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Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
12 Jul 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
“What partially taught me this lesson was when we realized we had not been collecting sales tax in different US states where we had Nexus, and it took us about two years and $5 million in settlements and cleanups to get out of that mess.”
— Speaker unverified
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Speaker unverified
- Attribution
- Not verified from this transcript
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 12 Jul 2025
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Yeah, I read, I don’t know if this is still the case, that Basecamp is an LLC and doesn’t have a CFO, like a full-time accountant. Is that [inaudible 02:31:10]. These days, we do have a head of finance. We did not for the first 19 years of life, I think. We got away with basically just having an accountant do our books in the same way you would do a small ice cream shop, except we would, over time, have done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The scale seemed quirky and, at some point, you can also fall in love with your own quirkiness to a degree that isn’t actually healthy, and I’ve certainly done that over time, and we should have had count the beans a little more diligently, a little earlier. This was part of a blessing of just being wildly profitable and selling software that can have infinite margins, basically, that you can get away with a bunch of stuff that you perhaps shouldn’t. What partially taught me this lesson was when we realized we had not been collecting sales tax in different US states where we had Nexus, and it took us about two years and $5 million in settlements and cleanups to get out of that mess. After that, I went like, “Okay, fine, we can hire a finance person.” Okay.…
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