Quotes from Jason Fried

The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.

Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.

It feels good to be productive.

Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.

Fix a few things here, improve a few things there, launch a new feature every so often. That's coasting. And I don't want Basecamp to coast.

I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn't enough.

It's easy to forget, as a leader, that when employees don't get the wide view, not only does the point of their work escape them, but it can also lead to real frustration. It's hard to feel pride and ownership when you don't understand where things are going.

Like many entrepreneurs, I started out in sales. I began at 14, when I got a job selling shoes and tennis rackets at a pro shop, and I've been selling one thing or another ever since.

When time, money, and results are on the line, it's easy for tension to build.

We like to bully deadlines. Pick on them; make fun of them; even spit on them sometimes. But what a terrible thing to do. Deadlines are actually our best friends.

It's like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do.

When it's all about the work, it's clear who in the company is pulling their weight and who isn't.

A fixed deadline and a flexible scope are the crucial combination.

A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.

When you can't see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.

There's nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.

You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.

I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.

I live in Chicago but own some property up in Wisconsin.

Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.

I've run into a lot of companies that invent positions for great people just so they don't get away. But hiring people when you don't have real work for them is insulting to them and hurtful to you.

Every time something slips through the cracks, the cracks get bigger.

Who you work with is even more important than who you hang out with because you spend a lot more time with your workmates than your friends.

If working remotely is such a great idea, why isn't everyone doing it? I think it's because we've been bred on the idea that work happens from 9 to 5, in offices and cubicles. It's no wonder that most who are employed inside that model haven't considered other options, or resist the idea that it could be any different. But it can.