All right if you're hearing about this for the first time you may be wondering what is going
on with basecamp? What is basecamp? What happened within their company?
So basecamp has been just a fantastic company for the last 20 years they've built
some amazing technology like ruby on rails. They've built some amazing products like basecamp,
they have written some amazing books on entrepreneurship, on remote work culture and
they've been contrarians in terms of how to build a business in the right way. They are heralded by
a lot of entrepreneurs as visionaries in many ways, and so what happened over the last couple
of weeks has just kind of taken the technology ecosystem, twitter certainly by storm. kind-of,
no one really knows what to make of it. Internally within basecamp they had kind of a
funny meme list of customer names. It's not quite clear how it started but it, kind-of was
secretly talked about, and kind of festered within the culture and the company for a number of years.
And you know some of the some, of the names some of the words were uh were derogatory or racists,
were inappropriate and it kind of built and built. And you know from the outside of i've
respected basecamp and what they've done. I didn't see any of this. It kind of manifested itself
with a big blog post that they published at the beginning of this week. They had historically been
such a leader in terms of company culture and work culture and entrepreneurship.
When they came out with this blog post it kind of took everybody completely by surprise. No one
really knew what to make of it and so the blog post outlined a couple things that were really
like confusing. So the first was no more political speech, no more societal speech. You're not
allowed to talk about these on company tools and company products you can take those conversations
outside of the workplace. Now saying something like you know hey try to take political
conversations outside of the workplace you know some elements of that may be fine
but the way it was put in the blog post was very black and white like none like no talking about
society no talking about politics. And the problem with that is most product decisions most company
decisions will touch on societal issues you're building products for the benefit of society for
the benefit of your customers you're setting pricing you're setting hiring policies you're
setting company culture you're setting decisions and those will impact employees in both societal
ways and political ways. You know how you deal with health insurance, how you deal with time
off these are all company issues. They're also political issues. They're also societal issues.
Some of the other things the blog post set out as new rules within the basecamp culture
within the basecamp company was that they would no longer have any committees. Too
many committees can obviously bad be bad for a company culture because you can get bogged down,
you're not actually making progress you're just kind of debating things.
But committees absolutely have a great place in company culture to allow voices that are
otherwise marginalized to be heard and you can imagine that this would be really disappointing
and problematic for diversity and inclusion initiatives and
other initiatives for underrepresented folks within a company, and so no more committees,
no more paternal benefits as the blog post put it so a lot of the things that were previously
put in place into the company things that people had expected when they signed on and joined the
company as benefits were being taken away and pulled back in exchange for compensation. And
again, sometimes compensation is the right thing it's the right why the right reason that people
join and do things but sometimes those benefits have a benefit outside of their monetary value
as well and so this was kind of a light switch moment where a number of things within the company
immediately changed and today about a third of the company resigned which is just astounding
and sad, i mean i really feel for a lot of the employees because they joined a company that
was really public in terms of what it believed and why it believed it, and what it was doing. It was
fighting for the little guy, and it was fighting against giants like Apple in many lawsuits and
many conversations and so a lot of the policies they really felt like they were an about-face.
Like they were disingenuous to the things that people believed and that's a real shame
for the company and for the employees because basecamp is such a well-known and well-respected
brand within the entrepreneurship community. I'm personally just kind of bummed out by seeing this
kind of transpire. I'm really hopeful that the founders of basecamp, Jason and David can
really reassess and and hopefully correct and mend some of the things. You know ultimately, I think
a lot of the people who left they're not going to come back and so they really have to rethink
and assess what they want and what they believe for their company for their culture and values and
you know how to set things right. You know I have a lot of respect for basecamp - i um i
hope that they can come around to seeing how some of the things that they put in
place were the wrong policies, how it could have alienated not just some employees but
huge sections of society, by how they approached and presented what was going on and ultimately
i hope they come around to recognizing their mistakes because that's what i think this was.
I'm otherwise a big fan of the things that basecamp has done in the past
and i hope they do find a way to come around out of this.
i'm Greg Raiz i talk about entrepreneurship technology
and design i hope i'll catch you in the next one.