The Cashflow King: “Here’s How I Do It”, Negotiating w/ Jeff Bezos, Elon’s Cracked Rocket - Jason Fried

**Shaan Puri** (0:01)
I got four words for you.
Self-funded cash cow.
That is what today's guest, Jason Fried, has built. He's got this company, 37 Signals. It's been around for, I don't know, 25 years, and they're very hush-hush about their numbers, but the only thing he's ever said is that they make tens of millions of profit a year and have been doing that for a long time. In fact, the investor Jason Lemkin once said that the two greatest self-funded cash cow companies he's ever seen are Craigslist and 37 Signals. And even better, they do this without setting any goals. They work only four days a week during the summers and they spend next to nothing on marketing. And so I was dying to ask Jason three questions. That's what we did in this episode. I said, how did you build this low stress lifestyle company that has no goals and no long-term plans? How do you do that as a CEO? The second thing I asked him was, what was it like being face to face with Jeff Bezos when he was negotiating his deal with him?
And lastly, I wanna know the step-by-step process. How does he generate massive interest in his products pre-launch? He's done this over and over again. He has this strategy where he uses a founder letter pre-launch and he uses that to generate a lot of interest. I wanted to understand how he does it. What is the strategy behind that? So no more teasing, let's do it. Here's the episode with Jason Fried.

**Sam Parr** (1:23)
We were doing research for this podcast and I've looked into a bunch. I'm inspired by you. Is it weird that we know that you spent something like $30 million on homes in the past like two years?
You started like a tech company, not looking to get into this and now like your home purchases are on the blogs.

**Jason Fried** (1:43)
It's fucking embarrassing. And frankly, I tried to hide them. I tried to do all the things like double LLC and the whole thing.
I like architecture, I like houses, I like land. It's just that's like really the thing I really found myself liking a lot. And unfortunately, it's very hard to just-

**Shaan Puri** (2:00)
How do they find it? How do they know? Cause they're like, Jason Fried bought this house and me and Sam, we're supposed to be prepping for the spot and we spent like 20 minutes clicking through these photos being like, this house is sick.
How do they actually find it?

**Jason Fried** (2:12)
I don't know. My guess is so like technically it's hidden in a sense, but I think that all we gotta do is probably ask like a real estate agent.
And you kind of have NDAs, but someone knows some or like the electrician or the cable company, someone hangs out and finds out, or they look in the mailbox and see that, there's a million ways, unfortunately.

**Shaan Puri** (2:32)
Well, what's cool about you and what I honestly admire, we started off talking about how big the business is, but the reality is what I admire is, some guys are into beautiful eyes, some guys are into butts. Me and Sam on this podcast, we are into people who define their own game and then play it. And that's the one thing I think you do really, really well. And you've gone viral many times by putting out there some of your philosophies on how you approach business. What I wanna do is I wanna kind of read you a quote and I want you to react to it. I want you to explain and unpack a little bit for each one of these and we can go fast. So the first one is you're anti long-term planning. You don't do long-term plans. And here's the quote I like to go, long-term planning is a fantasy.
I don't plan long-term because I wanna do what I think, not what I thought.
Explain that one.

**Jason Fried** (3:17)
Yeah, long-term planning is what you thought. And like doing, figuring out as you go is what you think. And I don't like the idea of having a thought six months ago, eight months ago, or 12 months ago, and feeling like I have to follow that whim because I happen to have it and happen to write it or wrote it down. I don't get that.
I know a lot of people think there's a lot of certainty or comfort in like setting out a plan and like, you know, but really it's, that plan is then just based on a moment in time. And then people are like, well, you can adjust. Well, if you're gonna adjust, just adjust. Just don't even do the first plan.