Increasing Capacity

What we found and what's true, I think, in almost all circumstances is that you can do a lot with less than you think, and that's sort of the fundamental premise that we base our hiring on and our team selection on

The difficulty of managing a larger team can end up producing a less effective organization than you think, like, how could a team of 80 not be substantially more productive than a team of 60? I mean, 33% bigger, but it's very easy for that to happen

Some of the lessons that we've had is that you go faster occasionally when you let people go, we're kind of holding up the group. And that's a difficult thing and it shouldn't be just a kind of blind show and you should hire new juniors because they're like, no, it's not that

We've stuck with that pride in leanness for many, many years, and even as Basecamp was growing hugely and having tons and tons of customers, we really kept the cultural lean.

It actually feels wrong not to have that extra person. It feels wrong for everyone who's on the team, who's going to feel a sense of extra responsibility that they can't take extra time off or it puts a lot of pressure on individuals when we're so lean that it actually hurts

This is totally common in startup land that want to go to the moon fast, that whatever culture they had, just get pulled if not torn apart as an entire new cohort of just as many people as are already there show up in an incredibly short amount of time. And I've seen plenty good companies become something else from that effect alone

Sometimes we just like have an itch. We want to make something new. We want to have an idea that we can't get rid of sometimes or something we want that we don't have. We have a luxury position right now, given the fact we've been in business for a long time to have some fun and explore some stuff

It's not just about making the maximum amount of money possible. It's not just about having a laugh every single day, it's just like, oh, this is so much fun. It's nothing else. It's not just about like, oh, can I come up with the most convoluted thing that stretches my talent in a way that's totally disproportionate to the problem we're trying to solve. It's all the things, all at once

We're not just, for someone who's listening to this, I can imagine them going, so you just try a bunch of stuff all the time, just brainstorm new things all the time, we do not do that. No, absolutely do not do that. We set a course occasionally with a new product in mind and then we discover things along the way, we plow a new path basically with this product