There’s a ton of focus on growing quickly and scaling, but there’s beauty in the long, slow, sustained effort. Scott Heiferman has been running Meetup since 2002 and Jason Fried has been at the helm of Basecamp since 1999. In this 99U Interview, the two accomplished founders discuss the long haul: how do we build businesses that become our life’s work?
“Not every business has to be a place where everything is chaotic and everyone’s sweating. Rapid growth and getting big create a lot of tension and turbulence. We’re in this for the slow, long term.” says Fried.
About Jason Fried
Jason Fried is the Founder and CEO of Basecamp, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary.
Prior to shifting its focus solely to Basecamp, the company was known as 37Signals and was responsible for launching a range of products including Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. 37Signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework. The company’s weblog, Signal vs. Noise, is read by over 100,000 people every day.
Jason believes there’s real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people’s desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of Basecamp’s products.
About Scott Heiferman
Scott Heiferman is Co-Founder & CEO of Meetup. Each week, 50,000 Meetups are self-organized by millions of people “using the internet to get off the internet.” The company is pursuing a long-range goal of a “Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything” — so that everyone has access to local community about what’s important to them. Scott lives in NYC and graduated from The University of Iowa. He was named the 2004 MIT Tech Review “Innovator of the year” and is focused for the long-haul on Meetup revolutionizing local community everywhere. He’s @heif.
