Jason Fried on the type of company he’s trying to build, from a recent interview with Fast Company:
Our magazine is called Fast Company, but it sounds like you want to build a slow company.
I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. I think that rapid growth is typically of symptom of… there’s a sickness there. There’s a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to—our revenues and profits support that—but I think we’d be worse off.
I like this call to slow down. I’m reminded of Jack Cheng’s recent article on The Slow Web:
Timeliness. Rhythm. Moderation. These things dovetail into what I consider the biggest difference between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge. Information passes through you; knowledge dissolves into you. And timeliness, rhythm, and moderation are all essential for memory and learning.
We aren’t building things—companies, apps, art, relationships—for speed, for the quick result, the right now, because we can. Let’s build slowly, like we’re in it for the long haul. Let it dissolve into us, enriching us all along the way.
“Time is less a rigid vase and more an unfired lump of clay, malleable at the hands of experience, better measured by the richness of our memories than any clock or calendar.”
—Jack Cheng, on an idea his dad has about time and memory and meaning and experience.
I don’t want him to ever stop asking me about it, because every time he asks, it’s a reminder. To make next week longer and more memorable than this one. To make each subsequent year slower than the one before, by going off the rails, opening myself to richer memories. Every time Dad tells me his idea, it’s a reminder to step away from the machine and pay attention to the world.
Oh man, this is good.
“It has many children, this Hunger. Self-doubt is one of them. As is the desire to prove our worth. To live up to—no, to exceed—the expectations. The thing about Hunger is that it’s both the reason we accept new challenges and the fear that stands in our way. The starting gun and the hurdles. The muse and the misery. And what a combination! Hunger pushes us into unfamiliar territories and compels us to find new angles on familiar ones. It throws us in the middle of a busy intersection during rush hour. It puts an egg timer on our desk, says “you know that thing that usually takes you a whole afternoon? You have one hour. Go!” And by doing so, Hunger makes us better.”
“In the coming years, Steve Jobs’s life and work will be even more scrutinized, even more imitated than they are now. But to simply ask “what would Steve do?” would be to miss the point. It would be accepting the very dogma he warned us against, living with the results of his thinking, not our own. To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity.”
