Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…It’s so fascinating, part of it’s the manager thing. Because humans don’t scale, communication between humans certainly don’t scale. You basically get the network-cost effect. Every time you add a new node, it goes up exponentially. This is perhaps the key thing of why I get to be so fond of having no managers at Basecamp, because our default team size is two. One programmer, one designer, one feature. When you’re operating at that level of scale, you don’t need sophistication, you don’t need advanced methodologies, you don’t need multiple layers of management, because you can just do. The magic of small teams is that they just do. They don’t have to argue, because we don’t have to set direction, we won’t have to worry about the road map. We can just sit down and make something, and then see if it’s good. When you can get away with just making things, you don’t have to plan, and if you can get out of planning, you can follow the truth that emerges from the code, from the product, from the thing you’re working on in the moment. You know far more about what the great next step is when you’re one step behind, rather than if you try 18 months in advance to map out all the steps. “How do we get from here to very far away?” You know what? That’s difficult to imagine in advance, because humans are very poor at that. Maybe AI one day will be much better than us, but humans can put one foot in front of each other. That’s not that hard, and that allows you to get away with all that sophistication. The process has become much simpler, you need far fewer people, it compounds, you need much less process, you need to waste less time in meetings. You can just spend these long glorious days and weeks of uninterrupted time solving real problems you care about and that are valuable, and you’re going to find that that’s what the market actually wants. No one is buying something because there’s a huge company behind it, most of the time. They’re buying something because it’s good, and the way you get something good is you don’t sit around and have a meeting about it, you try stuff, you build stuff. It really is incredible what one person, honestly one person can do in 100 hours of deep work, of focused work. Even less.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.