REWORK

"Fail early and often." You hear this all the time in the tech start-up world. Failure has long been held up as a badge of honor for new start-ups. This week Jason and David take on this idea and make a pitch for learning from your successes instead of your mistakes.

Show Notes

• 06:22 - Backpack
• 06:29 - Highrise
• 10:39 - Adobe Creative Cloud
• 12:27 - Campfire
• 12:31 - Slack
• 16:28 - HEY for Domains
• 18:16 - Work at Basecamp
• 20:33 - Hire good writers (Getting Real)
• 20:38 - Hire managers of one (Signal v. Noise)
• 23:09 - Microsoft Project
• 27:04 - Remote: Office Not Required

We continue our revisit of Rework with the essay, "Ignore the Real World." Topics include new ideas failing, risk avoidance, and Marvel movies.

Show Notes

• 09:13 - HEY
• 16:49 - Black Widow
• 19:54 - Ruby on Rails

In this episode we dive deep into the introduction and chapter 1 of Rework, The New Reality.

Show Notes

• 02:09 - It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
• 02:14 - Remote: Office Not Required
• 05:15 - Zoom
• 05:35 - [email protected]
• 07:52 - JavaScript
• 11:18 - HEY
• 11:53 - Ruby on Rails
• 12:37 - Shopify
• 13:07 - GitHub
• 13:07 - Airbnb
• 13:08 - Twitch
• 18:05 - Stripe Atlas
• 18:37 - Squarespace
• 20:50 - Upwork
• 28:11 - FAANG
• 30:50 - Bookshop.org

Rework is coming back for season 2 this September! In the meantime here's a little bonus to tide you over. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the dot com bubble, Basecamp cofounders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson both had run-ins with venture-backed tech startups. These experiences would form many of the ideas later published in Rework.

Show Notes

• 03:27 - Leo Burnett
• 03:54 - Daily Rush
• 04:03 - 37signals
• 04:15 - Quokka (the animal)
• 04:54 - The Around Alone
• 11:38 - Basecamp
• 18:18 - Ernest Kim
• 18:18 - Carlos Segura
• 19:12 - Copenhagen Business School
• 19:40 - Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael Porter
• 21:34 - Bitcoin
• 21:34 - Ethereum
• 21:34 - NFT
• 22:34 - Skype
• 22:35 - Zendesk
• 22:39 - Ruby on Rails
• 24:24 - Ammon Haggerty
• 24:40 - Josh Ulm
• 24:59 - John Johnson
• 25:36 - An Oral History of Quokka, The Company That (Almost) Shook Up Sports - Sportico

Tibet Sprague is a "communitarian technologist" with a vision for building companies and communities outside of investor-driven, for-profit systems. His current project is Hylo, an online platform for collaboration that's governed by its users.

Show Notes

"Truss the Process" and "Success is Surviving," our episodes on pay equity - 00:18

"Coops: The Next Generation" and "Exit to Community," our episodes about cooperatives - 00:21

Hylo - 00:29

Tibet Sprague on Twitter - 1:08

Terran Collective - 1:30

NRG acquired One Block Off the Grid (renamed Pure Energies Group) in 2014 - 4:10

Holo - 7:48

Announcement about Holo giving Hylo to Terran Collective - 9:08

Sociocracy for All - 17:30

"Mass vaccination site in Gary draws Chicago-area residents" (Chicago Tribune) - 24:32

"Gary, Indiana" from The Music Man - 24:42

Tibet's List of Resources

Prosocial
Reinventing Organizations
Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
Emergent Strategy

More books, articles, and resources can be found on Terran Collective's website.

How Basecamp's Michael Berger approached accessibility during the development of HEY, including collaborating with a blind Basecamp user on accessible features that ultimately improved the experience for everyone.

Show Notes

Michael Berger on Twitter - 00:52

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - 3:49

Apple's Voiceover - 5:32

JAWS - 5:39

NVDA - 5:41

Scott Ballard-Ridley on Twitter - 12:47

HEY for Work - 18:32

Ruby on Rails Core Team - 23:33

thoughtbot - 23:44

Aspiritech - 24:12

CSUN Assistive Technology Conference - 26:29

HEY's Accessibility page | Michael's write-up of his work on HEY - 29:51

Wailin's tweet complaining that Shaun doesn't insert enough airhorn - 30:10

Adam Stoddard on Twitter - 30:43

Manos: The Hands of HEY - 30:50

When Robin Petravic and Cathy Bailey bought Heath Ceramics from the company's founders in 2003, they promised to keep the dinnerware maker and its manufacturing workforce in its home base of Sausalito, California. The pandemic provided an opportunity for Heath to recommit to this pledge and create a Living Wage Initiative, which in turn prompted a radical overhaul of the company's 401(k) program. Robin Petravic comes on Rework to talk about walking the walk on equity, resilience, and equipping Heath for the next 200 years.

Robin and Cathy wrote about the Living Wage Initiative in Heath's January newsletter.

Show Notes

Heath Ceramics website | Instagram - 1:02

"Edith Heath: A Rebellion in Clay" (KCET, 2019) - 1:14

"A New Year, 166 New Owners" - 6:30

"Marin County's intensive effort drove down a COVID surge among Latino residents" (San Jose Mercury News) - 10:46

MIT Living Wage Calculator - 15:46

Eau de Space - 25:16

Upsolve makes a free tool that automates the process of filing for Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy. The organization is an atypical tech startup that's also an atypical non-profit. Co-founder and CTO Mark Hansen comes on the show to talk about how Upsolve alternately embraces and subverts the norms of the tech and non-profit worlds, and why the "right" corporate structure won't necessarily prevent an organization from causing harm.

Show Notes

Upsolve website | Twitter - 00:40

Mark Hansen on Twitter - 00:48

"HHS failed to heed many warnings that HealthCare.gov was in trouble" (Washington Post, February 2016) - 1:52

Rohan Pavuluri on Twitter - 2:28

Jonathan Petts on Twitter - 2:29

A 2014 study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that many payday loans trap borrowers in revolving debt - 3:45

Upsolve's explanation of a bankruptcy discharge - 5:37

Upsolve's explanation of the "meeting of creditors" - 8:17

The Legal Services Corporation's Technology Initiative Grant Program - 10:17

Philadelphia Legal Assistance - 10:22

Certified B Corporation - 10:32

Sidewalk Labs - 12:00

"YC-backed Upsolve is automating bankruptcy for everyone" (TechCrunch, January 2019) - 13:28

Yvon Chouinard's 2019 interview in Fast Company - 20:28

In 2016, software infrastructure consulting firm Truss made salaries transparent across the entire company. Salaries were revealed internally for all employees, from the executives on down. In this episode, Truss CEO Everett Harper and COO Jen Leech talk about why and how they approached their salary transparency project, and how they've adapted this system as the company has grown.

For more details, check out Jen's write-ups of the project on the Truss company blog: "Why We Made Salary Transparent" and "How We Made Salaries Transparent."

Show Notes

Truss website | LinkedIn | GitHub | Twitter - 00:30

Everett Harper's bio | @everettharper | Jen Leech's bio | @jennifermleech - 1:20

Buffer's policy on open salaries - 3:27

"The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap," a 2016 Freakonomics Radio episode - 3:47

"Demystifying the Gender Pay Gap: Evidence from Glassdoor Salary Data" - 4:52

Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (Wikipedia) - 6:43

Imagine if gig workers like rideshare drivers or grocery shoppers were compensated for their labor through ownership stakes in the Lyfts and Instacarts of the world. Imagine if companies distributed profits not just to founders and investors, but to their employees and customers. Start.coop is an accelerator for startups that are doing just this—reimagining concepts like scale, investment, and governance under a cooperative ownership structure, and trying to create a more equitable economic system in the process.

Show Notes

Exit to Community - 00:13

Start.coop | Twitter | LinkedIn - 00:37

Greg Brodsky on Twitter | LinkedIn - 00:54

Greg's dad, Howard Brodsky - 1:25

Greg was on the board of directors of the Cooperative Development Institute, a nonprofit for coops - 1:38

Start.coop's graduates - 2:29

Jessica Mason on Twitter | LinkedIn - 2:54

40 Acre Cooperative - 5:31

The U.S. Federal Reserve says the typical white American family has 8x the wealth of the typical Black family - 6:50

Equitable Economy Fund - 7:20

Driver's Seat Cooperative - 11:11

Twitter discussion about imagining Apple as a coop - 12:56