When they DHH+Jason laid the 7 of us off from Highrise (the Basecamp CRM spin-off) no one even showed up online to say anything to us on our last day. Just the Head of Devops to turn off our access to things. (That guy at least apologized for no-one else being there) :/
The way a company deals with really difficult things like lay-offs speaks volume about the character, empathy, and skill of leadership at the top.
This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
I'd like to highlight this. I'd like to frame it and tape it to the head of every founder and entrepeneur so they have to look at it constantly. Hell, everyone who ever has to oversee other people.
This is absolutely the heart and soul of good management and being a good person, and everyone who thinks they're created a great workplace, but doesn't know this, needs to chant this 1,000,000 times.
Could you speak a little more about your impression of the company while you were there? I know you didn't want to talk about it after you left, but so many of us are/were curious, especially as to how Basecamp's private image compares to its public image.
It's tough to get it all down here in a comment. Maybe now this is all out I'll share more in some channels soon. I will say that last comment in Casey's article: “They don't want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.” That could easily have been written from someone at Highrise. (It wasn't. But it could have been) We killed ourselves to turn that thing around. And it hurt. Some of this coming out I can definitely empathize with and concur with what people experienced. Thanks for asking.
I appreciate all the work you did at Highrise, but after DHH+JF announced they were going to sell it because it was a distraction & renamed 37 Signals to Basecamp, it was difficult to keep using the product… even when they decided they didn't want to sell.
The way in which DHH announced the _conversation_ he had with Salesforce was a thing of amazement all of its own.
Thank you. Oh for sure. (for people not familiar) So we took Highrise over a bit after that announcement, and that was almost an impossible thing to overcome. It was hemorrhaging customers. It was always a turnaround project. Our biggest task for the first couple years was just trying to erase the "marketing" that we had shut down already.
Thanks Nate, I really appreciate the reply, and just want to say how much I appreciate your (and your team's) work on Highrise. You poured everything into it and it's sad to read what happened at the end.
I really enjoyed reading about and watching your videos about your turnaround of Highrise as it was happening. Tons of work. Hope you'll publish what happened at the end someday.
