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Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…
CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1. Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The…
Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucra…
Below: Q&A with Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder of GitHub. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Chris and Tom from GitHub have also answered reader questions i…
Today we’d like to announce that we’ve bought a stake in The Starter League. This is the only investment that 37signals has ever made in another company. What is The Starter League? The Starter League (formerly known as Code Academy) is a small school in Chicago that teaches Rai…
Joel has decided to chase venture capital for StackOverflow, but I can’t exactly figure out why. He lists six benefits that just don’t compute under even light scrutiny: 1. The Answers market is in a land grab modeUnlike eBay, where there’s a general market for goods and you ge…
Our Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud series profiles companies that have over one million dollars in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.
An intense debate about business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics from episode 46 of This Week in Startups. This is really good stuff. (There’s 47 minutes of mater…
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…
A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people). But for those who’ve mastered that, I want to talk about the next step: making money twice (or three or four times). Making money off original content isn’t hard …
Sortfolio, our visual directory of web designers, has been helping companies find web design firms (and helping web design firms find clients) since October of 2009. Sortfolio works It’s been working quite well for people. In a recent survey we conducted, 45% generated new business th…
A few weeks ago, Paul Graham wrote a great essay about doing things that don’t scale. As usual, it’s clearly argued, well written, and full of solid advice. If your first instinct as a product developer or entrepreneur is to automate everything you can, I recommend reading Paul’s …
Braintree’s Bryan Johnson will answer your questions in the comments section. In 2003, Bryan Johnson (right) was hired for a commission-only job selling credit card services to businesses. “I was broke,” says Johnson. “The job was brutal. Business owners were tired of the industry’s decep…
A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp. Sort…
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…
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…
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 …
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 …
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 …
Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk …
Some have doubted our advice that you should hold on to your day job and start something on the side. They argue building a business requires such persistent effort that you need to devote all your time to it to do it right. And it’s true that building a business requires plenty of time an…
When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work. From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention (eNormicom), experiments with new ways of selling our services (37express), ways to show off our design thinki…
Sequoia Capital’s “R.I.P. Good Times” deck made the rounds on the web last week. It’s Sequoia’s take on what happened with the economy and what their portfolio companies should do to weather the storm. Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturnView SlideSh…
Startups can bring new ideas to market. They can give people a chance to change the world on their own terms. They can create something where nothing existed before. There is no doubt that they are exciting things to be a part of. But, as much as the tech world tries to treat them as special, we…
“I’d love to start a company / become a great programmer / write an awesome blog, but there’s just not enough time in the day!” Bullshit. There’s always enough time, you’re just not spending it right. Now that’s some tough love, but I’m sick and ti…