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Jason Fried isn’t your typical entrepreneur.
To start, Fried’s software development company, 37 Signals, eschews Fortune 50 companies in favor of courting what Fried calls “The Fortune 5 million.”
“We don’t just want to limit ourselves to 500 companies. Everybody works with those companies. It’s really hard,” Fried said March 29 at Gleacher Center. The event was cosponsored by the alumni-led Chicago Booth Global Entrepreneurship Network and by the Private Equity, Entrepreneurial Ventures, and Venture Capital Club, led by students in the Evening and Weekend programs. Fried shared his personal experience in creating and growing 37 Signals in hopes of inspiring current Chicago Booth students to become entrepreneurs, according to Ravi Viswanathan,’04, one of the event’s coordinators.
Fried’s inspiration came by way of encouraging out-of-the box thinking. “We don’t do things differently just to do things differently; we do things differently because we think they work better,” he said.
Among the different approaches Fried’s company takes is making its software simple, something that differentiates it from competition in a crowded field. It’s a strategy that Fried calls “under-doing your competition.”
“Don’t let anybody out-simple you. Do a few things really, really well,” Fried said. “We basically say our products do less than everybody else. For a lot of people, that’s a breath of fresh air; they find it’s exactly what they’ve been looking for.”
Fried also limits personal interaction and meetings at his company in order to focus on more passive forms of collaboration, which allow people to produce more, he said. “People don’t go to work anymore to work; they go to work to be interrupted,” he said.
Fried also encouraged would-be entrepreneurs to shelve innovation in favor of usefulness. “Innovation is wildly overrated,” he said. “People get sick of innovation. No one is ever sick of something that’s useful. You should focus on the useful stuff first and innovation as a way to maybe make something more useful.”
And forget that old adage that failure is a rite of passage in the business world: “It seems like that’s the standard advice—that you should be failing all the time, and that failure is where the lessons are. That’s just not how it works. Failure is not a prerequisite for success. You can just be successful.
“Entrepreneurs are seen as big risk-takers, people who are going to fail a whole bunch. But the best entrepreneurs are not the biggest risk takers; they are the ones who avoid the most risk. It’s not about quitting your day job or sinking your life savings into an idea. It’s about starting something on the side, seeing how things go, and then expanding if you want to.”
Fried also encouraged managers to shelve long-term plans and deadlines. Plans and estimates, he said, are not reliable more than a few weeks out, and deadlines “yield man-made anger.”
At 37 Signals, instead of lengthening a deadline to get a large project done, Fried’s team focuses on cutting out aspects of the project so it can be completed in two-week chunks. “You can’t keep pouring more money and more people into getting things done sooner. The only way to get something done sooner is to get rid of stuff.”
Another advantage of the talk, besides inspiring future entrepreneurs, was to give students and alumni a chance to network. “There is a lot of talent in this room,” Viswanathan said. “This gathering enabled participants to help each other, and to help mentor and inspire current students who want to be entrepreneurs.”
—Patrick Ferrell