Jason Fried: evaluation

Transcript context

…A lot of this trickles down from the biggest decision you made, which is, don't raise money, keep control of this business. You're the boss. There's no boss above you. Yeah, the independence. If you go to 37signals.com, there's 37 ideas. And the first one, there's a 00, which is start here, which is like a read me. But 01 is independence. Independence is the root of all the things we're able to do, and we did make that intentional decision. We didn't know all the tentacles that come up from that and what it's going to impact and touch, but we knew principally, we want to be able to do what we want to do. We want to be entrepreneurs and to me, that means working for yourself. The moment you go out and take money or have these big obligations, you end up working for someone else. I do understand why some companies do it, but I don't understand why a lot of people do it, who probably shouldn't do it. I think staying independent is a wonderfully fulfilling experience, and it's very hard to do when you're beholden to someone else's timeframe and expectations. Another thing we rarely have here are expectations. This is the point. We launch a new product, I don't know what's going to happen. We launched Basecamp, I didn't know what was going to happen. We launched HEY, I didn't know what was going to happen. We're going to launch some new stuff soon, I don't know what's going to happen. We don't say, "If this gets 20,000 users, then it's a success." I don't know. We don't care. It doesn't even matter. We're making it anyway, and we're going to see what's going to happen. The market will tell us what happens. I'll just wait to find out. There's no sense in spending the time thinking about what could be. Just to push back, I imagine there are expectations of like, "I hope this works out. I hope people adopt it. I hope it becomes the best email client in town." There's a sense of like, "We want this to succeed"?…

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