SEASON 2 - EPISODE 164 - SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

Total transparency

37signals’ co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share more about their business than many founders. In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, they chat with host Kimberly Rhodes about why transparency is important to them. They talk about how sharing openly can double as marketing, the upside of showing work that’s still in progress, and why timing matters when deciding what to put out to the public.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:13 - Why transparency matters at 37signals
03:07 - Everything is marketing
09:22 - Letting people follow along while the work is happening
12:43 - Knowing when and what to share

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Kimberly Rhodes from the 37signals team, joined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of the company. This week, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the transparency that both Jason and David have here on this podcast, in their writings… they’re pretty much an open book. Sometimes I’m even like, wait, y’all are going to say that? So I thought we could talk a little bit about it today. Okay, let’s just jump right into this. Have you guys always been as open as you are with your business? I think a lot of business owners would be like, no, this is private information, but you guys are sharing company announcements, just how the company is doing, decisions that you’ve made. Has it always been this way?

Jason (00:47): I think so. I mean, it seems harder to hide things.

(00:50): That’s the thing. It’s like if you know it, just say it kind of thing. If you’re thinking about it, just say it. If you have something you can share, just share it. Why not, essentially? This is something we wrote about I think in REWORK as well, which is sort of emulating chefs. They share their cookbooks, they share their recipes, or they share recipes in a cookbook. The recipes are what they do. That is the fundamental thing that they do. They cook, this is what they do. This is how much salt they put in the thing. This is it. This is the blueprint. They don’t worry about someone making a dish and opening a restaurant next to them and putting ‘em out of business. They know that sharing gets people to try things, gets people to explore things, get people maybe to come to their restaurant if they come to their city. This is the way to do it.

(01:29): And again, it just always seemed harder not to. I know so many people who run businesses and there’s like, I have to run this by legal and I dunno if I’m allowed to say this or share this or can I do? I get it, it’s different in a public company and whatever, but these aren’t public companies I’m talking about. These are private companies and everyone’s just afraid. They’re just afraid that someone’s going to use this idea and take it from them or whatever. I mean, look, we don’t have anything proprietary. I get i if you’re inventing some new medication or chemical thing and you’ve invested a billion dollars under the R&D, whatever it is, I don’t even know. But that’s not what we do. That’s not what pretty much anyone actually does. And it just seems far more lucrative, frankly, just to share as much as you can, to get people’s eyes on things that they normally wouldn’t expect to see.

(02:13): And they’re interested, like we just talked about in the previous episode, we just share our book sales over 15 years, and it’s done quite well. And I’ve never seen an author actually share this before. And not to say they haven’t, I just haven’t seen it and I don’t think a lot of people in our audience have seen it because they’re all surprised that we would share it. And to me it’s like, what’s the surprise? Here it is. It’s kind of interesting to see. So that’s the way we’ve always done things and it’s not like, there have been times where we’ve said, should we share this? For example, we don’t share our exact revenue numbers, and we’ve sort of talked about why not in some degree? Maybe we should. I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t, but that’s probably one of the things that we don’t actually share. Pretty much everything else we do, including salaries, including a number of other things. People have reverse engineered our profit sharing numbers to determine our profits. People have done that. We’ve shared some of that stuff and it’s fine. It’s all good, everything’s fine, it’s fine. It’s better than fine because of that. Actually,

David (03:07): This is another chapter of REWORK, which is everything is marketing. Everything you can do to be interesting is marketing. And not only is it marketing in this instrumental cell, it’s interesting in its own sense. I search for interesting things. I think we all do. We are attracted to interesting things. When I read something interesting, I go like, ah, that’s interesting. I’d like to hear more of what this person have to say. If they had one interesting thing to say, they might have another. And very often that is true. And I try to reciprocate actually in some degree here of, I’ve learned so much from people who are just interesting and who share the interesting things that make them interesting. I should try to do a little bit of that. And you can get into a habit and you can develop an eye for doing that well.

(03:54): Once you develop an eye for what’s other people going to find interesting, because I would find it interesting, you’re well underway to realizing that almost everything is interesting. If you just share deep enough, if you share enough behind the curtains, it becomes interesting. And when it becomes interesting, it can move things and it can move people and it can get them to pay attention. It’s pretty hard to get people to pay attention these days. Folks will spend literally months if not years, developing a new shigamajing and then they’ll put it out there and go like, ta-da, and two days later it’s old news. So there’s also some of that, which I’m not always sure I think is a good thing, but there is some degree of, you have to show up. You have to be part of the conversation. You have to be in the mix if you want to kind of keep the moving average moving in the right direction.

(04:49): Because if you just go like, well, okay, we’ve shared our thing. See you in nine months, that thing better be goddamn spectacular. Are you catching spaceships with chopsticks? Okay, you can just wait nine months. Most of us are not doing something that interesting. You need a little bit more maintenance to keep that going, right? I think once you realize that everything is marketing, you also realize again, the privilege it is not to have to ask for permission. I can recall a handful of times where I’ve gone, this is really interesting, but you know what? I’m just going to check with Jason. Just going to check with Jason and see like, do we want to share that? And then there’s about 10,000 other things where I just went, oh, this is really interesting, post write up, whatever. This whole thing about the earnings we had from the book.

(05:40): It’s a great example of that. Jason and I both posted it almost at the same time. Neither of us thought, do you know what? I just got to check in to make sure that that’s okay that we share. Have we checked in with finance about whether we’re revealing something? Have we checked in with Ron? Is Ron going to tell us no? Do you know what? This is one of the privileges of owning the goddamn business. It’s not just one of the privileges, it’s one of the superpowers because it allows you to just out share almost anyone who’s stuck in some corporate mill where it has to go through five layers. Now I think what’s also interesting here is that the most successful people in the world who run public companies also do this shit. I mean the shit poster in chief, Mr. Musk, he’s notorious for this, right?

(06:27): Notorious for freaking out his legal teams. And you know what? Worked out pretty well I think in that regard. Tesla famously spent about $0 on marketing. I don’t know if they spend a little bit now, but for essentially their entire lifespan, they spend nothing because he realized correctly that if you just start talking about these things, if you’re just interesting and if you’re in the mix, you don’t need it. And do you know what? If you can do that as literally the richest man in the world running seven companies at the same time, then our little mini put operation here can probably do two.

Kimberly (07:01): Over the years have there been anything that you guys have shared publicly that you wish you hadn’t?

David (07:07): Timing? I think not content. We had this big blowup at the company in 2021 about sharing a new policy around talking politics internally. And I don’t for a minute regret sharing the policy or making the decision do it. In fact, I think it’s one of the crowning achievements of my goddamn career. I do regret the timing because there was too short of a lag between the internal post and the external post. And that sometimes, that counterbalance to the enthusiasm we so often talk about the urgency of like, well, there’s all these reasons for why you want to get it out. Sometimes a little bit of timing is not the worst thing in the world or thinking about it a little bit if it’s really humongous. And then the other thing I would say is cat.jpeg. We had an incident in 2011, 2012 where someone from the operations team shared what the file name of the, I don’t know, 1000000000th uploaded file to Basecamp was, I forget what the milestone was and revealed that it was cat.jpeg.

(08:14): And that was a share where it really started a lot of question. Like wait, you can look at our files? Even though no one did look at the file, it was a thing that was posted in a log post, but it was actually a good reminder that do you know what? Even file names, you think of them as metadata. Oh, I’m not looking at the file, but the file name actually reveals stuff and you shouldn’t be sharing that. So sometimes there are some degrees of that, and I’ve seen that in other ways where companies sometimes share things about their customers, even if it’s sort of in slide aggregate where I go, that’s a little yucky. I don’t want you to be collecting this data and aggregating it and then sharing it to the world when it sort of feels like it’s my data. So I do think perhaps there’s a line there. And cat.jpg was one of the times we crossed it and it really seared into my head. I mean, this is now whatever almost 15 years ago, and there’s like a scar. Somewhere, like right there is the scar of don’t you ever do that again. Never share customer data. Don’t even fucking look at it, right? Whether it exists in log files for forensics purposes or operational purposes. Okay, don’t fucking look at it and don’t share it.

Kimberly (09:20): Okay. And then the other thing that I know that we share often is work in progress. Like Jason, you’ve done a lot of design reviews, we’ve done some code walkthroughs. Tell me about that and why you guys have chosen to share all of that stuff.

Jason (09:36): I personally do that because I wish I could watch it more frequently from others. I love to see people work through ideas like things that are unfinished, unresolved in progress, like struggling to solve this problem or admitting this doesn’t work quite right. I don’t really know how to get it to work yet, but I know we will. But here’s where we’re at so far. I just find that to be fascinating. That’s what product development is, working through a bunch of unknowns and figuring out the right combination of things to do and get right in a certain way. And I like that stuff. So I like to share it and I don’t see it enough. In fact, I’ve long talked about this. I would love to do a podcast of work in progress, which actually I used to a long time ago, we had this fellow named Nathan who was running Highrise, and every day we would do this little YouTube video series called Work in Progress, like show me what you’re working on.

(10:26): I’ll show you what I’m working on. And I kind of miss that frankly, because you end up hearing interviews and stories of completed work and then there’s a recalling and a replaying of history that people recollect probably, and it’s probably not totally true. And it’s not like they’re trying to mislead you. It’s just like they miss all the details. I like to see the things as they’re happening and see unfinished work in progress, but in a similar way that we were just talking about companies are afraid to share information, they’re also afraid to share work in progress. They think a competitor’s going to take their idea and run with it or whatever. They don’t, and who cares? And if they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it anyway. It’s not like they’re waiting on you to tell them what to do, but I’ve always found it interesting.

(11:04): So yeah, with Fizzy right now, Fizzy is not out yet, but we’re getting close and I’ve been sharing things we’ve been working through and changes we’ve been making along the way. And hey, here’s a review of something that we changed that I showed you two weeks ago and here’s different about it now. And here’s some of the subtle details that you might not notice, but we thought through and I just found that to be cool. I don’t know. And people seem to like it. I don’t kind of care if they do or they don’t. I want to share it anyway, like it to be out there. I’d more people to actually share this way. And again, I also think it helps you in some ways. I was just doing a call before this podcast. We just hired a new designer and I was walking in through some of the stuff we’re doing in Basecamp 5, which is a new version of Basecamp we’re working on, and there’s a bunch of unknown things up in the air, and I was explaining, I’m like, this isn’t quite right yet, but there’s something here that we like.

(11:50): And I just find myself getting juiced up when I’m talking about that kind of thing. Solving problems that are up in the air is fun. I don’t know, and maybe that’s my job is to do that kind of thing. So that’s why I enjoy it. But I would like to see more of that. And I think David’s Writing Software Well series or On Writing Software or whatever, it’s similar, although of course we’re reviewing code that exists just like I’m reviewing a design that exists. I also once wrote an article and I recorded myself writing the article. I was writing the article for Inc. Magazine many years ago, and I write in iA writer. I’m like, I should record me typing and talking out loud. I don’t like that paragraph. I don’t like, I’m going to move this over here. And it was probably pretty boring, but it was, I thought would be fun to watch someone else do the same thing. So I guess in general, the things you want to see out in the world, put your own versions of those out there and other people will probably be interested and maybe other people will do it and encourage more people to share that way.

Kimberly (12:41): Okay. Jason, you mentioned Basecamp 5. So tell me when you think it’s too early to be transparent and to share what you’re working on. Obviously we’re not in the place of sharing that yet. Kind talk us through what your decision-making process is on that.

Jason (12:57): Yeah, I would say a lot of it depends on so many variables, but one of ‘em is, like Fizzy is a brand new product. So there’s no legacy. There’s no one who’s already using a version of Fizzy. And we can share from ground zero essentially. With Basecamp, I will share lots of what we’re doing with Basecamp 5, but probably a few months prior to launching for a variety of reasons. First of all, I want to prime the pump and let people know what’s coming because there’s some big changes. I will show our customers, we’ll share with the public, but I don’t want to share things too early that aren’t even quite resolved yet because there’s so many people who depend on Basecamp. I don’t want anyone to freak out about things that might be changing and then go, I don’t like that and I don’t like Basecamp now.

(13:35): It’s like, I don’t want this thing that’s going to happen. I’m like, I don’t even know if this is going to happen. Maybe it’s going to happen. We’re not sure. Maybe you like it, we don’t know. But I think there’s something when people are using something that already exists, it’s kind of better to wait a little bit longer, I think, to share so you don’t create some anxiety that’s unnecessary, compared to something that’s brand new, that doesn’t exist at all, and there’s no comparison. Or in fact, they might be using something else. They go, I’d rather use that. That’s pretty exciting. And they get pumped up about it versus comparing to something they’re already used to because humans are very good at getting comfortable with what they know. And then you show ‘em something else, and if it’s something that they’re going to eventually have put upon them, they’re going to be nervous about it. That’s super natural. So I want to just be careful not to do that too early. There’s no answer like exactly 90 days, but that’s what I think about.

Kimberly (14:17): David, on the tech side, are there things that are too early to show or to share?

David (14:22): I think maybe it’s rarer because when we look at the behind the scenes and we look at piece of code, whether it’s going to make it into the product in that way or not, it doesn’t really matter. But the series that Jason refers to, On Writing Software Well, was something I wrote after the features have shipped. And I think the reason that resonated so well, and I keep meaning to come back to that, I think it’s been seven years since I recorded the last episode, so I’ve stopped making promises about when that was going to be, but the series is still actually something we use internally. When someone new is hired on the programming team, we give them that playlist. And here’s a way to get an insight into how we think about the work that we do, how the exact code actually looks like.

(15:07): And it’s so interesting because there’s never been more code available online, and 99% of it is open source, and there’s a wonderful open source code to learn from, but open source usually takes quality of plumbing infrastructure. There’s not all that much application code in the same way. And I think it’s just such a shame because this is how we learn. I think in the design world, it’s actually much nicer. You can look at someone’s design and you can start critiquing it, and you can start taking it apart intellectually and conceptually. You can’t do that with code, even less so than when I started programming. We used to have this wonderful thing called View Source on the web. You’d right click on a webpage and you’d view source and you’d see exactly how they build it. And it’s like, oh, they use JavaScript this way. Oh, they use a table in this way to structure these things.

(15:57): And now, unfortunately, that has devolved into these bundlers and minification processes that obscure how something’s actually built. And now you can’t learn all that much anymore that way. And I think we’re really cutting the legs of the learning curve for someone new coming into the industry. You want to see how real things are built, not toy examples, not kind of invented stuff, but how is this website built? So I felt a bit of an obligation to share some of the behind scenes stuff from our code base. And do you know what? It’s funny, because the reaction was very much like a little bit of a gasp. You can do that? You can share real production code? Isn’t that proprietary? Are there security risks? There were all these questions that would fall apart under just the absolute minimum amount of scrutiny. None of the code that I showed in that video turned out to be some Basecamp competitor that then put us up business because they saw the secret ingredient.

(17:00): I mean, what are you talking about? I share like 95% of all code I’ve ever written. Maybe that’s not true. 70% of all the code I’ve ever written has been shared as open source. You can just look at all that stuff if you want to see how I build things. So it’s not that special and there’s no secrets in it. And whatever security issues that are there, that’d be security through obscurity which is no security at all. So what are you afraid of? But it really is fear. There’s a lot of fear around sharing things that you’re working on, about sharing things that are inside. And I think 95% of that is just silly.

Kimberly (17:36): Okay, well, with that, we’re going to wrap it up. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website, 37signals.com/podcasts. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com/podcast. Question.