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Tech Industry & Business 104Startups 35Life, Learning & Writing 35Career & Management 33Society, Policy & Culture 28Design & UX 15
Every time a young, promising start-up is bought out by a stodgy, old incumbent, the world is flush with congratulations. Congratulations to the team, island mojitos now await them. Congratulations to the venture capitalist, their past nine flops can fade in the background for a week. Congratulatio…
Back in 2008 we shared some of our workplace experiments including the four day work week (still in effect May – Oct), funding people’s passions (we’re still doing this, too), and discretionary spending accounts (everyone still gets a company Amex they can use for anything work re…
Exit Interview is a Signal vs. Noise series that talks to founders to see what happens after companies get acquired. Webshots Webshots has been acquired multiple times. Webshots Founder Nick Wilder: Webshots has quite a sordid history: we sold it to Excite@Home in 1999, they went bankrupt, w…
Over the last 20 years, my primary computing environment has gone from Windows 3.1, to Mac OS 6/7/8/9, to Windows for about a decade, and then back to a Mac a couple of years ago. Recently, I switched to using a Linux desktop as my primary computer. I can’t say that there’s a dramatic r…
I love when people call what we do at 37signals a “lifestyle business” — but probably not for the reasons they think. When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat on top of the head. An “oh, that’s such a pretty drawing, dea…
Rails ships with a default configuration for the three most common environments that all applications need: test, development, and production. That’s a great start, and for smaller apps, probably enough too. But for Basecamp, we have another three: Beta: For testing feature branches on rea…
After fielding over a dozen offers for Sortfolio, we finally came to an agreement this weekend with a couple of entrepreneurs who will be the new owners of Sortfolio. This is big news for our Sortfolio customers. Back in May we said we’d either be selling Sortfolio for $480,000 or retiring…
Verifiable (shut down August 1, 2010) Stuart Roseman shut down Verifiable, a crowdsourced charting and data analysis site, to start SaneBox, a product that automatically identifies important email and separates them in a user’s inbox. Below, he explains how he knew when it was time to pull t…
You can’t say your company is not for sale these days without incredulous stares and doubtful gasps. The big flip has become the holy grail. Worshipped to the point where non-believers are chastised, straight-faced, for refusing to give up their life’s work. See, the new world of …
Our new office has a dishwasher. It’s sleek, modern, and silent. It blends into the stainless cabinets and countertops just perfectly. It has the same handle style as the drawers and doors to the left and right. It has no buttons or lights or anything on the outside. You don’t even know…
I was watching a Q&A presentation at a conference a while back. Several questioners said something along these lines: “I was so inspired by what you say that I decided to quit my job and start a new business!” And then the whole room broke out in applause. Seen this sorta thing e…
There are many reasons why someone would want to start a company. There’s the pursuit of wealth, glory, and fame, but above all, I believe most founders are searching for freedom. Freedom to run things the way they see fit, freedom to be the masters of their own domain. But until you have …
I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard “shortcuts”. Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what’s up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?
Matt asks: In my experience, credit card processing has been one of the major hurdles in starting an online business. Especially recurring/subscription charges. You’ve got PayPal, which seems a little unprofessional (and is a pain in the a*), and an absurd number of 3rd party vendors …
Quick prototypes. Small teams. No bureaucracy. No lengthy documentation. Limited meetings. A Skunk Works approach to design. They were all essential to Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson’s process for creating some of the most remarkable planes of the past century, including the Lockheed …
Predictably, some argue the iPad doesn’t do enough. It needs a keyboard or a removable battery or multitasking ability or whatever. But there’s an interesting backlash to that backlash. (Meta-backlash!) The discussion has people openly discussing an ugly truth that doesn’t typi…
We’ve been talking about the basic wonder of putting a price on your product for such a long time that it almost seems trite at this point. I certainly thought that point would have lost propulsion long ago, but I keep being surprised by the contrary. It seems that the web has been so thor…
Facebook sucks you in because everyone you know is using it. You go to eBay to find something because you know someone is selling what you want to buy. Oracle wins in the enterprise because there are tons of experts and plenty of auxiliary software available. All these business rely heavily on the …
On top of making Basecamp, we write books about what we’ve learned running our own business. They’re filled with practical advice you won’t find anywhere else.
When Gruber first linked the TripLog/1040 UI by Stevens Creek, I wasn’t kind either. Bright colors, controls seemingly placed at random. It was the opposite of what designers strive for in our circles. A mess. Soon the Flickr page was a schoolyard of insults. And then something interesting ha…
When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up …
A couple weeks ago on Twitter I said: “I still maintain the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Has been for years.” A few people agreed, but most didn’t. Some thought it was a joke. I wasn’t kidding. To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond…
We’ve never had a lot of chargebacks (a chargeback is when a customer calls their credit card company to dispute a charge they don’t recognize), but last year we made a simple change that reduced our chargebacks by 30% as a percentage of sales. I can’t be certain the reduction …
Khoi, who’s consistently one of the best writers on the web, recently took a swipe at enterprise software. Who can blame him? We agree. If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdi…
Yesterday, during an interview with Andrew Warner at Mixergy, I spoke about my early work experience bagging groceries, selling shoes, pumping gas, etc. There’s nothing particularly unique about these jobs – they are common jobs. But they taught me some important lessons about people, h…