Basecamp changed some rules about workplace politics discussions, forbidding specific subjects in their main channel in the company. Here’s a quote from Jason Fried’s blog post:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.

DHH also follows with the message they sent internally, to try to explain the decision even more. Here’s New York Times’s take on it, as well.

Truth is every company gets to a point where some things need to be removed. I remember during the MavenHut days that we had a saying: “That’s why we can’t have nice things!”. There’s always someone trying to game the system and triggering a more strict rule, spoiling the fun for everyone. I assume this is what happened there, as well. Someone kept pushing politics, activism and the likes to everyone in the company and kept doing it even after being asked not to.

What makes Basecamp different is that they were always a champion of the people, of their epmployees. They were seen as the solution to the corporation machine. And I still think they are. But Twitter disagrees.

Other than that, have you seen the subscription form on their HEY World blogs? It’s only slightly skewed, not straight, to drive you crazy and get you to focus on the form. And, possibly, subscribe.

Sunday. London. Rain. Bar on the street level. Sitting at a table next to the window, with hot tea in front of me. Looking outside to people walking. Next to me, Cambridge Theater, with a big billboard presenting Chicago – The Musical. Music in the bar: John Lennon – Imagine.

I feel like I am in a movie. What’s next?

2021 update: I wrote the text above in 2008 to the day (Apr 27th, 2008). It was my first time in London and, since then, I visited the city often enough to develop a love/hate relationship with it. But in 2008 it genuinely felt like I was in a movie and that big things were waiting to happen. And they were. I was there for my training with Yahoo!, the company that employed me as their representative for Romania for a year. And it was my first job in a corporation, so I genuinely didn;t know what to expect.

I miss that feeling. One of the places I always felt like being in a movie and waiting for things to happen was a hotel pub in Dublin. Ireland. I went there often during my MavenHut years and I loved the feeling I had in the afternoon or evening when I could relax and enjoy a soup or a hot tea and people watch. And think of the big things that were to come.

Why I miss it? Of course, I miss travel. I miss seeing different people and hearing different languages. And I also miss thinking about the big things to happen, in a bar, at the street level, with a hot tea in front of me.

Oh, and the hotel in Dublin? Grand Canal. The pub: Gasworks Bar. Nothing amazing. But it didn’t matter for me. And their soup with soda bread was amazing.

photo credit, under licence, with no modifications

The best way to build wealth from scratch right now is building a company. So what are you waiting for?

In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.

Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them.

How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56 derive from founders’ or early employees’ equity (52 founders, 2 early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing investment funds.

From here: How People Get Rich Now.

This is a good Twitter thread to remind you what the first stage of your startup is about.

The full thread is here, on Twitter, from @Suhail. I’ve also saved it completely below, so I can go back to it when I forget.

1/ The first 18 months of a startup:
After starting my 2nd company in 2019, I decided I would write down useful lessons I learned or re-learned along the way. Some were hard-earned & others required steady focus. A thread that I hope may help other founders starting out

2/ Clarifying your plans: the first thing I did was write down a 7-page Elon Musk- style master plan. Write down what problem you plan to solve, how you’ll solve it, and why it’s important. Then have your smart friends critique it. Let no valid question go unanswered.

3/ End every conversation with an expert about your industry with: “Why do you think I am going to fail?” to lean into brutally understanding what you need to de- risk.

4/ Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be “good enough” reduces the amount you’ll learn each day. The first set of users paid me $20 on Venmo!

5/ Occasionally someone you respect will give you unsolicited advice that may cut you down. First, absorb it. Later, try to put their advice in a way you would’ve wanted to give yourself. This removes the hurtful part allowing you to hear it in a way you can benefit from.

6/ Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work.

7/ Learning from users is a practiced skill just like programming. If you don’t have experience, make a plan. Start with simple questions, then go deep.
Here was mine going into early customer interviews:
👇

8/ Be married to the problem, not the technology. If you’re married to technology, you might easily give up due to stress induced by setbacks or boredom. Being married to the problem will motivate you to have the perseverance to continue through hard times or tedious work.

9/ As your relationship with your co-founder changes, there will be times of tension. Confront issues early. Be explicit about how you will divide & conquer. Lean on each other’s passions. Don’t confuse working style differences with how the company ought to work. Get a coach.

10/ I think startups often take half pivots early on. Mine did. The 1st idea might be wrong but if you stick w/ it a bit longer, you’ll often discover a deep problem people care about. All that’s stopping you is if you want to run that company to achieve that particular mission.

11/ Sometimes smart people didn’t like my idea. You don’t need to persuade everyone! Instead, I used it as an opportunity to understand their opposition & worked hard to see the truth of their opinions. I used it as a moment to strengthen my understanding from a smart critic.

12/ During the first 6 mo of my startup, I largely focused on the eradication of risk: Will people want this? Will people pay? Can this make a profit? Can it scale one day? Will the tech work? All in the pursuit of what will kill me? You just need to know there’s a solution.

13/ If you’re worried about something that will cause your inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry ™:
1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue.
2. If it’s above the value, worry!
3. If it’s below the value, focus on the next risk & ignore

14/ Every month I ran my current goals/plans by another founder outside of the company. I found it better to assume my current thinking had a subtle fatal flaw I couldn’t see. That will often save you time or make you think differently enough to break out of a local maxima.

15/ Early on, each hire should be a little anti-sold before they join vs only passionately persuaded. Every startup has setbacks, makes mistakes, might pivot, and must overcome unforeseen obstacles. The early team must be sufficiently optimistic & capable of rapid recovery.

16/ Momentum is oxygen for a startup. Without momentum, you let fear, uncertainty, and doubt cause your demise.

17/ When building a startup:
If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users.
If you have uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow.

18/ The first goal I set for our company was narrow: make 10 happy users use our product. A happy user uses it, pays for it, and organically praises it. Focusing on a few wonderfully happy users is a better recipe for great retention. Then go from 10 → 100 → 1K → 10K → 100K.

19/ I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don’t meet investors if you’re not raising. Build a rhythm each day that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done. Users will notice your pace.

20/ If you’re a 2nd-time founder, resist the urge to button everything up. It’s a trap that makes you think you’re doing meaningful work. The first time around this blissful ignorance helped me focus on what mattered most: making a great product. It’s okay for things to be messy

21/ Your company culture doesn’t need to be set & written in a handbook on day one. I think culture is best formed organically & needs time to bake with a small team. From there, you can discover what works & what breaks. The values of a company need not be preserved, they evolve

22/ Last but not least: talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users. talk to users.

I’ve put the list of twits together using ThreadReaderApp, a really good service for something like this.

Patreon just announced they raised a new round of investment at at $4B valuation ($155M in the round). If you’re asking yourself why, here are some interesting numbers about the creator economy and about freelancers.

The growth of freelancing worldwide is staggering. In the US alone, freelancers make up 35% or 55 million workers who collectively earned $1 trillion in 2016. That number is predicted to reach 43% by 2020 with some analysts citing that figure at 80% of the global workforce by 2030.

This is from here (sorry for the Medium link).

And here’s what Patreon were saying in March 2020:

A large number of creators are launching on Patreon. More than 30,000 creators launched in the first 3 weeks of March 2020 alone, and these new creators are acquiring patrons faster than usual.

The COVID pandemic forced some processes to happen earlier than initially thought: it’s obvious that freelancers/creators are on their way to become the main part of workforce earlier than 2030.

I feel that we’ll see a lot of new tools targeting this growing part of the workforce, even more than what we see now.

Image from Canva

Andreessen-Horowitz is, without a doubt, an interesting take on the investment fund paradigm. I have a friend that really wants them to invest in his startup just because of the power network that they created around their startups and founders.

But they are, in my opinion, a really strong media and research company. I feel a lot of the value they provide is through media appearances of their GPs and not only and these reports they provide. I mean, the best book on what it means to build a startup is written by Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing about Hard Things.

The last report I’ve seen is their report on marketplaces that you can see here. If you are interested in marketplaces, as a founder or an investor, you need to read this.

The past year has been a gut-punch for many marketplace categories. Ticketing marketplaces found their businesses drastically diminished when events were cancelled around the world. As schools were shuttered and many businesses enacted work-from-home policies, childcare marketplaces scrambled to adopt new safety precautions and stay afloat. Even the #1 marketplace last year, Airbnb, grappled with shutdowns, cancellations, and refunds.

As 2020 drew to a close, however, many marketplaces proved to be extraordinarily resilient—a testament to the flexibility of the model. In a year when in-person interactions were heavily restricted and unemployment went through the roof, marketplaces allowed people to access the products and services they needed and, in many cases, monetize their own talents, services, and resources. From food and alcohol delivery to games, online education to outdoor getaways, marketplaces like Instacart, Valve, Outschool, and Hipcamp helped us weather a difficult year.

From here: The a16z Marketplace 100: 2021.