Total transparency

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37signals team, joined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of the company. This week, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the transparency that both Jason and David have here on this podcast in their writings. They're pretty much an open book. Sometimes I'm even like, wait, y 'all are going to say that? So I thought we could talk a little bit about it today. Okay, let's just jump right in to this. Have you guys always been as open as you are with your business?

0:33I think a lot of business owners would be like, no, this is like private information. But you guys are sharing company announcements, just how the company is doing, decisions that you've made. Has it always been this way?

0:46Kimberly Rhodes:I think so. I mean, it seems harder to hide things. That's the thing. It's like, if you know it, just say it kind of thing. If you're thinking about it, just say it. If you have something you can share, just share it. Like, why not, essentially? Um, this is something we wrote about, I think in rework as well, which is like sort of emulating chefs. They share their cookbooks. They share the recipes or they share recipes in a cookbook. Like the recipes are like what they do. Like that is the fundamental thing that they do. They cook. This is what they do is how much salt they put in the thing. This is it.

1:15Kimberly Rhodes:This is the blueprint. They don't worry about like someone making a dish and opening a restaurant next to them and putting them out of business. Like they know that sharing gets people to try things, gets people to explore things, get people maybe to come to the restaurant. If they come to their city, this is the way to do it. And again, it just always seemed harder not to. I know so many people who run businesses and there's like, I have to run this by legal. And I don't know if I'm allowed to say this or share this, or can I do? No, I get it. It's different than a public company and whatever, but like, these aren't public companies I'm talking about.

1:42Kimberly Rhodes:These are private companies and everyone's just afraid. They're just like afraid that someone's going to use this idea and take it from them or whatever. I mean, look, we don't have anything proprietary. Like I get it. if you're inventing some new medication or chemical thing and you've invested a billion dollars or the R &D, whatever it is, I don't even know. But that's not what we do. That's not what pretty much anyone actually does. And it just seems far more lucrative, frankly, just to share as much as you can to get people's eyes on things that they normally wouldn't expect to see. And they're interested, like we just talked about in the previous episode, we just share our book sales over 15 years.

2:19Kimberly Rhodes:And it's done quite well. And like, I've never seen an author actually share this before. And not to say they haven't, I just haven't seen it. And I don't think a lot of people in our audience have seen it because they're all surprised that we would share it. And to me, it's like, what's the surprise? Like, here it is. It's kind of interesting to see. So that's the way we've always done things. And it's not like there have been times we've said, like, should we share this? Like, for example, we don't share our exact revenue numbers. And we've sort of talked about it. Why not? Then some degree, like, maybe we should, I don't know, maybe we shouldn't.

2:48Kimberly Rhodes:But that's probably one of the things that we don't actually share. Pretty much everything else we do, including like salaries and including a number of other things. People have like reverse engineered our profit sharing numbers to determine our profits. Like people have done sex. We've shared some of that stuff and it's fine. It's all good. Everything's fine. It's fine. It's better than fine because of that. Actually, this is another chapter of free work, which is everything is marketing. Everything you can do to be interesting is marketing. And not only is it marketing in this instrumental cell, it's just like, it's interesting in its own sense.

3:22I search for interesting things. I think we all do. We are attracted to interesting things. When I read something interesting, I go like, oh, that's interesting. I'd like to hear more of what this person has to say. If they had one interesting thing to say, they might have another. And very often that is true. And I try to reciprocate, actually, in some degree here of I've learned so much from people who are just interesting and who share the interesting things that make them interesting. I should try to do a little bit of that. And you can get into a habit and you can develop an eye for doing that well.

3:54Once you develop an eye for what's other people going to find interesting because I would find it interesting, you're well underway to realizing that almost everything is interesting. If you just share deep enough, if you share enough behind the curtains, it becomes interesting. And when it becomes interesting, it can move things and it can move people and it can get them to pay attention. It's pretty hard to get people to pay attention these days. Folks will spend literally months, if not years, developing a new shing-a-mik-jing and then they'll put it out there and go like, ta-da! And like two days later, it's old news.

4:31So there's also some of that, which I'm not always sure I think is a good thing, but there is some degree of you have to show up. You have to be part of the conversation. You have to be in the mix if you want to kind of keep the moving average moving in the right direction. Because if you just go like, well, okay, we've shared our thing. See you in nine months. That thing better be goddamn spectacular. Are you catching spaceships with chopsticks, okay, you can just wait nine months. Most of us are not doing something that interesting. You need a little bit more maintenance to keep that going, right?

5:08And I think once you realize that everything is marketing, you also realize, again, the privilege it is not to have to ask for permission. I can recall a handful of times where I've gone like, this is really interesting, but you know what? I'm just going to check with Jason. Just going to check with Jason and see, like, do we want to share that? And then there's about 10 ,000 other things where I just went, oh, this is really interesting. Post, write up, whatever, right? This whole thing about the earnings we had from the book, which is a great example of that. Jason and I both posted it almost at the same time.

5:43Neither of us thought like, do you know what? I just got to check in to make sure that that's okay that we share. Have we checked in with finance about whether we're revealing something? Ever checked in with Ron? Like, is Ron going to tell us no? Do you know what? This is one of the privileges of owning the goddamn business. And it's not just one of the privileges, it's one of the superpowers, because it allows you to just outshare almost anyone who's stuck in some corporate mill where it has to go through five layers. Now, I think what's also interesting here is that the most successful people in the world who run public companies also do this shit.

6:20I mean, the shit poster in chief, Mr. Musk. I mean, he's notorious for this, right? Notorious for freaking out his legal teams. And you know what? Worked out pretty well, I think, in that regard. Tesla famously spent about$0 on marketing. I don't know if they spent a little bit now, but for essentially their entire lifespan, they spent nothing because he realized correctly that if you just start talking about these things, if you're just interesting and if you're in the mix, you don't need it. And do you know what? If you can do that as literally the richest man in the world running seven companies at the same time, then our little mini put operation here can probably do two.

7:01Over the years, have there been anything that you guys have shared publicly that you wish you hadn't? Timing? I think not content. We had this big blow up at the company in 2021 about sharing a new policy around talking politics internally. And I don't for a minute regret sharing the policy or making the decision. Do it. In fact, I think it's one of the crowning achievements of my goddamn career. I do regret the timing because there was too short of a lag between the internal post and the external post. and that sometimes that counterbalance to the enthusiasm we so often talk about the urgency of like well there's all these reasons for why you want to get it out sometimes a little bit of timing is not the worst thing in the world or thinking about it a little bit if it's really shoemongous right and then the other thing i would say is cat jpeg we had an incident in like 2011, 2012, where someone from the operations team shared what the file name of the, I don't know, one billionth uploaded file to Basecamp was.

8:10I forget what the milestone was and revealed that it was cat JPEG. And that was a share where it really started a lot of questions like, wait, you can look at our files, even though no one did look at the file. It was a thing that was posted in a log post, but it was actually a good reminder that, do you know what, even file name sometimes you think of them as metadata. Oh, I'm not looking at the file, but like the file name actually reveals stuff and you shouldn't be sharing that. So sometimes there are some degrees of that. And I've seen that in other ways where companies sometimes share things about their customers, even if it's sort of in slight aggregate where I go like, that's a little yucky.

8:44Like, I don't want you to be collecting this data and aggregating and then sharing it to the world when it sort of feels like it's my data. So I do think perhaps there's a line there and cat jpeg was one of the times we crossed it and it really seared into my head i mean this is now whatever almost 15 years ago and it just there's like a scar somewhere right like right there is the scar of like don't you ever do that again never share customer data into don't even fucking look at it right like whether it exists in log files for forensics purposes or operational purposes okay don't fucking look at it don't share it okay and then the other thing that i know that we share often is work in progress.

9:25Like Jason, you've done a lot of like design reviews. We've done some code walkthroughs. Tell me about that and why you guys have chosen to share all of that stuff.

9:36Kimberly Rhodes:I personally do that because I wish I could watch it more frequently from others. I love to see people work through ideas, like things that are unfinished, unresolved, in progress, like struggling to solve this problem or admitting like this doesn't work quite right. I don't really know how to get it to work yet, but I know we will. But here's where we're at so far. I just find that to be fascinating. That is what product development is, is like working through a bunch of unknowns and figuring out like the right combination of things to do and get right in a certain way. And just, I like that stuff.

10:07Kimberly Rhodes:So I like to share it and I don't see it enough. In fact, I've, you know, long talked about this. Like I would love to do a podcast of like work in progress, which actually I used to a long time ago. We had this fellow named Nathan who was running high rise. And every day we would do this little YouTube video series called work in progress, which I show what you're working on. I'll show you what I'm working on. And I kind of miss that, frankly, because you end up hearing interviews and stories of like completed work. And then there's a recalling and a replaying of history that people recollect probably.

10:39Kimberly Rhodes:And it's probably not totally true. And it's not like they're trying to mislead you. It's just like they miss all the details. I like to see the things as they're happening and see unfinished work in progress. But in a similar way that we were just talking about, companies are afraid to share information. They're also afraid to share work in progress because I think a competitor is going to take their idea and run with it or whatever. They don't. And who cares? And if they're going to do it, they're going to do it anyway. It's not like they're waiting on you to tell them what to do. But I've always found it interesting.

11:04Kimberly Rhodes:So yeah, with Fizzy right now, Fizzy's not out yet, but we're getting close. And I've been sharing like things we've been working through and changes we've been making along the way. And like, hey, here's a review of something that we changed that I showed you two weeks ago. And like, here's what's different about it now. And here's some of the subtle details that you may not notice, but we thought through. And I just found that to be cool. I don't know. And people seem to like it. I don't kind of care if they do or they don't. I want to share it anyway, because I'd like it to be out there. I'd like more people to actually share this way.

11:31Kimberly Rhodes:And again, I also think it helps you in some ways. Like I was just doing a call before this podcast. We just hired a new designer. I was walking him through some of the stuff we're doing in Basecamp 5, which is a new version of Basecamp working on. And we're, there's a bunch of like unknown things up in the air. And I was explaining like, this isn't quite right yet, but there's something here that we like. And I just find myself getting juiced up when I'm talking about that kind of thing. Solving problems that are up in the air is fun. I don't know. And maybe that's like my job is to sort of do that kind of thing.

12:00Kimberly Rhodes:So that's why I enjoy it. But I would like to see more of that. And I think like David's writing software well series or on writing software or whatever. It's similar. Although, of course, we're reviewing code that exists, just like I'm reviewing a design that exists. I also once wrote an article and I recorded myself writing the article. I was writing the article for Inc. Magazine many years ago. I write an IA writer. I'm like, I should record me typing and like talking out loud. Like, I don't like that paragraph. I'm like, I'll move this over here. And it was probably pretty boring, but it was, I thought would be fun to watch someone else do the same thing.

12:31Kimberly Rhodes:So I guess in general, the things you want to see out in the world, like put your own versions of those out there and other people will probably be interested and maybe other people do it and encourage more people to share that way. Okay, Jason, you mentioned Basecamp 5. So tell me when you think it's too early to be transparent and to share what you're working on. Obviously, we're not in the place of sharing that yet. Kind of talk us through what your kind of decision-making process is on that. Yeah, I would say a lot of it depends on, I mean, so many variables, but one of them is like Fizzy is a brand new product.

13:02Kimberly Rhodes:So there's no legacy. There's no one who's already using a version of Fizzy and we can share from ground zero, essentially. With Basecamp, I will share lots of what we're doing with Basecamp 5, but probably a few months prior to launching for a variety of reasons. First of all, I want to prime the pump and let people know what's coming because there's some big changes. And I will show our customers, I'll share with the public. But I don't want to share things too early that aren't even quite resolved yet because there's so many people who depend on Basecamp. I don't want anyone to freak out about things that might be changing and then go, I don't like that.

13:34Kimberly Rhodes:And I don't like Basecamp now. It's like, I don't want this thing that's going to happen. I'm like, I don't even know if this is going to happen. Maybe it's going to happen. We're not sure. And maybe you'll like it. We don't know. But I think there's something when people are using something that already exists, it's kind of better to wait a little bit longer, I think, to share. So you don't create some anxiety that's unnecessary compared to something that's brand new that doesn't exist at all. And there's no comparison. Or in fact, they might be using something else to go. I'd rather use that.

13:56Kimberly Rhodes:That's pretty exciting. And they get pumped up about it versus comparing to something they're already used to. Because humans are very good at getting comfortable with what they know. And then you show them something else. And if it's something that they're going to eventually have put upon them, they're going to be nervous about it. That's super natural. So I want to just be careful not to do that too early. There's no answer like exactly 90 days, but that's what I think about. David, on the tech side, are there things that are too early to show or to share? I think maybe it's rarer because when we look at the behind the scenes and we look at a piece of code, whether it's going to make it into the product in that way or not, doesn't really matter.

14:32But the series that Jason refers to on writing software well was something I wrote after the features have shipped. And I think the reason that resonated so well, and I keep meaning to come back to that. I think it's been seven years since I recorded the last episode. So I've stopped making promises about when that was going to be. But the series is still actually something we use internally. When someone new is hired on the programming team, we give them that playlist. And here's a way to get an insight into how we think about the work that we do, how the exact code actually looks like. And it's so interesting because there's never been more code available online.

15:12And 99 % of it is open source. And there's a wonderful open source code to learn from. But open source usually takes quality of plumbing infrastructure. There's not all that much application code in the same way. And I think it's just such a shame because this is how we learn. I think in the design world, it's actually much nicer. You can look at someone's design and you can start critiquing it and you can start taking it apart intellectually and conceptually. You can't do that with code. And even less so than when I started programming. We used to have this wonderful thing called view source on the web.

15:48You'd right click on a web page and you'd view source and you'd see exactly how they build it. And you're like, oh, they use JavaScript this way. Oh, they use a table in this way to structure these things. And now, unfortunately, that has devolved into these bundlers and minification processes that obscure how something's actually built. And now you can't learn all that much anymore that way. And I think we're really cutting the legs of the learning curve for someone new coming into the industry. You want to see how real things are built. Not toy examples, not kind of invented stuff, but how is this website built?

16:25So I felt a bit of an obligation to share some of the behind-the-scenes stuff from our code base. And you know what? It's funny because the reaction was very much like a little bit of a gasp. Wait, you can do that? You can share real production code? Isn't that proprietary? Are there security risks? There were all these questions that would fall apart under just the absolute minimum amount of scrutiny. None of the code that I showed in that video turned out to be some Basecamp competitor that didn't put us out of business because they saw the secret ingredient. I mean, what are you talking about?

17:01I share like 95 % of all code I've ever written. Maybe that's not true. 70 % of all the code I've ever written has been shared as open source. You can just look at all that stuff if you want to see how I build things. So it's not that special. and there's no secrets in it. And whatever security issues that are there, they'd be security through obscurity with no security at all. So what are you afraid of? But it really is fear. There's a lot of fear around sharing things that you're working on, about sharing things that are inside. And I think 95 % of that is just silly. Okay, well, with that, we're going to wrap it up.

17:38Rework is a production of 37 Signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website, 37signals.com slash podcasts. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com slash podcast question.