How to level the playing field.

The two phases of building a new product.

It really doesn’t have to be like this.

Bringing the Humanity Back to Customer Support

Why are you here?

It pays to not answer to anyone.

Remote work is an opportunity.

Since Shape Up came out, many people asked some version of this question: I understand you make bets six weeks at a time. But how do you plan in the longer term? Don’t you have some kind of a roadmap? The short answer is: no. We don’t have roadmaps. We think about what to do at the timescale larger than single bets, but we do it in a different way. No matter how you try to hedge it, a roadmap communicates a plan—a series of commitments—to other people.

Moving is never fun. It’s bad enough when it’s your stuff, but ten years of stuff at an office you only spent two years in can be daunting! I’m Navid, and part of my job at Basecamp the last two years has been taking care of our office in Chicago. As folks outside of Basecamp learned of our impending office closure, I began to get some questions. The most common being “what did you do with the stuff?

Back in the mid-90s, just as Netscape Navigator was giving us our first look at what the visual internet could be, web design came in two flavors. There was the ultra basic stuff. Text on a page, maybe a masthead graphic of some sort. Nothing sophisticated. It often looked like traditional letterhead, or a printed newsletter, but now on the screen. Interactions were few, if any, but perhaps a couple links tied a nascent site together. And there was the other extreme.