Bravo. Both to Sal for understanding the importance of what Basecamp did, though also Basecamp for doing what they did. If they were a public company I would put money into them. Basecamp reminds me of a company I spent 10 of the best years of my work-life with. A tiny company, started by the Father of the man that hired me. By hard work, sacrifice, and choosing the right people, he grew this tiny company with about 50 clients to a multi-million dollar industry leader in the SouthEast that was eventually purchased by one of the world's largest companies in this field. As it changed to a highly structured Corporate environment I left and went into consulting. Wonderful memories and invaluable learning experience helping him grow the company and providing a quality service to our customers.
Contrast this with how I spent the past few weeks. My program had an in-progress review scheduled, and I had about a 30-minute window in the agenda to report on the work my team has been doing. The team did a great job pulling things together, solving problems, and basically kicking ass. Then, once they had the first draft they presented it to me, I shared it with a design cross-product team (twice!), had it reviewed by my technical and functional leadership. Then the "almost final" version sat on a server and waited a week for comments (of which there were none). Then one more internal review with company executives, followed by a dry run with the customer's PM. That 30-minute presentation (of actually important stuff) contains about a staff year of work before we get to the review. At the virtual review, day 1 had as many as 270 participants online for an 8-hour agenda, and day 2 about half as many for 6. Of all those folk, maybe 15 had material to convey, and a dozen or so asked (mostly pertinent) questions.
Bravo. Both to Sal for understanding the importance of what Basecamp did, though also Basecamp for doing what they did. If they were a public company I would put money into them. Basecamp reminds me of a company I spent 10 of the best years of my work-life with. A tiny company, started by the Father of the man that hired me. By hard work, sacrifice, and choosing the right people, he grew this tiny company with about 50 clients to a multi-million dollar industry leader in the SouthEast that was eventually purchased by one of the world's largest companies in this field. As it changed to a highly structured Corporate environment I left and went into consulting. Wonderful memories and invaluable learning experience helping him grow the company and providing a quality service to our customers.
Contrast this with how I spent the past few weeks. My program had an in-progress review scheduled, and I had about a 30-minute window in the agenda to report on the work my team has been doing. The team did a great job pulling things together, solving problems, and basically kicking ass. Then, once they had the first draft they presented it to me, I shared it with a design cross-product team (twice!), had it reviewed by my technical and functional leadership. Then the "almost final" version sat on a server and waited a week for comments (of which there were none). Then one more internal review with company executives, followed by a dry run with the customer's PM. That 30-minute presentation (of actually important stuff) contains about a staff year of work before we get to the review. At the virtual review, day 1 had as many as 270 participants online for an 8-hour agenda, and day 2 about half as many for 6. Of all those folk, maybe 15 had material to convey, and a dozen or so asked (mostly pertinent) questions.