This Week in Startups - E1099: Basecamp Co-Founder Jason Fried on building Hey, making email exciting again, Hey vs. Apple & more

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Check out Hey: https://hey.com FOLLOW Jason Fried: https://twitter.com/jasonfried FOLLOW Jason Calacanis: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups. I'm really excited about our next guest. Jason Freed is with us. You know him as the co-founder along with my good friend, David Hanmeyer Hansen, who's had two amazing episodes of this podcast. over the years. We've had great discussions, and they co-founded Basecamp together back in, I think,

99, and they have a new product that just came out called Hay.com that's taking the interwebs by storm. I've been trying to have Jason on the pot. I don't know, we've been talking about this for five or six years in the making, but here we are. How's everything going in the pandemic? Are you in Canada, Chicago? I don't know where you are. I'm in Chicago, yeah. Chicago has been pretty rough. Yeah. Like every place, you know, and certainly many people have it, far worse, but we've been home just kind of doing our thing wearing the masks and staying out of the public basically as much as we can. We've got two young kids, so it's challenging, you know, for them and for us and, you know, it sucks.

Yeah. It does feel like other countries have figured out how to beat this by just simply wearing a mask. And we as Americans, it is just so confounding that we have to go through this pain and suffering in death and politicize. something as silly as wearing a 69, 79 cent mask. It's my boggling. In perpetuity, too. I mean, this is just not going to end. It seems like, it seems like basically the U.S. is thrown in the towel and said, like, we're just going to wait for the vaccine. Fuck it. Like, what a stupid strategic decision when you think about it, because nobody knows when

the vaccine is here. If even. If even, right? Because, I mean, remember, I think we're old enough to both remember when HIV and AIDS occurred. And they're like, vaccine is going to be here any day now. Yeah. And that still never arrived, right? I mean, they have ways to mitigate it, but there's no cure for HIV. There's only been a few vaccines, really, but have done anything. You've got what? You've got, what is it, Hep, Hep A or Hep C? I don't know, which one has a vaccine. Yeah. You've got, you've got, you've got HIV is sort of now kind of, finally, to some degree. You've got HPV. You've got polio, of course. there's been what some of the yellow fever I can't remember one of them like there haven't there's been a lot of diseases and only a handful of vaccines that have been really the good news is we have so much so much being thrown at this one that maybe this time will

be different but then you read the statistic that people are like oh I'm not taking the bill gates chip world domination virus you know vaccine and you're like oh my lord this is now becoming like a Darwinian IQ test like bizarre It's terrifying, literally. It's a long-term terrifying. And then if you think about the business we're in, we're so lucky and fortunate to be behind keyboards. But you think about anybody else in the real world, and we have a couple of investments that operate in the real world.

And overnight, their revenue went to zero. And then other people in our portfolio, and you probably experienced this with your line of products at Basecamp and now hay.com, you get a disproportionate amount of attention. and growth. And so it's just such a weird phenomenon. And we have to get through this. And hopefully we'll have a change in leadership. Yeah, let's hope so.

Let's hope so. I mean, I think, yeah, in some ways, you know, we were in the right space, let's say, collaborative software and whatnot. But like, hey, the next thing could be the internet goes down for three months. Like, who knows? Then we're screwed. I mean, like anyone can be screwed at any time.

Who knows? So you can't really count your blessings here. Yeah. And it is interesting, the resiliency of the human species. other countries. They did it. We have to do it. So moving on, and I think it's important, we have this discussion. Congratulations on the launch of hay.com. I got on it very quickly. Unfortunately, Jason at hay.com was taken by some squatter. Yeah, that guy's a bastard. I'm never going to get my Jason on there. I'll sell it to you. Tell me the background of why

you felt in the year 2020, or I think maybe you started working on this in 20, actually, why you felt in 2019 would be a good idea to start an email competitor or a new email product. Right. So we actually started a couple years ago. But, you know, here's the thing. Like the last time, okay, let me step back. We're an email all day long.

Most people are. No matter what else you use, you're also probably an email too. And the last time email was exciting was 16 years ago when Gmail launched in 2004. You probably remember that. I remember that waiting for invites, trying to get, you know, 16 years, man. It's been 16 years. And so, you know, we just, we have this thing where we just get really easily frustrated by, like, bad, by things that haven't improved for a long time. And that's kind of why we built Basecamp back in 2004 is because project management hadn't improved for a long time.

And so we spent our time in email as well. So we said, like, let's, let's worry about this. Can we do something better? Now, originally, though, it started out as a CRR. We were experimenting with improving high-rise, which is our CRM tool. Yeah. I'm going to make a whole new version of high-rise. But as we got into it, we started making all these email-specific features.

And we're like, you know what? We want this for all of our email, not just business email, but personal email. I want to manage email this way. So we started going deeper into email and started to really pay attention to all the workarounds. Because the email is one workaround after another. Like, for example, you need to get back to someone. What do you do? Well, you mark the email unread.

That's not, that's a total hack. It's like a total workaround. It's a complete hack. But that's what everyone does, right? Yeah. And so we just kind of sort of piling up these annoying frustrations. with these workarounds that we all have to go through every single day. And we've just sort of given in and put up with them.

And we're like, that shouldn't be that way anymore. So we start digging in and, you know, a lot of people use email. Everyone likes to think it's dead. It's not anywhere near dead. It's very vibrant, very alive. It's the only real sort of widest common denominator communication medium that works no matter where you are, no matter what provider you use. And it's a wonderful thing.

And we want to breathe new life into it. And the basic protocol of email has, not changed all that much. It really is interesting how open source, you know, platforms, whether it's the web or email seem to be the most resistant to corporate ownership or closing, obviously podcasting being the other one that has long been open with RSS feeds and attachments, although maybe that's at risk now because of certain players wanting to have exclusives. I'm wondering if the under did you consider taking the underlying protocol of email and changing that in some way. And maybe you could educate us on that underlying protocol.

Who sets the standards for how email changes over time? Yeah, well, first off, at a slightly higher level, when we attack this problem, we decided we're not going to build a client. We're not going to build something that lives on top of Gmail. Right. For example, or Outlook or whatever. Because you can't really innovate. when you're on top of someone else's platform like that. There's so many things that are just fixed in place and there's so much legacy in email that

you just can't really improve that much around the margins, which is why most email clients have been focused on perhaps speed or interface design or like some stuff, but you really can't get too deep with improvements. And so with Hey, Hay is actually an email service. It's not something that lives on top of Gmail. It's a service. We're an email provider. So when you sign up for hey, H-E-Y.com, you get an 8.1.

H-E-Y.com email address. And because we can sort of control that we're vertically integrated, essentially, you make the clients and we make the service, we can do all sorts of things that just clients can't do. Now, the thing, though, is with email, of course, is that it has to be interoperable. So you have to make sure that, you know, if we send an email out of, hey, it can be reached, you know, someone in Gmail can get it. Someone from Gmail can email us.

So we have to follow those basic standards. As far as who defines those, I don't even know. Yeah. But we know what they are. Like you have. That's the beauty of email, of course, which is different than, let's say, at the SMS in some countries, like even sending an SMS doesn't work. Yeah, that's why you need Twilio to kind of be your ambassador to just resolve all of those

issues, which are super complicated. Which is what's so great about email is that email doesn't have those things. So we had to, of course, make it work with that at that level. But everything else we could redo and reinvent and reintroduce in new ways, the way you organize email, the way the control you have over who can email you, all these things we can do because we're vertically integrated all the way down to the bottom. So that was key for us. How did you get hay.com?

That is a three-letter domain name in the English language. And everybody knows that if it's in the English language and the shorter is the more expensive. I think it's a three to ten million dollar email on the open market. How did you get it? What did you pay for? Well, first, I just can't tell you what we paid for because we've got NDA. Great question though. I mean, that's the question I would ask.

It's definitely seven figures, okay? I can't say anything. Truly, I can't. I can just tell you it was a lot of money. Let's just say that. Who had it? Who had it? No bargain here.

There's no main squad or had it or a company had it? No, this is what's so cool. An individual guy had it who registered in 1995. Good for him. Who had been using it for his own business. He was like a video marketing guy. And he owned hay.com. So I went to hay.com.

Here's the thing. The product was originally called Haystack because we own H-A-Y-S-T-K.com. We own haystack.com. Nice one. Yeah, it's a good domain. Needle in a haystack. There you go. I mean, it's perfect for email.

But it didn't make a good email address because it's kind of long and we want to get something even shorter than Gmail, let's say. So for 30 years I've been emailing, I always pretty much start my emails with, hey, Jason, hey, Jason, hey, whatever, right? And so I'm like, that should be it. And in base camp, we have a menu called hey, which is where all your notifications go. I'm like, I want to get hay.com. So I went to hay.com and saw who owned it. and I wrote a little email to the bottom, like on the, it was like Webmaster at Hay or contact at hay or whatever, right? So I wrote the guy, and it took about 18 months or so of negotiation,

two years almost, back and forth. I wrote a whole blog post about this. So if you search for how we acquired hay.com, you can read all the details, and I shared some of the emails with the fellow's permission. We went back and forth, a lot of false starts, some offers that weren't accepted, obviously, some negotiation, some dead spots from like, there's no way this is going to happen. And then it just kind of happened in the end. he made out great, we're happy with it. I'm assuming he has a little upside in it too, so that's always good. If this becomes a billion dollar company, he might get a little something on the back end, I assume.

I can't speak to any of those particular. Just for people who are, you know, what I'll tell people who are listening, who are founders, which is everybody listening basically, except for the VCs, is you got to play the long game with domains. And it's a matter of, you know, the cash payment and what could happen in the back end. It took me over 10 years to get inside.com. That was a long one. Mahalo and Kukua took me a year each or each or two. And then I had 20.com, 2.0.com, which I bought for 70 grand and wound up selling for millions.

When the Chinese internet culture decided numbers were better than word. You had 20? You had 2.0. That was the original idea for Mahalo was going to be the top 20 search results picked by humans. But then I went to Hawaii and, you know, the word mahalo.com just felt, you know, just better to me. And it tested better. So I went with Mahalo. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know about the App Store feud and the battle you got into with Apple over them wanting to take 30% of the revenue from hay.com in perpetuity when we get back on this week.

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all you have to do is go to gusto.com slash twist g-u-t-o dot com slash twist again gusto. gusto.com slash twist I'm telling you you're gonna love it get started today I use it I love it it makes everything easy breezy for us okay let's get back to this amazing episode all right finally Jason Freed is on the podcast he's Jason Freed F-R-I-E-D on the Twitter I'm at Jason however he's Jason at hey.com and I'm Jason Kalakanis at hey.com so I got the Twitter, he got the hay.com. And we all know

Apple controls their ecosystem with an iron fist. They want complete and utter control. This is a Steve Jobs legacy. He wanted to have the computers work, you know, the desktop computers

work flawlessly, easily. But this has now extended into a money-making strategy, not just user ease. And we've all experienced it buying a charging cable over the years and having it stopped working or working and paying $40 for a charger when they should cost $3.

You know, and you buy a USB standard charger. The App Store has some interesting rules around Apple cannot, Apple does not allow anybody else to run an app store on their iOS devices. So if Apple sells apps, Amazon as an example, or Google can't have an app store on the iOS device, nor can they have a bookstore or an audio bookstore. So if you've ever had the, I have an iPhone, I listen to Audible and Love Auto, like 400 books in my collection. We've all had this experience of having to go to. the web browser to buy a book that we just bookmarked in the app because Apple wants their Vig.

You guys are letting people, people have to sign up for email at hey.com and pay for it. You get 30 days free. After that, you pay $99 a year. Pretty fair price. A lot more than the free Gmail account. We'll talk about that in a moment. But what would explain to people who don't understand the beef you had with Apple, how, it went down and what your position was and what their position was.

Yeah. So there's a lot to it. So first off, we released or we followed all the unwritten rules. So the unwritten rules basically are if you have a software as a service product, which is what Hay is, and you allow signups on the web. Well, you're not allowed to say sign up on the web on the iOS app or subscribe or have any billing information or mention money in any possible way in the app. If you don't want to pay Apple 30%, which we don't.

This is what we do with Basecamp. This is what Salesforce does. This is what Slack does. Netflix. You just Spotify. All of them, right? Almost all of them, yeah. Yeah, almost all of them.

You don't mention these things because this is the unwritten rule. As long as you don't mention that Apple's been cool with it in the past. So that's what we did with, hey, we did the same thing we've done with Basecamp. Basecamp's been the App Store for eight years. Never a problem. We submit the app, version 1.0 to the App Store. Apple approves it. So we're in the App Store.

wonderful. We're all happy. We're thrilled. Then we release 1.02 to the App Store, which is a bug fix update. And they reject us. They reject us on the grounds that we basically owe them 30% of our revenues because we are a paid product. And you have to offer, if you have a paid product, you have to offer in at payments, Apple's payment system within the apps to allow people to subscribe, which was news to us because we followed all the unwritten rules. Everyone else followed. And we never had that experience with Basecamp. So we, we, we, we, we, we, we, thought there must have been a problem. And so we filed, we filed an appeal, basically. And then they came down saying, no, no, we're right. We as an Apple. We're right. You owe us 30 percent. And or if you don't, you know, if you don't comply, we might kick you out of the app store, essentially, like completely out. Even though we already approved your 1.0, we might just kick you out. Right. And so that's an existential threat. I mean, if you're not in the app store and you have an email product, like you're done trouble, you're done, right? Well, also because the Apple consumer are the vanguard.

They are the early adopters. And let's face it, they are... They pay. They pay. And anybody who's had an app in Android gets, you know, three times the downloads in Android and one third the revenue or something in that ballpark. Yes. So,

we had to be there. And so, you know, then, you know, so we filed this appeal. They rejected us. And then we kind of went to the press, which is what Apple says you shouldn't do. They have a whole thing. No, they do not like that. Don't go to the press.

Yeah. So, but you know, like here we are. We're a small independent company. We, we have a lot of followers. We have a lot of fans. The product was doing so, like the launch of hay was unlike anything we've ever launched before. The enthusiasm was off the charts.

And here we are, unable to bring simple bug fixes to our customers. That's a problem. We don't like that. That's not fair to anybody. So we kind of go to the press and tell the story and it blows up in a big way, huge way. David's leading this charge because David's great on Twitter. He's particularly good at mixing it up. As the ratings from this podcast prove and as our Twitter followers will agree. Yeah, if you have a sweep's week kind of thing, like you want David on the show. Always, always. Get him off of the

sweeps week. So anyway, that's, so David, you know, took to Twitter and I took to Twitter, but David really took to Twitter. And we made some noise because this is just flat out unfair. First of all, it's monopolistic. Second of all, it's inconsistent. And here's the thing. We're fortunate. No, we have base camp. We already have a business that's functioning, right? If we launched hay, we didn't have base camp, we put two years into this product, and we're following the unwritten rules that Apple has, and it seems like it's totally cool. And we put this thing out in the app store, and Apple kills it, like we could be out of business instantly, literally. It just feels like bullying. It's unfair, and it's lame. And it's impossible for a small business owner especially, an app maker, an individual,

to know what's coming from Apple if they change the rules, if the rules are selective based on who you are, based on unwritten rules, based on back office dealings. It's just like, it's impossible. It's just impossible and unfair. And so we went public with this, notion, and it got a lot of coverage and a lot of discussion. This happened to be a week before WWDC, which was not planned, but it turned out to really, I think, turn up the heat on Apple on this. Yeah, and you know, it's a different era now and you and I have both as underdogs coming

up in the industry, you know, around the same time, we both realized you always fight up and it is a great marketing strategy and in fact, in your book, Rework, the great money quote is having an enemy gives you a great story to tell customers

too. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides, passions are ignited, and that's a good way to get people to take notice. So a cynical person might say you knew this was coming and set it up. Yes or no? Well, a cynical person might say that, but absolutely not. I mean, there's no way to. We, truly, we, we didn't know if they would do that. I had no clue. In fact, they approved 1.0. Like, if our plan was to have them approve 1.0 and then reject the future

versions, which had no changes that were material to payment, that would be like David says, playing 4D chess, basically. We put this in the app store. We wanted none of this controversy. This was a shitty two weeks for us. I mean, it was brutal. It sucks because you can't make basic fixes. And everybody knows when you hit scale, you get the first 10,000, 20,000 people, things are going to pop up. What's great about the moment today, though, is five or 10 years ago, you know, Apple wasn't under the scrutiny of the government. Antitrust wasn't such a big concern. And anybody like I did with Google when I was complaining about their panda update and the way they treated us at Mahalo or other folks where they would change the SEO rules specifically to kill Yelp and have Google Local above it,

I had no way. I mean, and people were like, let it go, Jason. You're being difficult and stop beating up Mac cuts and da-da-da-da-da. But today, if I was in that fight, you know, you've got congressmen, senators, and the EU taking action. And, you know, the scale of Google and Apple are so huge right now that they're held to a different standard where, you know, I don't think they particularly want to pick a fight with you and David because it's just not worth it to just extract. If you become a hundred million dollar of your business, that 30 million is not worth them losing control of the app store. which is the possibility. Do you think we'll see Apple lose and have to accept third-party app stores or those kind of things on their platform? I don't think that's going to happen.

It could, but here's the thing that's frustrating, I think, about it. A couple things. First of all, the 30% is, of course, what everyone's eager to talk about because it's money and the thing. It's an easy thing to talk about. But we're really frustrated in me, and I wrote like a, a like a lot. about this, which I post on our site, was that we have a multi-platform business. And what's happened over the last 10 years is multi-platform businesses have sprung up. Like eight years ago, or whenever they introduced, well, they introduced the app store 10 years ago, but in-app payments

is a more relatively nuanced, newer thing. Businesses have changed. We're not just an app maker. We don't just make an app. We make a service. Our service is available on the web, on Android, on Windows, on the Mac, on Linux. Like, we have to support our customers in different places, and we have to do it the same way. What's really frustrating to me as a business owner about the app store for getting the 30% just for a moment is that I can't take care of my customers the same way. For example, a lot of people don't know this. If you send your customers through the in-app payment system through Apple, you can't help

them with billing issues. You can't help them with refunds. You can't help them with hardship discounts. You can't give them away for free. You can't do a whole bunch of things because Apple controls that whole process. Right. And if a customer has a problem, you have to say, go ask Apple. And you know what that ends up being?

it sometimes it's three to five day response time. While we have one hour response. If you even get a response. If you even get a response. We have invested heavily in amazing customers. It usually get responses from us within an hour. And so for me to say like, hey, all you iOS users, I can't provide a great level of customer service, which we've invested in for 20 years building.

Yeah. And back-end systems that we've built to make this so simple for people. Like, we can't help you. It's such a terrible experience for the user. And Apple loves to say that the in-net payment system is beneficial for the user. And yes, the individual process of maybe buying the thing is nice. No friction. That's great.

Yeah, no friction. And your privacy. I don't know if you saw now where you can log in with your email, but they don't give the email to the person. I love that. It's wonderful. There's some wonderful aspects to it. Yeah.

So the wonderful aspects, but. There's more to it, right? There's more to it. It's very nuanced. Payment is just the smallest little detail, truly, about really taking care of a customer. And if a customer's paying me $100 a year, you know, you're going to be. They expect me to help them. And for me to say, I can't, that's wrong.

So I think what's going to happen is, and I understand how this happens. Like, there's new businesses, there's new business models, there's new platforms, there's new stuff that's changing. Apple's a big, huge company with a big entrenched, you know, setup. And it's going to take a while for them, I think, to adjust ultimately to the reality on the ground that not every business runs only Apple stuff. And once they realize that, I know, I'm sure they know it now, but it takes a lot of energy to move a big, massive object like Apple, they will probably ultimately allow.

people to choose their payment processors to maybe one of the things I'd love to see happen is sort of a sort of a decoupling of the of the charges so let's say we have 30% this is an idea I don't know where this goes but here's an idea right 30% is their number well how do they attribute the 30 where's the 30% come from what Apple typically because because look credit card charging is between 1.8 and 2.8% basically that's how much a charge. Let's call it 3% rounded up fine 3% right okay so what's the balance well distribution I don't need distribution my own distribution. Marketing, discovery. I get how if you're a brand new app maker, you don't have a business, you don't need that. You might need that? I don't need that at all. I can send all my

customers. So for me, I'd be happy to pay 3% to Apple, perhaps, to process cards if that was a choice. I'd also be happy to pay, perhaps, for the process of reviewing an app that we submit because there's time. I wish they would do that. Why don't they allow you to pay 100 bucks or 500 bucks, something to minimis to get your app reviewed, this waiting and waiting is ridiculous. And I think they do that specifically to have power over you. And this is the Google technique as well, which is if we make this process opaque, the more opaque we make it, the less you can complain on CNBC like David was doing. Because they're just like, oh no, it's in process. When we get back from this quick break, I want to tell you my favorite feature, which I think is absolutely a game changer.

Everybody will copy. And I want to tell you my solution to the Apple App Store problem. We can get your feedback on it. When we come back on this week, it starts with Jason Freed. He is finally on the program. I love modern furniture. I am a modern furniture snob.

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You can go get yours. But you only get it for free for 30 days after that. 14. Oh, it's down to 14. It's always been 14. Always been 14. Then you pay 99. You had hundreds of thousands of people signed up on the wait list, correct?

Well, what we have right now is 170,000 plus people who've signed up for hay.com now. Got it. And if 10% were to convert, just 10%, that'd be 17,000, am I correct? Yeah. And not a great business. That'd be a great business. 17,000, 170,000, 1.7 million in revenue already. Yeah, but not a great business, right?

Like, you're kidding me. You're 30 days in. You made $2 million minimum. You're converting at least 10%. Well, my point is this. Have you probably released what you've converted or not? No. The conversion? We said only the first cohort. So the first cohort was the first day of people who signed up. Okay. 37% conversion rate. Oh my Lord. For the first day. So you made five million

dollars in the first month. Oh my lord. That is an incredible business. This is bigger than anything you've done in your career, correct? No. Base camp is a huge business. No, I'm saying in the first 30 days, base camp did not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. That was a slow burn. Yeah. Very slow. Yeah. I mean, no, what I meant by not a great business so far is that we have to have, we have to have a lot of people paying on the personal version of hay to really make this a viable. We've got two years. We've got a lot of people.

What does you take to launch something like this? 30, 40 people? Well, our company is 55 people. And, you know, we have a product development team. So we launched iOS, Android, and the web simultaneously. As long as Mac app, we use electrons. So Mac, Windows and Linux, native apps, too. We were part of the development team of half the company, basically.

The rest is support and operations, which, of course, is a big part of running the business. They're critical, but that's a company. You're about to have a lot more support issues. You're going to have to ramp up support. How do you think about that? Yeah, you want to know how many customer service emails we've gotten so far? I think 25,000 in three weeks. Oh, my Lord.

What is the top one? like how do I forward this or pop support or some some absurd stuff? A lot of them are there's a lot of it's not a lot of confusion it's more like can I yeah like do you guys support IMAP can I have a custom domain like a lot of the things that we're going to eventually you know do down the road perhaps but a lot of just questions about feature requests and can I do this and can I do that and that kind of thing and there's of course been problems

and bugs we've we've knocked out about a hundred plus bugs so far so there's all that too but yeah this is this is taking us by storm we did not expect we knew this was a great product but we did not know that it going to strike a nerve like it has. So we're thrilled. But the last two, three weeks have been, have sucked in a lot of ways because we are not used to working crazy hours. You know, you and I have talked about this in the past. Yes. We work for the hour weeks. Yeah. Anti-hustle culture. Yeah. We're not into the crazy hours. We're not into working on the weekends. And the last two weeks, two and a half, yeah, this was, this was not, this was, I mean, it's enthralling and

exhilarating and wonderful. And we couldn't be more, you know, couldn't be happier with the response, but we can't work like this forever. It's fucking brutal. It's horrible. So, you know, we have to get back to normal here soon. And we're going to hire some additional people. We brought on five temps to help on customer service. We're probably going to hire some more people. We're going to have to hire some people here now that we have something that's working. My only point with not a good business is that we have to sell a lot of personal accounts at 99 bucks a year. However, in a few months, we're going to launch Hay for Work, formerly, which is the multi-user work version, which is what we've been running inside Basecamp for a number of months now.

So, you know, you can collaborate on emails, you can have custom domains, there's a whole bunch of other features. So that's really, I think, with real businesses. That's like the front competitor. Front app lets you have like one multiplayer mode in email is like a big one. Yeah, we have that. So we're going to have that plus a whole bunch of other things. See, people don't understand how awesome that is because if you have an email and, you know, it's a customer support one is a perfect example. I might want to say, hey, share this with somebody, allow them to reply to it, or we can have a little discussion on the side of it, which I guess we use frontier for our customer support stuff and Zendesk. And this is like a real business opportunity,

I believe. Yeah, those are great products. And, you know, for us, we normally do like five or six 600 customer service emails a day because we have a lot of base camp customers and now we're going have all these. So like for us, we need a debt, we use help scout. We need a dedicated help system. But if you're a small company or your team that gets 20 or 30, 50 customer service emails a day, a shared inbox style product like this, like front or like like hey for work, it's perfect for that. Or you can just forward it into a Slack room and people can kind of mitigate it there. People do all kinds of hacks, but it really should be a built in feature. The feature I like the most is where if somebody's emailing you for the first time, you get to thumbs up or thumbs down.

if they get to talk to you. Explain how you came up with that feature. What do you call it again? It's called the screener. The screener. I told you guys on Twitter, I was like, this is the most brilliant part of it for me.

Tell everybody how you came up with the idea for the screener and how it works practically. Yeah, so basically, we're all very comfortable with screening our calls. 100%. Phone rings.

You look at the number. I don't know who that is. I'm not going to answer. No, never. That's what we do. That's death. Never, right? Maybe it goes to voicemail.

Maybe you listen to the voicemail. Maybe you go, oh, that's the card. dealer, the service is ready for pickup. Okay, I'll call them back. But most of the time, you just don't answer and you don't look at the voicemail or even if you do, you don't call them back, right? We have this power, basically this idea to a certain degree of consent. We're in control in a way of who we talk to on our phones, but we're not really in control, or we haven't been before, hey, of who we talk to via email. That one of the beauties of email, of course, is that

everybody can get in touch with everybody. That's one of the wonderful things about email, but it's also the worst thing about email is that you don't control who can get in touch with you anymore. It used to be 10, 20 years ago, you would just give out your email address to people that you wanted to hear from. But now our email address has been bought, sold, traded. They're all over the place. There's no such thing anymore. No such thing. Yeah. I mean, even when I came up with one and it's just immediately gets uncovered. It's everywhere. Yeah, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. So we wanted to bring the notion of, like the old school notion of, I get to control who gets in touch with me via email. So in, hey, the first time anyone ever emails you, they don't land. And

in what's called the inbox. They land in what's called the screener. And the screener shows the person and their email. And you say, do you ever want to hear from this person? Yes or no? If you say no, you'll never hear from them ever again. Now, we also have a spam filter ahead of that. But this is the thing. Spam is not the problem with email anymore. It used to be. Now the problem is other people getting through who you don't want to hear from, salesperson. The sequences, that's the big thing. is the sequences now. Oh my God. The drips, the e-emails are a three weeks.

And, you know, for me, it's a PR. I get, for this podcast, I get no less than two dozen emails a day with people who want to be on the podcast. Yeah. And we just tell them we don't, we don't accept submissions, but this, there's a company, Cision or Vision or some goddamn PR database where they, I keep asking them to take me out, but they're just, the way they build their database, is they'll give you a lower price. I think it's called Cision or Vision.

Anyway, it's a PR database. And these, I could say a curse word right now, these melon farmers, they specifically, from what I understand, if you're a PR person and you add people's contact information back, then they're like, oh, we didn't do it.

Somebody else did it. And I'm like, I want to be permanently out of this goddamn database. And then somebody downloads business podcast. So they download 400 emails and they spam me. I don't mind getting a personalized email, but for the love of God. And that I think, I literally think this is going to, this feature is going to become the standard. The next piece.

I hope it is. It will be. And here's the thing. Here's the thing that I think really important about it is that people deserve to have control over their own time and attention. Of course. Every time someone lands in an email in front of you, they're taking a piece of your time and attention. Even if you want to delete it or ignore it or archive it or whatever. people do, you still have to deal with it. It's cognitive overload. It's cognitive overhead. And it just

makes your life annoying. Yes. So we're stopping it at the source. And then someone could drip you, you know, nine emails over three weeks. It doesn't matter. You'll never get any of them. It's so great. Do they get any indication that they've been? So you're basically hell banning them. They're hell banned. I love it. Yeah. And you can change your mind. We save the emails for 90 days. So if you change your mind, you want to flip them back on to being yes, you'll get a all those emails that you decided that you didn't want to hear from. So sometimes you do it by accident, you do the wrong person or whatever. So you can save yourself there. But mostly it's like, no, I don't want to hear from you. I don't have time. I was using shift exclamation point when I

was in Gmail. And I'll tell you how I do with it. Now, this is the one thing I wanted to get to. So you know my favorite feature. The other thing is I have a solution for Apple, which I have been bringing up year after year. I bought the goddamn phone. It's my device. It is no longer yours. and you're making, they're charging, I think I paid $1,200 for my last one, and I read the cost of $350 or something. They're making like, basically you could buy a car for the cost of 15 iPhones, the latest one.

It's a really expensive high margin product. In your settings, there should be a button you click that says allow third-party apps and app stores. This would be the perfect way for them to say, we are not going to give you customer support if you click this button. Here's a warning. Your phone now is your responsibility. If you get hacked, if it breaks, don't come to the genius bar.

You're on your own. Just like, you know, and then we'd be done with this whole debate. And people could just load the Amazon app store or whatever they want. What do you think of my solution? Is this a viable one? I like it. I don't know if it's viable from their perspective. No, but if you and I were going to lobby, you know, Congress, the EU, etc., which we could do.

You and I and David and a couple of people could write a blog post. Let us do what we want with our phone and we'll assume the risk. Yeah, I just want choice. I want choice too. That's it. Like, I want choice. And here's the other thing. To your point, I almost wonder, maybe this is a cynical person in me.

You know how mostly now they don't really let, they don't really encourage people to buy phones now. Now they're just rented, right? You just kind of pay this monthly fee, right? So it's not really yours. Oh, yeah. So you have to kind of, but I think this idea of, yeah, paying outright, it's like, this is mine now. Right. I should have a little bit of control over, like, what gets on it.

And it's up to me. It's my thing. It's my device. It's my choice. And if a company, like, that I trust wants to send me iOS software that way, they should be able to, of course. Of course. And I understand, like, I really, I understand the fundamental principles of the app store as it, as it was in its purest form way back when loading software onto mobile phones back in 2007 or six sucked horribly. It was a terrible, terrible thing.

I remember having to do this with, like, loader apps and, like, you know, at a Palm Pre or whatever I had before. It's a horrible experience. So Apple really truly innovated as Apple does. And they're wonderful at this. And they're wonderful breaking categories. And they're amazing. Their user experience is fantastic. But things have changed.

Yeah. And as a, you know, as a customer, like let me, if I want, trust the companies that I want to trust. Why should Apple be the arbiter of who I can trust? Remember they wouldn't let you use VLC. the open source video player. So you couldn't have a video player. You were also not allowed to have a browser. So you couldn't download opera or whatever browser,

dolphin you wanted. And the public pressure from entrepreneurs and from users, I think pushed Apple to realize, you know what? If we squeeze too hard, you know, like Princess Leia,

I told Darth Vader, like the more galaxies are going to slip through your fingers. But also, you know, people were like, hey, JCal, you're a big investor in Super human, superhuman. Superhuman is 30 bucks a month. You're, I guess, $8 a month or so. Eight and a quarter a

month. And I saw you guys coming in and you know what I said? Wonderful. Because when it's a two horse race, when there are two extremely talented teams going after a big prize like email, boy, is that going to attract a lot of attention from consumers and it's going to make both teams better. Now, the way I handle, there's an incredible feature in superhuman, and this is going to become, I think the hey.com superhuman race is going to become another Uber Lyft, you know, kind of race, Apple, Android, which is fantastic for investors and owners of each of these companies. They have a great feature. When you hit the shift exclamation point, not only can you ban that person, you can ban the whole domain name. So when I get, you know, blank PR,

or blank communications, oh, not only do I ban you, I ban your entire domain. And the first thing I did when I saw Hay.com was I emailed Raul and the team over there, and I said, this screener is going to become the standard. You got to get this feature out there.

This is going to be awesome. And I know you guys have mixed it up a little bit with them about the tracking pixels, which, let's face it, everybody uses across all sales software. Let's unpack that for a minute. People track opens. It's done by default in almost universally all sales software. What should the standard be for email tracking?

I have my own views, but I'm curious about yours. And then I'm curious how you look at superhuman, which is a loved, elegant, beautiful product. Yeah, sure, of course. All right. So let's talk about the tracking thing. So, Hey, is really the first product of its kind built with this feature built in, which basically blocks all what we call spy pixels, which are pixels that are injected into emails that tell the sender all sorts of things about you without your permission.

Did you open the email? How many times did you open the email? What kind of computer do you own? What kind of phone did you look at the email on? How long did you spend reading the email? How many times did you go back to the email? What's your IP address, which can really leak some private location-based data in a sense? None of these things are anyone's business just because I opened an email.

So my feeling is that there should absolutely be no tracking for emails. And if you want to opt in to be tracked, opt in. And this is how I look at these things. Like, if the industry loves tracking so much and they think it's so important, well, then give people the option to opt into it, not opt out of it. Opt out of it is the default. And not let them opt in. They're going to see that very few people are willing to share that kind of information

back with the sender. It's none of anyone's business. I agree with you because if you look at something like the I message product, you can set read receipts, right? And so with my wife and my close friends, I want them to know that I read it, right? That's an important feature for me. Okay, I read it just so you know I saw it. It might be in a meeting or on the podcast, but at least you know I did read it.

But I agree it should be something that there is an open standard about. And I used to use something because I don't know if you know about, what is it, docksend? Is like everybody sends their pitch decks and docksend? I don't know if you get this. I know I've heard of something like that. Yeah, it's sort of like a PDF. Instead of sending a PDF, you send a dox send. What people don't know when you get a doxend because it doesn't give you this warning is, oh, I went through your startup's deck as an investor at one second a page and then I spent 17 seconds on this chart page, right?

So it's giving you this really granular stuff. Founders love it. People sending documents absolutely love it. I will not open a doxend. I use a VPN. I have personal security things like any tar. targeted, anybody who's a target, because, you know, Russian hackers, Chinese hackers, all these folks are trying to get in on venture capitalists or CEO's emails for obviously reasons.

And so I'm always using all these kind of crazy blockers, but I think it should become a standard where I agree with you, the standard should be in all of these products that you opt into this and you pick who you want to and it could even suggest to you. And it's got, it should be more upfront. I used to use something like a Chrome extension called Badmail or something like this and all these features are sitting there in the Chrome extension store, you know, they're just not updated and they're not built into products. One of the things I love about what you're doing, I love about what Superhuman is doing is you can collect all of these like little features that

people hack together. Oh, I don't know if you saw this. Somebody did the screener for Gmail. Did you see that yet? I saw that someone's working on some stuff like that. Yeah, somebody basically said, I'm going to make the screener as a Chrome extension. I was like, that's a really great tribute to it. How do you think about Google and Gmail? And also, how do you think about superhuman. Yeah, let me just add a couple more things on the side pixel thing. Then we'll get to that, which is you probably remember, you've been around for a while too. So like way back in the day, there wasn't unsubscribe links at the bottom of every

of every newsletter. Like that wasn't even a thing. Like it was eventually like people had to do this. It had to be added. Yeah. And so I think opt-in is important for sharing information back. I also think like let them disclose at the bottom of every email. Like let them say, did you know that when I, when you opened this email? Yeah. We received your IP address. rest, we received how many, like, then you start to expose the stuff.

People go, wait a second. Yep. Wait a second. And the thing that really bugs me is not so much newsletters, to be honest, because this is actually something that was, you know, superhuman used to do, right? Which is they would let you know if someone read your email. It's a read receipt that was on that the receiver didn't know anything about. And that really bug me.

It bugs us and a lot of bugs a lot of people because it's none of anyone's business. I don't even know what's being tracked. No one knew it was being tracked. And they got a lot of heat for that. So in general, opening an email should not reveal anything to anybody. It's just opening an email. It's like you open a letter. The person who sent it to you doesn't get a text back saying you open the letter.

It's just none of the other than that. So anyway, that's my take. Yeah. And I think on the web. It's personal identifying information, which is the problem. Because like people might argue, well, on the web, you know, there's analytics and stuff. But these analytics, of course, aren't personal analytics unless you've logged into a system. But literally every cell software does this.

And so we just need to have a standard on it. I think there should be a standard. And I like the idea that there's a big dialogue going on about it. Tell me how you think about the two competitors, Gmail and superhuman. And, you know, why has Google screwed this up so badly? Like, why does Hay and Superhuman even need to exist? Yeah. Well, first of all, they're all very different products.

So none of us are really competing with Gmail. Gmail is 1.5 billion people using. Crazy. So like superhuman and hey, don't have that, we'll never have that. They're different categories entirely. But like I think what, you know, Gmail, first of all, I think Google inbox was a wonderful product that they killed. Remember that?

Yeah. That was a really clever product, I thought, and they killed that and they rolled some of the stuff back into Gmail. But Google does a million things. Like they're not really focused on email that much. It's just like email matters to them, but it's not their primary focus. They don't really make a lot of money on it. It's not their thing.

They had to stop selling ads against it or personalized ads. Mad, did they get a lot of data, though? Oh, yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons why we don't do anything like that. Hey, we don't sell ads. We don't mind your data. We don't look at anything personal. We don't sell anything you give us.

You pay us for the product. So anyway, so Gmail is a, it's free email for anybody and everybody and like, we'll never be on that level, nor do we want to be on that level. Because you really can't provide great service. Like, we're all about providing great products and great service. Gmail can't provide great customer service to a billion people. people. There's just no, the economics don't work out. It's just not possible. Not for a free product, certainly. Not for a free product, right? So Hey is not free. Hey is not enough. So Superhuman is a client that sits on top of Gmail or other mail services. So Hey is different.

Hay is closer to Gmail and that it's a male provider. And superhuman is closer to any number of the different clients. Right. And it's a wonderful product. A lot of people love it. It's fat. Their whole thing is primarily fast and keyboard commands and, you know, Hay has all those things as well. a different audience, a different target. Yeah, I agree. And it's, look, like you said, I love competition. It's wonderful. And this is the whole thing, like, I'm getting back to the Apple discussion,

there should be competition. Things will get better. Prices will come down. All these things will get better. So I love it. And there's other players, too. There's other players, too. It's not just same superhuman.

Who else is doing something? Well, I see pro, is it proto-male? Proton mail and Basmail. Why is proton mail becoming popular? Is that strictly because people want to be anonymous or something? Yeah, so proton mail is end-to-end encrypted. So it's really for really sensitive emails, like journalists and all sorts of different people who, you know, sources or whatnot, sending stuff back and forth.

So their real thing is super high-end encrypted security or encrypted emails. Fast mail is another option, which is another mail provider, just like hey and Gmail are, and they have their own set of features, and that's a wonderful product too. What's their selling point? Does it have a specific selling point? Well, I mean, you'd have to ask them, but primarily it's that like you're not, you don't have to be on Gmail. You don't have to be giving your information to Google. You know, there's privacy.

Privacy, yeah. Yeah, privacy. And pay for the stuff and, you know, support a company. So I think, you know, and they have other features that it's a really nice product, actually. So there are a number of them out there. But what we're trying to do with, hey, is really revisit the workarounds. And email is full of workarounds. Like, how do I get back to people later?

Or you hack that. How do I set something aside for later? where you hack that. Why do I have to read emails one at a time? Why can I read them all on one page? Like, we have this feature called feed. I love that one. Yeah,

we have this feature called read together where you can just like open up six emails at the same time on the single page and scroll through them. Just like you do on Facebook or on Twitter or on LinkedIn or Instagram. You scroll through things. That's how we do it in modern day.

But email has been so far behind. So we're just trying to bring these modern ideas to email and reinvision. Where do you think the chances are the sleeping giant, you know, Gmail or Outlook or somebody wakes up? I think they're going to copy a lot of this stuff. But what are you going to do? Yeah.

I mean, and also there, it's, the difference is founder authority. I always think like the founders have a passion for it and the people who are the line workers. They just, all right, we got our asses kicked.

These new features, I guess we've got to try to catch up. But, you know, I also don't think that Gmail feels like any of the above our threats, like superhuman, hey, fast mail.

But they're, we're pimples, right? Yeah. Because they've got, 1.5 billion customers, a totally different customer base. They might improve. They might take some of these ideas and some of these features and build them into Gmail. Wouldn't be surprised. They're good ideas. And good ideas should flourish and they should spread around. We're not here to protect anything.

There's nothing we can protect anyway. We just want to provide a great service for people who want to support a company like ours and want to see email. And if they want to be on the frontier of what's possible with email, they want to be on. So it's up to people to decide that. And like I said, We're not free. We're at nine bucks minimum a year. And so that's not for a lot of people either. Yeah. It's so nice, though, that there's willingness on consumers now.

Like, consumers seem to be maturing in the, you know, third decade of the web or whatever we're on now of, you know, people are really understanding it. And they understand if they're not paying, then they're the product, right? If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And it's delightful to see consumers willing to pay. And the advice I give people about the app store is, you know, if you pay Apple their Vig, you're likely, and there's a reason why they have the top revenue charts. The top revenue charts reward people who give them money. They don't have insight into how much Netflix makes, so Netflix can never be or Spotify can never be on those charts.

But if another company puts it on there, I think for small companies, this is why if I was your partner on there, I'd say, let's pay them the VIG because we'll be on the charts, right? If 30, 40,000 people pay, we'll be the number one on that chart. So if you think about the marketing, did you guys have that internal discussion that, hey, maybe if we give them, you know, $300,000 will be pinned as, you know, top three or four paid apps for a couple of weeks. Yeah, you know, it's just not the way we want to do business. I'm not interested in giving anyone 30% of our revenues like that.

Like we've spent 21 years building a reputation, building customer base, building trust, building integrity, building great products. And for me, just to hand over my customers to Apple, just to get on a chart, not interested in that. I mean, here's the other thing that people, again, don't realize. When your payment goes through Apple and at payments, they're not your customer anymore. That's the key. See, I think that's the key issue where I'm agreeing with you. Why should I give my customers to Apple? And on the credit card charge slip, or well, not the slip, but like on your statement, it says Apple.

It doesn't say base camp, it does Apple. Yes. And that is the problem, yeah. That was Rupert Murdoch's problem, by the way. When he did the app, remember he did the news app? Oh. I forgot the name of it. It will come to me in a moment, or my producer will put it into the chat room and I'll take credit for it.

But, sorry, I seem so smart on the podcast. But it was the deli. It was the deli. Right. I got it. And his thing was, I'm not putting Wall Street Journal on there unless I get the names of the subscribers and I can talk to my subscribers. No, no Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs folded for him, but it was one of the reasons why I left Angelist was,

I didn't know who, you know, they wouldn't give me the contact information of the angels who were investing alongside of me. And I was like, you know what? I'm so done investing in platforms where they obscure and they create this distance to control me by not letting me know who my customers are. I want to know my customers. I want to know my LPs. I want to know my partners.

what's it like to work with David? He is a very interesting cat. Does he make you crazy sometimes? Do you guys fight about stuff? Or do you just like appreciate him for the wild berserker he is? Because, you know, he is a bit of a spirited individual like myself. What's it like to work with him? I love David.

David, I can, honestly, I could go on vacation with David because we don't agree on, you know, we agree on half the stuff. Sure. But I love to be. with people. I love when he's on the podcast. Love a different perspective. Yeah, David loves arguing, and you love arguing. And I love arguing, and I love arguing too. But does that get a little annoying having an arguer as a partner? You guys ever go at it? Oh, we do. We do. We see things, like, we see business stuff

95% the same. And there's like the 5% or 10% we don't about pricing or, you know, how to roll a product out. Like, there's a ton of debates around, hey, like, should we launch the work version first? Should we launch them both at the same time? Should we launch the personal version? Is there even a market for the person? There's all these headbutting debates. But the thing is, is that, I mean, I love working with David. David's brilliant and is such a smart cat, yeah. Such a great partner. What is his superpower? David is incredibly clear-minded. I think, you know, some people, you talk to him and they have arguments, and if you were able to knock on the argument, it'd sound like hollow, would. Like, if you knock on David's arguments, they're oak.

Like, David has, there's substance behind what he's saying. He believes in what he's saying. He's done the research. He's done the thinking. He might be right. He might be wrong. I mean, that's also for time to tell because people are wrong. People give him shit for like, you know, 10 years ago, whatever it was.

He's like, Facebook's not going to be worth anything. So, okay, he was wrong on that, right? People were wrong. He can't be 100% on anything, of course. But David really, when he argues, he believes what he's saying. And he's brilliant. And it's wonderful. I'm inspired to work with him.

I love working with him. We definitely go head to head on product decisions and product ideas. And at the end of the day, it's my call. It's my company. But, I mean, we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are without him. So, thrilled to happen. It's wonderful. I hope we've been in business now together.

I mean, I started the business in 99 with a few other different partners. So he came on a little bit later. So 2002, 2003 kind of thing was when he became a partner in the business, basically. And I hope we're still in business 20 years from now working together. I love it. It's wonderful. So he's great. He's great.

And, yeah, I mean, like, I don't, I don't. He's got his own set of personal debates and arguments that he's going to make, and I'm going to make my own. And I usually stay out of the fray on Twitter because I'm not interested in that side of Twitter. I'm more interested in Twitter is like a business commercial thing, not like a personal. That's where I'm moving to. For me, it was like a fun because, you know, all these online communities start as fun. And it's a small group of people. And then it just gets too big and it collapses on itself.

It's almost like a boom-bust cycle of like, it's like Darwinism. The pond gets too many fish in it. They eat all the algae, everything. It's also hard to defend in an argument in 240 characters, like to people who aren't really interested in listening or, and that's like we can all make bad arguments too. So it's not like any argument you make is worth defending. Sometimes you just make bad arguments. But like it's just so hard. But, you know, one thing I want to get back to, I was just thinking about this.

Your point about getting out of Angel List, you know, for a while, during the Apple thing with Apple and Hay, I was actually considering, if the Apple decision would have gone the other way, I was considering quitting and basically retiring. You as it like Yes Wow Because here's why If I didn't get into business I didn't start a business To be told what to do by another business

Right No you don't want to be bullied No And not even bullied just like Yeah bullied You're right bullied I don't want to be like That's not why I'm an independent

Like I've We've built an independent business intentionally We don't have outside funding You know the whole story right We're self-funded We do everything our own way So we can do it our own way

And to be in an industry where if Apple forced us to have to give them 30% of our business and not be able to interface with our customers the way we want, I don't want to be in that industry. I'm not running a business. It's horrible. And like, that's not, if that's the norm, I want out. I'm not interested in that. So, like, I was contemplating that during the thing. Like, I didn't know where this was going to go. We truly didn't know.

And by the way, I will say at the end, when it all kind of came together, Apple was very gracious. And they gave me a phone call and explained the reason. Yeah, I mean, it was nicely handled in the end. And the fellow, I can't share his name, but the fellow who I was interacting with at Apple was a very fair-minded, kind person. He was just doing his job. Right. You know, he wasn't being able to, he wasn't the one making the ultimate calls here.

And he gave me a call at the end to let us know the app was finally approved. And I was really happy with how that all wrapped up. But for a while there, I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be in this industry if I have to basically give in to a trillion dollar, if a trillion dollar business can tell me how to run my business. an independent business worth, whatever it's worth, it doesn't even matter. It's nowhere near what Apple's worth. If I can't be myself, if I can't run my own company, my own way,

what's the point? What's the point? Business at all? No, it'd be like, you know what? If you'd think about the art and the craftsmanship, the craft work that we do making these companies, it would be like being in the movie business and like you make this great film and the theaters are just like, yeah, no. You can't be on the screen.

It's like, but I put all this effort in art into this and like you have the movie theater and I have the movie. Like, can't we get along? And this is why I think, you know, I'm not a big regulation guy. I like free markets. I think you do like free markets. But this is anti-competitive. And when a company gets so big, they need to become self-aware and they have to pick the battle and they have to figure out, is this the hell they want to die on or the hill they want to murder people on? And it's a stupid decision for Apple to pick that hill to die on. They got here by developers. They don't make good software.

Apple makes terrible software. Apple, every Apple product, you know, from video editing to audio editing to calendar to mail sucks. They're dependent on the ecosystem to make beautiful apps. So why antagonize people who want to be on your platform? And I think that's what they realized. And I think it's a very important thing for people listening to this podcast to realize is when there is injustice like this with a big company, speak up. write the blog posts and the other founders, the other podcasters, the other entrepreneurs are going

to rally behind you. Yeah, we saw a lot of that. And it gave us a lot of energy because this is really an argument we were making for all developers. I mean, we were using our, we were in the thick of it. So like this is our example, but this, we want to see rule changes for everybody because it's simply just not fair. And here's the other thing, you know, we heard from dozens and dozens of founders and entrepreneurs and developers who came out of the woodwork privately to us off the record saying,

Yeah, they're not going to say it publicly. Yeah, they're afraid. And when a company strikes fear in other companies, that's the tell. Yes, that's the tell that something is wrong here. And there's so many companies out there, independent developers who feel totally bullied, have been pushed around and strong armed by large companies, Apple included. But they're afraid. They're afraid.

And you basically have had, historically, you've had to have been Spotify or Netflix or some big massive company who can spend the time and spend the money arguing. The thing is, is that company, like, the public doesn't care about billion-dollar companies arguing with each other. I think what was interesting about this case is that we were a relatively small company arguing against the big company. And that was kind of, I think, where the leverage was, ultimately. And I'm glad that it happened. And I'm glad that there's some rule changes. We'd love to see a lot more.

And I think your idea also is good. There's a lot of great ideas out there. And I think I'm hopeful that Apple will begin over time over the next few years to begin to pry open the door a little bit and give some people some choice and some ideas. options. Otherwise, at some point, and who knows when this is going to be, because no company really knows when this happens until it flips, people are going to leave, or governments are going to come down even harder. And we'll see how the EU shakes out. And there's also an antitrust investigations starting in the U.S. I think in July this month here. You overplay your hand at your peril. You know, you really have to think it through. If you're going to be a bully

like this, all of those enemies accumulate. And, you know, the same exact thing happened. When I started criticizing Google, people are like, hey, JCal, let it go. You know, just take the loss, lay off your employees, and don't fight it. And I was like, and that's not how I'm going down. I'm going down swinging. And to this day, I say, Matt Cut screwed me. And I say they lied to me. And I think that there should be antitrust.

Because if you look at what they did with search, they, this is the, the lying was so obvious. They said, we didn't change organic search. And I'm like, okay. But you moved the first organic search result, 400 pixels down the, the goddamn page and you put your box ahead of it. So you and everybody knows that 90% of the clicks are on the first three choices, therefore putting Yelp down there, therefore putting travel, therefore putting Mahalo, whatever it is down there.

You put yourself up top. You don't have to change your organic results. You're lying. And you caught them in this lie. And if you think about this bad behavior, you know, when people are scared, you're of speaking up, that should make you yourself have some level of self-reflection. And this is what I told to the highest levels of Google. I said, do you really want people to be scared of you? Is that how you want to live your life? Right. Because you could also be gracious and generous and you're making,

how much money has to pile up in Apple's coffers for them to think it's worth it? You know, like What point do you just look in the mirror and hate yourself? It's, it is baffling and it's unfortunate. But I think sometimes what happens is that not to defend it, because I'm with you on this completely, is that just this is what happens. Public markets demand returns. Everyone's looking for money and everyone's looking for revenue and here's a big revenue source. And they can take a, you want to take a slice of every, Apple wants take a slice of every service that exists.

Like, you could see how they would want that. Their service business now. So you can just kind of see how these things evolve. It doesn't mean that there's bad people that are making these decisions. decisions. It's just like, this is, this is what happens. And as a company amasses more and more and more power, this is what happens. This is just what happens every single time. And at some point, it breaks. And by the way, speaking of Google, I mean, you know probably, was it last year, we got in a whole thing with Google around having to buy our own branded keywords because

Google's selling our branded keywords, other people. And they've made the ads look like organic results, even more so than ever before. And people don't know and people are confused. And It's brutal. It's brutal. Like, why? Why? And I can tell you how we could fix this. This is what we need to do.

Because I did this with Mahalo. I recorded people using Google. If you record people using Google and you say, and you show them those bullshit ads where they make you pay to not have your competitor there. So for you, you know, if Basecamp is being competed against by Acme Project Management, they can buy your keyword. Put themselves up there. Then you have to buy it.

The word. The word ad is a little tiny chicklet. The smallest, you could possibly do it. If you have 100 people do it and then afterwards say, did you click on an ad or did you click on an organic search result? They will say, I didn't click on an ad, 60, 70% of the time. It's been proven. For sure.

And if there were videos like that submitted to the EU and we just did a focus group, it cost $1,000 to do this, if you're listening to me and you've got a problem with this, and you do, all you have to do is run that test, and then Google will stop in their tracks, because the last thing they want to do is get in a fight with people who say, you're deceiving users. Right. And it's so clear they're deceiving users by making the ad look so similar. Remember the old days the ad was in a box with a color behind it?

Totally. It was light blue. And in fact, if you look at, like, I think the New York Times maybe did a piece on this. They looked at like Google ads over the last 10 years or something. Maybe it's the post. I'm not sure who it was now. But anyway, and you could see that there's been a conscious effort to make these things look more and more and more like organic results. More native, yeah.

And it's just, it's wrong. And here's the other thing that's so wrong about it is that Google will allow anyone to buy our trademarked brand name, Basecamp, okay, or Hay. I haven't even looked at Hay ads. I don't know if anyone's taking ads out against Hay yet. But anyway, but if you try to buy Google and put Google in your ad, they will say, no, no, you can't use Google. that's a trade that's registered trademark so they know the value of the brand they know the value of trademarks and their argument would be well we can't have a database of everyone's trade what do you mean you have a database of everything you just index the world's data that's your argument right yeah

that's your argument it's like facebook being like we can't figure out what you know the posts are that our hates means you're porn but they can figure out if you put a dating ad app like they can't figure out it's a Russian or racist ad but the second you put a competing social network ad up or a competing, you know, ad for a dating site, you're immediately taken down. It's like, really, guys? Yeah.

I mean, you've got some of the brightest people, brightest people in the world working these places. Of course they can do this. It's just about the will and the business model and all that. So, I mean, of course they can figure this out. So it's really frustrating, though. And it's sad that there's basically duopoly. You've got Google.

You've got Apple. You've got these massive companies that are exerting all this pressure on the mobile environment. There's no one else. There's no other mobile operating systems. Windows phone's gone. There's two. and they basically, Google's slightly better in their app store or Google Play Store is slightly better with these rules, but they're going to move in Apple's direction too, I think. And they're already kind of maybe doing it. I don't know. But also like you said, it doesn't really matter. I want the apps reviewed. And so what I think, you know, to my point before about like, hey, I'm going to put mine on experimental mode or, you know, I'm going to put it in developer mode, basically. Anybody can click it over to developer mode and do whatever they want with their phones. I like the idea that they're reviewed. I like apps being reviewed for.

you know, malware or whatever. But I might want to take a risk on, you know, something, and which is, you know, I think they were going to try to kill test flight before they bought it. As we wrap up here, and thanks for your time. I know you're busy. Work from home was this weird, wacky, 5% of the market. We have the pandemic. And now you guys win the argument.

Unfortunately. Unfortunately, you win the argument over the pandemic. But the truth is, you know, you've been doing this longer and advocating a lot of, for longer than anybody. You had a beautiful office in Chicago, which I think you handed the keys back. Am I right? Our lease is up in one month and we're never, we're not renewing. What should people know about running an at-scale work from home company? What are the two or three things that you need to do to make it work? Yeah, I think the most important thing is to think of remote working as a platform, just like you think of macOS as a platform and iOS is a platform and Windows as a platform.

And the reason I'm making at this point is, and also DVDs as a platform and the web is a platform. Because let me just kind of go back for a minute. You'll see where this makes sense in a minute. Do you remember back in the early days of the web, 96, let's say, most websites were either super simple or they looked like CD-ROM DVD interfaces. Yeah, they were either disgusting or they just look like a piece of typewriter paper. Right. Because what happens is whenever there's something new, people port over what they're used to from the previous thing. So they ported over CD-ROM and DVD multimedia interfaces to the web.

Then eventually people figure out there's something called web design, and that got better. Now, the same thing was true when people ported Windows software over to the Mac. It was terrible, but like that's how, and then eventually Mac software got better, right? The same thing is true for remote working, which is that people are trying to port over the office environment online remotely. It doesn't work. Just like porting a DVD-ROM interface over the web doesn't work. These are different methods of working.

And so what's really important here is that remote working is a different way of working. It's not a remote version of office working. And what I mean by this is this. I'd like to see more asynchronous communication, less real-time communication. In the office environment, people have meetings all the time. They're talking out loud. That's real time. When you're remote, you can take advantage of the distance and have asynchronous conversation

so people can have more time to themselves and more attention to themselves. Fewer meetings. Don't replicate all your meetings on Zoom. Have fewer meetings, not more meetings. They're not the same meetings. These are opportunities to change the way you work, give people more time to themselves, more freedom, more autonomy. And with that transition, which can be hard for some, you're going to see that there's significant

advantages to working remotely. There's disadvantages too. There's isolation. There's a whole bunch of things around that. And clearly, like sometimes being in person, it's hard to beat. But when you can't, and you realize that there's other advantages to remote working and you kind of lean into those, you can really run a wonderful company remotely. But what people struggle with is when they're trying to run a remote company to weigh the same way they ran a local company.

It just does not work. How do you build culture? How do you keep people from feeling isolated? Because that is the thing that's becoming very cute for me personally. I feel so isolated. I don't enjoy it. And I'm starting to see people crack. Now, I'm a hundred percent extroverted, 96 percent extroverted on my Myers-Briggs horoscope.

You might be a little more introverted. Yes. So I think for introverts, this feels pretty good. For extroverts. Look what we've had to deal with this whole time. Yeah, exactly. Now you can deal with ours. Well, it feels like solitary confinement for me.

I'll be honest. Yeah. Here's the thing. I'm losing it. This is not really remote working. This is remote working in a pandemic. Because normally you could go out to a coffee shop and working. Yes.

You know, you could still meet up with people occasionally. Like we're not opposed to meeting up with people occasionally, but right now you can't. So this is not really a fair representation of what it's really like. It's too. This is like, I'm locked down. I'm stuck. That sucks. That said, there's still isolation.

You've got to get out of the house. You've got to be around human beings occasionally. You've got to find camaraderie elsewhere sometimes. But also, there's a lot you can do remotely. For example, at Base Camp, we use Base Camp. There's this feature called automatic check-ins, which lets you ask questions on a recurring basis automatically of everybody in the company. So we say, like, every Monday morning, what you do this weekend?

And this is totally optional. But people can share what they did this weekend. They share pictures of their kids. They share pictures of short vacations they've had. You can really get to know people this way. We ask people once a month, what books are you reading? And people share book reports about things they're in. interested in. You go, oh my God, I don't work with you that often, but you love Annie Diller.

She's one of my favorite authors, too. Like, oh, my God, now we have something in common. So there's a lot of ways you can create camaraderie, create relationships with people remotely. You don't have to see someone to know someone. I've never, I don't know, maybe we've met in person. I don't know. Maybe like, what was it like E-Tac, like O'Reilly? Yeah, T-Tac and San Diego 2005. That's what it was. I think it was like literally San Diego E-Tac, 2005. I had no ticket, and I'm sitting in the lobby and Tim O'Reilly's like, Calicanus, you're a freeloading bastard. Here's a ticket.

Thank you, Tim O'Reilly. I remember. It's like a miracle, like a dead show or something. It was literally, you know what? People forget. I was so goddamn broke. I would go to PC Forum. I would go to E-Tac and I just sit in the lobby.

We did something called lobby crashing was what we did to try to just get close to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or whoever was going to be at the event. And you would get the miracle. You hold up your finger. and I was like, Ripple, let's go. That's when I first ran into Jeff Bezos at E-Tech in 2005 in San Diego at that conference. He gave a great talk, and I gave a talk there. It was a wonderful time.

That was a really fun time. Well, he was investing at that time, and he agreed to put 250K into Weblogs, Inc. And Mark and Drison agreed to put 250K. So I was going to have 500,000 from those two, and then AOL bought the company. We did all right with that, too. Yeah, well, 30 million and 18 months. Well, sure, but way back when that way back when that was amazing. Well, when you think about it, yeah.

It's still amazing, obviously. It is weird. It is weird what's happened in the industry. When you think about delicious Flickr, weblogs, Inc. What else got sold in that little cohort? There was like a year of like $20 to $30 million exits and people lost their mind that Yahoo and AOL were going to lose all their money. Yeah. Well, remember, like 20 million bucks is always a lot of money.

Always a lot of money. Is it? Yeah, of course. Jesus Christ. I mean, I'm trying to get a plane here, and it's just, it feels like a lot. It doesn't feel like a lot of money. You got to talk to someone else about that. I know, I'm joking.

20 million bucks a lot of money. But yeah, you're right, Flickr was 20, right? Flickr was sold for 20. Flickr was 20. I think was 10. Weblogs was 30. TechCrunch eventually 24. It was just like an interesting thing.

But you look at like these reoccurring revenue businesses. I was watching Buffer app, which has been built with, you know, it's like posterists, which Gary Tan made long. long before it. Yeah. The simplest, elegant software buffer app, he publishes his revenue.

I think he might be a 15 or 20 million in revenue and the efficiency of business. You have 55 people. Your company's making, I think, nine figures. You're making at least a million

or two million per employee minimum. The efficiency of these businesses, you're not going to confirm it, I know. I can confirm anything. I know, but I look at your eyes. I got a little poker talent.

What we do say is we generate tens of millions in annual profits because I'm interested in profit. I'm not interested in revenue. You can lose a lot of money, making a lot of money. Yes, that's true. You can lose a lot of money generating a lot of money. Right.

So we're into the profit side of things. So yeah. What's the end game for you? How old are you now? 46. I'm 49. You think you just do this for 20 more years? Or do you think you hand it over or sell it?

What do you? I mean, what more do you have to prove or you just love coming to work every day? Yeah, it's not about proving. It's just, I mean, it's about proving things to ourselves. Like, can we... Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to people today at work about this. Like, we're,

In some ways, we were the old rock band. You know, Basecamp was around, you know, Basecamp was a big hit, you know, 16 years ago. Like, we haven't had a really good follow-up, perhaps, since we've had a few products, but nothing to hit like base camp. So it's kind of really, to be honest, very satisfying to feel like we still got it. It is nice to put out a great album. It's like Pink Floyd, you know, like they put out a decent album, whatever, 10, 20 years later. It's a nice feeling you still got it. So, you know, we love doing this stuff.

We love solving these problems. We love making these tools. I'd like to keep doing this for 20 years, but again, like maybe in five years I won't want to do it in 20 years. That's the beauty of independence, in my opinion, is that no one can force me out. I mean, of course, a competitor can beat us. Companies can go out of business for lots of reasons. Anything can happen, of course. Like, the other thing to realize is that you're in control of basically nothing.

I mean, you can do the best you can do, but there's very little that you really can control when it comes to being in the market, I think. Well, the pandemic and Trump have both taught us that. Like, we had two Black Swan events in three years, and it's just. Yeah. So are they black swan events really then? Or is this just like, is this the new normal that it's going to be insane for the rest of our lives? I really hope not because it felt so normal for so many decades. Maybe we just got lucky in our childhoods that we had 30 years of nothing happening. Certainly. Absolutely, we got lucky. I mean, luck is the biggest part of all this. But anyway,

point is, it's like, I want to keep doing it. We love doing it. It's great to have another hit after so many years. I'm happy for you. You think now that you got that little bug, are you in David going, maybe we got another hit. Maybe we should do another album. Maybe you do live from Poppeh. Maybe you do BudaCon. Maybe you go play BudaCon and do a live album. What's going on next?

That's a great Dylan album, by the way, live at Budacan if you want a good Dylan album. It's a great double CD. I mean, like, so many of them. So we're doing Hay for Work in a few months. We already exist. We're just finishing up. Oh, Hey for Work. Yeah.

Already finishing that. Base Camp Four is coming out next year. So that's our next big thing. And a lot of the things we thought about with Hay are going to make itself, make their way into base camp four. So we're really excited about that. But we don't look much further ahead than that. So that's as far ahead as we're looking.

But as far as like we've always been a long-term company, like I'd love to keep doing this for 20 years. But let's be honest. Like I'm not sure I'm fit to do this when I'm 65. Like am I really going to be doing this? I don't know. But I did think about that myself too. I was like, yeah.

Yeah. Would it be sad for me to be doing this in 20 years? Or would it be awesome to be doing it in 20 years? Like I never met a second. 69, 70 year old angel investor. It's hard. How do you relate to a 22-year-old founder at 70? How do you relate to a developer at 25 if you're 75?

I don't know. I don't know. I think another thing is like I mentioned 10 minutes ago, like I was ready to hang it up if the Apple decision went the other way. So like all sorts of things can happen out of nowhere. Life can change for all sorts of reasons. You know, I don't know. But right now we love doing this.

This is wonderful. I mean, why not? I really truly get to go to work and do great things that I enjoy every day and get to work with great people. Why would I give that up? I still have lots of years left that I have to work. So why would I want to give that up? That's why we've never sold the business and I have no interest in ever doing that.

Yeah. I mean, there's this new concept I've been floating with people I call the Pegasus, which is skipping rounds of venture funding. You're just bootstrapped the whole way. but if you look at Com.com, Fitbod, and Qualtricks, a number of companies have just said,

you know what? Well, if we need a little bit of cash, we'll raise a little bit, but we're going to keep it pretty thin. I mean, Bezos put a little money in, but you didn't need it back in the day. Yeah, and he doesn't have any, that money went to David and I,

so that money didn't go out. He still owns those shares? You guys ever were? You ever talk to him? I haven't talked to Jeff in a number of years. We used to talk to him once or twice a year and get dinner, like once a year, basically. And we haven't for six years, maybe.

I don't think I've talked to him for six years. Is that because he doesn't reach back, or you just don't really need to call him? I haven't, yeah, I mean, like, his involvement is, was always as, if we ever need him, let him know, and he'll, you know, he'll take a call. It's kind of cool to have Jeff Bezos as a friend. I mean, why wouldn't you just call him and have dinner? It's kind of dope. Well, I think he's probably got a lot of other interesting friends in the world.

I'm way down on the list. It's probably as far down as you can get. So anyway, I mean, we've learned a lot from Jeff, but we haven't relied on Jeff for many years. Learned some great things from him early on. We still talk to his office because we have to give them our numbers. We're an LLC. So Jeff gets distributions every year. Oh, my God.

He gets his distribution every year. He made a wonderful investment. He hasn't gotten his, you know, he hasn't sold his shares. He gets distributions every year. He's made way more money back from that than anything else. And he still owns all of his shares. So he got a really sweet deal. and you ever think of just saying hey can we just buy you out and get you off the cap table so you don't have to worry about this K1 honestly I would like to yeah I would like to

all right well Jeff listens to the show complicated it's very complicated just this message Jeff Bezos yeah hey uh you put in to 5500 how about we give you 10x we call it a day you got I got the distributions and uh it's one less thing on your tax form you got a complicated you can work it out I'll talk when I see Jeff I'll bring it up please Listen, Jason Freed, you're a delight. And I'm glad we finally got to do this. Say hi to David for me. If you haven't tried, hey.com, go ahead, give a shot. It's pretty great.

I have to say, for a 1.0, it's up there. You're one of the great entrepreneurs of our era. And so continue to success, Jason. Thanks for coming on the pod. That's very kind. Thanks for having me on. It's good to finally talk to you. Yeah, yeah.

And we'll see you all next time on this week and service. Bye-bye.