, I didn't even realize that the thing we built was so universally applicable. And in retrospect, of course it was managing projects, managing communication, managing people, is something that goes on inside every organization, inside every business. So we kind of quickly broadened our horizons and turned this base camp into more than just a client services tool and turned it into a general project management and collaboration tool.

And we're still running it. We launched February 4th, 2004, and here it is, still going strong after all these years, millions of people have used it. And along the way, we learned a lot about how to run a business, because we ran a business in a bit of a weird way when it comes to the rest of the tech industry. We didn't raise any money, as we've talked about, which is just a huge difference, 9 out of 10 of most of the tech companies you will have heard of, they will have raised venture capital, and it sets them on a very specific course of how they need to run their business, because there's a time frame, and as I like to call it, there's a bunch of time bombs. They have to disarm, and if they don't disarm these time bombs in five years and seven years, and on their

way to the IPO, they're going to blow up and the company is going to stop existing. We didn't have those pressures. So we had this essentially lab where we had all the freedom and independence to try to build the best company we would want to work at. Which is a really interesting challenge because I had worked for other people and I learned early on in my career that I was not good at that. And part of that was because I had some bosses I thought were terrible and through every one of those terrible experiences I would make a mental note, like a mental scar and say, like, damn it. If I ever get the chance to call the shots at a shop, we're going to do things differently.

We're going to go back to sort of square one and reconsider things and not just do things because that's the way they've always been done and that's the way they've been done in our industry. No, no, no, no. We're going to rethink things from first principles. So we started doing that and kept doing that. And that was what rework came out of. Reward was our most popular book.

It's open one and half a million copies around the world translated to I think 22 Languages and it came out of essentially distilling 10 12 years of those hard-won experiences into one book with a bunch of short essays that I would want to read This is the other thing. We were building the kind of company I wanted to work at We were building the kind of products that I would want to buy and we were writing the kind of books that I would have the patience to read. So, I think when you approach things from such a, some would call it self-centered approach, you at least know whether it's good or not for you. And I think that ability to discern quality is just so important. It's so difficult when you're trying to do something on behalf of other people.

And you're like, is this good? Is this what you want? We had that instant feedback loop. Is this good or is it not good? I'll tell you. I'm going to use it. And if it's not good, we're going to change it. And the same thing with the with the books. So with rework, we had essentially been writing this material, as I said, for 10, 12 years. We've been writing block posts, we've been doing conference talks. We've been collecting our material in much the same way as imagine a stand-up comedian would do. They go out on the road, they try material, and a bunch of it doesn't work. And then the best stuff makes it into the special. So this was sort of our special after 10 years of running the business. And we've written a bunch of other books since, like pertinent here to our pandemic,

we wrote a book about remote work, which is something we've been doing since the start in 2013 called remote office not required. Where at that point, I was thinking, like, do you know what, we're late to this. We've been working remotely for over 10 years this point in our company. We're telling everyone the obvious things,

they're like, hey, remote work is actually pretty great. If you have a tech company, if you have creatives who can work from home, you can hire from anywhere, we're not confined to what, the five million people who can commute into an office in Chicago. We have access to 700 million people who could possibly phone in and do the work for us. All these kinds of things and was like,

oh man, we're so late to it. And it turned out we were like eight years too early. So anyway, that's kind of the story of just trying to figure out what works from a personal sense of like, do you know what, I wanna create something good that I would like, I would buy, I would do, I would read. Something I love is just your quest for efficiency. Also, I just noticed that you look at things as a consumer would look at things. Less

of like, I'm trying to introduce you to something brand new and try and get you to buy into the concept more. How do I use these things? How do I make them better? How do I get them all to communicate with each other? I mean, was this a big motivator going into the construction of base camp to get things already existed to kind of pull them together in an efficient way? Absolutely. And it was part of that humility that we went in with.

Do you know what? I'm not the smartest programmer in the world. I am not a rocket scientist. I can't figure out the latest AI, ML, whatever, whatever. I can take existing pieces that already exist and put them together in novel, better ways. And do you know what? That's what most people need most of the time.

They don't need these ground shaking innovations so much of technology in particular is about just making computers a little easier to use a little easier to set up a little easier to get others to use with you these huge breakthroughs that get all the accolades and that's great they're very smart people who can do that not me not what we do and I didn't have an inferior already complex about that. In fact, for the longest time at Basecamp, we had this saying, we don't do science projects. Science projects being categorized

as these sort of big unknowns. Perhaps a huge payoff if you figure out the golden code. We're like, we don't do that. We don't do science projects. We do things we can ship in six weeks. Things we can ship in 12 weeks. Short intervals where we can measure what we're doing and then try to improve it.

And all the building blocks are really there, which is perhaps in some ways ironic because I ended up building almost all of my own blocks. Ruby on Rails, which is this toolkit that's been used to build everything from Twitter, to Shopify, to GitHub, to you name it, was something I built because I thought the blocks that were already there weren't good enough.

But again, there were no sort of groundbreaking innovations. It was all in the composition that I was taking the best ideas that already existed out there and remixing them, putting them together in a cohesive pack and integrating them. Because this is one of the things that techies so often get wrong, is they're like, they come up with this grand idea

and it'll just be one piece of the puzzle. And someone will be like, do you know what? I want a picture of a sunset. Why are you giving me a box of 1,000 pieces? I don't have freaking eight weekends to put that together. What I want is a picture of my wall of a sunset.

And I was like, yeah, I can do that. I'll assemble the puzzle piece for you. I won't engineer the new kinds of pieces in it. I'll just put it together for you. And you'll have a sunset. And that's what you want to buy. That's what you want to use. So I think that kind of just humility

to our own intellect and capacity and creativity was really serving us very well when we were setting out what to do because it was also part of that whole risk mitigation strategy that we weren't like thinking, oh, do you know what, we have to go into the dungeon for five years to cook up this huge innovation. And then if it doesn't work, we've just blown five years and then what, right? We put something out of the first version of base candidate we built together.

We had something working in like three weeks. In three weeks, we were already using the first version of base-kinda we built together we had something working in like three weeks. In three weeks we were already using the first version of it and in four months we had released the commercial product and then we started sort of iterating on it. In the market response obviously proves that you were right so many people find so much value in these products that you've created that they're using them and they're still using them to this day. I would imagine that the most challenging part of what you're communicating, because as you're talking, I'm sure people are listening and going, man, that makes sense. Efficiency makes sense. Yeah, you could definitely be more productive in 40 hours and 80 hours if you do things a

certain way. But I would imagine the most challenging thing that you said was about funding and not needing to raise capital. I've talked to other fellow entrepreneurs about that and they said, well, it's impossible to even start my idea with anything less than half a million dollars or an amount of money that they don't possibly have, that they'd have to go raise. So how did you guys fund your product? And in what recommendations or what advice do you have to people who want to start something and who are listening to you and saying okay

well what do I do then if I if I can't if you're saying I don't need to go raise all this money and go into crazy debt what should I do well I think you basically have two choices either you find a huge pot of gold which usually means borrow that pot of goal from someone or you're independently wealthy and if you are good for you. Option number two, you gotta learn to build yourself. What you have is time. And most people can teach themselves most things.

Certainly if you're interested in technology, you can teach yourself technology. This was how I met Jason in the first place. He was trying to teach himself how to program. He had already taught himself how to design. I had basically taught myself how to program. Lots of people learned this stuff all the time. And when you know how to build the thing you want to see in the world yourself, your investment is just time. I was building base camp on the side while going to Copenhagen Business School on 10 hours a week.

That was what we had. That was the constraints. And those constraints turned out to be incredibly helpful. I think one of the problems often is when you raise a bunch of money, you don't have constraints to teach you good habits. Like, the money is just sort of there. You don't have to figure out your unit economics up front. And before you know it, you're not figuring those things out, right? Like you end up chasing a thousand science projects at the same time because you can't.

Do you know what? When you have 10 hours a week to build something, you're going to spend that time very, very well. Because you know what, you see, you can float 10 hours, you know, takes almost no effort at all. And if you only have 10 hours in a week, you know what, that meant that week didn't matter. Like nothing happened, right? Like we wasted that. So you become very efficient with things when you don't have a lot of them.

And I find that that is one of the most important lessons of bootstrapping, that that level of, do you know what, we gotta make this count. We gotta make the time count. We gotta make the people count. got to make the time count. We got to make the people count. We got to make the money count in a way such that we can get where we want to go without running out of those things. So I'd say that the, I get it all the time. In fact, in rework, there's an essay called, there's no room for the idea guy. And it comes from essentially that question. If all you have is an idea and you

don't have any money and you don't have any skills, do you know what? Take a number. There's about seven billion worth of you. And an idea alone is very rarely enough to do anything. Sometimes it is, sometimes you have the right connection, sometimes your idea truly is groundbreaking, but that's one in a 10,000. For everyone else, they got to execute. They got to do it first. So it is sort of that choice and I can totally see someone goes like, well, I'm not going to learn how to program or I'm not going to learn how to design. I'm going to learn any of the skills it takes to build something in technology. All I just have is my wonderful idea. Well, you got to raise money then. There's not another magic

answer here. But I'd hope that more people would realize how approachable actually it is to go through the idea of learning some skills. So many of the big tech companies we know of today were built by people who were not like master geniuses at building technology. They were just sort of barely proficient and they strung something together that was enough to validate an idea and by the time the idea was validated, hey, do you know what, there was money coming in

and they could hire other people and then you could get the real rocket scientists send there to do a better version of it but you can get V1 out with very little at all. Along these lines, Dave, let's talk about running lean. When I read rework, one of the most paradigm shattering moments for me in our business was this, we're in the heart of the beast, like we're in Silicon Valley,

so that's where we built our business. And there's this misconception around, how successful your business is based on, how many employees do you have? And I remember falling into that trap as we were building and scaling year three or four of and people were like, hey, how's mine? I'm doing it.

I'm like, oh, we're doing great. How many employees do you have? That's like the next follow up question. And it's like, because some people are afraid to ask your dollar amount. So that's the obvious, like, go to how many people do you have. And I always felt that was so weird, but still fell in that trap of, you know,

oh, we have this new idea. Okay, now we gotta find a couple of people, we're gonna hire to go do that idea and see if it works, kind of like what you're talking about. And I read rework and it completely shattered that for me. So talk a little bit about that running lean like that and how kind of a silly that concept is. Yeah, I think this is one of those lessons

you learn very early when you're dealing with your own money. When you're spending your own money, it matters because if you don't spend it, you get to keep it. And that's pretty sweet. And that's a very valuable sort of study guide, right? We go like, do you know what? We have seven people right now. What can we build? Could we build substantially more that would really move the needle if we were 14? Maybe not. Let's just stay at seven and then keep growing the business. The longer we stay at seven people and the more we grow the business, the more of the growth we just get to keep. And this is one of the perversions that is injected when you deal with venture capital.

Because with a venture capital trajectory, it's basically like, you don't want to make money. Make money is bad. In fact, it's basically like, you don't want to make money. Make money is bad. In fact, it's frowned upon. You're not supposed to make money until, what, 10, 20 years down the line because you're supposed to grow as big as you possibly can, as fast as you possibly can. So any amount of profit is essentially seen as waste. That that was money that could have been reinvested into more growth. And we didn't have any of the dynamics breathing down our neck. So we just looked at it and like, you know what, we just made another million

dollars this year. Should we keep it? Yeah. Actually, let's keep it. That's a million dollars in the pocket. Yeah, that sounds good. Let's just keep that, right? So we grew the business very slowly. I think actually by year three or year four, we probably only had those separate people at the at the company, even though we were making millions of dollars. And that approach to it, when you're dealing with your own money, it just gives you sort of a very basic sense of economics and of business that are quite intuitive. It's quite intuitive and you're able to measure, is this worth it?

Quite easily, right? Okay, we can hire another programmer. That's gonna cost so and so much. What are the ideas we have right now? Where we're going, is this really needed? This is where we came to lessons that are in rework like only higher when it hurts. So much of venture capital,

and as you talk about this head count idea comes from like, you know what, we just said a number. We should be 300 people in two years. Why 300? Well, I don't know. It's a nice round number and it's on the hockey stick graph here that we've charted out, right? For almost our entire existence, we followed higher when it hurts. And higher when it hurts, for me me meant We're not hiring anyone to do that job before I've done myself and I'm sick of it I want to have done every job in the business that can actually also evaluate when we hire someone that they're clearly better than me at it That should be just the lowest possible bar here when you've played all the positions on your team You can gauge that quality.

Someone is not gonna come in and dazzle you with a fancy CV and you're just gonna be blinded by that and you're gonna go like, ooh, they must be amazing. Like, no, I actually did that job. I did the book, I did the finance. I know the questions to ask, even if I'm not the best finance person in the world, even if I'm not the best HR person in the world,

even if I'm not the best marketing person in the world, even if I'm not the best marketing person in the world, I know which questions to ask. So I think there's all these secondary benefits to running your business in the most basic way of making more money than you spend. And the more money you make in excess of what you spend the more you get to keep. And it's just such a basic idea that like,

hey, do you know what? If you're making $20 million a year and you're spending 10, you get to keep 10. If you spend five, you get to keep 15. I'd rather have 15 if I get to choose between those two. But in so many tech businesses and other businesses that are trapped in this growth idea, that never comes up because it's always just about more and more and one of the most Illustrative cases. I think we mentioned this in in rework as well for me was the flip Video camera. I don't know if you guys remember this. This is like 2005

This before cell phones had like really good video cameras and there was this flip camera You could buy that had like a pretty good video recorder in it, right? And they had a phenomenal run for five years. You're like, they just sold so many of these and they thought, entire way, hey, let's just reinvest. Let's grow it bigger. Let's grow it bigger. Let's grow it bigger.

They never made any money before that entire industry just disappeared and video cameras became a feature of a phone. It wasn't an independent thing. And I always thought, like, you know what? That's such a waste. You gotta take some money off the table along the way. At least if you're playing with your own money, right? Jason's dad trades, and wonderful saying

that I've heard since I've met Jason from him is, no one ever went broke taking a profit. And like, yeah, so we tried along the way to take a profit to have the fundamentals in order to keep it lean in such a way that we're playing with our own stash and a seem to leap of written about the black swan and so on has this skin in the game. You got to have skin in the game. And the more of your own skin you have in the game, the better you play it. Yeah, nobody spends money worse than people who pay no consequences for spending it poorly. That's a, or are rewarded just for spending it. That's even worse, right?

Oh, that's the worst. Yeah. Oh, we spend all our money. We need more funding. You know, here's our proof. We spent all our money. Yes. Yes. You know, the irony of what you're talking about with efficiency is that the beauty of the tech industry, the internet, I mean, all of it, right, the broad umbrella that covers

it all. And the reason why it's been so transformational for humanity is exactly because of its efficiency. You can do more work in one hour today because of technology than you could before in a month, or even a year of work. Now how many entrepreneurs you think fail or crash and burn or don't even start the process because of those false beliefs and what being a successful entrepreneur looks like. Do you think that that's causing more damage than anything else?

I think it does. And I think part of the damage it causes is that it's a very exclusionary club in a way that it doesn't need to be because you think of either these heroic sacrifice stories. Like, who can identify with the 80 hours a week? I'm not gonna have any relationships. I'm gonna just destroy my health. I'm gonna do all these things that it supposedly takes to become one of these prototypical entrepreneurs who sacrifice everything.

I think a lot of people look at that and like, yeah, I don't wanna do that. I have a good idea for business. I think we can have something that works, but I don't want that. I don't wanna be for business. I think we could have something that works, but I don't want that. I don't want to be that fat slob that is sitting on your 15 on their startup and maybe they've made a bunch of money, but they've also just wasted an entire decade of their life. And maybe they need to spend another decade making up for it in terms of relationships and

health and what else I've had you. And they look at like, that's not an appealing notion. And this is why I'm so passionate about spreading our example is because it doesn't have to be that choice. It's a completely false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either just this, throwing everything, throw all at it, or just nothing at all, especially with technology.

I mean, at least I'm imagining here, but if you wanna start a gym, I'm actually not imagining that much. I have a good friend who did start a gym. And one of the things with starting a gym is you had to buy some equipment or you had to lease it. You had to have some capital here, right? The kinds of businesses that are possible in tech, a lot of them can be bootstrapped off like your own efforts. Computers don't cost anything these days.

You can, you don't have to buy massive servers. You don't have to buy licenses for software. Most of it is open source, most of it is free. So it really is a uniquely open field for someone who's willing to learn how to make things and then be able to bootstrap that into something else. And if we're turning people off from giving that a shot just because they don't believe that they're willing to sacrifice everything, I think it's just such a waste. We're not going to see more base camps. If everyone believes that the only way to succeed in technology is if you turn into Facebook or

or Snapchat or whatever other huge outlier that people would normally celebrate us like, that is technology. There's room for so much more than that. In fact, we talk about, when we talk about our customers, talk about the Fortune 5 million. I don't really care about the Fortune 500. I don't think it's, yeah, it's fine. There's some big businesses. Okay, interesting. More interesting to me is the Fortune 5 million.

All these smaller businesses, like, you know what? This could be a great six person company. This could be a wonderful 18 person company. This could be a wonderful 18 person company. It doesn't have to be more than that. And small is not a stepping stone. In fact, when I think back of our history as a company, I have all sorts of nostalgia for when we were eight people. Things were a lot easier.

This is one of the other things I think one of the myths is that like starting is the hard part. No, no, it actually only gets harder. The bigger you get, the more complicated, the more convoluted, the more intricate, the more risk, the more obligations you have, which is why so many entrepreneurs, they look back upon their early years with such remembrance. Oh man, remember when we were just like four people and we were sitting around the pizza and we just like those are the memories that stand out because like those were actually great times. But so many people look at those times and think,

like that's just something I have to get through. This is, I'm just getting through that on my way to whatever make a company I'm trying to get into. I never, I never believed in that, which is why for a very long time, we stayed unreasonably small for the amount of customers we have for the amount of products that we had in 2014. We had four products. They're all growing at the same time. They were not all growing at the same pace, but they were all growing. And we were bursting

at the seams. We were about 40 people, 45 people at the time. And we were like, this can't go on. If we're gonna run four major products, we're gonna have to hire a bunch of people. And that's what almost every other company would have done, right? Do you know what we said instead? Like, what if we just kind of put three of the products out on ice and just focused on one of them?

Can we do one product with 45 people? Yeah, yeah, we can totally do that. Hey, let's do that. So that was when we became base camp and we basically cut our product portfolio from four down to one. And we stayed in that mode for then the next seven years or so. Where we basically like,

you know what, we're at a great place. We grew a little bit above that at our largest, I think we were 50 something people, but barely above where we were in 13. It also has some impact on the growth of the business, but at that point, we were already making plenty of money. And I was like, do you know what, there's nothing magic that's gonna happen in my life

if we squeeze out a few more millions out of this, even if there's another digit at the end of those millions. Like, what is that gonna enable? I'm already doing all the things I wanna do. I'm racing cars around the world. I'm living in my dream place in Malibuu. I'm doing all these things like all the material Reward you could get out of running a business. They're here Do you know what the easiest thing I could do is to fuck this thing up?

This is the thing that most people don't think about when they think about business and growth So many people or so many companies break their neck trying to get to the illusionary next step, right? When something should just be a certain size and you should be happy for that, at least for some period of time. Now, the irony is that we've just arrived at sort of a little bit of not the opposite conclusion, but a different conclusion. We launched another major product last year called hay.com, which is a new email service, which is a ludicrously ambitious project to take on Gmail and Outlook and charge for email when everyone else gives it away for free. And we thought like, well, here's a dumb idea

that we've earned the rights to take a shot at because now we've been around for 20 years and we can do it. So we launched that and boom, in what, a month and a half, we had 30,000 people paying for email. A bunch of people telling us, I never thought I'd ever pay for email. I've been using Gmail for 15 years.

I always get everything for free. I never thought I'd pay for this, but you guys have made a product that is appealing enough that we would do it. So we kind of stumbled into this second hit product and now we were in the same situation as we were do it. So we kind of stumbled into this second hit product. And now we were in the same situation as we were in 14, like, there's not enough people here to run these two things at the same time. What do we do? Do you want to get rid of base camp? I'm like, hell no, this is like the best idea we've ever had probably. Do you want to get rid of

this exciting new product that we just built and sell that off? No, it's way too good. Okay, well, then we got to probably grow a little. So that's what we've been doing recently and that's what we have a bit of a chart to do. You know what? We used to say 60 people is enough. Let's, let's, could we be 100? 120? Let's try that. And all of that is to say, like, you get to choose. You can say stop. And you can say, like, this is actually enough, and you can be where that is. And we were there for seven years, and they were seven glorious, profitable years,

that I look back upon with a huge smile and regret absolutely nothing about. And now after seven years, like, hey, let's try some new things. David, I want to get in the email in a minute because actually that wasn't even on my list to get into but I'm now super interested in it. But before I do that, I have a bit of a personal question

that I want to ask you. I love talking to somebody like yourself who has kind of came from nothing and then has accumulated all this abundance and you seem to have a really good relationship with wealth and money. Did that, was there a pivotal moment in your life when that happened? Tell me a little bit about your journey with money. Yeah, that definitely was.

So, the first thing was, of course, I had this Danish upbringing, where money just wasn't a big thing in the sense that the Danish society is a very class-compressed society. You don't see these huge class divisions. So there wasn't this growing up thinking like, oh wow, I need to do something to get to another level. That's what's gonna validate my worth as a human being or any of these other things.

I just grew up in this society, but that's not there at all. But I grew up with all the same dreams and fantasies as a new kid. I played this game with my brother where it would be like, hey, if you wanna, I was gonna say a million dollars,

but it was even more humble, a million crowners. What would you buy with that? And I'd be like, oh man, I'd buy the biggest computer I could get. I'd buy the coolest skateboard. I'd buy all these things that are sort of, we weren't exactly thinking of like private jets or castles or anything, right?

We just think about these things and I was like, that was there, right? It was always there as a striving, even when I started working, I wasn't making tons of money. When I started out, I was making like, whatever, entry-level money. And so you have these ideas,

you have these fantasies of what it's gonna do to your life if you hit the jackpot. And then I hit the jackpot. In 2006, Jeff Bezos bought a minority stick of Basecamp from Jason and I, and also then I went from having not nothing, but not a lot in the bank account to several million in the bank account.

And I went like, hold the shit, this is it. This is it, this is the magic moment. Like the money's there. Like there's literally millions of dollars in my bank account. Like I can seriously buy the biggest computer or five of them or ten of them. And a cool escape board and probably also a nice car and all these other things, right?

And it's almost sort of like you're finally getting to the top of the stairs and you're like oh we're gonna open the curtain it's gonna be amazing forever and it was amazing for like two days and then after two days I was like okay um now what what am I what am I supposed to do here right Like I bought a cool car and that was great. I love cars They're fun, but it's like I'm gonna drive around in a car for eight hours a day Then I'd be an Uber driver, right? Like that wasn't exactly De-aspiration here, right? So this was just sort of it was a a nice trinket reward whatever, but There was actually a real sense of disillusionment

because I had built it up in much the same way I think that a lot of people build up wealth that like, do you know what, if this thing happens, I'm just, this is just going to be bliss. All my problems are going to go away, all my aspirations are going to come true and I was like, that just didn't happen. Like after two days, I was back in front of my laptop programming. Because that was actually what I enjoyed all along. And I was like, huh, this is really interesting. I'm spending like 95% of my time in exactly the same way before and after. And there's the 5% they're sweet. Like you can definitely get some very nice things

when you have a lot of money. And I enjoyed many of those things. And there's nothing nothing bad about that but it was just a realization that that was like 5 to 10% of it and then the other 90% was the satisfaction of what I wake up to do every day and that didn't really change and in some ways that was a bit of a disappointment I thought there was going to be more confetti for longer that this party was just going gonna be something else than what it was But in other ways it was also reassuring That you know what I'd had most of the things that I was passionate about all along and here sitting What is this 15 years later? 15 years later after Jason or I became millionaires off that purchase and we've made plenty of money since and I'm spending my time in much the same way

now is oh Yeah, now how does the racing part factor into all this like how'd you get involved in that? Yeah, so the racing part is interesting. I'd say the racing part is the one part that money really on locks the interesting thing about that is that money really on locks. The interesting thing about that is growing up, I was crazy about video games, and one of my favorite genres of video games was racing games.

And I love playing racing games, and I've spent countless hours playing racing games, and sitting in an actual race car and doing actual racing is a nice level up from that. But it's smaller than people think, which sounds counterintuitive, but the jump from playing virtual racing games to doing real-life racing games, like it's there,

but it's not this quantum leap that you would expect, but it is a very nice efficient way to burn large piles of money, the fastest way to make a small fortune is to start out with a big one and then go racing. So tell us a little bit about how you are getting people to pay for email. I had no idea about this and when you said that I was like, that sounds... Yeah, very intriguing.

Yeah, that's very intriguing. How, why are people paying for something you can do for free? Yeah, so that's what's really interesting. So email has been around forever, right? Like what, 30, 40 years. Gmail, the last time email really changed, was launched in 2004. And not a lot has happened since then. We haven't really rethought email

and the things of how this thing works in a good 15 years. Some of that came from the fact that so many people simply declared the entire market dead because hey, what are you gonna compete with free from Google? How exactly, right? Well, how, by making a better thing, the people wanna pay for, the interesting thing about email

is there's a lot of people who spend an awful lot of time on email every day, all days out of the week during email, 30 minutes an hour, maybe even two hours a day because that's what they do. They send a lot of email. Email continues to be some people call it the lowest common denominator. I would say in many ways is the highest common denominator amongst all businesses. If you want to reach someone outside of your organization, you want to talk to them, email. The e in email stands for employed, which was something someone told me one time. I thought it was very true, right? This is the way we do a lot of commerce. This is how we settle contracts. This is how we do all these other things.

And sometimes it gets us into trouble and we should have done our projects on base camp. But that's another story. I think just the fact that like, there's so much time spent on email, and yet we were willing to deal with the best ideas of 2004 in 2020. Just because it was free, what is your time not worth anything? This was the opportunity. So the opportunity was,

hey, I've personally been emailing since like 95. I've had a lot of experience with email and I've had a lot of grievances with email and I never had a way to express those grievances and software. So that's what he is. It is my and Jason's 25 years of using email and fixing it in all the ways we wanted to see it fixed. I'll give you a few examples. So the first thing is People are so scared that their email is gonna get out there, right? They don't really want to enter it into things because what if I'm gonna get like a bunch of stuff I'm just gonna get a bunch of emails. I don't want Particularly famous people like hey didn't anyone can just email me at any time and we've set up email in such a perverse way

Where if someone gets your email address they can literally make your pants buzz. Like what? They'll send you an email, you'll get a notification and your iPhone or Android and your pocket is buzzing right because that notification showed up just because someone decided like at that time they want to reach out to you they can reach directly into your brain or your pocket and interrupt your attention. That to me always seems just utterly bizarre. Like I don't want random people to be able to have a direct line of their choosing of time and place to my brain. That seems insane. Insane and much the same way when I was growing up, we had phone books. You could just look up in a phone book and find anyone's phone number and call them.

Today we're horrified at the idea. Most young people don't even answer the phone anymore of any sort. Email is still the same way. You find someone's email and you have direct access to them and they will look at that in some way or another. I thought, that's the first thing we've got to, we've got to solve. We've got to have a, we've got to have a screener.

Like you would screen your calls and say, like, you know what, I'm not taking this, screen your emails. So this is what we built into, to hey, that you will not get anything into your inbox. If you're not already said, I want to hear from that person when they write you the first time. So we have this screener when he was writing you for the first time, you get thumbs up, thumbs down. If you say thumbs down to that person, never going to hear from them

again. And as someone in technology who deals with sales people and recruiters and also some other very persistent individuals who will not necessarily neither take no for an answer or stubbugging you just because you don't respond. Like that no button is a real game changer in my life and how I spent my time. Because now when I open my email, it's full of emails I want. One was the last time anyone using Gmail could say that. Oh, I opened up my email today and there was like a hundred emails in it and they were all great and I was super excited to read all of them. And that's just a thing no one ever said about traditional email. You open up

Hey and the inbox is actually emails you want to see. And this is the irony of email that so many people love to hate on email and for also to good reason there's bammers, there's scammers, there's marketing people, there's sales people there are also some people are trying to get your attention and email gets the blame for that. When really the blame should lie with the tools, we built crappy tools. Like there's a version of email that doesn't have all of that stuff and just has the good stuff. And the good stuff is that email is a way to communicate in long form with each other.

Not a line at a time, not a sentence of thinking at the time like we do with chat, like what's up? Yeah, okay, what is up, right? Like we used to have longer, more interesting conversations when we were writing things further out and particularly in business, where do you know what paragraphs are like a good thing? It takes multiple sentences, you're stringing it together,

you put five paragraphs and like, there's a whole idea, a whole idea pitched that I can read at my leisure when I want to do so. That's amazing. So that's one example. The screeners is really a complete game chamber. I went from getting probably 200 emails a day or something like that using Gmail,

just dealing with it, right? Like just, I got really fast at deleting things and scanning them, but like, I still have to process it. To some days, I'll get like, what, 15, 20 emails that actually hit my inbox and like, the emails I want, they're from people I want to hear from, they're about things I care about. That's just, it changes your entire relationship with email. This is probably the one thing that we hear back

from people who actually give it a try, is they didn't know how bad it was, because you've just been soaked in it, like you're at the boiled frog. I'm just used to getting 100 emails a day, and like that most of them are things that I don't want, and I'm just dealing with that, and then you see for the first time,

oh, I just got like 30 minutes of my day back. Compound that over a year, compound that over a decade and you go like, geez what are you charging for this thing? A hundred bucks a year? That's incredibly cheap. I mean how much would you pay to be able to get that time back when you're laying on your dead bed and like, hey do you know what? I could tell you four extra months here. Do you want to pay a thousand bucks for four months of extra life? I think most people would probably go like,

hell yeah, that sounds like an amazing deal. But we don't see that most of the time when we're in it. The other thing was some of these more nefarious parts of email that no one had addressed for the longest time. So there's this thing called spy pixels. I don't know if you've heard of it. But when a salesperson sends you an email, they can embed this little invisible pixel in the email and almost all of them do it. And when you then open that email, boom, they'll know exactly when you opened it, where you were when you opened it, what device you used when you opened it, how many times you opened it, and then they can start pestering you on the basis of that information,

which people do all the time. They'll be like, hey, I saw you open my email, but it's been three days and you haven't replied. So can we do a call tomorrow at the 240? And more people will be gilded into that like, okay, fine. And it's just such an abusive way of using email. And I had that happen to me a couple of times, right? Where you open emails like, how the fuck does he even know whether I own this email or

not. That seems like invasive. Is he peeking in my window? No, it's just this thing called spy pixels. And for the longest time, email providers would know about them. In fact, most mailing lists are for just like as a matter of course, has an end there. This is how you track things like open rates and so forth. Same kind of underlying technology.

But when it's used by individuals against other individuals, it's really creepy. So we built a blocker into that, not just a blocker, but a blocker and a shamer. So now if I get an email from someone who's using a spy picks a little say, like, hey, John just sent you an email, but no, he's using a spy picks that he can see where you were and all this other thing, but don't worry, we actually blocked that, so you can't see any of those things,

but you should know that John tried to spy on you. And do you know what? After we built this feature for, for, hey, I started replying to some of these people and like calling them out And you would never see more red-faced people. I mean just imagining the red face because of their garbled response I didn't mean to either. I didn't know. I counted you even know right like someone was caught with their binoculars Sitting out in the tree and you were like, hey, what are you doing up in that tree with those binoculars? So we've just we've packed email full of these things, packed hay, full of these features to fix

some of these fundamental parts of email that were broken and then left the parts that were awesome. And then what you're left with is mostly the part that's awesome. And it's funny because so many times Entrepreneurs and tech have tried to claim that email was dead I think I the first time I heard that email was dead was like 2002 and then every year since there's been a new product comes out like emails over email is dead now. It's just chat now. It's just this now. It says no email is still here We send more emails every year than we've ever done before. And for a good reason, because emails actually great. We just needed to dust it off, someone needed after 15 years to come back to the problem

and say, like, let's look at this with fresh eyes and 30 years of experience and build something better. And if we build something better, people will realize that their time is worth something. Not only is there time worth something, but the privacy is worth something too. One of the most infuriating stories I remember reading about Gmail was that, you know, when you get a receipt in Gmail, Google will look at that receipt and they'll go like, Oh, so you bought that. Let me tie that to your profile. It's that I can show you ads of other things like that. And you're like, you're literally

going through my mail, right? Like so many of these parallels, if we translate them to the real world, we'd be creeped out. You're like, wait, an advertising company is opening my email and reading through my emails, taking notes on what I buy and what things I sign up for, just that they can sell me more crap. Hell no.

Can I pay someone such that I don't have that happened to me? Yes. Hey. Yeah, that's there it is. You know, there's a there's a theme with a lot of these products that you've created. When I hear you talk about them, obviously brilliant and successful. Also they sound like obvious things like base camp took to get put together tools that people would use anyway, and you just put them all in one central area so you don't have to worry about trying to get them to talk to each other and work together. As you're describing, hey, as I'm listening to, I'm like, duh, that sounds so obvious, obviously brilliant, but also so obvious, why do you think so many entrepreneurs miss the obvious stuff and

instead go for the like I'm gonna invent the next Google? I think some of it is it goes back to that sense of humility. I don't think I'm that smart. I'm totally fine just picking out the obvious bits and putting them together. It's there's no skin off my back by not being heralded as the person who invents the next deep dish. I don't need that in my life. I'm just interested in, first of all, I'm interested in fixing my own problems, my own problems. And then I've come to realize that there's plenty of people who will pay if I fix my problems because it's their problems too. So when I fix something for me that can be sometimes just quite easy or fundamental, actually in hey,

the wonderful thing is like, I'm still programming a hey, 20 years into this business, I, one of the things I enjoy the most is the program. So I still make all my own features. And now I have my own email clients and whenever I'm annoyed by something, I can just fix it. So last week, I put in this thing, the mass spam button. So we had this screen, right?

So anything you receive from a first time sender, it'll go into a certain area. And after some amount of time, you've screened through most people you want to see. So a lot of the stuff that goes in there is stuff you don't really want. Before we had an individual thumbs up, a thumbs down on each line, you'd have to push.

And I'd wake up in the morning, be like I don't know five or six emails in it. And I'd just be I'm tired of clicking them out six times. Could I click the mouth mouse one time? I'll just scan these and like yeah they're all junk. I don't want it. Boom. I'll just put that button in there and now it's there right? That's not it's not it's not there's nothing magic in that. But for me, it is kind of magic. It's kind of magic that like, do you know what? These six people went through some effort of trying to get a hold of me and like boom,

I just clicked one button and they're all out of here and I'll never hear from them again. That's a kind of magic I enjoy. Like there's, it's not machine learning, it's not AI, it's not fancy, there's not a science paper, I'm gonna write about this. In fact, they're not science projects, right? This is one of the themes we have from,

from hey, is that in comparison to Gmail, we don't rely on artificial intelligence. We rely on human intelligence. Do you know what? Humans are pretty good at saying whether they wanna hear from someone or not. Gmail? Surprisingly crappy.

Surprisingly bad. Like so many times I'd hear from people switching from Gmail like yeah I had to switch from Gmail because they kept sending emails from my friend to spam. I've some the machine somehow thought that this person was spam and I kept going to spam and no how many of her times I said like this person is not spam it just kept going to spam. We just like hey what if we don't do the AI part? We'll just ask. And then you get to decide whether you want to hear from someone or not. And it works amazingly well.

Sometimes, techies, I'd say oftentimes, the most trouble they get themselves into is when they try to be excessively clever. I remember this joke from back in the old Microsoft days with word, they had this thing called clippy. And clippy was this little thing that would be at the side of the program, right? And be like oh looks like you're writing a letter to your lawyer Would you like to reformat this in dumb ways? And you'd always be like no fucking clippy shut up. I don't want to hear from you, right? And that's the problem with our official intelligence. AI doesn't have to be Right just like half the time. No, no, it has to be right just like half the time.

No, no, it has to be right 99.99% of the time. Otherwise, you get so annoyed when it's wrong that it erases all the benefit of when it's right. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not smart enough. And it seems like neither is most of the rest of the tech industry to come up with AI that is right 100% of the time. So I'm just going to sit out and wait until the singularity comes up or Elon or somehow

it comes through with a breakthrough with the right all the time. But until then, I'm going to bet on the human brain. David, you know what you've reminded me of? There's this old story, I don't know if it's true or not, I don't think it is, but it was around the Cold War and it was talking about the space race and how the US invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in trying to figure out how to get a pen to work in zero gravity so that, you know, the ink wouldn't flow to the ball so you could still write with it and they spent all this money on it. And then meanwhile the Soviets used a pencil, which, no matter what,

it's being a girl. Totally reminding me of that story. Do you have any personal advice or things that you use yourself to improve your efficiency? Because you seem like the perfect person to ask this question too. Are the things that you do to make yourself more effective in less time? Yes.

So I'd say the key lesson through all my years of where I've found the creative creativity and productivity has been in long stretches of uninterrupted time. That was why I was such a big fan of remote work from the get go. I had such a hard time working in an open office. That thing is just a tortured chamber for anyone who needs to concentrate. We've been running this experiment now for at least 25 years and it's just turned out horribly bad results, time and time again.

So hack number one, sit in your own office in a place where you can close the door. Boom, just that right there opens up all the gateways. Hack number two, turn off all notifications. In fact, this is another thing for hey. So every other email client in the world will default to sending your notifications when you get a new email. Hey?

No. It's the other way around. If I want to hear from you specifically, if I want you to buzz my pocket, I'll turn it on for you. Otherwise it's off all the time. And I'd say nothing else really in terms of setting up a new phone or a new computer can do more for your productivity and turning off all forms of notifications. Do you know what?

You don't need to know the second and email history inbox unless it is truly an urgent thing, magic deal, whatever. And you can turn it on in that case, 99% of the time, it can wait until you come up for a breather. So setting yourself up in such a way, turning off notifications, having a door that shuts, creating the space that you can get one, two, three, four hours of uninterrupt time, that's the magic. Literally.

This is why at Basecamp, we're such a big fan of Basecamp because Basecamp is all about asynchronous communication. Someone will post a message in Basecamp and you know what, I can read in two hours, I can read it tomorrow, it'll be fine. Most things are not that urgent and if they are fine, reach out to me, give me a phone call, right? Most things are not that urgent.

But if everything is scheduled as like, do you know what, I have a meeting at 10, I have another meeting at 115, I have another meeting at 115, I have another meeting at four, I occasionally have days like that, and I just know going in, do you know what, I'll get nothing done, but those three meetings today.

There's nothing I can engage my brain in that'll create major forms of progress in the way I like to make progress, because I can't think 30 minutes at a time. I can't think 45 minutes at a time. I can't think 45 minutes at a time. The greatest gift you can give yourself if you are dealing with tasks that require concentration and indebtedness is long stretches of uninterrupted time.

Excellent. What are some of your biggest critics say about the message that you're communicating right now? Number one is probably that it's unambitious. This is the critique we've gotten since day one that we're running a lifestyle business. Right. This is the thing we would get again and again. And they would they would think of it as a like a searing critique.

And I'd go like, yeah, actually, I would like to run a business that works for my lifestyle. What kind of business do you run? Would you run a business that does not work for any lifestyle? Like what kind of setup is that? This is how we get back into strategic strata bathroom breaks again, right? Where you're you're making yourself into this slave-like character because what? So yeah, we run a lifestyle business that just has happened to have created hundreds of millions of dollars of value over 20 years.

Yeah, I mean, I don't feel bad about that. The other thing I don't feel bad about is not being a billionaire, for example. That seems like a huge hassle to me. Every billionaire that I know or have come in contact with or have talked to, they're always talking about like what a just pain in the ass it is. Oh yeah, I have my own security detail of six people

that follow me around all the time. I'm like, yes, well, that's not a good selling point here. Not that interesting that. Almost all of the material luxuries that you can enjoy as a human being are accessible at far, far lower interpoints than being a billionaire. Unless the thing you love to do is,

I don't know, own a 500 feet yacht or something or perhaps shooting yourself into space on a rocket that has your name on it, anything lower than that, you can get by with far less. And this was perhaps the great lesson two of that moment moment 2006 when Jason or I became millionaires was that the difference between having zero money and a million dollars is

very very large the difference between having to can I pay rent this month do I have to check how much the groceries cost and not having to do those things is huge. The difference from there between a million dollars and ten million dollars is almost inconsequential. Yeah, of course there's more things you can do, but all of the real value of material goodness that comes from sort of just having those basics just settled and out of your mind and not haggling and hunting you again, it's enormous. And then the jumps only get smaller.

The difference from $1 million and $10 million, yeah. Do you know what? Is whether you can go racing and burn a bunch of money on that. Perhaps. Then the jump again from $10 million to $100 million is like, I don't even know. Instead of having four cars in your garage, you have six or eight,

is there a big difference in that? Not really. The difference then between a hundred million and a billion dollars seems like just a, we're over at the top of the hill here and it's starting to go downhill in terms of hassle and protections and obligations and all this other bullshit that comes with it on the other side. And I'm like, yeah, not interested. You know, you know, David, what you're saying is,

by the way, just for the listeners, is completely backed by all the research that's ever been done on what makes people happy. It's what you're saying is not, it's not just your anecdote. It's 100% proven in studies. And it's funny, you talk about, the things that you're talking about

reminds me of our space and fitness. How many people think that they have to kill themselves 10 hours a day to look fit and healthy and beat themselves up and sacrifice really. And it's totally false. If you do it the right way, it takes way less time. You get better results, you feel so much better. And then I remember, you know, we are again in the fitness industry. And there's a supplement here in Silicon Valley. I think it's called Soilent and it's literally a meal replacement drink, but it's advertised. I swear to God, and I don't know if you're familiar with this. The advertising is literally you don't have to get up from your desk to eat food. In fact, you never have to eat food. You just drink this and it gives you everything you need.

Imagine how productive you can be now that you don't have to chew your food. And so, I mean, what you're saying is so absolutely on the mark and true. And it's really a breath of fresh air. I love hearing it. I think it's a great message for people to hear. I want to, you know, we were all the three of us. We're a bit of fitness nerds, but we were talking last night about some things. And Sal brought this up about asking you,

and I actually originally said, oh, no, I don't think David cares about that, I wanna talk about it, but now that we're here, I kinda feel like you would be a fun person to have this conversation with. And the conversation last night was around this, the metaverse that's coming, NFTs,

and this is kind of the future of humanity and how business is going to work in the future and You know are we gonna be the people that Transition and start to build our business to compliment the metaverse are we gonna be some of those people that choose to unplug and not be a part of that bullshit Like I'd love to hear your thoughts on all that and kind of where you stand It's it's fascinating. So one of the things I've found in myself is when there weren't a lot of people, for example, in social media, I was very early on Twitter. I got an invitation before it launched and signed up for it and used it a lot. And I liked that early spirit of it and thought, like, do you know what, there's some luxury in being able to have the time

to do all these things. Now now I view the exact opposite. The luxurious version is the person who's not on Twitter. It's the person who's not on Facebook, right? Like the capacity and the perseverance to unplug from those hellhulls is something I am deeply admiring and trying to aspire to. So I think there absolutely is this sense that like,

the greatest luxury is just saying no. Like are you a person who has that capacity in your life? Can you afford, reputationally job wise, whatever interaction wise, to not be in these places? That to me seems like a new form of interesting luxury. The thing about the Metaverse is, I've been playing video games for 30 years, right? The Metaverse is not novel in that regard. And to me, my glib version is that this is like, I was replaying the lawnmower man from like 1995. Oh, class.

I don't know. No, I don't see it happening. And I don't see it happening because, first of all, we used a lot of these systems and we've used all these VR systems. So much of what we want to do is not make better because we're fucking floating avatar. Like, if I were on a read of email, is it better to read the email with my VR goggles on

floating around in space in some sort of skeleton suit? No! No, it's not. But at the same time, I love playing Fortnite with my kids. Fortnite is a total metaverse. They've had concerts in there. They've do all these creative things. It's really interesting and it's fun.

But like, is it the total sum of humanity? Absolutely not. I damn well, I hope it's not, right? So yeah, I'm quite skeptical on the grand vision here at that, like, the metaverse is the thing that's going to replace all these other, uh, ways of communicating, doing business, and otherwise, and, yeah, so I'm going to, I'm going to sort of put some skepticism up there, and that skepticism goes alongside the other thing we're talking about with AI. Um, I'm a huge fan of electric cars, and, and all the power to Elon Musk for what he's done, but

I think he's utterly delusional when he thinks that robots are going to drive our cars around for us in any near time frame. So I think it's a little bit like that where you can see a sparkle, you can see a glimmer, right? You're like, hey, it can do some things. Yeah, but the problem is with Clippy, when Clippy gets it wrong, you're like, oh, it's annoying. I'm not writing a letter to my lawyer when the Tesla autopilot gets it wrong, you're dead. Right. So you're like, okay, like maybe I won't be an early adopter of that one. Um,

and then with, with, with the metaverse too, I think it is one of the things people can get so hyped up and so excited And oftentimes yeah, we don't know until the end I could be totally wrong and in five years. I'm like oh I was I was late on that. I don't think so And I think for so many kinds of business unless this is like the core essence of what you do the price for just Sitting it out until there's a little bit more of a verdict is not that great. So I'm sitting that one out for now.

David, you talked about your kids. If you don't mind me asking, how old are they? And then how do you manage their screen time or social media use if they're old enough or when they are old enough? What kind of conversations will you be having with them? Yeah, so this is perhaps the most controversial segment that we're about to dive into, because I find that whenever you talk about parenting,

if you say something that's opposite of what someone else is doing, it's often the most vicious forms of attack or that's how it's perceived. But I'll just go dip in full on anyway. So I have three kits, one that's almost nine, perceived, but I'll just go dip in full on anyway. So I have three kids one that's almost nine of five and then two and the five-year-old was in my humble estimate perhaps the best damn fortnight player in the world at age four

So I played a lot of video games. I'm not afraid of video games, I think video games are awesome, and I think the bucket of screen time is such a blind dead alley. Screen time as a thing makes no sense to me, as in outside time, how much outside time do your kids get? Yeah, freaking matters, are they playing basketball or are they selling drugs? I would like them to have 0% outside time for selling drugs and as much as they want for playing basketball, for example, right? And the same thing with screen time,

like the internet is full of very dark places that kids should absolutely not go. And it's also full of a bunch of places that are wonderful and nice and they should be allowed to roam around in When I was a kid growing up I got my first computer when I was six years old and from six years old until I was about 22 or three or something like that The major center of my life was video games and and I look back upon that time and like do you know what?

I wouldn't be where I was If I had not spent a lot of time on video games and computers and learning that, and did I give something up here, or did I become addicted, right? Like this is often the things the parents worry about. And I think they're looking at it entirely wrong in much the same way that the whole thing about drugs

was looked at wrong. And it was looked at wrong because there was an experiment with cocaine and rats. I don't know if you've heard of this experiment where you put a rat in a cage and there's a cocaine dispenser, right? And the original experiment went like, do you know what? The rat will take as much cocaine until they die. Yeah. If they're in an empty box with no other forms of stimulus, a stimulation. And then someone else ran the same experiment, I think 2005 or 2006, where, hey, rat in a box, but the box isn't just an empty box with a cocaine drip. There's a cocaine drip, but there's also a wheel. There's other rats.

They can run around in a maze. There's things to do, right? Did the rat just die of an overdose of cocaine because it was absolutely not, right? Because there were other things that they could do and this is what I found with my kids. My kids love playing video games. But the second I ask, hey, do you want to build some Legos? Do you want to go outside and run around with me? They actually want to do that, right? There's such a fear from parents I feel like that, like, oh, these video games are going to take over their brains and their lives and like, they won't do anything else. Yes, this is what happens when you find interesting new things for the first time.

Like anyone who fucking watched one episode of a great show on Netflix and then binge the entire season, right? This is what humans do, there's nothing bad in that. In fact, that level of dedication and deep dive is key to becoming a great learner later on that you have that kind of capacity to go really deep on a subject. And so we ran this kind of experiment at home. And I'll say, my wife wasn't necessarily always,

100% sure it was gonna pan out, right? I was like, do you know what? No limits. If you want to play video games with 10 hours of a day, you do that. And for the first few days, that was what happened. A lot of video game playing. And do you know what then happened? They lost interest. Sometimes for longer periods of time, sometimes I have for shorter periods of time, my wife was just remarking the other day like, hey, do you know what, it's been three weeks.

They haven't really played video games at all because they got their fill. And I think part of this is, like, what are we trying to do as parents with kids? We're trying to protect them from all the bad things that could possibly happen in the world, or we're trying to teach them how to cope with that, right? Can we protect them forever about all the bad things, or or stimuli or addiction that could possibly be in the world? No, we cannot. Very quickly you'll run out of that. I mean, barely do they have to become teenagers

before you can no longer control all aspects of their lives. And then they have to kind of figure things out on their own. So my philosophy has been, do you know what? For them to learn portion control, they have to eat so much candy that they puke. You can't tell a kid, don't eat more candy because it's bad for you. That won't not register until they've thrown up the too much candy.

That registers. Once they've thrown up too much candy, they'll go like, yeah, okay, I'm not gonna eat that much candy again. That's a way where you teach sort of permanent lessons that they actually experienced on their own that feel authentic and theirs. It's not just something you're telling them. It's the same thing as we were talking about with the wealth thing. I remember before we had the investment for baseless, I would read these profound things like, oh, money's not gonna make your happy end. It go like, easy for you to say, right? Like you've already made your money or whatever.

Some of the things you have to experience on your own body, no one can tell you that lesson. And eating too much candy or playing too much video games, falls squarely in that category in ways that won't kill the kid. No kid has ever, to my knowledge, died of playing too many video games in a sort of short period of time. And they'll learn, like, do you know what? Life is more interesting than just playing video games.

If your environment is not just an empty box where that is literally the only thing in it. If there are other things, there's Legos, there's drawing paper, there's a soccer ball, there's Legos, there's drawing paper, there's a soccer ball, we can go kick, there's a bike, we can go right on, there's other kids I can interact with. Those options will be chosen and you have to have some faith that that's going to happen. So that's kind of what we run on the topic of social media. I'm not 100% sure there. So I'll give it in part because we haven't had

to face that issue, although to some small extent we have. So both the kids watch a fair amount of YouTube. And YouTube is an absolute wonder of the world in some parts and it's absolute hell in other parts. Like it's full of total garbage and crap that I would never ever in a million years want my kids to watch. But some of the things that they watch, for example,

is like, I think his name is Bec Bro Jack or something that plays Minecraft. And one of the things I learned from my five year old when he was watching that was like, do you know what, he leveled up on vocabulary, on intricacy of his bills, on all of these things, as though he had an older friend sitting next to him teaching him things. Do you know how kids learn a lot by having older peers

that are little ahead of them? Teach them things. And like, this is kind of a version of that. Again, that has to come with some level of supervision because you don't have to click too many times wrong when you're too many end up down these rabbit holes, right? But there's also entire categories of it of like, you know what, my kids just love to see how other kids play.

This is a core human thing that you would see in in normal place circumstances and how many 14 year olds have the patience to sit and teach my five year old how to build cool shit in Minecraft. They don't. Unless it's on YouTube and they get paid for views. The one thing I would say, if you're going to do that thing and if you're going to expose your kids to YouTube, you absolutely positively must get YouTube red, which is the version

of YouTube that doesn't have any ads. If you expose your kid to an ad every four minutes and they do long series of YouTube, yeah, absolutely. No, that's a child endangerment and don't do that. Yeah, no, great, great insight. I really appreciate that. It's like the difference between like, I gotta go outside and make this the world perfectly safe

or I gotta just outside and make this the world perfectly safe or I gotta just make my kid tougher and stronger to deal with. And stronger. It's like, which one is, you know, I can't possibly make the world perfectly safe. So let me focus on making my kid stronger. And the way you make someone stronger, just like when you work out, you gotta break a few things, right? You gotta throw up a little, you gotta hurt yourself, you gotta scrape your knee, you gotta to break a few things, right? You got to throw up a little, you got to hurt yourself, you got to scrape your knee,

you got to fall down from somewhere high. This is how you learn, right? Like if you're lifting weights that are so below your capacity, you're never going to break any of those muscles, you're not going to rebuild stronger. This is what we're trying to do. And I think this is one of the great tragedies of modern parenting that most parents have seen their view as like, you know what, I have to protect my kids in all the way, I have to create this cocoon bubble for them.

And that's one of the parallels, like we're living in Denmark right now. They're kids on the streets of Copenhagen, like six-year-olds riding their bike along to their friends. And it's like, yeah, actually, I never saw that in New York. I never saw that in Los Angeles and for probably fairly good reason, perhaps. And to some extent, not for so good reasons, because this used to also be childhood for American kids in the 80s, in the 70s, when the world was actually far more dangerous than it is today.

There's a great movement in the US called free-range kids that has had some success essentially legalizing nuts that it may sound that like a nine-year-old might walk on the street by themselves because there's been all these cases where you've had eight, nine, ten-year-olds essentially being picked up by the police or social services as like this is child-indirament, the the danger that you're letting these kids roam around and they're like, what are you talking about? Like the odds of these kids getting kidnapped or whatever fantasy people have in their head,

they're so vanishingly small compared to the almost surety that these kids are gonna grow up cocooned and weak, that by the time they actually hit reality they're utterly unprepared for it. Oh, I've hired some of those kids and so I know exactly what you're talking about in the past. So, this has been a very delightful interview. I didn't expect some of the stuff that you talked about, but very interesting. You have a great life philosophy that you've essentially applied to business and shown that

it works for business, but it's much more than that. So I appreciate you coming on the show. This has been great. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump

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