Most software is bloated, hard to use and ill-equipped for the task it’s designed to tackle. That’s the view of one Silicon Valley entrepreneur who’s taking a strikingly different approach to development by deliberately keeping his products simple and his team small – despite multimillion dollar growth.
Jason Fried, founder and CEO of 37Signals, is already something of a legend in Internet circles. Basecamp, the popular project management software developed by 37Signals, was the first ever package to be written using the Ruby programming language on the web-based Rails framework. In fact, it was Fried’s company that took the work it had done with the framework in Basecamp and released it to the open source community as Rails.
According to IT industry analyst group Gartner, Ruby will reach 4 million programmers in the next five years, positioning it as a mainstream programming language to rival the likes of Java. Unlike Microsoft’s C++, Ruby is a dynamic language making the code more “expressive” and potentially easier to read – it’s like the difference between reading lines of code and reading English. Ruby also gives developers the ability to more easily modify and extend it while it’s running –and it’s this power that the Rails framework exploits in a big way.
Basecamp was originally built in February 2004 to manage projects internally for 37Signals, which at the time was a web design company. But as the company started using it with clients and showing it to colleagues, it became clear that people needed something to manage their own projects. Fried says: “The lightbulb went off and we started thinking that we could make a product out of it. So we polished it up, named it Basecamp, slapped some prices on it and put it out on the market.”
Fried says the company’s early ambitions were modest, telling himself that if he made $5,000 a month in recurring revenue after 12 months he would be happy. “We hit that number in six weeks, so we knew we were on to something. The rest is history.”
'We love small teams... no keeping people busy just because they are on the payroll'
The company has made a lot of improvements to Basecamp since it launched, adding file sharing, the wiki-like writeboards, time tracking and images, but Fried says the “spirit” of Basecamp is all about keeping it simple. “We’ve received thousand of feature requests but we only add the ones we feel are in the best spirit of the product. It’s easy to mess up a good thing by doing too much. Most software is slow, complicated and bloated because the developers aren’t disciplined to know when enough is enough.”
Microsoft, of course, has always taken a different tack, forever adding new features and interfaces to its products and tackling new business challenges. So how can companies in the user-oriented Web 2.0 world hope to compete with the mighty development resources coming out of Redmond? The answer is that some of them don’t actually want to. “Basecamp is intentionally simple,” says Fried. “We don’t compete against other software products but against habit. Most people still manage projects via e-mail, phone, paper and fax. That’s why keeping Basecamp simple is so important – when the alternative is habit, simple is the only possible victor.”
This does of course mean that at some point you’re going to outgrow Basecamp, but that’s a fact that Fried and other web 2.0 start-ups are more than comfortable with. “We love small teams, we love simple software, we love stuff that just works. Most software sucks because it’s too hard to use, too packed with stuff you don’t need and too tailored for huge teams and people with technical backgrounds. Our stuff is simple, clear, intuitive, hosted and so easy to use you can get started in 30 seconds. No manuals to read, no IT staff required. It just works.”
It’s a philosophy that’s been extended to the company itself, which still has a headcount of 10, even though it’s poised to double its multimillion dollar revenue this year. “No management required, no muddled communication, no keeping people busy just because they’re on the payroll. Just focused happy people working on exactly what needs to get done.” Fried says the company could have 50 people by now, but he believes small is beautiful and intends to stay as small as possible “forever”. How long he can keep that up is an interesting question – it’s a wonder he even has time to answer my questions – but if small, focused teams are the future, then he’s certainly pointing the way.
By David Longworth, Webster Buchanan Research
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Entrepreneurs & Technology
Most technology entrepreneurs are creative by nature - but they don't always know how to hire the other innovators they need. Management guru Dr John Sullivan has strong views on how to get that right
Dr John Sullivan isn't known for holding back on his opinions. A professor at San Francisco State University and a well-known authority on people management issues, he's a frequent fixture at conferences and in the media expounding his views on how poorly most companies handle their employees. And talking to him a couple of weeks ago, one thing that's particularly irking him today is how companies mismanage their innovators.
While some of his views will be largely academic to smaller companies - his complaints about the inadequacies of many HR professionals make for entertaining reading, for example, but don't really matter if your workforce isn't big enough to hire one - much of his agenda drives to the heart of what makes a business succeed. Firstly, like a growing number of experts in the people management arena, Dr Sullivan believes recruitment is a sales and marketing activity rather than an HR discipline (see 'Candidate or Customer?' [TECHNICAL; 220035]). Good quality people are in high demand, and you need to adopt the same techniques to sign them up as you apply to winning a customer. While old school recruitment philosophy says candidates need to convince you to hire them, securing good people today is as much about convincing them that you're the best place for them to work.
So how exactly do you do that? To begin with, argues Dr Sullivan, you need to find out what factors they'll take into account when they decide on a job - what he calls their acceptance criteria. You can ask them direct when they put in an application or during the job interview - or you can be a little more circumspect and simply ask them to describe their dream job. Either way, it's unlikely that their goal is going to correspond exactly with the role you've created, so you need to adjust your sales pitch to hone in on areas where the two do cross over. In fact, if you've found a really good candidate, you might even change the role you'd mapped out - better to have a great person in a slightly different job than a mediocre operator who ticks all the boxes.
Secondly, you need to stand out from the rest of the people fighting for talent - so you've got to have what Dr Sullivan calls the 'wow' factor. In the technology field, companies like Google and Genentech have long attracted applicants by doing things differently. Google in particular has ripped up much of the employee rule book, famously shipping its Bay Area employees into work in limousine shuttles and providing free gourmet food at its campus restaurants. It also encourages engineers to work on their own projects one day a week, a policy that has helped spawn a huge number of its inventions. Likewise, biotech giant Genentech owes much of the success of one of its most successful therapies, Herceptin, to the 'underground' research culture it fostered, where scientists were encouraged to research their own projects. Breaking the rules to foster creativity creates a buzz and gets people talking.
Of course, 'wow recruiting' is easier to pull off when it's backed by the resource of an industry giant like Google, but that's not to say Dr Sullivan's philosophy can't be adopted by entrepreneurs. One advantage smaller businesses have, in fact, is that they can rewrite job roles much more easily than their large counterparts, which have to steer through internal politics and adapt complex hierarchies. Another is that, by their very nature, entrepreneurs tend to be trying something different - so if you're looking for an experienced software engineer, your ground-breaking technology concept could be the thing that woos them. The flipside, of course, is that new ideas don't do it for everybody - a great salesperson won't be excited by new technology, they'll be excited by new technology that looks like it will generate big dollars.
Thirdly, if you're going to 'wow' people, you need to target the right ones, and be clear about how to handle them. Dr Sullivan argues that companies need to distinguish between high performers, who've traditionally been the target for recruiters, and innovators, who are more likely to be the people driving today's companies forward. 'In a world that changes so fast, you have to innovate consistently,' he says. 'You've got top performers and innovators - the innovators are the critical ones. The top performer will make the wired phone better - the innovator will say 'Let's not have the wire'.'
The challenge with innovators, however, is that they're not just unconventional in their thinking - they also tend to be unconventional in their work habits. So you'll probably need to reciprocate by being flexible about your working practices. The reason Google offers employees breakfast, lunch and dinner on campus isn't just to keep them in the office for longer - it also knows that creative people work odd hours. In fact, some innovators won't want to be tied down to an office at all. Innovation has never been a nine-to-five job - so if you want to tap into someone's creativity, you might need to grab it wherever you can get it.
By Keith Rodgers, Webster Buchanan Research
Dr John Sullivan isn't known for holding back on his opinions. A professor at San Francisco State University and a well-known authority on people management issues, he's a frequent fixture at conferences and in the media expounding his views on how poorly most companies handle their employees. And talking to him a couple of weeks ago, one thing that's particularly irking him today is how companies mismanage their innovators.
While some of his views will be largely academic to smaller companies - his complaints about the inadequacies of many HR professionals make for entertaining reading, for example, but don't really matter if your workforce isn't big enough to hire one - much of his agenda drives to the heart of what makes a business succeed. Firstly, like a growing number of experts in the people management arena, Dr Sullivan believes recruitment is a sales and marketing activity rather than an HR discipline (see 'Candidate or Customer?' [TECHNICAL; 220035]). Good quality people are in high demand, and you need to adopt the same techniques to sign them up as you apply to winning a customer. While old school recruitment philosophy says candidates need to convince you to hire them, securing good people today is as much about convincing them that you're the best place for them to work.
So how exactly do you do that? To begin with, argues Dr Sullivan, you need to find out what factors they'll take into account when they decide on a job - what he calls their acceptance criteria. You can ask them direct when they put in an application or during the job interview - or you can be a little more circumspect and simply ask them to describe their dream job. Either way, it's unlikely that their goal is going to correspond exactly with the role you've created, so you need to adjust your sales pitch to hone in on areas where the two do cross over. In fact, if you've found a really good candidate, you might even change the role you'd mapped out - better to have a great person in a slightly different job than a mediocre operator who ticks all the boxes.
Secondly, you need to stand out from the rest of the people fighting for talent - so you've got to have what Dr Sullivan calls the 'wow' factor. In the technology field, companies like Google and Genentech have long attracted applicants by doing things differently. Google in particular has ripped up much of the employee rule book, famously shipping its Bay Area employees into work in limousine shuttles and providing free gourmet food at its campus restaurants. It also encourages engineers to work on their own projects one day a week, a policy that has helped spawn a huge number of its inventions. Likewise, biotech giant Genentech owes much of the success of one of its most successful therapies, Herceptin, to the 'underground' research culture it fostered, where scientists were encouraged to research their own projects. Breaking the rules to foster creativity creates a buzz and gets people talking.
Of course, 'wow recruiting' is easier to pull off when it's backed by the resource of an industry giant like Google, but that's not to say Dr Sullivan's philosophy can't be adopted by entrepreneurs. One advantage smaller businesses have, in fact, is that they can rewrite job roles much more easily than their large counterparts, which have to steer through internal politics and adapt complex hierarchies. Another is that, by their very nature, entrepreneurs tend to be trying something different - so if you're looking for an experienced software engineer, your ground-breaking technology concept could be the thing that woos them. The flipside, of course, is that new ideas don't do it for everybody - a great salesperson won't be excited by new technology, they'll be excited by new technology that looks like it will generate big dollars.
Thirdly, if you're going to 'wow' people, you need to target the right ones, and be clear about how to handle them. Dr Sullivan argues that companies need to distinguish between high performers, who've traditionally been the target for recruiters, and innovators, who are more likely to be the people driving today's companies forward. 'In a world that changes so fast, you have to innovate consistently,' he says. 'You've got top performers and innovators - the innovators are the critical ones. The top performer will make the wired phone better - the innovator will say 'Let's not have the wire'.'
The challenge with innovators, however, is that they're not just unconventional in their thinking - they also tend to be unconventional in their work habits. So you'll probably need to reciprocate by being flexible about your working practices. The reason Google offers employees breakfast, lunch and dinner on campus isn't just to keep them in the office for longer - it also knows that creative people work odd hours. In fact, some innovators won't want to be tied down to an office at all. Innovation has never been a nine-to-five job - so if you want to tap into someone's creativity, you might need to grab it wherever you can get it.
By Keith Rodgers, Webster Buchanan Research
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