37signals cofounder Jason Fried offers advice in new book
Meetings are rubbish—and other anti-business-as-usual musings from a maverick tech entrepreneur
By Jennifer Tanaka Author Jason Fried
Jason Fried seems like a nice enough fellow, but then he starts arguing with you. Well, not exactly arguing with you but gently poking holes in your working assumptions. For example, you might expect that someone who majored in finance would have done so in order to run a future company. “I just thought I’d be good at it, so I could graduate from college,” the 35-year-old says breezily. “My parents were paying, so they made me finish.”
Fried, who grew up in Deerfield and moved back to Chicago after college, did end up starting his own company—37signals, which makes web-based productivity software for small businesses. Founded by Fried in 1999 with two partners (Ernest Kim, who now works for Nike, and Carlos Segura, the well-regarded Chicago graphic designer), the West Loop–based venture has since become a real maven among tech companies. In 2004, after a few years as a web-design company, 37signals released a software product called Basecamp, an online project management program that it had created to use internally. A couple of years later, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, contacted 37signals and soon after signed on as its sole minority investor. Today, the 16-person company has more than three million customers across its suite of six products.
Tags: graphic designer, small businesses