Jason Fried Chats with the Illinois Technology Association

I attended yesterday's Illinois Technology Association event, featuring a casual chat with 37 Signal's Jason Fried. I took some video (about 20 minutes long) before my FLIP ran out of juice.

I've heard Jason speak before, met him once and always thought he was a smart guy.  I'm not a software developer by any means, but the simple ideas and business examples that Jason presents makes me look at my own ideas differently. I like that challenge.

Here are some tidbits that resonated with me last night. Hopefully, they'll come in handy for some of you. Then again, I'm sure a hefty majority of you read the Signal v. Noise blog.  Much of the notes below won't be a surprise to you.

Staff
37 Signals employees 12 people. 6 in the office and 6 virtually. Perks include help financing extra curricular activities like flying lessons or learning to play the banjo.  They are also experimenting with not working on Fridays. Jason hires 'when it hurts'.  Another body is brought in when it's time to create a full time job out of the work that a person is already doing, in addition to their other projects.

PR
-Be yourself, that's the best PR. 37 Signals hired a PR firm for three months, as an experiment, and it didn't do much.

What They are Working on

• New book, this time on entrepreneurship
• Possibly sell their products as a suite

Quotes I liked:
"Marketing is what we do"
"Be a curator...say no to things that may not be beneficial"
"Hire from the open source world"
"When people sit together, someone wants to call a meeting" (when speaking about virtual offices and what works for 37 Signals).

I particularly liked Jason's 'tough love' when it came to many Web 2.0 startups - basing success on selling ads. 37 Signals has free versions of their products, yes, but the best versions of their products are paid.  Getting someone to PAY for your product/service shows you, the entrepreneur, that you are servicing the customer and they find value in your work.

Thanks to Terry Howerton for moderating the discussion and thanks to the Illinois Technology Association for hosting.

You can also see the archived presentation, in chunks, at Justin TV.

Comments

[Bob Brill]

Blagica (BlahGeeTsa): Thanks for putting this together. Good to see you in person last night. Cheers, Bob