SEASON 2 - EPISODE 154 - MAY 28, 2025

Ignoring the competition, the next wave of CEOs & other listener questions

In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson answer listener questions. They explain why keeping tabs on competitors isn’t part of their strategy, reflect on the changing face of leadership as younger CEOs step in, and talk about the energy that comes with fresh perspectives.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:22 - Why focusing on your customers matters more than watching competitors
05:55 - A new wave of CEOs is bringing a fresh approach to leadership
10:34 - Why you don’t always need a mentor—sometimes figuring it out is the best teacher
17:38 - Jason and David’s views on handling employee roadblocks

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 your host, Kimberly Rhodes from the 37signals team, joined by the co-founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week we’re going to knock out some listener questions. These are ones that got submitted from our new video podcast question request, so thank you for sending those in. The first one is from André.

Listener André (00:22): Hello, my name is André. I’m from Brazil. I read your REWORK book. You said a very audacious statement there, which is to ignore the real world and the competitors. I’d like to know if you still think the same. We are living on the age of AI and people are putting AI everywhere, even on places which shouldn’t have them. Some years ago, people were slapping touchscreen interfaces everywhere, even on refrigerators, so the market keeps doing that and I think you probably just ignore those things and keep focusing on customers problems. I’d like to know if you still think the same that people can run their businesses by just focusing on their customer’s needs and forgetting, ignoring those fads and fancy stuff. That’s my question. I love your show. Thank you.

David (01:13): You can absolutely continue to ignore the competition as long as you don’t ignore your customers and what they want, and those two things are occasionally linked, that customers are excited about something that the competition is doing because they’re doing something that they want and you’d be a fool to ignore that. But chasing the competition in and of itself is almost always a mistake. First of all, because you’re going to be second. If you’re just chasing, you’re not necessarily analyzing why is it working? Are you just copying something that is already there? Or you’re just copying someone else’s output without necessarily copying how they’re thinking, how they’re analyzing things? I think occasionally that can work in commodity markets where people just want a cheaper widget and whoever can produce the cheapest is all that matters. Do you know what most businesses that we usually talk about or not like that.

(02:09): Basecamp is certainly not like that. We have not chased the competition when it comes to Basecamp and I think we’re pretty well off for the sake of it. We’ve been doing this for over 20 years with Basecamp and it’s worked out pretty well, but part of it is perhaps your definition of what works out means. Does it mean you’re going to beat all your competitors just because you’re not paying attention to them? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. We’ve found that with our business, we’ve built something great, successful, sustainable, wonderful to our employees, wonderful to our customers, but there’s a bunch of things or bunch of other companies that people would define as our competitors who have perhaps more revenue or they have more employees or maybe they even have more customers. That’s totally fine, but I think it really boils down to what do you want? Do you want a business where you’re putting the best of what you got, your talents and your resources to work in a way that you see fit and you find inspiring to work on? Then you can certainly ignore the competition. If you are just trying to beat the other guy, then maybe you have to pay a little more attention. We’ve certainly chosen our path. We’ve stuck to it, so ignoring the competition continues to ring true for us.

Kimberly (03:28): Well, I just have a follow up because André didn’t say this in his question, but I kind of get the impression he’s wondering, do we feel pressure like AI in particular he mentioned, do we feel pressure to keep up with that?

Jason (03:41): Well, I would say that there’s as much pressure as you want to put on yourself. There’s always competition, there’s always alternatives. There’s always new technology. There’s always things you’re not doing, other people are doing. You have your own cost to compete with. I mean, there’s always pressure, so whether or not the AI age is going to change that, I don’t actually think it changes that, it’s just another new thing that is the next new thing, but it’s not like competition didn’t exist before AI. I mean competition’s always been here and always will be, and you don’t control them and you don’t know where they’re coming from and they’re not paying you any money. I’ve always liked this about Jeff Bezos. People are like, should you worry about the competition? He’s like, the competition doesn’t pay us anything. I worry about people who pay us things. Our customers, they pay for things, so I’ve always liked that too. I just get the sense that it is very easy to worry about things and it’s really easy to worry about the competition if you want to. It’s this big huge looming thing, right? But I also feel like in some ways it’s a form of procrastination actually to worry too much about the competition because it’s a great reason not to do something. It’s a great reason to be afraid, and if you’re looking for that, you’ll find it in that group called the competition.

David (04:45): And I think it’s essentially the essence of Stoicism, which I’m a big fan of. I think Jason likes it too, that you should focus on the things that you control. The competition and what they do out of your control. If you’re just going to be a follower of that, a paranoid follower of that, an afraid follower on that, what odds do you have of beating them at what they’re good at? Seems very long to me. Versus if you focus on what you’re good at, the talents that you have, the resources you have, the voice you have, the audience you have, the angle, you have the software that you’ve built, perhaps, you stand a much better chance of succeeding. Or not. There are no guarantees. Whether you pay attention to the competition or you don’t pay attention to the competition, you may win or lose. There is no magic bullet that you can shoot that’s going to guarantee you success in business or perhaps even in life, but at least in business you know that the odds of going out of business, they’re always there and they’re probably better than not.

Kimberly (05:48): Okay, this next video question is from Robert and I feel like David, you might have something to say about this.

Listener Robert (05:55): How you guys doing? My question is as technology continues to accelerate and digital fluency becomes more and more critical, is the era of the older seasoned CEO starting to fade and if so, is our next wave of CEOs going to be in their twenties? Thank you so much.

Kimberly (06:10): You guys were in your twenties when you started this whole thing. True?

David (06:13): We were

Kimberly (06:13): Yeah

David (06:14): And I think what you’re describing is the cycle of life. It has always been like this. It has always been that there is a new generation. It’s always been that there’s been new evolution, but I actually want to question the premise just for a half second here. Technology doesn’t move that fast. This is a delusion that people have. Technology moves very slowly. There have been, in my optics, three major changes in technology. There’s the internet around ’95, got very popular, set a tone, still going. Whatever you learned about the internet in ’95, the vast majority of it still applies. Even the technology is the same. The HTML page you wrote in ’95 will still work today. The skills you picked up then, making things to the internet, they still apply today, so that’s the first paradigm. The second paradigm was the mobile phone. When the iPhone came out in 2007, it very quickly rewrote everyone’s expectation of what a computer was.

(07:15): The primary computer for most people became the one you have in your pocket. That was a big change. And now we’re looking at quite likely the third big change with AI. That’s three changes in 30 years. Now there’s a bunch of other changes that happened at that time, but most of them were incremental. They were often irrelevant. They came and they went, they were fads or they were just part of the fabric. If you’re constantly freaking out about how fast things are going, yeah, okay, maybe you are getting old. Maybe it does feel like everything is speeding up, but in reality it’s not really. It feels perhaps so a little bit right now because we do have a major factor with AI that feels like it’s on the same level as the mobile phone is and the internet, but again, not that fast. So I think as now an older statesman founder at ripe year of 45, do you know what?

(08:12): I’m not going to do this forever. That’s fine. I’m not going to do everything as well as a younger generation. Whoever’s 22 years old right now and coming up with something, they’re probably going to come up with something different than what I would come up with. They don’t have my legacy of experiences and imprints and everything else that I went through. They never went through the.com boom and bust. They don’t have those imprints. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful that we’re going to get something new from new people? I think where people often go astray once they’ve been to business for a while, they try to, they stay young, stay hip and okay, fine, stay in touch with technology. But if you’re trying to out compete, I don’t know, a 21-year-old on everything that they’re coming at it with, you’re probably run out of steam quite quickly. They’re going to run faster than you. They’re going to have more stamina than you. They’re going to have more of all of that. Hopefully you have something else. Hopefully you have some crystallized intelligence. Hopefully you have a little bit of wisdom. Occasionally that wisdom is helpful and you can turn that into profit. Occasionally it’s not and you’re just going to miss out and there’s nothing you can do about it, so lean back and embrace the circle of life. Don’t worry too much about it.

Kimberly (09:27): Jason, anything to add?

Jason (09:29): Well, I’m a few years older than David, so I will say that that’s all true. It’s kind of like when you have your parents might say some hip word that they heard somewhere and you’re like, oh God, don’t do that. That’s kind of what this is like. Don’t try to be what you’re not. Don’t try to be a 21-year-old if you’re 50 or 40 or whatever, just do your thing. There’s plenty of room for all sorts of different things. Not everybody needs the latest and greatest everything, cutting edge, whatever. Just do your stuff. Provide your service, be kind, be good to customers, take care of your own employees. You can run a business in a lot of different ways. You don’t always need to be on the latest and greatest and cutting edge of everything. That’s one way to do it, but I think that ultimately it is about being yourself, finding what’s your nature, who are you, what do you like to do, and just do that and it’s probably going to be good enough and if it’s not, it’s not, but yeah, you can’t be something you’re not. You can be that in the short term. You can act a little bit, but it’s not sustainable and your sort of true self is going to show through and then if you’re doing something that isn’t natural, it’s not going to last very long and you’re not going to be very happy with it.

Kimberly (10:37): I know you guys haven’t seen this video, but Robert who called in is younger than all of us, so he may be on the other side of this hoping that the next round of CEOs are in their twenties.

Jason (10:46): You know what annoys me? I’ll tell you this. I get emails from people fairly frequently who are 16, who are like, can you give me some advice? And I’m like, fuck. First of all, you don’t need any advice. You’re 16, don’t listen to anybody. First of all, I can’t tell you anything that’s worthwhile and it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have listened to myself and I was 16. I don’t know what I’m talking about in your world and also you just don’t need advice. Just go do something. Go make… I mean if I’m going to give you advice, just go make something, but don’t listen to anybody. Just go make something. Use your advantage, which is that you don’t really know anything. You also kind of know everything and what worked before doesn’t matter anymore, just go and go. And it annoys me that people feel like they need to be on this track of getting advice all the time.

(11:33): That whole thing really is starting to really bug me, actually this idea of people looking for advice, looking for mentors. I kind of get it at some level, but you’re better off I think just going and making something on your own and then you can check in with other people later but don’t feel like it’s something that’s in your way that you can’t do until you get, or that if you’re 16, you’re seeking out advice from someone who’s much older than you. They might be able to tell you some things about life, whatever, but as far as your idea that you want to pursue, just go and do your own thing.

David (12:00): This connects directly to one of the most annoying questions I get asked quite often in interviews what would you tell your younger self if you… 30 years of experience, how would you distill it down to something that would make an impact on your younger self? And my answer is always, I wouldn’t tell myself a damn thing. I would not rob myself of the glory of experienced things for the first time of being so ignorant and being so arrogant as we were when we were in our twenties and we thought that we could do everything in a weekend. That is a superpower. No, you can’t do it in a weekend, but the belief that you can is what’s going to propel the start. And once you get started, you get going and once you get going you’re going to learn a bunch of things and you get figured out.

(12:47): I think Jason and I in those early days really committed to that idea that we wanted to face all of our experiences for the first time, that we did not need a cheat sheet, that it was actually going to be worse if we encountered every novel situation with a playbook written by someone twice our age. How the hell are we supposed to learn anything novel from that? I think a lot of their rejuvenation that we get from new generations is exactly because they don’t have the same baggage, is exactly because they approach perhaps the same problems with an entirely new mindset because they’re in a different context. That’s how you get something new. I hear this all the time in technology, this idea of not invented here syndrome, that this is the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is if you dare think about a problem that someone else has already solved. What a load of bullshit. You should think about problems that people have already solved because a hundred times out of a hundred someone has missed something, and if you go back to an existing problem and you look at it from a new angle and the new angle may just be your age, the new angle may just be you at 18.

(14:00): You’re going to see something new and so often that new vantage is going to give birth to a new solution. And do you know what? The market all the time goes like, oh yeah, I thought this was a solved problem, but clearly it’s not. Someone thought about it anew. I’m going to buy that thing. Great.

Kimberly (14:15): I feel like this reminds me of some of the questions I hear that Gary V gets all the time from people who are trying to at a young age do something progressive or feel like they’re already behind in their twenties. Like this all goes into that, age is just a number friend.

Jason (14:30): In fact, you’re just so far ahead. If you’re just 20, you’re just so far ahead actually, just by the nature of the fact that you don’t know things yet. To David’s point, you don’t really know yet. That’s an advantage. It’s a huge advantage. People just miss that and I get why people miss that because it doesn’t sound intuitive at all in a sense, but I think the fundamental thing is you wouldn’t listen to yourself. You wouldn’t have listened to yourself 30 years. I would not have taken advice from myself today if I was 20. There’s no way. I’m not going to listen to… what the hell would I have known then? I’d be like, this guy doesn’t know anything. What is… he’s 50? What the hell does he know? and whether or not I know anything, it doesn’t even matter. It’s just like, I wouldn’t have listened to myself and I think that’s the right thing to say is I’m not going to listen to you. I’m going to figure this out on my own.

David (15:18): I’ll say one last thing, which is whatever you can learn from someone more senior, someone more experienced, someone more successful, you can glean that from afar. You do not need to talk to that person. That person, if they’re capable of articulating any lessons that they’ve learned at all, they’re already sharing them, ad nauseum. That’s what we’re doing fucking right now, right? If we have a conversation, you and me, audience member, I’m not going to say something that’s different from this. There’s not like this secret stash of amazing insights that I’m already not sharing with the world and I’m just waiting for you to have a one-on-one with me before I’m sharing. What? That would make no sense at all. I’m sharing everything. I have a lot of bad ideas, maybe some decent ones and perhaps a few golden nuggets along the way, but you will have access to them from afar.

(16:09): You do not need a one-on-one relationship with anyone to be able to learn the best lessons that everyone in the world have accumulated because at this point they can’t shut up about them. Whatever insights they have, if they’re connected to the internet, they have shared them in a hundred tweets already in 25 podcasts. There’s nothing novel there. There’s just a sour citrus that you don’t want to squeeze any further, right? I’ve had enough. There’s enough out there, just take some of that in. Sample a little here, sample a little there. Get inspired and then go off on your own. I never had a mentor, a real life one. I had a lot of mentors in books and in articles and in code, from afar, sometimes thousands of years back in history, sometimes they were contemporaries. I never had conversations with anyone. And the few times I did, like for example, Jason and I have a mentor relationship of sorts with Jeff Bezos, right? He bought a small slice of our company and we had some very nice conversations with him along the way. Whatever golden nuggets he shared with us were golden nuggets he had already shared with everyone else. It was a very pleasant experience and you can get something else and wisdom out of that relationship. You can get confidence perhaps. That’s nice. You have someone important saying, go! Yeah! Believe in yourself. There’s something there, okay? It’s not wisdom. The wisdom is already there. It’s already distributed. Don’t wait around for these like secret nuggets. They’re not there.

Kimberly (17:37): Okay, one more question before we wrap up this episode. This one is a video from Carlos.

Listener Carlos (17:41): How do you encourage new team members? This could be experienced people to not get blocked or stuck for long time and ask questions sooner than later. I typically use the one day rule. Do not get stuck for more than one day. I want them to know by themselves, figure out by themselves, give them energy and also fulfilling of like, they got it, but do not get stuck more than one day and encourage them to just ask questions to unplug them and just ask right away, but the one day rule is the one that I use, I want to know what other people think.

Jason (18:17): My answer is kind of that you just notice that there is a dip in forward momentum somewhere, somehow. It may be a product is not moving where you thought it was and you got to figure out why and you realize, well, this person hasn’t done something. They’re probably stuck on something. There’s not super obvious indications, although we do have these automatic check-ins that people write and they’re supposed to write at least a couple times a week. Sometimes you see some of those missing and you’re like, something’s going on here, but that might not be stuck as much as something else. I think it’s mostly just about paying attention and caring about the people you’re working with and paying attention to the work itself, paying attention to the forward momentum on something and you just kind of notice. I mean, that’s my just general sense. You just kind of notice that something isn’t quite right and then you dig into it and find out why.

(19:01): As far as the one day rule that might work. For me, things like that are too rigid. Someone might be heads down for a few days. I don’t consider them stuck if what’s coming out of those few days is really a lot of forward momentum, so the one day thing is a little bit too tight for me, but I do think you just get to notice it over time, but the key is you have to pay attention and then it’s on you. And it’s actually like if you’re not paying attention and you don’t spot those things to begin with and something’s actually wrong with your involvement more so than someone else’s stuck on something.

David (19:27): I’m going to say something that may be a little controversial here. I don’t think smart people get stuck. I don’t think that’s a thing. I think smart people keep going. They may not be going the most efficient way possible, but they’re not stuck. They’re not blocked, at least not on competence. It’s exceedingly rare that I can remember a technical conversation I’ve had with a programmer who I thought really had great sparkle and a great future where I would walk in and they would be stuck in this one little thing and I’d say like, boom, boom, boom, and now they’re unstuck and off we go. Really rare. This notion of stuckness is at best like a temporary productivity lift. And even when it’s that it’s not always a good thing to unstick someone. There’s a huge amount of value in getting stuck, in slowing down for a hot second because there’s something you don’t understand.

(20:25): Why are you not moving forward? Usually it’s a source of lack of understanding. I can’t, most people can’t, deliver that understanding to you. There’s not like five sentences or two paragraphs or even in a page in most cases on something that relates to competence that I can just hand to you and then you got it, right? It’s okay to be stuck. It’s okay to be stuck as long as you’re applying your mental faculties. What I see and what the problem usually is, you’re not stuck because of competence. You’re stuck because of circumstances outside of work. You’re stuck because of a lack of motivation. You’re stuck for factors that do not pertain to the problems that you’re facing directly themselves. That’s at least what I’ve seen. When it has been someone who’s repeatedly stuck on pure competence. Hmmm… a little bit of a red flag. Doesn’t mean someone can’t move past it.

(21:21): There’s a bunch of things I don’t know, and I’m stuck for a hot second. These days I’d say, you’re probably better off just asking AI. Like, AI is going to know something about whatever area of competence you’re stuck on. May not have the right answer. It may even make up bullshit, but even when it makes up bullshit, at least to me, it brings me just a little further because it tweaks the thing a little bit and I get it moving again. I get my own brain moving again and now we’re rolling and I’ll figure it out. But otherwise, if people are repeatedly getting stuck on the competent ladder, do you know what? Something is wrong. They’re in a wrong situation, something else kind of needs to change. One of the things I like to say to managers is you’re not going to save them. As a manager, someone who’s responsible for unsticking someone, you’re not going to save them if the stickiness is the competence. You can save them in other ways.

(22:18): Sometimes people get stuck in how they communicate with others. Occasionally you can give some redirecting feedback, which is sort of the bullshit we say for telling someone what to do if they’re doing it wrong. That’s redirecting feedback. You can give someone redirecting feedback on how they should relate to other people. For example, we have had people who’ve started at 37signals and they haven’t been good at checking in. Jason referenced those automated questions that folks are supposed to answer a couple of times a week. And if a couple of weeks go by and that doesn’t happen, sometimes people just not in the rhythm of it, they’re not in the habit of it. You can tell ‘em that. I can get sort of stuck on not doing that, and you can tell ‘em that. The programming not so much.

Jason (22:59): I think everything you just said makes a lot of sense to me. I was kind of thinking about it from a different direction and I don’t know what the person who asked the question is looking for, but I think on the design side, people sometimes get stuck in a loop of polishing something too early or a loop of perfection at the wrong time, and so that’s something I’m on the lookout for because there’s a lot of things that just don’t matter yet and they don’t matter yet because we’re not even sure we’re going to keep this around, and so the worst thing to do is to sit around in a loop, stuck polishing something to make it perfect when you’re going to throw it out in three months because it’s just not the right idea anyway. And so at certain points of a product development process, you haven’t poured concrete yet and you don’t want to perfect certain things, so that’s an area that I do, if someone’s stuck there, I’m like, let’s just move on from this. This is whatever, we’ll get back to it or we won’t, but we need to move on from that. So that’s another level of this, which is a different angle than David’s taking. I think both are valid, but it just depends. I don’t know what the questioner actually was particularly curious about.

Kimberly (24:01): I think you guys have given them a lot of information regardless. With that, we’re going to wrap it up. Rework is production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast, full video episodes or on YouTube, and if you have a question for Jason or David, send us a video. You can do that at 37signals.com/podcastquestion. We might just answer it and have you with us on the show.