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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm really excited about our next guest. Jason Fried is with us.

SPEAKER_04: You know him as the co-founder, along with my good friend, David Hanmeyer Hansen, who's had two amazing episodes of this podcast over the years. We've had great discussions. And they co-founded Basecamp together back in, I think, 99. And they have a new product that just came out called hey.com that's taking the interwebs by storm. I've been trying to have Jason on the pod. I don't know.

SPEAKER_05: We've been talking about this for five or six years in the making. But here we are. How's everything going in the pandemic? Are you in Canada, Chicago? I don't know where you are.

SPEAKER_07: I'm in Chicago, yeah. Chicago. Chicago's been pretty rough. Yeah. Like every place, you know, and certainly many people have it far worse. But we've been home just kind of doing our thing, wearing the masks, and staying out of

SPEAKER_10: the public basically as much as we can. And we've got two young kids, so it's challenging, you know, for them and for us. And, you know, it sucks.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And it does feel like other countries have figured out how to beat this by just simply wearing a mask.

SPEAKER_16: And we as Americans, it is just so confounding that we have to go through this pain and suffering

SPEAKER_17: and death and politicize something as silly as wearing a 69, 79 cent mask. It's mind-boggling.

SPEAKER_10: In perpetuity, too. I mean, this is just not going to end. It seems like basically the U.S. is throwing the towel and said, like, we're just going to wait for the vaccine. Fuck it.

SPEAKER_16: Like, what a stupid strategic decision when you think about it, because nobody knows when the vaccine is here. If even. If even, right?

SPEAKER_04: Because, I mean, remember, I think we're old enough to both remember when HIV and AIDS occurred, and they're like, vaccine is going to be here any day now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: And that still never arrived, right? I mean, they have ways to mitigate it, but there's no cure for HIV.

SPEAKER_10: There's only been a few vaccines, really, that have done anything. You've got, what is it, Hep A or Hep C? I don't know which one has the vaccine. One of them, yeah. You've got, you've got, sort of, HIV is sort of now, kind of, finally, to some degree. You've got HPV. You've got polio, of course.

SPEAKER_07: There's been, what, some of the, is it yellow fever? I can't remember one of them. Like, there's been a lot of diseases and only a handful of vaccines that have been really

SPEAKER_29: worthwhile.

SPEAKER_30: The good news is we have so much, so much being thrown at this one that maybe this time will be different, but then you read the statistic that people are like, oh, I'm not taking the Bill Gates chip world domination virus, you know, vaccine, and you're like, oh,

SPEAKER_04: my Lord, this is now becoming like a Darwinian IQ test, like bizarre.

SPEAKER_32: It's, it's terrifying, literally.

SPEAKER_35: It really, it, it, it, it, it's a long-term terrifying, and then if you think about the

SPEAKER_04: business we're in, we're so lucky and fortunate to be behind keyboards, but you think about anybody else in the real world, and, and we have a couple of investments that operate

SPEAKER_16: in the real world, and overnight their revenue went to zero, and then other people

SPEAKER_04: in our portfolio, and you probably experienced this with your line of products at Basecamp and now hey.com, you get a disproportionate amount of attention and growth, and so it's just such a weird phenomenon, and we, we have to get through this, and hopefully we'll

SPEAKER_38: have a change in leadership at some point.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, let's hope so. Let's hope so.

SPEAKER_07: I mean, I think, yeah, in some ways, you know, if we were in the right space, let's say collaborative software and whatnot, but like, hey, the next thing could be the internet

SPEAKER_40: goes down for three months, like who knows, then we're screwed. I mean, like anyone can be screwed at any time, who knows, so you can't really count your blessings here.

SPEAKER_42: Yeah, and it is interesting, the resiliency of the human species.

SPEAKER_04: Other countries, they did it, we have to do it. So moving on, and I think it's important we have this discussion, congratulations on the launch of hey.com.

SPEAKER_05: I got on it very quickly. Unfortunately, Jason at hey.com was taken by some squatter.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah, that guy's a bastard. I'm never going to get my Jason on there. I'll sell it to you.

SPEAKER_04: Tell me the background of why you felt in the year 2020, or I think maybe you started working on this in 2019 actually, why you felt in 2019 would be a good idea to start an email competitor, or a new email product.

SPEAKER_10: Right. So we actually started a couple years ago, but you know, here's the thing, like, the last

SPEAKER_07: time, okay, let me step back. We're in email all day long. Most people are. No matter what else you use, you're also probably in email too. But the last time email was exciting was 16 years ago when Gmail launched in 2004. You probably remember that. Oh yeah. Yeah. You're trying to get, you know, 16 years, man. Right. It's been 16 years. And so, you know, we just, we have this thing where we just get really easily frustrated by, like, bad, by things that haven't improved for a long time. Right. Yeah. And so we spent our time in email as well. So we said, like, let's, let's worry about this. Can we do something better? Now, originally though, it started out as a CR. We were experimenting with improving HiRISE, which is our CRM tool. Yeah. We're going to make a whole new version of HiRISE. But as we got into it, we started making all these email specific features. And we're like, you know what? We can, we want this for all of our email, not just business email, but personal email. I want to manage email this way. So we started going deeper into email and started to really pay attention to all the workarounds because the email is one workaround after another. Like, for example, you need to get back to someone. What do you do? Well, you mark the email unread. That's not, that's a total hack. It's like a total workaround. It's a complete hack. But that's what everyone does, right? Yeah. And so we just kind of started piling up these, these annoying frustrations with these workarounds that we all have to go through every single day. And we've just sort of given in and put up with them. And we're like, that shouldn't be that way anymore. So we started digging in and, and so, you know, a lot of people use email. It's everyone likes to think it's dead. It's not anywhere near dead. It's very vibrant, very alive. It's the only real sort of widest common denominator communication medium that works no matter where you are, no matter what provider you use. And it's a wonderful thing. And we want to breathe new life into it.

SPEAKER_04: And the basic protocol of email has not changed all that much. It really is interesting how open source, you know, platforms, whether it's the web or email seem to be the most resistant to corporate ownership or closing. Obviously, podcasting being the other one that has long been open with RSS feeds and attachments, although maybe that's at risk now because of certain players wanting to have exclusives. How did you get the, I'm wondering if the under, did you consider taking the underlying protocol

SPEAKER_16: of email and changing that in some way?

SPEAKER_04: And maybe you could educate us on that underlying protocol. Who sets the standards for how email changes over time?

SPEAKER_25: Yeah, well, first off, at a slightly higher level, when we attack this problem, we decided we're not going to build a client.

SPEAKER_07: We're not going to build something that lives on top of Gmail. Right. For example, or Outlook or whatever, because you can't really innovate when you're on top of someone else's platform like that. There's so many things that are just fixed in place. And there's so much legacy in email that you just can't really improve that much around the margins, which is why most email clients have been focused on perhaps speed or interface design or like some stuff, but you really can't get too deep with improvements. And so with Hey, Hey is actually an email service. It's not something that lives on top of Gmail.

SPEAKER_40: It's a service. We're an email provider. Right.

SPEAKER_07: So when you sign up for Hey, H-E-Y.com, you get an H-E-Y.com email address. And because we can sort of control that we're vertically integrated, essentially, you make the clients and we make the service. We can do all sorts of things that just clients can't do. Now, the thing though, is with email, of course, is that it has to be interoperable. So you have to make sure that, you know, if we send an email out of Hey, it can be reached, you know, someone in Gmail can get it. Someone from Gmail can email us. So we have to follow those basic standards as far as who defines those. I don't even know. Yeah. But we know what they are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: That's the beauty of email, of course, which is different than, let's say, SMS in some countries. Like even sending an SMS doesn't work to other countries.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah, that's why you need Twilio to kind of be your ambassador to just resolve all of those issues. Bingo. Which are super complicated.

SPEAKER_07: Which is what's so great about email is that email doesn't have those things. So we had to, of course, make it work with that at that level. But everything else we could redo and reinvent and reintroduce in new ways, the way you organize email, the way the control you have over who can email you.

SPEAKER_66: All these things we can do because we're vertically integrated all the way down to the bottom. So that was key for us.

SPEAKER_02: How did you get Hey.com?

SPEAKER_04: That is a three letter domain name in the English language. And everybody knows that if it's in the English language and the shorter is the more expensive, I think it's a three to $10 million email on the open market. How did you get it? What did you pay for it?

SPEAKER_39: Well, first, I just can't tell you what we paid for because we have an NDA. Great question though. I mean, that's the question I would ask you.

SPEAKER_68: It's definitely seven figures.

SPEAKER_10: Okay. I can't say anything. Truly. I can just tell you it was a lot of money. Let's just say that. Who had it?

SPEAKER_71: Who had it? No bargain here. No main squatter had it or a company had it? No, this is what's so cool. An individual guy had it who registered in 1995.

SPEAKER_07: Good for him. Who had been using it for his own business. He was like a video marketing guy and he owned Hey.com. So I went to Hey.com. Here's the thing.

SPEAKER_10: The product was originally called Haystack because we own H-A-Y-S-T-A-C-K.com. We own Haystack.com.

SPEAKER_78: Nice one.

SPEAKER_71: Yeah. It's a good domain. Needle in a Haystack. There you go.

SPEAKER_07: Perfect. It's perfect for email, but it didn't make a good email address because it's kind of long and we want to get something even shorter than Gmail, let's say. Yeah. So for 30 years, I've been emailing. I always pretty much start my emails with, Hey, Jason. Hey, Bill.

SPEAKER_10: Hey, Susan. Hey, whatever. Right? And so I'm like, that should be it. And in Basecamp, we have a menu called Hey, which is where all your notifications go. I'm like, I want to get Hey.com. So I went to Hey.com and saw who owned it. And I wrote a little email at the bottom.

SPEAKER_07: It was like webmaster at Hey or contact at Hey or whatever. Right? So I wrote the guy. And it took about 18 months or so of negotiation, two years almost back and forth. I wrote a whole blog post about this. So if you search for how we acquired Hey.com, you can read all the details. And I shared some of the emails with the fellow's permission. We went back and forth, a lot of false starts, some offers that weren't accepted, obviously, some negotiation, some dead spots where I'm like, there's no way this is going to happen. And then it just kind of happened in the end. And he made out great. We're happy with it.

SPEAKER_16: I'm assuming he has a little upside in it too.

SPEAKER_84: So that's always good. If he, if this becomes a billion dollar company, he might get a little something on the back end, I assume. I can't speak to any of those. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04: Just for people who are, you know, what I'll tell people who are listening, who are founders, everybody listening basically, except for the VCs is you got to play the long game with domains. And it's a matter of, you know, the cash payment and what could happen in the back end. It took me over 10 years to get inside.com. That was a long one. Mahalo and Kukua took me a year each or two. And then I had 20.com to zero.com, which I bought for 70 grand and wound up selling for millions.

SPEAKER_61: When the Chinese, when the Chinese internet culture decided numbers were better than words. You had 20.

SPEAKER_93: You had two zero. I had two zero.

SPEAKER_04: That was the original idea for Mahalo was going to be the top 20 search results picked by humans. But then I went to Hawaii and you know, the word mahalo.com just felt, you know, just better to me and it tested better. So I went with Mahalo. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know about the app store feud and the battle you got into with Apple over them wanting to take 30% of the revenue from Hey.com in perpetuity when we get back on this week's news.

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SPEAKER_100: Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right.

SPEAKER_04: Finally, Jason Freed is on the podcast. He's Jason Freed, F-R-I-E-D on the Twitter.

SPEAKER_30: I'm at Jason. However, he's Jason at hey.com and I'm Jason Calacanis at hey.com.

SPEAKER_61: So I got the Twitter. He got the hey.com. And we all know Apple controls their ecosystem with an iron fist.

SPEAKER_30: They want complete and utter control. This is a Steve Jobs legacy. He wanted to have the computers work. The desktop computers work flawlessly easily. But this has now extended into a money making strategy, not just user ease.

SPEAKER_04: And we've all experienced it buying a charging cable over the years and having it stop working or working and paying $40 for a charger when they should cost $3. You know, you buy a USB standard chart, USB C standard charger.

SPEAKER_05: The app store has some interesting rules around Apple cannot. Apple does not allow anybody else to run an app store on their iOS devices. So if Apple sells apps, Amazon, as an example, can't have or Google can't have an app store on the iOS device, nor can they have a bookstore or an audio bookstore.

SPEAKER_04: So if you've ever had the I have an iPhone, I listen to Audible and love auto like a 400 books in my collection, we've all had this experience of having to go to the web browser to buy a book that we just bookmarked in the app.

SPEAKER_30: Because Apple wants their VIG.

SPEAKER_16: You guys are letting people, people have to sign up for email at hey.com and pay for it, you get 30 days free. After that, you pay $99 a year, pretty fair price, a lot more than the free Gmail account. We'll talk about that in a moment.

SPEAKER_04: But what would explain to people who don't understand the beef you had with Apple, how it went down and what your position was and what their position was?

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, so there's a lot to it.

SPEAKER_07: So first off, we released or we followed all the unwritten rules. So the unwritten rules basically are if you have a software as a service product, which is what hey is, and you allow sign ups on the web. Well, you're not allowed to say sign up on the web on the iOS app or subscribe or have any billing information or mention money in any possible way in the app. If you don't want to pay Apple 30%, which we don't.

SPEAKER_10: This is what we do with Basecamp. This is what Salesforce does.

SPEAKER_105: This is what Slack does. This is what everyone does. Netflix. Spotify. All of them, right?

SPEAKER_108: Almost all of them, yeah.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah, almost all of them. You don't mention these things because this is the unwritten rule. As long as you don't mention that, Apple's been cool with it in the past. So that's what we did with, hey, we did the same thing we've done with Basecamp.

SPEAKER_07: Basecamp's been in the App Store for eight years. Never a problem. We submit the app version 1.0 to the App Store. Apple approves it. So we're in the App Store. Wonderful. We're all happy. We're thrilled. Then we release 1.02 to the App Store, which is a bug fix update, and they reject us. They reject us on the grounds that we basically owe them 30% of our revenues because we are a paid product. And you have to offer, if you have a paid product, you have to offer in-app payments, Apple's payment system within the apps to allow people to subscribe. Which was news to us because we followed all the unwritten rules everyone else followed. Yeah. And we never had that experience with Basecamp. So we thought there must have been a problem. And so we filed an appeal, basically. And then they came down saying, no, no, we're right. We as an Apple, we're right. You owe us 30%. And or if you don't comply, we might kick you out of the App Store, essentially. Like completely out. Even though we already approved your 1.0, we might just kick you out. Right. And so that's an existential threat. I mean, if you're not in the App Store and you have an email product, you're in trouble. You're done. You're done, right?

SPEAKER_04: Well, also because the Apple consumer are the vanguard. Yes. They are the early adopters. And let's face it, they are… They pay.

SPEAKER_120: They pay.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And anybody who's had an app in Android gets, you know, three times the downloads in Android

SPEAKER_123: and one-third the revenue or something in that ballpark.

SPEAKER_124: Yes. So we had to be there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: And so, you know, then, you know, so we filed this appeal. They rejected us. And then we kind of went to the press, which is what Apple says you shouldn't do. They have a whole famous thing. No, they do not like that.

SPEAKER_07: Don't go to the press. Yeah. So, but you know, like here we are. We're a small independent company. We have a lot of followers. We have a lot of fans. The product was doing so, like the launch of Hay was unlike anything we've ever launched before. The enthusiasm was off the charts. And here we are unable to bring simple bug fixes to our customers. That's a problem. We don't like that. That's not fair to anybody.

SPEAKER_10: We kind of go to the press and tell the story and it blows up in a big way, huge way. David's leading this charge because David's great on Twitter and he knows how to do this.

SPEAKER_16: He's particularly good at mixing it up as the ratings from this podcast prove and as

SPEAKER_135: our Twitter followers will agree.

SPEAKER_134: Yeah. If you have a sweeps week kind of thing, like you want David on the show.

SPEAKER_137: Always, always get him off of the sweeps week.

SPEAKER_134: So anyway, that's so David, you know, took to Twitter and I took to Twitter, but David

SPEAKER_07: really took to Twitter and we made some noise because this is just flat out unfair. First of all, it's monopolistic. Second of all, it's inconsistent. And here's the thing. We're fortunate that we have Basecamp. We already have a business that's functioning, right? If we launched Hay and didn't have Basecamp, we put two years into this product and we're

SPEAKER_40: following the unwritten rules that Apple has and it seems like it's totally cool and we put this thing out in the app store and Apple kills it like we could be out of business instantly, literally.

SPEAKER_140: It just feels like bullying. It's unfair and it's lame.

SPEAKER_141: And it's impossible for a small business owner especially, an app maker, an individual, to

SPEAKER_07: know what's coming from Apple if they change the rules, if the rules are selective based on who you are, based on unwritten rules, based on back office dealings. It's just like, it's impossible. It's just impossible and unfair. And so we went public with this notion and it got a lot of coverage and a lot of discussion.

SPEAKER_10: This happened to be a week before WWDC which was not planned but it turned out to really, I think, turn up the heat on Apple on this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: And you know, it's a different era now and you and I have both as underdogs coming up in the industry, you know, around the same time, we both realized you always fight up and it is a great marketing strategy.

SPEAKER_05: And in fact, in your book Rework, the great money quote is, having an enemy gives you a great story to tell customers too. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict.

SPEAKER_16: They take sides, passions are ignited and that's a good way to get people to take notice. So, a cynical person might say you knew this was coming and set it up.

SPEAKER_146: Yes or no?

SPEAKER_108: Well, a cynical person might say that but absolutely not. Yes. I mean, there's no way. Okay.

SPEAKER_134: Truly. You didn't know if they would do that. Yeah. I had no clue. In fact, they approved 1.0. If our plan was to have them approve 1.0 and then reject the future versions which had no changes that were material to payment, that would be, like David says, playing 4D chess

SPEAKER_07: basically. Like, we put this in the App Store. We wanted none of this controversy. This was a shitty two weeks for us. I mean, it was brutal.

SPEAKER_16: Well, it also sucks because you can't make basic fixes. Yes. And everybody knows when you hit scale, you get the first 10,000, 20,000 people, things are going to pop up.

SPEAKER_04: What's great about the moment today, though, is five or 10 years ago, you know, Apple wasn't

SPEAKER_30: under the scrutiny of the government. Antitrust wasn't such a big concern. And anybody like I did with Google when I was complaining about their Panda update and the way they treated us at Mahalo or other folks where they would change the SEO rules specifically to kill Yelp and have, you know, Google Local above it. I had no way. I mean, and people were like, let it go, Jason. You're being difficult and stop beating up Matt Cutts and dah, dah, dah, dah.

SPEAKER_16: But today, if I was in that fight, you know, you've got congressmen, senators and the EU taking action. And, you know, the scale of Google and Apple are so huge right now that they're held to a different standard where, you know, I don't think they particularly want to pick a fight with you and David because it's just not worth it to just extract. If you become $100 million a year business, that $30 million is not worth them losing control of the app store. Which is the possibility?

SPEAKER_155: Do you think we'll see Apple lose and have to accept third party app stores or those kind of things on their platform?

SPEAKER_157: I don't think that's going to happen. It could.

SPEAKER_07: But here's the thing that's frustrating, I think, about it. A couple of things. First of all, the 30% is, of course, like what everyone's eager to talk about because it's money and they'll think it's an easy thing to talk about. But what really frustrated me, and I wrote like a letter about this, which I posted on our site, was that we have a multi-platform business. And what's happened over the last 10 years is multi-platform businesses have sprung up. Like eight years ago or whenever they introduced, well, they introduced the app store 10 years ago, but in-app payments is a more relatively nuanced, newer thing. Businesses have changed. We're not just an app maker.

SPEAKER_40: We don't just make an app. Right. We make a service. Our service is available on the web, on Android, on Windows, on the Mac, on Linux. Like we have to support our customers in different places and we have to do it the same way. What's really frustrating to me as a business owner about the app store, forgetting the 30%

SPEAKER_07: just for a moment, is that I can't take care of my customers the same way. For example, a lot of people don't know this. If you send your customers through the in-app payment system through Apple, you can't help them with billing issues. You can't help them with refunds. You can't help them with hardship discounts. You can't give them away for free. You can't do a whole bunch of things because Apple controls that whole process. Right. And if a customer has a problem, you have to say, go ask Apple. And you know what that ends up being? Sometimes it's three to five day response time, while we have one hour response time. If you even get a response. If you even get a response. We have invested heavily in amazing customers who usually get responses from us within an hour. And so for me to say like, hey, all you iOS users, I can't provide a great level of customer service, which we've invested in for 20 years building. Yeah. And back-end systems that we built to make this so simple for people. Like we can't help you. It's such a terrible experience for the user. And Apple loves to say that the in-app payment system is beneficial for the user. And yes, the individual process of maybe buying the thing is nice. Apple does a great job with that.

SPEAKER_04: No friction. That's great. Yeah. No friction. Wonderful. And your privacy. I don't know if you saw now where you can log in with your email. Yes. But they don't give the email to the person. I love that.

SPEAKER_155: It's wonderful. There's some wonderful aspects to it.

SPEAKER_166: Apple has so many good things going for them. Yeah. So the wonderful aspects, but. There's more to it, right? There's more to it.

SPEAKER_19: It's very nuanced. Payment is just the smallest little detail truly about really taking care of a customer.

SPEAKER_07: And if a customer is paying me a hundred bucks a year, they expect me to help them. And for me to say I can't, that's wrong. I think what's going to happen is, and I understand how this happens. Like there's new businesses. There's new business models. There's new platforms. There's new stuff that's changing. Apple's a big, huge company with a big entrenched, you know, set up. And it's going to take a while for them, I think, to adjust ultimately to the reality on the ground that not every business runs only Apple stuff. And once they realize that, I know, I'm sure they know it now, but it takes a lot of energy to move a big, massive object like Apple. They will probably ultimately allow people to choose their payment processors to maybe one of the things I'd love to see happen is sort of a sort of a decoupling of the charges. So let's say we have 30%. This is an idea. I don't know where this goes, but here's an idea, right? 30% is their number. Well, how do they attribute the 30? Where's the 30% come from? Right. Because look, credit card charging is between 1.8 and 2.8% basically. That's how much it charges. Let's call it 3% rounded up. Fine. 3%, right? Perfect. So what's the balance? Well, distribution. I don't need distribution. I have my own distribution. Yep. I get how if you're a brand new app maker, you don't have a business, you don't need that. You might need that. I don't need that at all. No. I can send all my customers. So for me, I'd be happy to pay 3% to Apple perhaps to process cards if that was a choice. I'd also be happy to pay perhaps for the process of reviewing an app that we submit because

SPEAKER_174: there's time involved. I wish they would do that.

SPEAKER_04: Why don't they allow you to pay a hundred bucks or 500 bucks, something de minimis to get your app reviewed?

SPEAKER_30: This waiting and waiting is ridiculous. And I think they do that specifically to have power over you. And this is the Google technique as well, which is if we make this process opaque, the more opaque we make it, the less you can complain on CNBC like David was doing because they're just like, oh, no, it's in process. When we get back from this quick break, I want to tell you my favorite feature, which

SPEAKER_123: I think is absolutely a game changer and everybody will copy.

SPEAKER_16: And I want to tell you my solution to the Apple App Store problem and get your feedback

SPEAKER_04: on it. When we come back on this week, it starts with Jason Fried. He is finally on the program.

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SPEAKER_04: Go ahead and check it out. I know you will too. Okay. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Jason Fried is here. If you haven't gotten your hey.com domain and email yet, go get it. I'm Jason Calacanis at hey.com. You can go get yours, but you only get it for free for 30 days. Make sure that it's nice. 14.

SPEAKER_30: Oh, it's down to 14. It's always been 14. Always been 14. Then you pay 99. Yep. You had hundreds of thousands of people signed up on the waitlist, correct?

SPEAKER_108: Well, what we have right now is 170,000 plus people who've signed up for hey.com now.

SPEAKER_123: Got it.

SPEAKER_30: And if 10% were to convert, just 10%, that'd be 17,000. Am I correct? Yeah. And one- Not a great business. That'd be- Not a great business. 17,000, 170,000, 1.7 million in revenue already.

SPEAKER_183: Yeah, but not a great business, right? Like- Are you kidding me?

SPEAKER_184: You're 30 days in, you made $2 million minimum. Sure, but- You're converting at least 10%. At least.

SPEAKER_07: My point is this. Of course-

SPEAKER_186: Have you publicly released what you've converted or no?

SPEAKER_07: The conversion? We said only the first cohort.

SPEAKER_10: So the first cohort was the first day of people who signed up. Okay. 37% conversion rate. Oh my lord. For the first day. For the first day.

SPEAKER_04: So you made $5 million in the first month. Oh my lord. That is an incredible business. This is bigger than anything you've done in your career, correct? No.

SPEAKER_190: Basecamp is a huge business.

SPEAKER_191: No, I know, but I'm saying in the first 30 days, Basecamp did not-

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. That was a slow burn.

SPEAKER_07: For 30 days. Very slow, yeah. I mean, no. What I meant by not a great business so far is that we have to have a lot of people paying on the personal version of Hay to really make this a viable- We've got two years, we've got a lot of people. Each customer- What does it take to launch something like this?

SPEAKER_194: 30, 40 people?

SPEAKER_07: Well, our company is 55 people. And we have a product development team. So we launched iOS, Android, and the web simultaneously. Wow. Windows, Mac app, we use Electron, so Mac, Windows, and Linux native apps too. You know, we were part development team of half the company basically. The rest- Credible. Is support and operations, which of course is a big part of running the business. They're critical, but-

SPEAKER_83: You're going to have a lot more support issues. You're going to have to ramp up support. How do you think about that?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Do you want to know how many customer service emails we've gotten so far? 20, I think 25,000 in three weeks. Oh my Lord.

SPEAKER_08: What is the top one? Yeah. Like how do I forward this or pop support or some- It's interesting.

SPEAKER_52: A lot of them are- There's a lot of- It's not a lot of confusion. It's more like, can I-

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, like, do you guys support IMAP? Can I have a custom domain? Like a lot of the things that we're going to eventually, you know, do down the road perhaps. But a lot of just questions about feature requests and can I do this and can I do that and that kind of thing. And there's of course been problems and bugs. We've knocked out about 100 plus bugs so far. So there's all that too. But yeah, this is- This has taken us by storm. We did not expect- We knew this was a great product, but we did not know that it was going to strike a nerve like it has. All right. I'm thrilled. But the last two, three weeks have been- have sucked in a lot of ways because we are not used to working crazy hours. You know, we- you and I have talked about this in the past. Yes. We work 40 hour weeks. Yeah. Anti-hustle culture. Yeah. We're not into the crazy hours. We're not into working on the weekends. And the last two weeks- Oops. Two and a half weeks. Yeah. This was- this was not- this was- I mean, it's enthralling and exhilarating and wonderful and we couldn't be more- You know, couldn't be happier with the response. But- It's brutal. We can't work like this forever. It's fucking brutal. It's horrible. So, you know, we have to- we have to get back to- to normal here. It's soon. And we're gonna hire some additional people. We brought on five temps to help on customer service. We're probably gonna hire some more people. We're gonna have to hire some people here now that we have something that's working. My only point with- with the not a good business is that we have to sell a lot of personal accounts at 99 bucks a year. However, in a few months, we're gonna launch Hey for Work. Oh boy. Formally. Which is the multi-user work version, which is what we've been running inside Basecamp for a number of months now.

SPEAKER_108: So, you know, you can collaborate on emails. You can have custom domains. There's a whole bunch of other features. So that's really- Oh, so that's kind of like-

SPEAKER_04: What the real business is. That's like the front competitor. Front app lets you have like one- multiplayer mode in email is like a big one. Yeah, we have that.

SPEAKER_207: So we're gonna have that plus a whole bunch of other things.

SPEAKER_04: See, people don't understand how awesome that is because if you have an email and, you know, it's a customer support one, it's a perfect example. I might want to say, hey, share this with somebody, allow them to reply to it or we can have a little discussion on the side of it, which I guess we use Frontier for our customer support stuff and Zendesk.

SPEAKER_30: And, you know, this is like a real business opportunity, I believe.

SPEAKER_61: Okay.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, those are great products. And, you know, for us, we normally do like five or 600 customer service emails a day because we have a lot of Basecamp customers. And now we're gonna have all these- So like for us, we use Help Scout. We need a dedicated help system. But if you're a small company or your team that gets 20 or 30 or 50 customer service emails a day, a shared inbox style product like this- Perfect.

SPEAKER_212: Like, hey, for work, it's perfect for that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Or you can just forward it into a Slack room and people can kind of mitigate it there. People do all kinds of hacks, but it really should be a built-in feature.

SPEAKER_16: The feature I like the most is where if somebody's emailing you for the first time, you get to thumbs up or thumbs down if they get to talk to you. Explain how you came up with that feature. What do you call it again? The-

SPEAKER_04: It's called the screener. The screener. I told you guys on Twitter, I was like, this is the most brilliant part of it for me. Tell everybody how you came up with the idea for the screener and how it works practically.

SPEAKER_214: Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: So basically, we're all very comfortable with screening our calls. 100%. Your phone rings. You look at the number. I don't know who that is. I'm not going to answer. No, never. That's what we do. That's death.

SPEAKER_134: You look at the voicemail. Maybe they go, oh, that's the car dealer. The service is ready for pickup. Okay, I'll call them back. But most of the time, you just don't answer and you don't look at the voicemail.

SPEAKER_07: Or if you do, you don't call them back. Right? We have this power, basically this idea to a certain degree of consent. We're in control in a way of who we talk to on our phones, but we're not really in control, or we haven't been before, hey, of who we talk to via email. One of the beauties of email, of course, is that everybody can get in touch with everybody. That's one of the wonderful things about email, but it's also the worst thing about email is that you don't control who can get in touch with you anymore. It used to be, 10, 20 years ago, you would just give out your email address to people that you wanted to hear from. But now our email addresses have been bought, sold, traded.

SPEAKER_66: They're all over the place. There's no such thing as a private email anymore.

SPEAKER_83: No such thing. Yeah. I mean, even when I came up with one and it just immediately gets uncovered. It's everywhere.

SPEAKER_07: But you wanted to bring the notion of, like the old school notion of, I get to control who gets in touch with me via email. So in, hey, the first time anyone ever emails you, they don't land in what's called the inbox. They land in what's called the screener. And the screener shows the person and their email. And you say, do you ever want to hear from this person? Yes or no. And if you say no, you'll never hear from them ever again. Now, we also have a spam filter ahead of that. But this is the thing. Spam is not the problem with email anymore. It used to be. Now the problem is other people getting through who you don't want to hear from. Salesperson.

SPEAKER_66: The sequences.

SPEAKER_223: That's the big thing is the sequences now. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_66: The drips. The eight emails over three weeks.

SPEAKER_16: The drip campaigns are a bit much. And you know, for me, it's a PR. I get, for this podcast, I get no less than two dozen emails a day with people who want to be on the podcast.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And we just tell them we don't, we don't accept submissions.

SPEAKER_16: But this, there's a company Cision or Vision or some goddamn PR database where they, I keep asking them to take me out, but they're just, the way they build their database is they'll give you a lower price.

SPEAKER_04: I think it's called Cision or Vision. Anyway, it's a PR database. And these, I could say a curse word right now.

SPEAKER_16: These melon farmers, they specifically, from what I understand, if you're a PR person and you add people's contact information back, then they're like, oh, we didn't do it.

SPEAKER_30: Somebody else did it. And I'm like, I want to be permanently out of this goddamn database. Yeah. And then somebody downloads business podcasts. So they download 400 emails and they spam me. I don't mind getting a personalized email, but for the love of God. And that, I think, I literally think this is going to, this feature is going to become the standard. The next piece. Yeah. I hope it is.

SPEAKER_62: It will be. Here's the thing, I think really important about it is that people deserve to have control over their own time and attention.

SPEAKER_40: Of course. And every time someone lands an email in front of you, they're taking a piece of your time and attention. Even if you want to delete it or ignore it or archive it or whatever people do, you still have to deal with it.

SPEAKER_102: It's cognitive overload. Yes. It's cognitive overhead. And it just makes your life annoying. Yes.

SPEAKER_07: So we're stopping it. I love it. At the source. And then someone could drip you, you know, nine emails over three weeks. It doesn't matter. You'll never get any of them.

SPEAKER_234: It's so great.

SPEAKER_17: Do they get any indication that they've been? No. We're basically hell banning them. Yeah. They're hell banned.

SPEAKER_40: I love it. Yeah. And you can change your mind. We saved the emails for 90 days. So if you change your mind, you want to flip them back on to being yes, you'll get all those emails that you decided that you didn't want to hear from.

SPEAKER_07: So sometimes you do it by accident. You did the wrong person or whatever. So you can save yourself there. But mostly it's like, no, I don't want to hear from you. I don't have time.

SPEAKER_04: I was using shift exclamation point when I was in Gmail. Yeah. And I'll tell you how I deal with it now.

SPEAKER_16: This is the one thing I wanted to get to. So, you know, my favorite feature. The other thing is I have a solution for Apple, which I haven't been bringing up year after year. I bought the goddamn phone. It's my device.

SPEAKER_30: It is no longer yours. And you're making, they're charging, I think I paid $1,200 for my last one.

SPEAKER_04: And I read the costs are $350 or something.

SPEAKER_30: They're making like, basically you could buy a car for the cost of 15 iPhones, the latest one. It's a really expensive high margin product. In your settings, there should be a button you clicked that says allow third party apps and app stores.

SPEAKER_16: This would be the perfect way for them to say, we are not going to give you customer support if you click this button. Here's a warning. Your phone now is your responsibility. If you get hacked, if it breaks, don't come to the genius bar. You're on your own. Yep. Just like, you know, and then we'd be done with this whole debate and people could just load the Amazon app store or whatever they want.

SPEAKER_232: What do you think of my solution? Is this a viable one? I like it. I don't know if it's viable from their perspective, but I would love it. No, but if you and I were going to lobby, you know, Congress, the EU, et cetera, which we could do.

SPEAKER_16: You and I and David and a couple of people could write a blog post. Let us do what we want with our phone and we'll assume the risk.

SPEAKER_232: Yeah. I just want choice.

SPEAKER_07: I want choice too. That's it. Like I want choice. To your point, I almost wonder, maybe this is a cynical person in me. You know, mostly now they don't really let, they don't really encourage people to buy phones now. Now they're just rented, right? You just kind of pay this monthly fee, right? Yeah, 50 bucks. So it's not really yours.

SPEAKER_238: Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_07: So you have to kind of, but I think this idea of paying outright, it's like, this is mine now. Right. I should have a little bit of control over like what gets on it. And it's up to me. It's my thing. It's my device. It's my choice. And I trust wants to send me iOS software that way. They should be able to, of course. Of course. And I understand like, I really, I understand the fundamental principles of the app store as it, as it was in its purest form way back when loading software onto mobile phones back in 2007 or six sucked horribly. It was a terrible, terrible thing. I remember having to do this with like loader apps and like, you know, at a Palm Pre or whatever I had before. Yes. It was a horrible experience. So Apple really, truly innovated as Apple does. And they're wonderful at this and they're wonderful at breaking categories and they're amazing. Their user experience is fantastic, but things have changed. Yeah. And as a, you know, as a customer, like let me, if I want, trust the companies that I want to trust. Why should Apple be the arbiter of who I can trust?

SPEAKER_243: It's just weird.

SPEAKER_30: Let you use VLC, the open source video player. So you couldn't have a video player.

SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm . You were also not allowed to have a browser. So you couldn't download opera or whatever browser dolphin you wanted. Right. And the public pressure from entrepreneurs and from users, I think pushed Apple to realize, you know what, if we squeeze too hard, you know, like Princess Leia told Darth Vader, like the more galaxies are going to slip through your fingers. But also, you know, people were like, hey, J Cal, you're a big investor in superhuman. Superhuman is 30 bucks a month. You're, I guess, $8 a month or so. Eight and a quarter. Eight and a quarter a month. And I saw you guys coming in and you know what I said? Wonderful.

SPEAKER_16: Because when it's a two-horse race, when there are two extremely talented teams going after a big prize like email, boy, is that going to attract a lot of attention from consumers and it's going to make both teams better.

SPEAKER_04: Now, the way I handle, there's an incredible feature in superhuman and this is going to become, I think, the hey.com superhuman race is going to become another Uber, Lyft, you know, kind of race, Apple, Android, which is fantastic for investors and owners of each of these companies. They have a great feature.

SPEAKER_16: When you hit the shift exclamation point, not only can you ban that person, you can ban the whole domain name.

SPEAKER_17: So when I get, you know, blank PR or blank communications, not only do I ban you, I ban your entire domain. And the first thing I did when I saw hey.com was I emailed Raul and the team over there and I said, this screener is going to become the standard.

SPEAKER_30: You got to get this feature out there. This is going to be awesome.

SPEAKER_04: And I know you guys have mixed it up a little bit with them about the tracking pixels, which let's face it, everybody uses across all sales software. Let's unpack that for a minute. People track opens. It's done by default in almost universally all sales software. What should the standard be for email tracking?

SPEAKER_30: I have my own views, but I'm curious about yours. And then I'm curious how you look at superhuman, which is a loved, elegant, beautiful product.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, sure. Of course. All right. So let's talk about the tracking thing. So hey is really the first part of its kind built with this feature built in, which basically blocks all what we call spy pixels, which are pixels that are injected into emails that tell the sender all sorts of things about you without your permission. Did you open the email? How many times did you open the email? What kind of computer do you own? What kind of phone did you look at the email on? How long did you spend reading the email? How many times did you go back to the email? What's your IP address? Which can really leak some private location based data in a sense. None of these things are anyone's business just because I opened an email. So my feeling is that there should absolutely be no tracking for emails. And if you want to opt in to be tracked, opt in. And this is how I look at these things. Like if the industry loves tracking so much and they think it's so important, well then give people the option to opt into it, not opt out of it. Opt out of it is the default. And not let them opt in. They're going to see that very few people are willing to share that kind of information back with the sender.

SPEAKER_40: It's none of anyone's business.

SPEAKER_16: I agree with you because if you look at something like the iMessage product, you can set read receipts, right? Yep. And so with my wife and my close friends, I want them to know that I read it, right? That's an important feature for me.

SPEAKER_04: Okay, I read it. Just so you know, I saw it. I might be in a meeting or on the podcast, but at least you know I did read it. But I agree it should be something that there is an open standard about.

SPEAKER_16: And I used to use something because, I don't know if you know about, what is it, DocSend? Is like everybody sends their pitch decks in DocSend. I don't know if you get this. Yep. I know.

SPEAKER_249: I've heard of something like that.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. It's sort of like a PDF. Instead of sending a PDF, you send a DocSend. What people don't know when you get a DocSend because it doesn't give you this warning is, oh, I went through your startup's deck as an investor at one second a page and then I spent 17 seconds on this chart page, right? So it's giving you this really granular stuff. Founders love it. People sending documents absolutely love it. I will not open a DocSend. I use a VPN.

SPEAKER_04: I have personal security things like any targeted, anybody who's a target because, you know, Russian hackers, Chinese hackers, all these folks are trying to get in on venture capitalists or CEOs emails for obviously reasons. And so I'm always using all these kind of crazy blockers, but I think it should become a standard where I agree with you. The standard should be in all of these products that you opt into this and you pick who you want to and it could even suggest to you. And it's got it should be more upfront. I used to use something like a Chrome extension called bad mail or something like this. And all these features are sitting there in the Chrome extension store. You know, they're just not updated and they're not built into products. One of the things I love about what you're doing. I love about what superhuman is doing is you can collect all of these like little features that people hack together. Oh, I don't know if you saw this. Somebody did the screener for Gmail. Did you see that yet?

SPEAKER_144: I saw that someone's working on some stuff like that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, somebody basically said I'm going to make the screener as a Chrome extension. And I was like, that's a really great tribute to it. Yeah. How do you think about Google and Gmail? And also how do you think about superhuman?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, let me just add a couple more things on the five pixel thing. Sure. Then we'll get to that, which is you probably remember you've been around for a while too. So like way back in the day, there wasn't unsubscribed links at the bottom of every newsletter. Like that wasn't even a thing. Oh, yeah. Like it was eventually like people had to do this. Can't spend. It had to be added. Yeah. And so I think opt-in is important for sharing information back. I also think like let them disclose at the bottom of every email. Like let them say, did you know that when you open this email? Yeah. We received your IP address. We received how many. Like then you start to expose the stuff. People go, wait a second. Yep. Wait a second. And the thing that really bugs me is not so much newsletters to be honest, because it's actually something that was, you know, Superhuman used to do, right? Which is they would, they would let you know if someone read your email. It's a read receipt that was on, that the receiver didn't know anything about. And that really bugged me. It bugs us. And a lot of bugs, a lot of people, because it's none of anyone's business. I don't even know it's being tracked. No one knew it was being tracked. And they got a lot of heat for that. So in general, opening an email should not reveal anything to anybody. Right.

SPEAKER_40: It's just opening an email. It's like you open a letter. The person who sent it to you doesn't get a text back saying you open the letter.

SPEAKER_256: It's just none of them. So anyway, that's my take. Yeah. And I think on the web-

SPEAKER_134: That's personal identifying information, which is the problem. Because like people might argue, well, on the web, you know, there's analytics and stuff. But these analytics, of course, aren't personal analytics, unless you've logged into a system.

SPEAKER_155: But literally every cell software does this.

SPEAKER_16: And so we just need to have a standard on it. I think there should be a standard.

SPEAKER_04: And I like the idea that there's a big dialogue going on about it. Yeah. What do you think about the two competitors, Gmail and Superhuman? Sure. And, you know, why hasn't- Why has Google screwed this up so badly? Like why does Hay and Superhuman even need to exist?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Well, first of all, they're all very different products. So none of us are really competing with Gmail. Gmail is 1.5 billion people using- Crazy. So like Superhuman and Hay don't have that. We'll never have that. They're different categories entirely. But like, I think what, you know, Gmail, first of all, I think Google Inbox was a wonderful product that they killed. Remember that? Yeah. That was a really clever product, I thought. And they killed that and they rolled some of the stuff back into Gmail. But Google does a million things. Like they're not really focused on email that much. No. It's just like email matters to them, but it's not their primary focus. They don't really make a lot of money on it. It's not their thing. They just had to stop selling ads against it, or personalized ads. Man, did they get a lot of data though. Oof. Oh yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons why we don't do anything like that. We don't do anything like that. Hey, we don't sell ads. We don't mine your data. We don't look at anything personal. We don't sell anything you give us. You pay us for the product. So anyway, so Gmail, it's free email for anybody and everybody. And like, we'll never be on that level, nor do we want to be on that level. Because you really can't provide great service. Like we're all about providing great products and great service. Gmail can't provide great customer service to a billion people. There's just no, the economics don't work out.

SPEAKER_263: It's just not possible. Not for a free product, certainly.

SPEAKER_07: Not for a free product, right? Yeah. So Hey is not free. Hey is 99 bucks. So Superhuman is a client that sits on top of Gmail or other mail services. So Hey is different. Hey is closer to Gmail in that it's a mail provider. And Superhuman is closer to any number of the different clients. A client. Right. And it's a wonderful product. A lot of people love it. It's fast. Their whole thing is primarily fast and keyboard commands. And Hey has all those things as well. But it's a different audience, a different target. Yeah, I agree. Look, like you said, I love competition. It's wonderful. And this is the whole thing like, I'm getting back to the Apple discussion. There should be competition. Yeah. Things will get better. Prices will come down. All these things will get better. So I love it.

SPEAKER_266: Capitalism. Not all bad. And there's other players too. There's other players too.

SPEAKER_16: It's not just saying Superhuman. There's a lot of other players. Is it Protomail? Protonmail and Fastmail.

SPEAKER_268: Why is Protonmail becoming popular? Is that strictly because people want to be anonymous or something?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah.

SPEAKER_134: So Protonmail is end-to-end encrypted. So it's really for really sensitive emails like journalists and all sorts of different people

SPEAKER_07: sources or whatnot are sending stuff back and forth. Their real thing is super high-end encrypted security or encrypted emails.

SPEAKER_40: Fastmail is another option, which is another mail provider just like Hay and Gmail are. And they have their own set of features and that's a wonderful product too.

SPEAKER_07: So there's a few of them.

SPEAKER_273: What's their selling point? Does it have a specific selling point?

SPEAKER_07: Well, I mean, you'd have to ask them. But primarily it's that you don't have to be on Gmail. You don't have to be giving your information to Google. You know, there's privacy. Privacy, yeah. Yeah, privacy and pay for this stuff and, you know, support a company. So I think, you know, and they have other features that it's a really nice product actually. So there are a number of them out there. But what we're trying to do with Hay is really revisit the workarounds. And email is full of workarounds. Like how do I get back to people later? Will you hack that? How do I set something aside for later? Will you hack that? Why do I have to read emails one at a time? Why can't I read them all in one page? Like we have this feature called a feed.

SPEAKER_275: That's a nice feature. I love that one.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah. We have this feature called read together where you can just like open up six emails at the same time on the single page and scroll through them. Such a great power user. Just like you do on Facebook or on Twitter or on LinkedIn or Instagram. Absolutely. You scroll through things. That's how we do it in modern day. Like but email has been so far behind. Yeah. So we're trying to bring these modern ideas to email and re-envision.

SPEAKER_83: Where do you think the chances are the sleeping giant, you know, Gmail or Outlook or somebody wakes up?

SPEAKER_279: I think they're going to copy a lot of this stuff. Yeah. But what are you going to do? Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: I mean, and also, the difference is founder authority. I always think like the founders have a passion for it and the people who are the line workers,

SPEAKER_281: they just, all right, we got our asses kicked. These new features, I guess we got to try to catch up, but you know.

SPEAKER_134: I also don't think that Gmail feels like any of the above are threats, like superhuman,

SPEAKER_07: hey, fast mail. But we're pimples, right? Yeah. Because they've got 1.5 billion customers, a totally different customer base. They might improve. They might take some of these ideas and some of these features and build them into Gmail.

SPEAKER_134: I wouldn't be surprised. They're good ideas. And good ideas should flourish and they should spread around. We're not here to protect anything.

SPEAKER_07: There's nothing we can protect anyway. We just want to provide a great service for people who want to support a company like ours and want to see email. And if they want to be on the frontier of what's possible with email, they want to be on, hey, that's what they want to be on. So it's up to people to decide that. And like I said, we're not free. We're 99 bucks minimum a year. And so that's not for a lot of people either. Yeah. It's so nice though that there's willingness on consumers now.

SPEAKER_16: Like consumers seem to be maturing in the third decade of the web or whatever we're on now of people really understanding it. And they understand if they're not paying, then they're the product, right? If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And it's delightful to see consumers willing to pay.

SPEAKER_30: And the advice I give people about the app store is, you know, if you pay Apple their VIG, you're likely, and there's a reason why they have the top revenue charts. The top revenue charts reward people who give them money.

SPEAKER_04: They don't have insight into how much Netflix makes. So Netflix can never be, or Spotify can never be on those charts. But if another company puts it on there, I think for small companies, this is why, if I was your partner on this, I'd say let's pay them the VIG because we'll be on the charts, right? If 30,000, 40,000 people pay, we'll be the number one on that chart. So if you think about the marketing, did you guys have that internal discussion that,

SPEAKER_16: hey, maybe if we give them, you know, $300,000, we'll be pinned as, you know,

SPEAKER_289: top three or four paid apps for a couple of weeks?

SPEAKER_290: Yeah, you know, it's just not the way we want to do business. I'm not interested in giving anyone 30% of our revenues like that.

SPEAKER_07: Like we've, we've spent 21 years building a reputation, building customer base, building trust, building integrity, building great products. And for me, just to hand over my customers to Apple, just to get on a chart, not interested in that. I mean, here's the other thing that people, again, don't realize. When, when your, when your payment goes through Apple and at payments, they're not your customer anymore. They're Apple's customer. That's the key.

SPEAKER_292: See, I think that's the key issue where I, where I agree with you.

SPEAKER_07: I agree with you. Why should I give my customers to Apple? And on the credit card charge slip or, well, not the slip, but like on your, on your statement, it says Apple. Right. It doesn't say Basecamp. It says Apple.

SPEAKER_16: Yes. And that is the problem. Yeah. That was Rupert Murdoch's problem, by the way, when he did the app. Remember he did the news app. Oh. I forgot the name of it. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I seem so smart on the podcast, but it was the daily. It was the daily. Right. I got it. And his thing was, I'm not putting wall street journal on there unless I get the names

SPEAKER_04: of the subscribers and I can talk to my subscribers. No, no Steve jobs and Steve jobs folded for, for him. But it was one of the reasons why I left angel list. Was.

SPEAKER_16: I didn't know who I, you know, I was, they, they, they wouldn't give me the contact information of the angels who were investing alongside of me.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And I was like, you know what? I'm so done investing in platforms where they obscure and they create this distance to control me by not letting me know who my customers are. I want to know my customers.

SPEAKER_16: I want to know my LPs. Yeah. I want to know my partners. What's it like to work with David? He is a very interesting cat. Does he make you crazy sometimes? Do you guys fight about stuff or do you just like appreciate him for the. The wild berserker he is? Cause you know, he is a bit of a, a spirited individual like myself.

SPEAKER_05: What's it like to work with him? I love David. David. I could honestly, I could go on vacation with David. Cause we don't agree on, you know, we, we agree on half the stuff. Sure. But I love debating with people.

SPEAKER_232: I love when he's on the podcast, love a different perspective. Yeah. David loves arguing and you love arguing and I love arguing too.

SPEAKER_301: But does that get a little annoying having an arguer as a partner? Um, you guys ever go at it?

SPEAKER_07: Oh, we do. We do. We, we see things like we see business stuff, 90, 95% the same. And there's like the 5% or 10% we don't about pricing or, you know, how to roll a product out. Like there's a ton of debates around, Hey, like should we launch the work version first? Should we launch them both at the same time? Should we launch the personal version? Is there even a market for the person? There's all these headbutting debates. But the thing is, is that, I mean, I love working with David. David, David's brilliant and is such a- He's a smart cat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_304: Such a great partner. What is his superpower?

SPEAKER_07: David is incredibly clear minded. Um, I think, you know, some people, you talk to them and, and they have arguments. And if you were able to, to knock on the argument, it'd sound like hollow wood. Yeah. Like if you knock on David's arguments, they're oak. Right. Like David, David has, there's substance behind what he's saying. He might be wrong. I mean, that that's also for time to tell because people are wrong. People give him shit for like, you know, 10 years ago, whatever it was. He's like, Facebook's not gonna be worth anything. So, okay. He was wrong on that. Right. People were wrong. He can't be a hundred percent on anything, of course. But David really, when he argues, he believes what he's saying. And he's, he's brilliant. And, and it's wonderful. And I'm, I'm inspired to work with him. I love working with him. We definitely go head to head on product decisions and product ideas. And at the end of the day, it's my call. It's my company. There we are without him. So I'm thrilled to have him. It's wonderful. I hope we've been in business now together. I mean, I started the business in 99 with a few other different partners. So he came on a little bit later. So 2002, 2003 kind of thing was when he became a partner in the business basically. And I hope we're still in business 20 years from now working together. I love it. It's wonderful. So he's great. He's great. And yeah. I mean, like, I don't, I don't, he's got his own set of personal debates and arguments that he's going to make. And I'm going to make my own. And I usually stay out of the fray on Twitter because I'm not interested in that side of Twitter. I'm more interested in Twitter as like a business commercial thing, not like a personal. That's where I'm moving to.

SPEAKER_146: For me, it was like a fun, cause you know, all these online communities start as fun and it's a small group of people and then it just gets too big and it collapses on itself.

SPEAKER_30: It's almost like a boom bust cycle of like, um, it's like Darwinism. The pond gets too many fish in it though.

SPEAKER_306: Then they eat all the algae, everything.

SPEAKER_07: It's also hard to defend in an argument in 240 characters, like to people who aren't really

SPEAKER_134: interested in listening or in, and that's like, we can all make bad arguments too. So it's not like any argument you make is worth defending. Sometimes you just make bad arguments, but like, it's just so hard.

SPEAKER_07: But you know, one thing I want to get back to, I was just thinking about this, um, your point about getting out of angel list, you know, for a while during the apple thing with, apple and hay, I was actually considering if, if the apple decision would have gone the other way, I was considering quitting and basically retiring.

SPEAKER_307: You as it like.

SPEAKER_07: Yes. Wow. Because here's why. If I didn't get into business, I didn't start a business to be told what to do by another business. Right? No, you don't want to be bullied. No, and not even bullied. Just like, yeah, bullied. You're right. Bullied. I don't want to be like, that's not why I'm an independent. Like I've, I've, we've built an independent business intentionally. We don't have outside funding. You know, the whole story, right? Yeah. We're, we're self funded. We're, we do everything our own way so we can do it our own way. And to be in an industry where if apple forced us to have to give them 30% of our business and not be able to interface with our customers the way we want, I don't want to be in that industry. I'm not interested in. No, it's gross. Running a business. It's horrible. And like, that's not, if that's the norm, I want out. I'm not interested in that. So like I was contemplating that during the thing. Like I didn't know where this was going to go. We truly didn't know. And by the way, I will say at the end when it all kind of came together, Apple was very gracious and they gave me a phone call and explained the reason. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was nicely handled in the end. Um, and, and the fellow, I can't share his name, but the fellow who I was interacting with at apple was a very fair minded kind person. He was just doing his job, right? You know, he wasn't being able to, he wasn't the one making the ultimate calls here. Um, and he gave me a call at the end to let us know the app was finally approved. And I was really happy with how that all wrapped up. But for a while there, I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore.

SPEAKER_40: I don't want to be in this industry. If I have to basically give into a trillion dollar, if a trillion dollar business can tell me how to run my business and independent business worth whatever it's worth.

SPEAKER_07: It doesn't even matter. It's nowhere near what Apple's worth. If I can't be myself, I can't run my own company my own way. What's the point? I don't want to be in business at all.

SPEAKER_05: No, it'd be like, you know what? If you think about the art and the craftsmanship, the, the, the craft work that we do making

SPEAKER_16: these companies, it would be like being in the movie business. And like, you make this great film and the theaters are just like, yeah, no, you can't be on the screen. It's like, but, but I, I put all this effort and art into this and like, you have the movie theater and I have the movie, like, can't we get along? And this is why I think, you know, the, I'm not a big regulation guy. Um, I like free markets. I think you do like free markets, but this is anti-competitive. And when you, when, uh, when a company gets so big, they need to become self-aware and

SPEAKER_04: they have to pick the battle and they have to figure out, is this the hill they want to die on or the hill they want to murder people on? And it's a stupid decision for Apple to pick that hill to die on.

SPEAKER_16: They got here by developers. They don't make good software. Apple makes terrible software. Apple, every Apple product would, you know, from video editing to audio editing to calendar to mail sucks. They're dependent on the ecosystem to make beautiful apps. So why antagonize people who want to be on your platform? And I think that's what they realized. And I think it's a very important thing for people listening to this podcast to realize is when there is injustice like this with a big company, speak up, write the blog posts

SPEAKER_312: and the other founders, the other podcasters, the other entrepreneurs are going to rally behind you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: We saw a lot of that. And it gave us a lot of energy because this is really an argument we were making for all developers. Not, I mean, we were using our, we were in the thick of it. So like, this is our example, but this, we want to see rule changes for everybody. Cause it's simply just not fair. And here's the other thing, you know, we heard from dozens and dozens of founders and entrepreneurs and developers who came out of the woodwork privately to us off the record saying.

SPEAKER_313: Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: They're not going to say it publicly. Yeah. They're afraid. And when, when you're afraid, when, when, when a company strikes fear in other. That's the tell. Yes. That's the tell that something is wrong here. And there's so many companies out there and independent developers who feel totally built bullied, have been pushed around and strong armed by large companies, Apple included. And, but they're afraid, they're afraid. And you basically have had historically, you've had to have been Spotify or Netflix or some big massive company who can spend the time and spend the money arguing. Right. Thing is, is that company like the public doesn't care about billion dollar companies arguing with each other. I think what was interesting about this case is that we were a relatively small company arguing against the big company. And that was kind of, I think where the leverage was ultimately. And I, and I'm, I'm glad that it happened and I'm glad that there's some rule changes. We'd love to see a lot more. And I think your idea also is good. There's a lot of great ideas out there. And I think I'm hopeful that, that Apple will begin over time over the next few years to, begin to pry open the door a little bit and give some people some choice and some options. Otherwise, at some point, and who knows when this is going to be, because no company really knows when this happens until it flips. Yeah. People are going to leave or governments are going to come down even harder. And we'll see how the EU shakes out.

SPEAKER_40: And there's also an antitrust investigation starting in the US, I think in July, this month here.

SPEAKER_312: You overplay your hand at your peril.

SPEAKER_16: You know, you really have to think it through. If you're going to be a bully like this, all of those enemies accumulate. And you know, the same exact thing happened when I started criticizing Google.

SPEAKER_04: Um, people are like, Hey, Jake, how, let it go. You know, just take the loss, lay off your employees and, and don't fight it. And I was like, that's not how I'm going down. I'm going down swinging. And to this day, I say, Matt cut screwed me. And I say, they lied to me. And I think that there should be antitrust because if you look at what they did with search, they, this is the, the lying was so obvious.

SPEAKER_30: They said, we didn't change organic search. And I'm like, okay.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. But you moved the first organic search results, 400 pixels down the goddamn page and you put your box ahead of it. Yeah. So you and everybody knows that 90% of the clicks are on the first three choices. Therefore putting Yelp down there, therefore putting travel, therefore putting Mahalo, whatever it is down there, you put yourself up top. You don't have to change the organic results. You're lying. And the EU caught them in this lie. And if you think about this bad behavior, you know, when people are scared of speaking up, that should make you yourself have some level of self reflection. And this is what I told to the highest levels of Google.

SPEAKER_04: I said, do you really want people to be scared of you?

SPEAKER_318: Is that how you want to live your life? Right.

SPEAKER_16: Because you could also be gracious and generous and how much money has to pile up in Apple's coffers for them to think it's worth it? You know, like what point do you just look in the mirror and hate yourself?

SPEAKER_07: It is baffling and it's unfortunate. But I think sometimes what happens is that, not to defend it because I'm with you on this completely, is that just this is what happens.

SPEAKER_40: Public markets demand returns and everyone's looking for money and everyone's looking for revenue. And there's a big revenue source and they can take a slate. You want to take a slice of every Apple and take a slice of every service that exists. Like you could see how they would want that their whole their service business now.

SPEAKER_07: So you can just kind of see how these things evolve. It doesn't mean that there's bad people that are making these decisions. It's just like this is this is what this is what happens. Yes. And as as a company amasses more and more and more power, this is what happens. This is just what happens every single time. And at some point it breaks. And by the way, speaking of Google, I mean, you know, probably was it last year we got in a whole thing with Google around having to buy our own branded keywords because Google selling our branded keywords other people.

SPEAKER_322: And so they made the ads look like organic results even more so than ever before. And people don't know. And people are confused. And it's brutal. It's brutal. Like why?

SPEAKER_16: Why? Damn it. But again, listen, it'shy FOX. This is what we need to do because I did this with mahalo. Mm-hmm. I recorded people using Google. If you record people using Google and you say and you show them those bullshit ads where they make you pay to not have your computer to there. So for you, you know, if Basecamp is being competed against by Acme project management, they can buy your keyword, put themselves up there, then you have to buy it. The word ad is a little tiny chicklet. The smallest. The smallest you could possibly do it. If you have 100 people do it and then afterwards say, did you click on an ad or did you click on an organic search result? They will say, I didn't click on an ad 60, 70% of the time. It's been proven.

SPEAKER_327: For sure.

SPEAKER_16: And if there were videos like that submitted to the EU and we just did a focus group and it cost $1,000 to do this. If you're listening to me and you've got a problem with this and you do, all you have to do is run that test and man, Google will stop in their tracks because the last thing they want to do is get in a fight with people who say you're deceiving users. Right. And it's so clear they're deceiving users by making the ad look so similar. Remember the old days the ad was in a box with a color behind it?

SPEAKER_07: Totally. It was light blue. And in fact, if you look at like, I think the New York Times maybe did a piece on this. They should look at like Google ads over the last 10 years or something, maybe it was the post. I'm not sure who it was now. But anyway. And you could see that there's been a conscious effort to make these things look more and more and more like organic results.

SPEAKER_334: More native. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: And it's, it's just, it's wrong. And here's the other thing that's so wrong about it is that Google will allow anyone to buy our trademarked brand name, Basecamp. Okay. Or Hey, um, I haven't even looked at Hey ads. I don't know if anyone's taking ads out against Hey yet. But anyway, um, but if you try to buy Google and put Google in your app, they will say, no, no, you can't use Google. That's a trade. That's registered trademark. So they know the value of the brand.

SPEAKER_234: They know the value of trademarks and their argument would be, well, we can't have a database of everyone's trade. What do you mean? You have a database of everything. Yeah.

SPEAKER_337: You just index the world's data.

SPEAKER_338: That's your argument, right? Yeah. That's your argument.

SPEAKER_16: It's like Facebook being like, we can't figure out what, you know, the posts are about our hate speech or porn, but they can figure out if you put a dating ad app, like they can't figure out it's a Russian or racist ad. Yeah. But the second you put a competing social network ad up or a competing, you know, uh, ad

SPEAKER_08: for a, a dating site, you're immediately taken down. It's like, really guys?

SPEAKER_134: Yeah. I mean, you've got some of the brightest people, brightest people in the world working these places, of course they can do this. It's just about the will and the business model and all that.

SPEAKER_07: So, I mean, of course they can figure this out. So it's really frustrating though. And it's, it's sad that there's basically duopoly. You've got Google, you've got Apple, you've got these massive companies that are exerting all this pressure on the mobile environment. There's no one else. There's no other mobile operating systems. Windows phone's gone. There's two and they basically, Google's slightly better in the app, in their app store or Google play store is slightly better with these rules, but they're going to move in Apple's direction too, I think. And they're already kind of maybe doing it. I don't know. But also, like you said, it doesn't really matter.

SPEAKER_16: I want the apps, I want the apps reviewed.

SPEAKER_04: And so what I think, you know, to my point before about like, Hey, I'm going to put mine on experimental mode or, you know, I'm going to put it in developer mode. Basically anybody can click it over to developer mode and do whatever they want with their phones. I like the idea that they're reviewed. I like apps being reviewed for, you know, malware or whatever, but I might want to take a risk on, you know, something in which is, you know, they, I think they were going to try to kill test flight before they bought it as we wrap up here. And thanks for your time. I know you're busy. Work from home was this weird, wacky 5% of the market. We have the pandemic. And now you guys win the argument.

SPEAKER_347: Unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04: Unfortunately, you win the argument over the pandemic. But the truth is, you know, you've been doing this longer and advocating for longer than anybody. You had a beautiful office in Chicago, which I think you handed the keys back.

SPEAKER_16: Am I right?

SPEAKER_62: Our lease is up in one month and we're never, we're not renewing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: What should people know about running an at scale work from home company? What are the two or three things that you need to do to make it work?

SPEAKER_320: Yeah. I think the most important thing is to think of remote working as a platform, just like

SPEAKER_07: you think of Mac OS as a platform and iOS as a platform and Windows as a platform. And the reason I'm making this point is, and also DVDs as a platform and the web as a platform, because let me, let me just kind of go back for a minute. You'll see where this makes sense in a minute. Do you remember back in the early days of the web, 96, let's say, most websites were either super simple or they looked like CD-ROM DVD interfaces. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: They were either disgusting or they just looked like a piece of typewriter paper.

SPEAKER_07: Right. Because what happens is whenever there's something new, people port over what they're used to from the previous thing. So they ported over CD-ROM and DVD multimedia interfaces to the web. Then eventually people figure out there's something called web design and that got better. Now, the same thing was true when people ported Windows software over to the Mac. It was terrible, but like that's how, and then eventually Mac software got better, right? The same thing is true for remote working, which is that people are trying to port over the office environment online remotely. It doesn't work.

SPEAKER_40: Just like porting a DVD-ROM, DVD-CD-ROM interface over to the web doesn't work. These are different methods of working.

SPEAKER_07: And so what's really important here is that remote working is a different way of working. It's not this, it's not a remote version of office working. And what I mean by this is this, I'd like to see more asynchronous communication, less real-time communication. In the office environment, people have meetings all the time. They're talking out loud.

SPEAKER_40: That's real-time. When you're remote, you can take advantage of the distance and have asynchronous conversations so people can have more time to themselves and more attention to themselves. Fewer meetings. Don't replicate all your meetings on Zoom. Have fewer meetings, not more meetings. They're not the same meetings. These are opportunities to change the way you work, give people more time to themselves,

SPEAKER_07: more freedom, more autonomy. And with that transition, which can be hard for some, you're going to see that there's significant advantages to working remotely. There's disadvantages too. There's isolation. There's a whole bunch of things around that. And clearly, like sometimes being in person, it's hard to beat. But when you can't, and you realize that there's other advantages to remote working, and you kind of lean into those, you can really run a wonderful company remotely.

SPEAKER_40: But what people struggle with is when they're trying to run a remote company the way the same way they ran a local company, it just does not work.

SPEAKER_04: How do you build culture? How do you keep people from feeling isolated? Because that is the thing that's becoming very acute for me personally. I feel so isolated. I don't enjoy it. And I'm starting to see people crack. Now, I'm 100% extroverted, 96% extroverted on my Myers-Briggs horoscope. You might be a little more introverted. I'm not. Yes.

SPEAKER_358: So I think for introverts, this feels pretty good. For extroverts- Look what we've had to deal with this whole time. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_360: Now you can deal with ours.

SPEAKER_05: Well, it feels like solitary confinement for me, I'll be honest. Yeah. I mean, I'm losing it.

SPEAKER_134: This is not really remote working.

SPEAKER_07: This is remote working in a pandemic. Because normally, you could go out to a coffee shop and work in there. You know, you could still meet up with people occasionally. Like, we're not opposed to meeting up with people occasionally. But right now, you can't. So this is not really a fair representation of what it's really like. It's too extreme. This is like, I'm locked down. I'm stuck. That sucks. That said, there's still isolation. You've got to get out of the house. You've got to be around human beings occasionally. You've got to find camaraderie elsewhere sometimes. But also, there's a lot you can do remotely. For example, at Basecamp, we use Basecamp. There's this feature called automatic check-ins, which lets you ask questions on a recurring basis automatically of everybody in the company. So we say like, every Monday morning, what'd you do this weekend? And this is totally optional. But people can share what they did this weekend. They share pictures of their kids. They share pictures of short vacations they've had. You can really get to know people this way. We ask people once a month, what books are you reading? And people share book reports about things they're interested in. You go, oh my God, I don't work with you that often, but you love Annie Diller. She's one of my favorite authors too. Like, oh my God, now we have something in common. So there's a lot of ways you can create camaraderie, create relationships with people remotely.

SPEAKER_134: You don't have to see someone to know someone. I've never, I don't know, maybe we've met in person once or twice.

SPEAKER_364: Maybe like, what was it like, E-Tech, like O'Reilly E-Tech?

SPEAKER_366: Yeah, E-Tech in San Diego in 2005.

SPEAKER_358: Like literally San Diego, E-Tech 2005. I had no ticket and I'm sitting in the lobby and Tim O'Reilly's like, Calacanis, you freeloading bastard. Here's a ticket.

SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Tim O'Reilly. I remember.

SPEAKER_368: It's like a miracle, like a dead show or something.

SPEAKER_04: It was literally, you know what? People forget. I was so goddamn broke. I would go to PC Forum. I would go to E-Tech and I just sit in the lobby. We did something called lobby crashing was what we did to try to just get close to Bill

SPEAKER_30: Gates or Steve Jobs or whoever was going to be at the event. And you would get, you know, the miracle. You hold up your finger and I was like, Ripple, let's go.

SPEAKER_134: That's when I first ran into Jeff Bezos at E-Tech in 2005 in San Diego at that conference. He gave a great talk and I gave a talk there. It was a wonderful time. That was a really fun time.

SPEAKER_30: Well, he was investing at that time and he agreed to put 250K into Weblogs Inc. And Marc Andreessen agreed to put 250K.

SPEAKER_17: So I was going to have 500,000 from those two and then AOL bought the company.

David Friedberg: We did all right with that too.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, well, 30 million in 18 months. Well, sure.

David Friedberg: But way back when, that was amazing.

SPEAKER_04: Well, when you think about it, it is weird what's happened in the industry when you think about Delicious, Flickr, Weblogs Inc. What else got sold in that little cohort? There was like a year of like $20 to $30 million exits and people lost their mind that Yahoo

SPEAKER_139: and AOL were going to lose all their money.

SPEAKER_372: Well, remember, like 20 million bucks is always a lot of money. Always a lot of money. Is it?

SPEAKER_373: Yeah, of course. Jesus Christ. I mean, I'm trying to get a plane here and it doesn't feel like a lot of money.

SPEAKER_375: You've got to talk to someone else about that. I know, I'm joking. 20 million bucks is a lot of money. But yeah, you're right.

SPEAKER_322: Flickr was 20, right? Flickr was sold for 20.

SPEAKER_378: Flickr was 20. Flickr was 30. TechCrunch eventually 24.

SPEAKER_16: It was just like an interesting thing. But you look at like these reoccurring revenue businesses.

SPEAKER_04: I was watching Buffer App, which has been built with, you know, it's like Posterous, which Gary Tan made long before it. The simplest, elegant software Buffer App.

SPEAKER_16: He publishes his revenue. I think he might be at 15 or 20 million in revenue.

SPEAKER_58: And the efficiency of business, you have 55 people. Your company's making, I think, nine figures. You're making at least a million or two million per employee minimum.

SPEAKER_16: The efficiency of these businesses, you're not going to confirm it, I know. I'm not going to confirm anything.

SPEAKER_375: I know, but I look at your eyes. I got a little poker towel.

SPEAKER_134: What we do say is we generate tens of millions in annual profits because I'm interested in profit. I'm not interested in revenue. You can lose a lot of money making a lot of money.

SPEAKER_385: Yes, that's true. Well, you can lose a lot of money generating a lot of money. Right. So we're into the profit side of things. So yeah.

SPEAKER_386: What's the end game for you? How old are you now?

SPEAKER_378: 46. I'm 49. You think you just do this for 20 more years or you think you hand it over or sell it? What more do you have to prove or you just love coming to work every day?

SPEAKER_388: Yeah, it's not about proving. It's just about proving things to ourselves.

SPEAKER_134: Yeah, that's what I mean. It's funny. I was talking to people today at work about this. In some ways, we were the old rock band. Base Camp was a big hit 16 years ago. We haven't had a really good follow-up perhaps since we've had a few products, but nothing to hit like Base Camp. So it's kind of really, to be honest, very satisfying to feel like we still got it.

SPEAKER_391: It is nice to put out a great album. It's like Pink Floyd. They put out a decent album, whatever, 10, 20 years later. It's a nice feeling you still got it.

SPEAKER_07: I feel good about this. So we love doing this stuff. We love solving these problems. We love making these tools. I'd like to keep doing this for 20 years.

SPEAKER_134: But again, maybe in five years, I won't want to do it in 20 years. That's the beauty of independence, in my opinion, is that no one can force me out. I mean, of course, a competitor can beat us. Companies can go out of business for all sorts of reasons. Anything can happen, of course. The other thing to realize is that you're in control of basically nothing. I mean, you can do the best you can do, but there's very little that you really can control when it comes to being in the market, I think.

SPEAKER_83: Well, the pandemic and Trump have both taught us that. We had two black swan events in three years, and it's just...

SPEAKER_385: Yeah, so are they black swan events really then? Or is this just like...

SPEAKER_04: Is this the new normal that it's going to be insane for the rest of our lives? I really hope not, because it felt so normal for so many decades.

SPEAKER_331: Maybe we just got lucky in our childhoods that we had 30 years of nothing happening. Certainly. Besides...

SPEAKER_372: Absolutely, we got lucky. I mean, luck is the biggest part of all this.

SPEAKER_07: But anyway, the point is, it's like, I want to keep doing it. We love doing it.

SPEAKER_134: It's great to have another hit after so many years.

SPEAKER_378: I'm happy for you. You think now that you got that little bug, are you and David going, maybe we got another hit? Maybe we should do another album?

SPEAKER_30: Maybe we should do live from Pompeii? Maybe we should quit while we're ahead. Maybe we should do Budokan? Maybe you go play Budokan and do a live album? What's going on next?

SPEAKER_61: That's a great Dylan album, by the way, live at Budokan, if you want a good Dylan album. It's a great double CD.

SPEAKER_134: I mean, like, so many of them. So we're doing Hey for Work in a few months.

SPEAKER_07: And a lot of the things we thought about with Hey are going to make itself, make their way into Basecamp 4. So we're really excited about that. But we don't look much further ahead than that. So, you know, that's as far ahead as we're looking. But as far as like, we've always been a long-term company. Like, I'd love to keep doing this for 20 years. But let's be honest, like, I'm not sure I'm fit to do this when I'm 65. Like, am I really going to be doing this? I don't know. But I'd love the company to go on and on.

SPEAKER_140: I did think about that myself, too. I was like, yeah, is it, would it be sad for me to be doing this in 20 years or would

SPEAKER_16: it be awesome to be doing it in 20 years? Like, I never met a 69, 70-year-old angel investor. Yeah, it's hard. How do you relate to a 22-year-old founder at 70? How do you relate to a developer at 25 if you're 75? I don't know.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I think another thing is like I mentioned 10 minutes ago, like I was ready to hang it up if the Apple decision went the other way. So, like, all sorts of things can happen out of nowhere. Life can change for all sorts of reasons, you know. I don't know. But right now, we love doing this. It's wonderful. I mean, why not? I really, truly get to go to work and do great things that I enjoy every day and get to work with great people. Why would I give that up? I still have lots of years left that I have to work. So why would I want to give that up? That's why we've never sold the business and have no interest in ever doing that.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, I mean, there's this new concept I've been floating with people. I call it the Pegasus, which is skipping rounds of venture funding. You're just bootstrapped the whole way. But if you look at Calm.com, FitBod, and Qualtrics, a number of companies have just said, you know what? Well, if we need a little bit of cash, we'll raise a little bit.

SPEAKER_30: But we're going to keep it pretty thin. I mean, Bezos put a little money in, but you didn't need it back in the day.

SPEAKER_124: Yeah, and that's, he doesn't have any, that was, that money went to David and I. So that didn't, that money didn't go out.

SPEAKER_16: He still owns those shares? You guys ever, you ever talk to him?

SPEAKER_07: I haven't talked to Jeff in a number of years. We used to talk to him once or twice a year and get dinner, like once a year, basically. And we haven't for six years, maybe. I don't think I've talked to him for six years.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Is that because he doesn't reach back? Or you just don't feel you need to call him?

SPEAKER_07: I haven't, yeah, I mean, like his involvement is, was always as, if we ever need him, let him know and he'll, you know, he'll take a call.

SPEAKER_68: It's kind of cool to have Jeff Bezos as a friend. I mean, why wouldn't you just call him and have dinner?

SPEAKER_236: It's kind of dope. Well, I think he's probably got a lot of other interesting friends in the world.

SPEAKER_07: I'm way down on the list. It's probably as far down as you can get. So anyway, I mean, we've learned a lot from Jeff, but we haven't relied on Jeff for many years. Learned some great things from him early on. We still talk to his office because we have to give them our numbers. We're an LLC. So Jeff gets distributions every year.

SPEAKER_408: Oh my God, he gets his distribution every year.

SPEAKER_07: He made a wonderful investment. He hasn't, he hasn't gotten his, you know, he hasn't sold his shares. He gets distributions every year. He's made way more money back from that than anything else. And he still owns all of his shares. So he got a really sweet deal.

SPEAKER_278: And yeah, we think of just saying, Hey, can we just buy you out and get you off the cap table? So you don't have to worry about this K1?

SPEAKER_322: Honestly, I would like to. Yeah. I would like to. All right. Well, Jeff listens to the show. It's complicated.

SPEAKER_378: Jeff, just, there's a message to Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Hey, you put in to $5,500.

SPEAKER_146: How about we give you 10X? We call it a day. You got the distributions and it's one less thing on your tax form. You got a complicated tax form. You can work it out. I'll talk. When I see Jeff, I'll bring it up.

SPEAKER_358: Please.

SPEAKER_61: All right, listen, Jason Freed, you're a delight and I'm glad we finally got to do this. Say hi to David for me.

SPEAKER_30: If you haven't tried Hey.com, go ahead and give it a shot. It's pretty great. I have to say for a 1.0, it's up there. You're one of the great entrepreneurs of our era and so continue to success. Jason, thanks for coming on the pod.

SPEAKER_61: That's very kind.

SPEAKER_290: Thanks for having me on. It's good to finally talk to you.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Service. Bye-bye.