“How much is Basecamp worth? I don’t know, and I don’t care.” – Basecamp Founder & CEO, Jason Fried There’s a common roadmap for SaaS growth. Build a product that solves a need for your core audience. Raise venture dollars to build new products and features. Land and expand upmarket to the enterprise. Basecamp has… (more) How an Anti-Growth Mentality Helped Basecamp Grow to Over 2 Million Customers
Slack isn’t just the fastest-growing SaaS startup in history. It also accomplished the seemingly impossible in just five short years: Slack made work fun. Slack’s tagline is “Be Less Busy,” but for the first two years of Slack’s development, the company was very busy. What began as an internal tool hacked together out of necessity… (more) How Slack Became an $16 Billion Business by Making Work Less Boring
In 2011, Joel Spolsky launched his company Fog Creek’s new product at TechCrunch Disrupt called Trello. It looked a lot like a whiteboard with sticky notes translated into a web browser and an iPhone App. Instead of physically moving a sticky note on a whiteboard, you could drag and drop cards on a board from… (more) Why Trello Failed to Build a $1 Billion+ Business
“Every team in the world is capable of accomplishing bigger goals… software could help empower them to drive work forward with more ease, clarity, and accountability.” – Asana co-founders There are a handful of common workplace struggles that plague almost every industry. Emails pile up. Status meetings are unproductive. Teammates working on the same project… (more) Asana’s Rise to a $1.5 Billion Valuation
The myth of the college student who drops out to create the world’s next technological innovation in their garage is one of Silicon Valley’s most well-worn tropes. Yet every few years, a visionary young entrepreneur emerges who genuinely does change the world with their startup. Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, is one such… (more) How Box Conquered the Enterprise and Became a $1.7 Billion Company in a Decade
When Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett got together in 2008 to collaborate on a project, the three friends fully intended for their side hustle to be just that—a weekend project, and nothing more. But it didn’t take long for them to realize that their idea was potentially much bigger than they’d realized. Their… (more) How GitHub Democratized Coding, Built a $2 Billion Business, and Found a New Home at Microsoft
With the possible exception of the earliest pioneers of Silicon Valley, such as IBM, Xerox, and Bell Labs, it’s hard to think of a company that has had a more profound, lasting impact on the world of technology than Microsoft. However, despite its role in fundamentally shaping the landscape of modern computing, Microsoft has an… (more) The Most Important Turning Points in Microsoft’s History
Admitting a mistake can be incredibly difficult for some founders. They become so invested in proving the validity of their original idea that their businesses fail. Not every founder falls into this trap but many do. Ivan Zhao, co-founder of Notion, found himself in this exact position in 2015. Having launched a no-code tool, Zhao… (more) How Notion Is Going After Atlassian and Why It Just Might Win
Your CRM should get you more deals, not more trouble. Most CRMs are built to handle the needs of dozens, even hundreds of sales reps. For a small business, that’s overkill. There are way too many features and the CRM ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. It doesn’t have to be like that.… (more) The 5 Best G Suite CRMs to Close More Deals
The quality of a postmortem rests entirely on the analysis. Get the analysis right and teams will consistently improve on every project. Do the analysis wrong and teams get stuck in an endless treadmill, repeating the same mistakes. When I’ve asked folks on my team to complete the analysis part of a post-mortem, I get… (more) How to Complete a Great Postmortem Analysis Reliably
