Character is like toothpaste - it really only comes out under pressure (unknown)
I don’t know where I first heard the above quote, but the events of the last week have really shown how true this saying is.
I will start by saying that I have been an interested (but not rabid) fan of the journey that Jason Fried and DHH have been, building their startup called Basecamp. I started on my journey of building online SaaS system 20 years ago, when they first started the company. I had a further 20 years more experience of running a software consulting business before that, so I was intrigued, and a little surprised that two young lads could start an online software business that just seemed to go gangbusters out of the gate.
I guess that was the main thing that caught my attention - that it seemed so effortless, and looked like revenues just snowballed from day 1. Heck they even said that they were earning revenue before they had a chance to build in a billing and payment interface into the system! Something that I had never experienced at that stage.
As a developer myself, I admired DHH’s work with building the Rails framework. Though even back then, I found the framework to be a little too opinionated - much like the founders themselves. I grew to love the Ruby language, but not the Rails framework. Indeed my current startup, which is successful beyond my dreams, is built using Ruby (but on a different framework).
I used to read Jason and David’s blog posts, and over the years, I even bought a few of their books. However I always read their advice with a touch of reservation. They always struck me as being the guys that fell into a pond and came up with a Koi carp in their mouth and went “Oh, hey, let’s tell everyone else how to be great Koi carp fishermen like ourselves”.
Don’t read me wrong - I did respect a lot of the things they did, and how they rattled some of the embedded habits of running a business, but somehow, it all seemed to come from a charmed existence, devoid of any real challenges or problems that required some really creative problem solving.
As far as I know, the never had to deal with situations like:
Having to make payroll for the team with $0 in the bank
Having an employee go rogue and either embezzle funds from the company or conduct systemic abuse of another employee over time
Having a founder/partnership separation that was acrimonious or came at the wrong time
Having to deal with data loss or accidental customer data deletion due to bad internal practices
I have had to deal with nearly all the above in my 40 odd years of running former businesses. Some of them more than once. I wanted advice that came from the painful viewpoint of having experienced this and and had you staring at the possibility of the end of your company as a consequence. But when you are busy raking in the cash as Jason and David were, it is hard to listed to the “Oh, just do as we do and you will be just as successful” mantra.
The current events at the company have shown the fragility of the foundations that have brought the company to these dizzying heights. Fundamental issues with employee management have been ignored and seemingly plastered over with benefits and reinforcement of “You are lucky to be working at such a great company and being lead by such great leaders!”.
It seems though, that when push came to shove, and employees expressed dissatisfaction with a number of policies and people within the company, it all became too hard, and instead of confronting the problem head on and dealing with the issue, the decision to avoid it and offer band aid solutions was put forward. This seems not to have worked this time around.
Indeed, it seemed that at the ultimate “all hands” meeting, one founder put his normally opinionated personality into hiding and said he would offer no opinions, and the other founder attended from his bed, turned his video off and muted his mic and seemingly posted a slew of anti-Apple retweets during probably what was the most important meeting of his company’s existence.
Basecamp is a wounded beast now, and it will take some time to recover. I genuinely hope that they find their feet again, and that they learn from this, and that their company sticks around for another few decades. I hope that the employee’s who left find gainful and happy employment elsewhere, and I hope that Jason and David approach any future “lessons” they they wish to impart with a lot more humility. I also hope they also see fit to step down from the pulpit every now and then and ask for advice from those that came before them, rather than roll over every business legacy with their own thoughts of how things should be done.