Recode Decode: Jason Fried

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Kara Swisher** (1:57)
Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, Editor-at-Large of Recode. You may know me as someone who hasn't checked her email since 2007, I hope I didn't miss anything. But in my spare time, I'm just a reporter and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about power change and the people you need to know. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Jason Fried, the CEO and co-founder of Basecamp. He's back on Recode Decode today because Basecamp has just launched a new product called Hey, which it describes as a fresh start for e-mail. I also want to talk about the tools like Basecamp that are helping people work from home more than ever. Jason, welcome to Recode Decode.
So you've been here a lot, and I want to talk about a lot of things, including Hey, because I'm thrilled to be able to try to use that.
But let's talk a little bit about coronavirus right now because one of the things that your company, you have sort of put out a lot of stricture on your company that were already here in these, what a lot of people are doing. So I'd love you to assess the landscape right now.

**Jason Fried** (2:55)
Yeah, you mean remote work?
Yeah, you know, first of all, I'm thrilled that people are getting the chance to go remote and that a myth has been busted. Anytime a myth has been busted, it's great. So the myth is that the office is a special place, that only great work happens in the office, that the office is required for people to get together and collaborate. And there's some advantages to being in person occasionally, but there's also a lot of disadvantages. So I love the fact that people are getting a chance to do this, even though it's a scramble for some and a hard adjustment at some times.
But the biggest thing I'm seeing that's going wrong, frankly, is that people are trying to, or companies are trying to basically port the office environment remotely. And if you think about like porting anything, you know, back when the web first hit like in 95, 96, the graphical web, people tried to kind of port CD-ROM and DVD style interfaces onto the web because that's all they knew. There was this new platform called the web. They didn't know how to design for it, so they took a previous design from another platform, CD-ROM and DVD, and moved it over. So all the buttons were very graphical and textured and 3D.
And then, you know, that doesn't really work. And then a platform needs time to find its place. And I think the web finally did that. And you can also see it in software like someone writes a tool for Windows and then ports it to the Mac. You can tell it's not quite right. And I think that's what's happening today is people are trying to port the office environment online.
And that's not the right way to work remotely. So I understand it takes some time to adjust, but I'm a bit disillusioned by the just like, let's just have the same number of meetings. Let's just have them online. Let's just do the same things we did before, but let's just do it online. That's not really the best way to approach this.