Ask Me Anything with Jason Fried, Co-Founder, Hey & Basecamp — MicroConf Remote

0:00[Music] so our our next guest um is the co-founder of hey hey.com and so um hey is a a headline sponsor headline partner of microconf and startups for the rest of us um in 2020 and they've been a great supporter of ours for the past several years and you know our next guest jason free joined me on stage last year at microcomp growth we had a really good q a session and conversation where he answered questions about the early days of base camp he took questions from the audience and was just very gracious with his time and and we really appreciated it and uh you know hey has launched this

0:41year this is the new product coming out of base camp um and hey has been as i said you know a sponsor and they've come alongside to to try to help this bootstrap indie funded community and and help us be able to provide events like this to you because these types of events we'd have to charge a lot more for them if we didn't have sponsors like hey um so i'd love it if you'd give a shout out to hey on twitter and just thank them for supporting this bootstrapped community and with that i'd love to welcome jason freed the co-founder of base camp to the show

1:13um you know obviously he's one of the original badass bootstrappers that has consistently provided guidance and good advice to founders for going on two decades now several books written with his co-founder dhh and obviously an outlier that's you know taking a stair-step approach to the very top started building new prep to take their companies to new heights it's like he he added many zeros to the to the formula that i think most of us uh ascribe to so this is an ama and ask him anything this is here to answer all your questions about what it was like to build hay how the successes of base camp served as a basis

1:47for the launch of hay and really anything you'd like to ask them about that i also have a few questions um to kick us off but you can just use the question button in shindig and it's it's down below you and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible my guess is based on how these things normally go with jason there will be more questions that we can possibly answer but we have about um well just under 30 minutes now to roll in so jason sir thank you so much for sharing the stage with me again oh it's great to be here thanks for

2:12having me back yeah it's awesome awesome to see you again are you uh are you in chicago or california i'm currently in california yeah but primarily living in chicago oh yeah it's nice and sunny outside there so i was thinking you might be on on a coast there somewhere so for for folks who don't know so anyone can email me rob walling hey.com if you want to hit my hey inbox um but hey is an email service that doesn't you know so i want to i want to set the stage right there's gmail and then super human launched a few years ago and superhuman is built on top

2:46of gmail so you need a gmail or google apps account to use it hey is not that hey is is next to gmail like you have bare bones servers smtp top three all that stuff right it's if you have you have the entire infrastructure in place yeah hey is an email service so just like when you sign up for gmail you get a gmail.com address if you sign up for hey you get a hey.com hey.com so we are a provider you don't need to use google you don't need to use outlook you don't need to use apple icloud you don't need to use any other email provider

3:17and the reason we did that is because we wanted to innovate we wanted to make new something new and if you're riding on top of someone else's platform like most email clients sit on top of gmail or whatever smtp provider you there's not a lot you can really do because you're beholden to how they do things so if you want to do something new you've got to start from the ground up um you've got to be vertically integrated in that way and that's where you can really make some changes and you know so obviously i mean base camp is an amazing success story but you know compared let's compare your

3:49revenue to google microsoft apple these other companies you're competing with it's there's there's a lot of zeros difference there so why a lot yeah yeah what i guess you know what is in your dna you know the dna of base camp that convinced you guys that hey we can take on these these bigger players well for one i mean yeah technically we're taking them on because a lot of our customers have switched over from from gmail for primarily from gmail over to hey so technically yes we're competing but not really and what i mean by that is i think gmail has 1.5 billion email accounts on gmail we're not going to have that

4:32we're not looking for that we're not even in that realm and we don't want to be you know we're a paid service so we're not giving email away for free and just like with basecamp you know if we get a hundred thousand paid customers we're in a pretty good position so that's kind of what we're looking for we're looking for people who really care about email who are frustrated to no end with it looking for something new looking for something that's private looking for something that's not going to mind your data and looking at it something that has built-in workflows and not workarounds and so if we get 100 000 200 000 of

5:05those kinds of people we're in a good place so we don't need to match google or outlook or or or yahoo different game although we're playing the same by the some of the same rules and that we're a service provider like they are but but our approach is very different so yeah i mean it's the stupidest thing we've ever done and i mean that in the most you know appealing way um but we're also not really trying to we're like for us we're not gonna look and go like we didn't we didn't get you know we didn't beat gmail so we lost like that's just not how we look at things in

5:36general yeah here's the other thing i want to say about this is that companies have their own economics and this is something you don't hear enough about in my opinion which is that people are like well how do you compete with them and how do you compete with them and well one of the first questions i would ask is like what are your costs because if your costs are a lot less than everyone else's costs then you can afford to compete in a different level like if we had to get a billion signups to make this thing viable for us well then we're probably not going to be

6:04gmail but we don't need that we need tens of thousands or a hundred thousand or a couple hundred thousand like over a number of years because our cost structure is is set up completely differently we don't need that much to cover our cost compared to what google does of course when they have you know tens of thousands of employees so you got to start with that and then then you can sort of figure out what makes sense for you it doesn't you don't have to do what someone else does you got to do what works for you and that's really an important thing i think for entrepreneurs

6:32yeah no i think that's really important thanks for calling that out you mentioned a couple differentiators you know you said you're very privacy focused uh workflows not workarounds um do you want to dive into those two and maybe if there are any others that are you know common talking points about how you are different why you're different than these other providers yeah for sure let's start with privacy um one of the big problems with email and i'm going to hit it from a couple different angles but one of the big problems with email of course is that you're not in control of who can contact you it used to be that you'd give out

7:00your email address to someone and only that person would have it and you that was how you kept control over who can get touch with you but these days your email address has been bought and sold and traded and posted online it's everywhere so we've stopped being in control of who can get in touch with us which is a problem if someone calls your cell phone and you don't recognize the number you just don't pick it up it's very there's very little effort just to go ahead no with email anyone who emails you basically lands in your inbox this is a problem it's a fundamental problem with email today

7:30so with hey you get to decide who can email you the first time somebody emails you you give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down and if they're thumbs down you'll never hear from them again so that's one version of privacy which is that you are in control who can get in touch with you you're in control who can communicate with you the other side of course is that we um we don't sell ads so we're not minding your data we're not looking at your data we're not pulling anything out of your data not interesting to us don't want to do that ever and also

7:55we um we block trackers so what a lot of people don't know is these days by simply opening an email with no indication this is the case if you just open an email the sender the person who sent it to you can receive all sorts of personal information about you how long you read the email if you opened it how often you opened it what kind of phone you have what brand computer you have what time it was your ip address which they can give you you know basically get you down to some local information that way as well we block all that so if someone tries to

8:25include a tracker an email and you're a hey.com customer they will not know anything about you so we're protecting your privacy on that side too so one number one is control number two is on the back end we're making sure that nobody learns anything about you about your behavior no one tracks you simply by opening an email now that's some of the privacy stuff there's a bunch of other things as well but the the bigger thing though to me is is the workflow situation what's amazing to me about email is that email has not evolved for about 16 years 16 years ago gmail came out and it felt different it had new ideas

8:56in it the thing is is that we're still stuck doing the same things we've always done and no one's really come up with better workflows for example simple one someone sends you an email and you need to get back to someone later comment this happens all the time it's like yeah i gotta get back to that person later so what do you do you hack you hack it you like mark it unread again maybe you star it or flag it maybe you maybe you make a folder or a label and put some stuff in there maybe you snooze it none of those things have anything to do

9:28with the mental understanding that i need to get back to someone later so you're hacking around with workarounds to try to remember that you need to do something later and you're using all these different things that aren't quite right so with hey which of a button on every email that says reply later and when you say reply later it goes into a nice pile along with all the other emails that you said reply later to then you can go into a mode called focus and reply you click that it opens up all those emails it stacks them one on top of the other and lets you simply reply to those one

9:57after another without being interrupted or distracted by anything else that's happening and it's an entirely different way to work on email and it saves you it saves me hours a week which is significant um and it saves me a lot of hassle and it allows me to say okay i've got like 30 minutes now i'm going to knock out all my emails at the end of the day i know exactly where they are nothing else is going to get my way so we've got a dozen or so of those kinds of workflows built into hay versus workarounds where you're trying to make one thing do something else so

10:29we thought about all that stuff and we were so frustrated by the fact that like email just hasn't changed in so long it's time to do something new and that's what hay is all about awesome we have a we have questions pouring in from the listeners as you would expect um i want to jump down to one producer xander from brian yiddo because it ties into something i was going to ask you about anyways jason this question is how is hayes pushback on apple's app store terms of service going and if you wouldn't mind just giving a you know a couple sentences or one minute description of what happened

10:59there with apple uh to catch people up and then talk about you know has there been a resolution and what that's been yeah of course um so when we launched hey we put 1.0 version 1.0 in the app store apple app store and android store both were approved which was wonderful and then we were we put a 1.0.2 bug release version or update into the app store in the apple app store a few days later and apple rejected it and they rejected it even though nothing materially changed they rejected on the ground that we weren't giving them 30 percent of our revenue because we were selling a subscription

11:35service and somehow that slipped by the reviewers in the first place is what what apple claimed um and so we got in this battle with apple basically apple said you have to give us 30 of your revenues and we said we're not giving you 30 of our revenues um and they gave us some other things and this basically kind of blew up in the press we went to the press over because it was a strong arm tactic by apple to extract 30 of our business which they are not entitled to um the problem is that on ios of course everybody knows you don't have choice so

12:03we can't sell we can't even mention that we can sell our product some other way we can't mention billing we can't mention credit cards we can't mention sign up can't mention all these things we didn't mention any of those things long story short is um we got into a big public uh battle with apple over this um it was all over the press for about a week and we we didn't give in on terms of the 30 we're not paying them 30 percent but what we did eventually come to terms with with them over was um we introduced a slightly well free version uh of hey that's available on ios which is

12:36a slightly different version from our main product and if you still want to buy hey the full version you still go to hey.com and you buy it there but at least when you load the app up there's something that you can sign up for that doesn't require visiting our website so it turned out that apple was comfortable with that we're still not giving them 30 of our revenue um but they were comfortable with at least the app doing something on on launch um but the the bigger thing here is not there's a few things going on so there's the percent which of course i think is just you know uh

13:09usually it's it's it's unfair it's two it's too much first of all but it's deeper than that and this is i think will resonate with with people who are who are watching this who are entrepreneurs which is that i do not believe that a company any company should be able to tell me how i can service and treat my customers one of the big unknown things about the app store is that when if you use the in-app payment system that apple requires you to use if you sell products through apple is that you cannot provide your customers a certain level of customer service if you have a billing issue you

13:39have to defer them to apple if you want to give them a discount you can't if you want to give them half off you can't if you want to give them a hardship discount you can't for example when covid first hit a lot of our customers on base camp wrote us saying hey we're small businesses this is really going to get take a big hit this is really hard for us we said we'll give you a couple months free don't worry about it like we'll help you out we're here to help you you can't do that once you've given your customer to apple because you're not in

14:02control of the billing system so now i have two tiers of customers i have the customers i can really help the way i want to help them and i have the customers have to say well you got to go talk to apple and by the way apple's not going to be able to help you because that's not what the business apple's in it's not apple's right to be able to do that to me they're a one trillion dollar company why should they tell me how i can provide service to my customers it's completely abhorrent to me and i'm not going to give in to that so that was another big

14:27big angle that we pushed all this forward and out there and a lot of people started to pay attention and saw people came out of the woodwork saying apple's been doing this to us for years apple's been pushing us and bullying us for years and i think it created a groundswell of of um of interest and excitement and then um you know apple changed the rules at wwc the following week um hopefully influenced a little bit by what we did and hopefully over time they'll change them more and more and more and give developers choice uh i can go into more detail but i don't want to take over all the time but

14:56that's kind of how that happened yeah bravo yeah thank you sir good explanation um completely another direction we have a question from quang von and he says is hey using ruby on the back end oh yes all of our products are built on on rails um so yep hey base camp high rise campfire backpack everything from this point back forward or four or backwards and forwards is built on rails there's other technologies we're using as well but rails rails is the predominant uh language behind everything yep or framework um ah i'm trying to figure out if i understand this question it's from adrian fletcher and it says what features were base camp

15:41hay employees really upset to ignore or miss out on in order to launch the service so i think what he's asking is what did you leave out of hay that maybe team members really wanted to be in there but you you just oh my god so many things here's the thing about a 1.0 version 1.0 of anything is not all your ideas it's not the best version it's not everything you've ever wanted to do it's simply what made the cut and there are so many things that didn't make the cut that will add in subsequent releases we've already added some we'll be adding more and more down the road we're

16:18currently working on hey for work which will allow companies to use hay and all the employees to use hay together and host your your company's email on that so we're working on that right now there are so many things um one of the features that didn't make it that i really liked was simply a feature called waiting on sometimes you send an email to somebody and you're waiting on a reply from them and so we had this feature we built the feature early on where you'd you'd mark something waiting on and it would put it into a separate pile so you can keep track of the things that you really know

16:48you need to hear back from someone about so you can see you can go to that list later and go oh yeah these are the six things that i really need to get answers back from and then the system could potentially send out a nag or something to the other person saying hey jason really needs to hear about this or whatever as we started using it we didn't build the whole feature we just built basically the way to flag something is waiting on and it didn't have enough bite there wasn't enough value in it without kind of completing the whole idea which is like the the additional system

17:20going out and helping you out by reminding the other person that you need something by a certain time so since we didn't build the whole thing we decided to hold it back so we didn't build sort of a half-assed piece of software so we held that back there's a lot of things like that that we that we held back that weren't fully formed but the idea is right and it's there and we'll get to it later when we can complete the whole thing and put the whole thing out but there's a number of little things like that but waiting on is one of those like the first thing that comes to mind is

17:47something i still want today but we didn't really make it useful enough to put it out there and i'd rather kind of make a splash with it when it's actually really fully ready but there's literally hundreds of things we didn't do that we're gonna do in 2021 specifically is going to be pretty exciting for hey we've got a lot of things planned this will be pretty fun awesome did i read somewhere and correct me if i'm wrong but i think it was posted in a tiny seed slack by just a founder who's commenting that did you guys release numbers either like mrr that you launched to or

18:18number of customers or number of users was it like a hundred thousand users a month already or something yeah so when hey first launched we signed up about 200 000 people in the first few weeks so the the interest was off the charts we didn't expect we we knew we had something really good here um we didn't know that it was really going to strike a nerve like it did and how it's continued to strike a nerve um so we're really excited about that we had about 200 000 in the first couple weeks a lot of this was driven by the apple news and the publicity we got

18:50there but a lot of it was driven by pure excitement over the product as well like people were so hungry finally to to do something new with email and see email in a new light and like when they when they watch my demo i'd give this 37 minute demo which you can find on on youtube or if you google like jason freed hey demo or hey walk through you'll find it when people watch that i think it got a lot of people really excited about the product because i shared the philosophy behind the features and then walk people through the features at the same time and i think a lot of product people

19:20really appreciated that type of work walkthrough um and that got people fired up and people signed up about it and told about it and told everyone and we had an invite process the whole thing so there's a lot of that it's of course tapered off as as you'd expect i mean it's like boom launch tapered off um but you know we have tens of thousands of paying customers um already um conversion rate's been pretty wonderful we're pretty happy with that um it's been more than basic higher than base camp which has been great um and there's some things that a lot of people really really want like for

19:50example custom domains which has been something that a lot of people been asking for which we don't offer yet everyone gets an at hay.com email address once we launch custom domains later this year i think a lot more people are going to jump back in and check it out again for a second time so we're very comfortable with how things are going and it feels really great right awesome congratulations on that um thank you so deep asks he says i love your contrarian way of thinking how do you suggest a new founder who wants to build a company with solid values and a solid culture that sticks

20:25i think he's asking just that like base camp has such strong culture and values and you've obviously been deliberate about that like how can how can another founder do that in their company first off um it's a mindset right so you have to believe that that that's what you want so don't follow us you can't follow us or follow anyone because that's not you're not being true to yourself if we if you believe what we believe then you're being true to yourself but don't don't look to us i want to be like them figure out what matters to you um and it's all about actions so for

20:57example like it's not about what you write down it's not about you know your handbook it's really about the way i like to think about culture is it's a 50-day moving average what have you been doing as a company over the last 50 days how do you treat people what do you do when people are stressed out how do you help people what kind of criticism or critique do you give what kind of feedback do you give how do you share how do you help people who are stuck like those the things that make the culture and those things can change which is good and bad but

21:27what how the last 50 days been that's kind of how i look at it because there's always these spikes or these moments for example we launched hey two weeks of incredible stress terrible stress i hated it um it was wonderful but i hated it but it's unsustainable and so we're past that now so now we're settling back into how we want to be um because we don't want to be working late at night working on the weekends and being stressed out so i think it's a matter of how you act it's a matter of the last 50 days or so of how you act and understanding what's important to

21:57you now real quick about this um a lot of people like look at our our benefits and they look at our handbook and they read that and go i want to be like that it took us 20 years to get to that i mean we didn't offer most of these i mean we've been layering in things that we've been learning we've been layering in benefits we've been layering in the ability to give people more vacation time or to give people more sabbatical time like we couldn't afford to do some of these things many many many years ago and i for people were just starting out a lot

22:24of people in your audience this is probably the beginning is probably not the right time to be extremely generous on time off and you know like wait till you have some some some cushion some room in the bank and you can layer things in as you go so figure out what the most important things are and in my opinion the most important thing to begin with is free which is make sure you give people more time to themselves during the day longer stretches of uninterrupted time to get their work done that is the best benefit any company can give any employee um and and let them go home at the end of

22:55the day fulfilled satisfied get a good night's sleep come back refresh the next morning that's a wonderful benefit and that doesn't cost you anything bravo sir all right so a question from justin jackson whom you know he says as hate takes over the world um oh no i'm sorry i was reading wrong questions you joked saying building hay was the dumbest thing we've done on a serious note do you regret it at all all the drama with apple the scale of the app etc i don't regret any of it um i'm thrilled that we built hay hay's going to make base camp better hey it's going to make

23:32hay better base camp's going to make hay better i like this thing where we can go back and forth now one of the things we've learned about launching something new is that you launch something new and that's the only time you can really explore really new ideas and those new ideas you know of course affect the new product you're building but they also affect the other things that you have so we're we've already begun work on base camp four which is going to be out next year and a lot of those ideas came from the things we developed when we built hay so hey is going to benefit

23:59everything um i don't regret the the apple uh fight at all i i think it was absolutely the right thing to do and working we're continuing to do so um we're supporting a whole wide variety of um of efforts and initiatives to to to you know bring this to to the government's you know awareness and you know both in in the in the us and the eu um standing with other companies that are fighting and other developers that are fighting because this is not something you just do and walk away from like apple's going to be relentless about this and you've got to continue to stand

24:29up for what you believe to be right so no i don't regret it that said it was a horrible it was the most stressful time we've ever had in 20 years those two weeks were terrible um again like exciting and hugely rewarding but terrible mentally physically we aged we aged we didn't feel good people were sick it wasn't it wasn't a good time um so um what i would regret is if we stayed at that pace past the first couple weeks of launch that would have been that would not be worth that would not have been worth it but the fact that we've been able to to

25:08kind of settle back into our normal cadence we hired like five customer service people um really quickly that really helped a lot to bring the we were getting about 2 000 emails a day um when we launched hey so like it we just weren't ready for any of those things so that was a mess but we we remedied that and now we're comfortable again but if we were not comfortable and had to live at that pace i would have regretted it yes yep all right this is an interesting question i actually get this one now and again and i sometimes struggle to answer it so i'm uh i'm curious how you take it so

25:39the question is from tom biscuit and he says if you didn't have your brand and your resources how would you start a company today would addressing something as big as email be possible without that kind of leverage um it's a great question i would launch the company the same way we launched base camp when we had no branding and no awareness which is slowly carefully with no expectations um we were a web design firm when we when we started we launched this base camp thing we built it for ourselves we did it on the side we put it out there and we waited a while to see if it was

26:16going to work it turns out it worked really well and then we were able to stop doing the other thing that we were doing um so i so so they're like i would do the same thing i would always try to have i wouldn't i don't like putting myself at risk i like taking a risk but i don't like putting myself at risk so um in the case of when we launched base camp no one really knew who we were we had a little bit of a following but like you know a thousand people reading our blog it was not very big compared to today a lot of people have a lot

26:42larger followings today when they launched than we did when we launched um it's much harder to reach people back than everything but we had we had a functional business of some sort that was going that could fund our endeavors into something else and only when that something else did better than the other thing that we stopped doing the other thing and started focusing a hundred percent on base camp so i would do it the same way and keep your cost again cost low small team no rent one or two or three people to start struggle through that um before you you make it hard on yourself by it

27:12seems like you'd make it easier on yourself by raising money or hiring more people but you're actually in some ways making a lot harder on yourself so i'd start as small as you can and and um and and keep that you know maybe a little bit of money here and there right but not a big amount of money which forces all sorts of unreasonable expectations on you as far as tackling email um no we couldn't we could not have other people might be able to we could not have tackled email in the way that we chose to do it um had we not had um probably a big brand behind us to launch

27:44um it was it took us two years to build hay and the expertise that we needed we didn't we would not have had had we just started today it took us 20 years to understand how to do this how to deal with the loads we were gonna we were gonna have how to deal with the technology that we needed to build um all the infrastructure email is incredibly complicated it would not be the first thing i would ever choose to pick off so we could not have done it but that wasn't about the brand necessarily although it helped to launch but it was more about the understanding and the learning

28:14and the just the skills and experience that we needed to build over the last 20 years to be able to feel confident enough to even take this challenge on yep excellent so i think we have time for one or maybe two more questions uh and we have several pouring in so some really good i'm picking the best off the top this is a really interesting one and it's actually one that i've thought about and i was going to ask you on my own so so i like it it's from tim van dyk castile and he says you meaning base camp decided for a while to only have one product

28:44because you you know used to have several products as you said uh yeah i won't name them but whatever it was campfire and we all had our list and all this stuff you actually set it for a while to only have one product stopping actively developing the other products and selling them off what made you to decide that you still wanted or you want to go back to being a multi-product company so this is sort of an interesting one and i'll try to make it fairly brief because i know we don't have a lot of time we didn't set out to build another product actually when we built hay we

29:09set out to build a new version of highrise so we set out to build high rise two like we built base camp two and now we're in base camp three and we're building base game four but we're going to go back and build high rise two as we were building higher rise too we recognized that there was something else going on here that we were building that we wanted this thing that we were making for all of our communication not just business communication but personal family all these things and so eventually it split it off into its own thing but i think we've what we learned about what's good

29:41about having two things versus one thing is again that you get to start from scratch again more frequently um so we're building you know we just built hey now we're doing hey for work next year we're gonna do base camp four we're going to learn some stuff we're going to pull some stuff from hay into base camp for when we build base camp we'll learn some new things that we'll bring into hay so i think this idea what we're calling it is like tick-tock development back and forth back and forth between two products is actually a really fresh and healthy thing to do i think though

30:08it wouldn't work for us if we had three or four or five so i think two is what we feel right now is probably going to be our sweet spot it's going to be different for every company if you have hundreds of employees you can do more things we have 56 57 58 employees in our size at our scale we feel like two is right and here's one other reason why we think two is right basecamp's product cycle so we do basically do a new version of base camp every four to five years whole new version from scratch essentially and the when we launch that new version

30:42we're all in on it but then over the next number of years we're basically just making marginal improvements around the edges that's like technically what happens to mature products you're not like reinventing the product every year like you just kind of can't reinvent it every year so what ends up happening is you built up this all these skills and all these people who are really wonderful at making products and we're putting all those skills and just making marginal improvements around the edges and it's not a really efficient way to run a company actually with all that talent just tweaking which is what ends up happening with mature products

31:14so by jumping into a new thing we get to use all that energy and all that talent on something brand new from scratch work on that for a while and then jump back on the other thing and make a whole new version of that so we're going to be making new versions of things more frequently in a staggered way i think which is going to just be a healthier perspective for us so that's that's i mean in a nutshell that's why we decided to do it it kind of was an accident then we kind of leaned into it and now we think it's kind of probably going to be the right

31:41thing to do awesome i'm glad to hear it yes sir if you're over time but do you have quest time for one more question of course yeah cause i've gone long on these answers no no this is great it's perfect um there's a i like this question uh so it's from johnny tong and he says how does base camp manage employee career progression when it favors a low head count flat structure because you know a lot of people want to progress and move up the chain and in a larger org right that's easier to do so i'd love to hear your take on that yeah it's a really wonderful question um

32:10and we've struggled with this over the years what we basically do is we don't really have a managerial track so people in most companies people move up right um at base camp you you move sideways by expanding your your ability so for example a lot of our designers get better by learning programming as well so they're not just designers but they they do all their css themselves they do all the visual design they do a lot of rails now they do a lot of javascript now so so they sort of expand outward and that's typically how most people progress and then they move up in the organization on our pay scale

32:47because they have more skills and they take more responsibility we do have team leads so there are some team leads but they're pretty well established people who've been here for a long time so it's not a very it's not like a high churn position so those positions pretty much sit there um but but people sort of expand their skill set and then move up in our pay tier so that's something that's kind of unusual actually at companies because most people actually they get narrower narrower in a sense they move into a managerial track where they actually lose a lot of the skills that they had and they atrophy like me i've i've

33:18atrophied like i i'm i'm not as good anymore getting in the html and css like i used to like i i'm not just not that good at that anymore because i've been focusing on other things and this happens to a lot of people as they move up through management but at base camp we want people to get better at their craft and so you know if you could think of a someone who's good with woodworking loves woodworking they might also expand into other materials they might explore you know uh metal they might explore ceramics they might explore other things they're still using the same skills but

33:49in different mediums and i think that's the idea here at base camp is that you might be a great designer but you might want to pick up some programming or you might want to be a better writer and that's how people expand and that's how people get paid more and move up the scale at our company and then there are some people always some people who just simply do want to run teams or manage people and if there's not a position here it's totally fair for them to say you know base camp doesn't have what what what what i want and i'm going to move on to go find a

34:16place that does that and we would gladly help them we'd hate to lose them but we understand that like it's no it's not good for us to keep anyone who would want to do something else so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna help them find something somewhere else that would satisfy that we've had a number of people who either left to manage bigger teams or left to start their own businesses um and uh that's great we're you know happy for them and want to support them as well sure and i bet they're set up well to do it because with base camp on your resume you can get hired by

34:45most of the people that i know so yeah it's helpful such a such a gentleman thank you for taking your time to you know to give back to founders um i've been i mean this is the kind of stuff where if i say it one-on-one it sounds awkward but like i've been an admirer of yours for at least 14 years i've read all your books and and i just love i love having conversations with you because you're you're always just dropping knowledge and giving back founder so thanks so much for you know sharing the stage with me again well thanks rob this is great and i'm

35:11happy to by the way answer additional questions if people have them you can email me at jason hey.com h-e-y or on twitter jasonfreedfried and i'll try to uh answer there as well thanks again jason catch you next thank you [Music]