A company of a few dozen people avoided venture capital, overtime, and most meetings.
In 1999, Jason Fried co-founded a web design firm called 37signals in Chicago.1 By 2004, the company had built an internal project management tool to organize its own client work. The tool worked well enough that Fried and his colleagues decided to sell it. They called it Basecamp.
Basecamp's early programmer, David Heinemeier Hansson, extracted the software framework he had built for the product and released it as open source in 2004. The framework, Ruby on Rails, became one of the most widely used web development tools in the world.
The company operated on principles that contradicted standard technology industry practice. It avoided traditional venture capital, kept its team to a few dozen employees, embraced remote work more than a decade before the pandemic, and enforced a thirty-two-hour workweek during summer months.23 Fried and Hansson published Rework in 2010, a New York Times bestseller arguing against long hours, bloated teams, and growth for its own sake.1
Jeff Bezos acquired a minority stake through his personal investment company in 2006, but the founders retained control and continued to operate on their own terms.4
The company renamed itself Basecamp in 2014 to focus on its flagship product, then reverted to 37signals in 2022 after expanding its product line to include HEY, an email service, and ONCE, a software licensing model that let customers buy rather than rent.5
In 2021, the company lost roughly a third of its employees after Fried announced a ban on political discussions in internal forums.6 The departures drew extensive media coverage but did not alter the company's operating philosophy.