Welcome back to the 20 min in VC with me Harry stabbings. And if you'd like to see more from me behind the scenes you can on Instagram @ H stabbings 1996 with two bees and I always love to see you there. Now. I'm going to put myself out there with this one and say this is the best found episode we have ever done. It's honest it's really quite raw and both the guests and I open up emotionally a lot more than definitely is usual for me and his usual for the show. And so with that I'm thrilled to welcome David Hyneman Hansen for those that do not know David, where's three? Incredible has he's the creator of Ruby on Rails. He's also
The founder and CTO at base camp the all-in-one tool kit for remote companies formerly named 37signals and he's also the best-selling co-author of rework and remote office not required. Finally if that was not enough fun fact David went from not having a driver's license at 25 to winning at 30 for the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. One of the most prestigious automobile races in the world. But before we move into the show stay I want to take a moment to mention hellosign a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience.
Hello sign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of 16 million dollars in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive 230 million dollars check out. Hello sign.com 4/2 zero VC to join the thousands of companies and Founders who value fast secure and simple e-signatures and speaking of signatures and getting deals done that and so I want to talk about Cooley the global Law Firm built around startups and venture.
She capsule since forming the first Venture Fund in Silicon Valley Cooley is formed more Venture Capital funds and any other law firm in the world with 50 plus years working with VCS. They help VC's former managed funds make investments and handle the Myriad of issues that arise through a funds lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing vc-backed companies going public had over to cool e.com. And also check out Cooley go.com. However, that's quite enough for me. So now I'm very very excited to hand over to David Hyneman Hanson found
CTO at base camp
You have now arrived at your destination David my what it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Stay. I've been in the Marvels for a long time from afar on Twitter. So thank you so much for joining me.
Sure. It's my pleasure to be here. I
would love to kick off say David with a little bit on you. So tell me how did you make your way into the world of tech and startups? And what was that founding moment for you? And Jason with base camp?
Sure. So in the mid to late 90s, I was doing gaming journalism online learning about the internet and in
The one I had learned just enough PHP HTML and whatever else to be dangerous or overconfident enough to write Jason when he posted a Blog posting on the company website signal beeping noise 2001 asking for some help. I was just meet David sitting in Copenhagen Denmark 7 time zones away a fan of the company and I wrote him an email explaining how to do something in Pap. He decided it was actually easier to hire me then it was to learn PHP and we started working together and then we work.
For a couple of years on client projects together, we build once a sap before we got going on base camp, but in 2003 we started working on base camp together and 2004. We released it 2005. I release the extraction Ruby on Rails the toolkit from base camp and I've pretty much been working on both of those projects ever
since and I mean what an incredible journey, it has been ever since and you've really become a thought leader in the world of kind of remote work it specifically and I do want to start on that because obviously it's come to prominence more than
Very to the last few weeks with covid and we seen the world and world's largest company shift to work from home overnight throughout human your kind of insight into it for so many years kind of being ahead of the curve. Is it what you expected it to be in terms of the world shifting to it and what have been some of your corpse of a shins as people moved to a remote
sure. So we wrote a book Jason and I called remote office not required back in 2013. And when we wrote that book, I thought I was already stating the obvious Jason and I had been working together at that point for a good 12 13 years.
Remotely together and had just taken it for granted that all companies would have gotten the obvious advantages of having a remote Workforce allowing people to work from home or wherever they were most productive but in a series of conversations in sort of around 2000 10 11 12, I kept just having the same conversation over and over again with other entrepreneurs and a conversation would go something like oh you guys are working remotely. Oh, well, that's interesting that would never work for us because hey, how would you replicate the magic around the Whiteboard? How would you know whether
Working all these sort of try to excuses for why remote wasn't going to work from them. I could just can't hearing the same one over and over again and they were always shallow. They weren't very well thought out and I thought you know what rather than having the same conversation a billion times repeated. Let's just write it down. Let's write down the arguments for why remote work is actually a great idea. And then once we've made the argument for why your company should allow remote work, then let's teach you how to do it because even though it's not rocket science. There's still a method to it. There's some habits. There's some take
Sneaks into practices you can adopt just that you do it better and that's what we wrote down in 2013. And one of the phrases we had in that book was seems like an historic inevitability that remote work is going to take off and going to be the dominant force of how we work when we do creative work that can be done in front of a computer from anywhere now, we didn't exactly know that this was what it was going to take. I wish this hadn't been the instigating Factor, but now that it's here we might as well all take advantage of it that during this crisis we can
And something new we can learn how to be productive and happy working somewhere else than the office. Obviously now it's not so much an argument since it's a imperative. So that part of our advocacy is sort of receded a little bit into the background that we don't really have to make the argument in more now people interested in how to do it. Well because they have to do it and perhaps a number one thing. I've seen people make the mistake of thinking remote work is just like the office but from home so they take all the same principles or approaches that they would do in an office.
And they try to replicate those remotely the number one perhaps being meetings. Lots of companies have lots of meetings and they think once they start working remotely that that just means we should have a lot of virtual meetings right that we should install some video conferencing software and we should pack in our day just the same way. We would do it the office that said it's end-to-end video conferencing calls. And then at the end of the day, wow, that was a great days work. No, that's a terrible way of working. I think it's a terrible way of working even if you're in the office, but at least if you're in the office that terrible way of working
You in a room with a bunch of people and maybe that's what you enjoy and blessed be with that to some extent. You don't get that from remote work. So now is really a good time to have some introspection. Look at how you do things and perhaps consider that you could do things differently. And if the one thing you get out of this is the realization that all those meetings you had didn't translate very well to Virtual because everyone just gets completely zoomed out of their mind after a long day of N2.
End-to-end video calls and you replace those with something else you replace all of those meetings or the bulk of them at least with writing instead. We will have taking a huge step forward for remote work. And I think we will have realized that remote work is not just about location. It's also about a mindset. It's about an approach to how to collaborate how to work together how to be productive and that the insights and conclusions from that are much deeper than just oh video conferencing calls have gotten pretty good now.
Can I ask David? How do you do?
Having between the meetings to Tate versus the meetings not too I must admit I suffer victim to this where I take all of them because I never know which serendipitous good thing could come out of them. So I always take everything and then I spent my time zoomed out of my mind. So how do you determine it? And what advice would you give
me? Great question? I think there's good set of tactical rules. You can adopt the first one being that what a meetings good for in my opinion meetings are great when you have two or three or four that's probably the limit if you get into 5, it's already starting to be problematic, but let's just say
a for people who were very well informed about specific set of issues and they're not on the same page. They share all the same information. They read all the facts and they're at opposite ends of it and they need to come to a conclusion. If not a understanding shared understanding shared acceptance of where we're going to go and they have to Hash that out. I think meetings are great for vigorous debate. Now people use meetings for a thousand other things. They use meetings to announce things. They use meetings for status calls, they use meetings for
Just general introductions. They use meetings for pitches. They use meetings for all these things that are really about one person delivering information to another person. I think meeting suck for that purpose and I think we're much better off when we use anything from email to base camp to other ways of asynchronous communication where someone can write something up be considered in their thought using full sentences forming paragraphs comprising entire ideas convey those in writing and then
Afterwards if we aren't in the same page and we're on just uniformly agreeing on the direction to take then we can have a meeting but already this that filter will cut off at least 80% of all the meetings the most people have
can I ask because I love that as a framework. My question to you is you know, this is the respond arise that no one else is, you know, a lot of people haven't seen or experienced before a big question for me and I think a lot of leaders would be how do you combat the mental health the loneliness and the isolation maybe for a generation that have an experienced in?
Would you advise in that perspective
it's really tough. And it's real and the first thing you have to accept that. This is real and this is something people do struggle with different people struggle with it in different proportions, but you have to deal with it head-on. So the way we deal with it at base camp is that instead of mixing it together with the work we say our social connections. Our human connections are really important. They need to be replenished frequently often and let's just do that explicitly one example of that is we just instituted.
Lee is Fridays at 10 a.m. We have an hour of game time. It's a open video conferencing call where anyone who's interested can jump on during work hours to Simply hang out with their co-workers and play games. It has no work purpose. It's not like the games are about the work that we do. They're simply there for the social connection another example of this that we've done for many years now is something we call Five by 12 were in normal times once a month five people. Plus Jason and I will get on a call again during work hours for an hour to talk about
Everything else except work what's going on in our lives what's going on in the world all that kind of stuff and using those opportunities to sort of top off on the social connections. We do the same thing in a synchronous form using base camp. We have these automatic recurring questions in Basecamp that ask once a week. What did you do this weekend people will very often they'll do a small right up with pictures about. Oh, I went hiking or I did this with my kids or something else which again really helps
Create that human connection where you realize something about your co-workers, you might not have known and very often it leads to follow-up conversations and follow-up connections. We do similar questions once a month. We have what have you been reading where we share internally books that we've been reading. We have the same thing about movies. And right now, we actually we have a base camp project called all pandemics Gathering all the discussions about the pandemic that's going on such that those discussions don't leak into every other option in the company, which was well,
Happening before we started that all pandemics base camp that simply every single chat room a message turned into a pandemic talk. Anyway in that base camp. We have another question once a week. We asked how are you doing and people share sort of distress has that dealing with the anxieties that they're dealing with and they come together with coworkers around those things. So there are all these techniques you can use their work very well remotely. And in fact in many cases work even better we've had several employees joined base camp who said after they've been here for a while they know their
Course at base camp much better than they knew their co-workers at their past job where they were working together in an office because in an office a lot of it is based around proximity and whatever click you end up hanging with in the people you go to lunch with and those are the people, you know something about and those are the people you form a social bond with but then the rest of the company and maybe not so much. I think what a lot of people join base camp have been surprised about is just how cross-team how cross-functional those bonds are being formed than support hangs out with with aberrations with design.
Whatever because we're exposing more of the human to more of the people and that creates those bonds that crossover departments and teams.
I totally agree with you in terms of building that kind of deeper connection being more intentional in terms of sharing it. You mentioned the kind of the teamwork and the kind of colleagues that I think the really striking thing for me when I make it base camp is actually the head count and you know, the impact that you have as a company the team is still remarkably small and Eve's that before it can packs T curve is not linear when adding new people. Can I ask what did
you mean by this? I was listening when I was on my run. As I said, what did you mean by this? And how do you think about necessary versus luxury additions to the team? Well
first in terms of the complexity, it's I forget. What is it? Conway's laws something about the number of connections between people or is an exponential function. Maybe I'm getting this wrong. But just the difference between an organization of five people in organization of 10 people or one between 10 and 20. It's not twice as hard. It's far more than twice as hard and the
Sound of coordination overhead that it requires when you double your head count is again not double it is far more than that. So for a very long time since Inception, we've tried to keep base camp as absolutely as small as possible because one of the things that both Jason and I enjoy working at base camp is doing the work ourselves. So we're the two Executives at the company and perhaps most other companies that this size of 56 the executives aren't as hands into the work as we like to be I
I love programming I try to make as much as my week about programming which means that I have to make room of my on my plate for for that. Right? I we work 40 hour weeks eight hours five days a week, right? So there isn't just this time where I can smash in programming on top of a full 40 hour work week doing executive functions. So I have to fit in on that plate and when Keys way we do that is to keep the organizational complexity low.
Less coordination that requires sort of syncing up of a bunch of meetings people to sort of aligning their calendars playing calendar Tetris. We don't do any of that. We have quite few regular meetings and any given week I'd be surprised if I have more than three, maybe four and in some ways, I have zero face-to-face or video to video conversations with people the vast majority of the coordination work that we do the executive function that we do the delegation that we do happens asynchronously.
Groan easily through base camp either. It's through discussions on to do items that are assigned to people or its messages being written up or it's occasionally direct messaging or so forth. And that allows me to have room for doing more of the stuff that on enjoy the most and I get to do a large amount of programming and I really enjoy that and I know that Jason really enjoys writing he really enjoys design and he gets to do a lot of that as well and we only get to do that because we keep the rest of the organization relatively simple.
That's not just about headcount. Although it is an important factor. I don't think we could do the things that we could do if we were 300 people or a thousand people which is actually one of the main reasons. We try not to get to that right and I don't want to work at a place that has 300 people or thousand people that I am responsible for and that I have to follow up with through however, many layers of management that is going to require to do that. That's not a job. I want so Jason and I have designed base camp as an organization for
the jobs that we want and I think that's something a lot of entrepreneurs perhaps they don't have that luxury. They can't say stop. They can't say o 56. That's a great number. Let's just stay here. No, they're on this treadmill where they have to grow and grow thin lot of people's minds mean bigger headcount sort of doing more stuff and we just said that you know what that's not what we're interested in. That's not what we're going to do. We already make more than well enough with what we have and it's a great place. So let's just hang out here.
I mean I am
Love that his mindset as a couple of things. I have to unpack there and it's you mentioned kind of about how Granny Li Yuan maybe being more so than for a company that this kind of got as big an impact as you do with base camp, but that I call it and something you said about parenting before I heard you saying it was the big challenge of parenting is not to get kids to do as you'd like, but to resist the temptation to make them I guess how do you balance the being much more Hands-On and in the weeds and they be a lot more Executives would be with resisting the temptation to make them in the micromanagement. How do you balance the
The two I think the easiest balance is I try to do the work myself. I mean, I'm on a team and we're all moving forward but I have enough just doing my own stuff such that I don't have to worry so much of the time telling other people what to do because one of the big principles we have at base camp is this notion of managers of one that everyone at base camps should strive towards being a manager of one that they get sort of an overall pointer in which direction to go but they got to figure out how to get there and they should need someone to check in on them every day or every other
The day if that's happening, that's either because their Junior and their own on-ramp and that on-ramp is eventually going to end and they're going to graduate out of that Junior status or because something is wrong the majority of the people who've been here at base camp for a very long time my involvement in their work is profoundly optional. I try to think of my presence in the company as a bonus. The entire operation should be able to run whether I'm here or not. And then when I am here I'm contributing and doing my slice of to work.
And I'm perhaps chiming in and doing some editing on other people's work. But if we take that away, no one's blocked. No one sort of looks up and have no idea what they need to do. Everyone just continues on doing the work so that sort of comes back to whole principle of management of which I think the book turned the ship around is one of the greatest examples where you give people the power and ability to set their own course, and then they
Simply communicate that course and if you are sort of a different opinion of which direction we can go you can chime in you can help set a different course, but you will just assume that everyone who works for you are creative diligent caring people who if said in just a rough Direction, we'll figure out the best way to get there and you don't need to constantly interfere with that. Now that also happens to be directly correlated with sort of employee and human happiness if you look at what motivates people
People at work. It's things like autonomy Mastery and purpose. Now these three factors are exactly correlated and connected to this idea of letting people set their own Direction figure things out on their own and you not judge them. You helped set broad directions, but you don't try to interfere too much in there nitty-gritty work and the best antidote for interfering and all that. Nitty-gritty work is to have your own goddamn nitty-gritty work to do so, you don't have too much time on your hands. I think one of the key problems in a lot of
Benny's is that executive simply have too much time and they need to spend that time on something and often that time is spent interfering with the people who actually do the work.
So I absolutely love that in terms of the manager of one in the autonomy. I guess my question to you is is it difficult balancing the accountability but also letting them know that it's okay to fail. I think a lot would suddenly feel with the accountability on their shoulders almost this massive fear of failure and the repercussions. How do you think about creating that culture of it's okay to fail and try and not be scared of the
debility by
not being an asshole. That's a good start by not sort of cutting people's heads off when they do make mistakes. I think you can say everything do you want that's not how culture is created. That's not how sort of a safe working environment is created know those things are created through actions. What do you do and what you don't do so when you reprimand people in public or otherwise when they make mistakes or when you fire people after they have the single mishap you're creating the culture that that is actually there the culture that there is not the one you
Up in your damn mission statement or your memos to the company know people are smarter than that and they look at actions and heavily heavily discount your words. So we try to have good actions and some of those actions are that there is a framework for steering this there's a clock frequency essentially at base camp at that clock frequency runs on six weeks Cycles ever six weeks. We stop for a week or two and take stock of what we've done in the past six weeks and what we're going to do next and again it runs.
In the same principle that everyone or all teams are responsible for essentially reporting what they worked on and then telling the rest of the company what they plan to work on next and that mechanism alone requiring people to account for what they've done and what they intend to do and then squaring those two things up against each other. He's an incredibly supervising function in and of itself. It doesn't actually require a manager to swing any whips. Most people are actually self-critical.
That doesn't mean they don't wraps have blind spots, but they can't be taught things or whatever but in terms of the clock frequency of figuring out. Hey, did I do good work that I make progress having to write up what you've done and what you intend to do is a remarkable self-enforcing tool to get on that and really it hasn't been a big problem. I don't think well, you shouldn't ask me right. Like first of all the executive is the last to know so you shouldn't ask me perhaps whether that works. You can look at perhaps some of the stats like how many
years that people spend at base camp and and so forth and you could talk to them directly, but I would think that if you asked most people at base camp whether they are afraid to fail they would say no and they would also say no if you ask them whether there are these whether they're Draconian consequences of this, I think the problem with the word accountability is that it's often total bullshit accountability is only meaningful in my opinion when it's tied to an individual's own Declaration of work. You can't have meaningful accountability of your
Telling them how much work to do and in which time to do it, then you're just a slave driver and I mean, okay, maybe that's what you want. Then don't use the word accountability. Like you're the one who should be accountable for your actions. And now you set the direction of the company. If you're not giving people the autonomy and the scope to make their own Direction and their own assessment of what the shape of the work should be. You can't also claim that you're some insightful organization that runs on accountable or accountability.
You mentioned the mission statement in that piece and
This is I've sign here David and I probably shouldn't say this but you've been very open and honest and so I will be T. I've seen here in this chair interviewing amazing Founders and they say our but we hire the best people in the world because of our mission and then they proceeded to tell me I'll be the most Bland and you know boring mission that is applicable to every single company and really everyone would just want anyway and you've said before when it comes to mission statement, if you're not constraining the world, what are you trying to do? And so I guess how do you think about that principle setting and what makes the best in your mind and what separates the good?
In the grave. Yeah, man. This is just a
topic that continuously Riles me up before we hit record. We were talking briefly about zoom and I just fell over this yesterday and I think the zoom mission statement is deliver happiness or some blanched shit like that. And you go like this is exactly what I'm talking about. Any one organization that has us through mission statement to deliver happiness unless that is I don't know fucking clowns at kids birthday parties. It's just Bap it right like there's nothing there.
There's no content the mission statement. If it is to have any effect at all is a way of weighing trade-offs between two things that you want both and then deciding which of the two you want more if it's not providing that function if it's not putting a hand on the scale in those weighings, it's useless and who is going to deliver what sadness is any organization going to be we're here because we're trying to deliver sadness if there's no opposition to your turn.
It's useless. So we don't even try I think we have some general principles. We've written up in our handbook, but I can't even remember them off the top of my head and the ones that are there will be extractions where we look back upon the actual actions that we took and we try to provide a narrative around that we don't try to invent sort of some fantasy about like what kind of company we are want to be and where we're going because that shit always ends up being complete bullshit. So just don't do that focus on sort of more fundamental.
Mental basics of Virtues and ethics here focus on telling things straight up both to your employees and to your customers focus on doing what you say. You will do focus on being kind and being fair. I mean, there's not a lot of complexity in that it's not this sort of quest. We're uncovering some truly unique beacons for base camp that like, oh, wow, we're going to be so unique because this is this is what we do right this idea of being kind and and fair,
And doing what you say you're going to do like it's nothing novel there. That doesn't mean it's not hard. It is actually hard as hell to do any of those things. Well as a company because you have all sorts of commercial pressures pulling you towards the
opposite. I'm safe. He's out of all the commercial pressures that because you know, you have this unique Vantage Point as we said from going to click the couple of different contrary installs is that you know, it's interesting you say they shouldn't be that strange or rocket science, but they are contrary and another one is when it comes to kind of the fundraising path and it really you
You never got on the Silicon Valley VC treadmill. And so I guess my question to you on that one is you mentioned the commercial pressures. What do you make of the immense surgeon activity? We've seen over the last five years in VC Fund Raising the requirement that you have to raise VC money. And how do you think about that having have the perspective that you
have? Well having at the perspective I've had which goes all the way back to the first.com boom and bust is that I don't think there's anything novel in the past five years. Maybe the valuations got higher but these pressures.
Been in software for a very long time and I don't think there are any more widespread. In fact, if anything, I think the opposite is true. It's never been easier to start a new software company than it is today without raising money. It's never been easier to build a nest age working for someone else for a short period of time making copious amounts of gold doing that and then taking that gold and starting off on your own past this idea that you need Venture Capital you need outside money is is complete bunk and bust and this
goes back to a lot of things as we talked about remote work the fact that you don't have to live in Silicon Valley or New York or Seattle or any other high-priced metropolitan area to collaborate to launch something new you can live wherever and it's going to be fine and also goes to the example that we've been trying to set up base camp as you just you don't need a thousand people. In fact, when we started base camp, we were for people working part-time on this side project that was base camp and it took us about a year before that.
Project was making enough money to pay our salaries and it wasn't until then plus some margin that we decided to go full time that Avenue was available in 2004 that Avenue has only gotten so much easier 16 years later back then servers and connectivity and whatever actually cost a fair bit more than it does today. All software is virtually free. Even Cloud operations are virtually free when you have no users and as soon as you have users, if you are selling a product you're going to be you're going
You'll be fine. You're going to be profitable right now. I think the Distortion that has happened is this idea that well if I want to be a unicorn if we want to be a billion dollar company? Yeah, there's probably a different path that for those terrible odds. However, they are that they are slightly better. If you go that route where you raised a bunch of money our advocacy has been don't fucking chase being a unicorn being a unicorn as a shitty place to be for most people most of the time and the kinds of companies that come out of that that are unicorns have
For more of them are totally morally deplorable and you shouldn't be chasing that in the first place not from a personal perspective of sort of life not from a perspective of doing well by your employees and certainly not by the perspective doing well by your customers, either this idea that technology is all about the unicorns. It's just bunk and been trying to debunk it from for a very long time and I understand that this podcast is is for VC. So, of course when your paycheck depends on you not understanding that.
That you're not going to understand that right like you're going to have the perspective that lag. No, no actually Uber and door - and whatever this is doing amazing things for Humanity because that is what you must think to be able to do what you do every day. Just know that there's a lot of people out there who think the opposite that these companies are not good for the world. In fact that they're terrible for the world and that we should try to have a look at the kind of pipelines that produce those kinds of companies and those moral Quagmire's and
Dismantle them or reconfigure them or just blow them the fuck
up. I mean, do you know why I have my phone calls to hat on and so I that's totally fine for me to hear. It is a podcast of the Seas. So don't worry. It's totally cool II do have to also you managing their about kind of, you know, working out with base camp as a science project for a
year and then moving, you know,
it's a risk to move full time. I guess my question to you is
no no no. No, that is exactly the point by the time
Time we moved full time. There was Zero risk zero because we were already making more than well enough money to pay our own salaries and have a fair margin and I think that this is one of these key points. I keep attacking over and over again in this mythology of Entrepreneurship that entrepreneurship is all about risk. It's all about these brave men and women who defy all the odds and then they grasp for what the stars and then they land on the moon or whatever other tribe bullshit people pull out of the pockets. No, it's not there are all these other ways.
Of starting a company particularly a software company that has no Grand Capital needs on day one Beyond just the labor of the people who found the thing and put it in where you can reduce the amount of risk that you're taking on two very very little now. It's not a completely without risk and it's not completely without having some amount of privilege that either you have some Nest age or you have a job that allows you to work part-time or your consultant or any of these other enabling factors, but these factors are so much more approachable and
adoptable by a much larger percentage of people who could potentially be entrepreneurs than the tiny group of entrepreneurs who happen to be well connected enough to come into some accelerator or see person or get on the VC treadmill in
general. Can I ask you a kind of personal question but I am intrigued by it and he said if it's too personal, how do you think about your relationship to money given the stance that you
take? I think I had a unique blessing growing up in a country like Denmark that has an incredibly well functioning.
Democratic Socialist state where the basics of human needs and flourish menteur taken care of by a democratic welfare state and those things for me growing up lower-middle-class probably working class. Actually. Was that a I didn't really get to think much about class until I became much older because it just wasn't something that was holding me back. I wasn't deprived of things. I got a great education through the Danish its location system. I got great Healthcare when I needed it without ever having to think about
about what does it cost? So I had that blessing of growing up in a country like that that showed me how little money can mean doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything and I have plenty of memories from us growing up. We're getting towards the end of the month. There was no more money and that was that and then you sort of just found a way to make do until it was the first of the month and the paycheck would come in and yet money did not dominate my upbringing right. So when you get that exposure to an entire society that
Not revolve around money to the extent that happens in the US you just end up with a different perspective. So that perspective was then augmented by the reality of becoming a millionaire in my 20s and realizing that even having grown up in the country like them work where there was not this huge emphasis on money or success or whatever you still end up sort of being under the subjugation of California occasion and you think like, oh man, once you're a millionaire
Like all this magic is going to happen and then I became a millionaire and I realized oh shit, where's the magic? It wasn't actually that magical. Right and I realized just again privileged position growing up in Denmark. Yeah. She had that experience with another what 5.8 million people live in Denmark right now and then coming to the US under sort of very easy terms joining a company that was already doing well, so I wasn't exposed to the precarity that is the American situation and perhaps I would have had a different perspective if I was under that precarity.
But I wasn't so I got to have the perspective that you know what the money is nice and they buy and it bunch of nice fine things, but it is not the primary source of happiness for someone who's cleared a baseline bar and I had already lived above that Baseline bar. So I quickly realized that what I cared more about was how do I spend my time? And hey do I get to do some of the things I enjoyed the most in this world do I get to spend my time doing programming a lot? Yeah, if I get to do that, that's pretty great. I wouldn't trade a bigger pot.
Of gold such that I could what sit in meetings all day and not do any programming fuck no not interested. So having that clear sense of how much money matters to your life and what revolves around it. I think is pretty important. And the sad reality I think is that in the American experiment for a lot of people it is the center and I mean Jesus what a bankrupt Human Experience. That is I
have to admit David. I don't think I've ever been this open and personal on a podcast before but you know for a long time I tied happiness.
Money together and bluntly the show's done very well for me now. And I have more than I ever could have expected when I started this from my bedroom as an 18 year old, but you know, my mom is a mess doesn't go away. The loneliness doesn't go away. The vulnerability doesn't go away and I remain hungry at never ending up wanting just more and more and and not essentially being happy with what I have. How am I seeing this wrong? And how would you think about
it? Well, I can tell you and I will guarantee you that that path will continue to bind you in unhappiness because there is no point where you say
Suddenly wake up. Once you're on that treadmill and think out that was it that extra million or that extra 10 million or that extra billion. That's the Tipping Point where true Bliss lies behind. No, it's not you have to Simply change your entire world view of what is important. And thankfully we have a treasure Trove of humans who have pondered this exact question for thousands of years, and if you dive into that Treasure Trove of wisdom, I think it is possible to change your worldview.
And change your angling and your ambition to be something more than just the chase of money and I would recommend starting with a 20th century author. Who's probably my one of my favorite authors of all time name is Eric from he wrote a great book called to have or to be that explores this exact topic of defining who you are in terms of what you have or in terms of who you are. It sounds simple as we talked about some of these simple things are not hard to explain but
Really hard to internalize and live. So Eric from is is great. And I recommend him these days more than the stoics even though I'm also a fan of the stoics and I think you can get a lot out of stoic perspective, but also not all you have to augment that somewhat and I would start by augmenting that with Eric from and then I would look into existentialism. I think it's the existentialism is dealing with this exact question. I mean all philosophy really is but perhaps more intently and more
Li, like what's the purpose? Why are we getting up in the morning? Right one of the great existential is writers. Albert Camus had this saying like there's only one great question in life, which is whether or not to kill yourself. What sounds sort of dire but I think it comes to this point like, why are we doing it? Why are you on the chase? Why do you want more and then once you work through some of this wisdom, I think it is possible to arrive at a place where you go. Do, you know what I have enough like the chase is no longer worth.
With my entire human Direction and I can focus and flourish in other dimensions of my being and that is more satisfying. It's more challenging. It's more interesting It ultimately makes life worth more.
Can I ask is it wrong to have Legacy as one of the reasons and what I mean by that is like I've always said I want to be 70 with grandchildren and have them running around me in an armchair and say hey I'll family is part of building something special with this in terms of what I've built is it wrong to have let Legacy as a co-driver?
All but I don't know if it's the thing that should be at the top of the list and the number of 70 year old miserable fucks who don't have their grandchildren running around them, but have them alienated and is strange because they were always chasing more and they never had enough and they end up being these stereotypical misers who focused on that Legend, right? Like it's a stereotype for a reason the number of 70 year olds who end up on the other side sitting in the rocking chair looking back.
On a life well spent you know, what money is probably not the top thing on their list. In fact, it is assuredly not that Howard had a longitudinal study called the I think it was called the human Happiness Project and that looked on upon Harvard graduates for a hundred years or something like that. The question they were trying to answer was like what makes for good living like what makes people happy. You know what money wasn't even on the list right Nick. And again, maybe there's some privileged here. This is studying Harvard students, so they weren't probably
Eat of the basic necessities, but at the end what was the conclusion? It was human connections that was it. The people who had the greatest strongest most loving human connections where the happiest people and there's were those were the ones with the least regret and again, it is so trite as to almost fit on a postcard that this is the truth yet the vast majority of people who work in this sphere of money don't act as if that is true and they act as if though if they just spend more time at the office if they push it from 80 hours to a hundred hours. That's where
Happiness is going to be and it's not there so sadly mistaken and they're going to wait up wake up on the final day and they're going to look back and say shit. I blew it and they're going to go to their graves full of regret and I think this is also one of those reasons actually that there are so many people in Tech and Venture Capital who seemed obsessed with extending life. Oh, let's find this breakthrough where we can live longer. Where as I look upon life. And I think you know, what if I can make it to whatever the average life expectancy is for someone at my socio-economic
I think it's maybe 86 or something if I can make it to 86 that's enough. I don't need anymore. That's fine. I will look back upon life. Hopefully at 86 and think you know what I spend it. Well, I didn't spend it all in the office. I didn't spend it all chasing more gold. I spend it on and with the people I love and I care about I spend it with my kids when they were small I spend it with my kids when they were older. I spend it enlarging my Humanity. I spended enlarging my perspectives and that's going to be enough in the
end.
Yeah, now I listen II do I do understand by I didn't think I quite have the mindset. Yeah, and I will try
I didn't either I didn't either. I mean this is part of the human journey, I think is that this is it's not
intuitive. Did you have a snap moment or was it a realization over several
years? Well, I think first I had a good foundation again coming from society like Denmark that kind of put a bunch of lessons into my brain that perhaps I didn't appreciate when I was 22, but they were there.
And as I started unearthing more of sort of the long-running human wisdom that is available to anyone who cares to read those lessons were dug up and they were made accessible and they were kind of being pieced together until I had more of the pieces of the puzzle. I'm not short of claiming. I have any Final Solution here. In fact, I'm just pointing to other people who helped me on a direction of coming to these realizations as I've come to them. So no, I don't think there was necessarily just like that one snap Tipping Point, but it was a slow boiling.
Until to the point where you can recognize it over time. I look back of 20 years earlier and I look back at my Copenhagen business school critiques of Danish Social Democratic Society and I just shake my head in disbelief of how naive and well frankly stupid they were so I can see it over long period of time I can't pinpoint like, oh it was on that day everything changed and I think that's also just too unrealistic and it's not even helpful to think. It's just a switch. You have to flip that's not what it is. This is suspect.
This is a marathon of
insight isn't David. I've absolutely loved this show. This has been one of my favorite shows I've ever done in my gun. Mm. I do want to dive into my favorite which is a quick-fire out. So I see a short statement and then you hit me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to dive in go? Okay. So what book you mentioned some amazing books? What book would you most recommend see
audience man? So hard to have a to be would probably be one of my favorites for this particular audience because it is tackles head on so many of the questions we talked about the chase. I was out.
Guys going to stay another book of Eric from actually called escape from Freedom which explains a lot of what's going on with the political situation both in the US and much of the western world right now. So perhaps if I tweaked the question and say which author would you recommend I would recommend Eric from I would start with to have it to be and then I would work my way as I have actually through his very long history of books. I would take escape from Freedom as number 2 and then it would just keep on going.
I don't think I have a superpower. I don't think there's anything Supernatural about how we operate base camp or how I go to work. In fact, I think it's a misnomer when people think about in that sense because then it puts them off as something that they could learn I picked up a bunch of skills and habits of how to run a company but perhaps more than a specific habit of skill. It's a centering of my worldview. I think of myself as working for someone else whatever decision that I make or help influence at base camp at the executive level. I always try to think of
Myself on the other side because I was on the other side. I've worked for plenty of terrible bosses and each terrible decisions that they made that influenced me. I cherish because it gave me this perspective that every single time I think about the decisions that I make that influence other people. I'm sitting on the other side too trying to think it through weakness. I'm not very disciplined. I don't know if that is a weakness or maybe it's a humble brag, but I fly all around all over the place and and sometimes the things that need to be done.
At the business and there are plenty of those. I'm not good at getting to those and I wish I was better because oftentimes it would be way better if I could just say hey here. I'm going to spend three days on shit. I don't really want to do but I'm just going to do it rather than procrastinate it until the end of the month until it actually have all sorts of bad consequences. So I wish I was more
disciplined. What would you guys like to change about the world of tacking startup
statement The Narrative around money and the importance of big the importance of the Unicorn Chase. I think that is probably one of the most damaging
Means of memetic viruses floating around if we could liberate more entrepreneurs and Founders think less about what the x is going to be and what the ultimate size is going to be and more about just like hey am I working at a place? I want to work with people who want to work with working on something that's good in sort of a more basic sense than changing the world. I think far too many Tech entrepreneurs are obsessed with disruption, you know, what a little less disruption on a little more
fixing cross. We mentioned delivering a
Penis earlier this isn't on the schedule. But I'm just enjoy. What's your core problem with zoom? Sorry David. I think that's really where I think we need
another perhaps 30 minutes for that. But I'll make the short Spiel. I don't like people who lie when the things came out about soon claiming to be into and encrypted for example, and they weren't you just go like why are you saying that? Why are you pretending that all the shit that they've done? That's kind of on the sly whether it was last year when they installed this on installable web server just because they wanted to save a
Click right and then apples and had to release this emergency fix to remove the huge security vulnerability that came of that. There's just so many things in what Zoom does that seem so short-sighted into sort of kpi level I can totally imagine that there's this Zoom product meeting where they go like they count the number of clicks. It'll take for someone to join a meeting right and then they just a focus myopically and getting that number from I don't know whatever it is four to three and they think like this is what matters this is really the most important thing we could do is to reduce the number.
Number of clicks it takes from four to three which rules do we have to bend which security things do we have to cheat to get there? And you just go like fuck it is so unnecessary. You have great underlying video tech. You don't need this and I think that this is so true in so many other companies that make it well is that that same myopia that we at times celebrate entrepreneurs right there laser-focused like this is one of the things you hear over and over again. Oh man, it's just laser focused. You know, what a lot of times you don't need a fucking laser focus you need a
Perspective and if you can't change in switch between those two sort of at regular intervals. It's really a weakness and and that laser focus is going to end up biting you in the ass like it has with zoom getting from let's say four to three clicks or whatever else they've gotten out of all these slide tricks. They pulled you think any of that is worth the shitstorm. They're dealing with right now. Of course, it's not. Yeah. All right. That was the short
Spiel. I want to finish their own the nice High V is for you and for base camp. What does that look like in your
mind? It's one of those questions I hate and I don't mean that personally.
I mean that in the sense of not living in the moment not living in the moment not living and dealing with the problems we have right now and constantly living in Tomorrowland. I try not to do that. So my bestest extrapolation of what is going on in five years is just to say I hope more of the same I'm quite content person even though it may not appear. So on Twitter because Twitter is sort of my spleen my outlet for sort of all the gall that otherwise would build up in the system, but in terms of a life work balance thing,
Good. That's why I've been working on the same shit for 15 years, right? Things are good. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy writing Ruby code and making rails and making base camp and now we're making this new hey.com email service, and I'm excited about that and I hope I still get to do that in five years. I hope I still get to do that in 10 years old. I still get to do that in 15 years. Do you know what's not at the top of my list of what to do is to have more money. So one of the things I'm really happy to have arrived at is the sense that like, you know what I have enough. I don't need more in that sense. I need to
be I mean David.
Can I say on this one as we said before the show? I've done over 2500 episodes. I probably shouldn't say this is probably been my favorite found absurd by far. Honestly. I can't thank you enough for joining me today, and I'm just so enjoyed the chat and I can't wait for a fantastic round two.
Well, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
As I said my favorite founder episode that I've ever recorded rad to have someone be so open and honest in the hot seat. Shall we say and if you'd like to see more from David which is a must you can find out from him on Twitter at dhh like
To be great to welcome you behind the scenes here you can do so on Instagram @ H stabbings 1996 with two bees. However, before we leave each day, I want to take a moment to mention hellosign a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience hellosign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of 16 million dollars in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive 230 million dollars check out.
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