Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have a sense you run that branch at 37 singles for 20 years. I’ve experimented with forking back on the other side, I’ve experimented with having a full-time lawyer on staff, I’ve experimented with having engineering managers, and I can tell you life is much better at 50, 60 people when none of those individuals or none of those roles… It’s never about the individuals, it’s about the roles. None of those roles are in your organization full-time. Occasionally, you need a manager. Occasionally, you need a lawyer. I can play the role of manager occasionally, fine, and then I can set it back down to zero. It’s almost like a cloud surface. I want a manager service I can call on for seven hours this week and then I want to take it down to zero for the next three months. 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.”…

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