Jason Fried

Jason Fried is an entrepreneur, author, and software designer best known as the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the Chicago-based company behind Basecamp and the HEY email service. He studied finance at the University of Arizona, graduating in 1996. After a brief stint as a web designer in San Diego, he concluded he "wasn't built to work for other people," returned to Chicago, and did freelance web design before co-founding 37signals in 1999 with Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim as a web design firm.

The company pivoted from client services to building its own web-based products, launching the project-management tool Basecamp in 2004 — which became so central to the business that the company briefly renamed itself Basecamp before reverting to 37signals. Fried has long partnered with David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails), and together they built a famously profitable, bootstrapped, small-team business that has resisted venture funding and enterprise sprawl. In 2006, Jeff Bezos took a minority stake in the company; that same year Fried was named to MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of top innovators under 35.

Fried is also a prolific writer and speaker. He co-authored *Defensive Design for the Web* (2004), *Getting Real* (2006), the New York Times bestsellers *Rework* (2010) and *Remote: Office Not Required* (2013), and *It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work* (2018), all with Hansson. His TED talk "Why work doesn't happen at work" and his writing have made him a well-known contrarian voice on calm companies, sustainable growth, and building without chasing scale.

As an angel investor, Fried operates conservatively and personally rather than as a professional VC. He has described keeping most of his risk tied to his own business, and many of his personal investments function as support for friends and founders he believes in rather than as return-maximizing bets.

• Invests his own money personally, at angel/seed scale — not through a fund and not as a lead institutional investor.
• Deliberately conservative: he keeps the bulk of his financial risk inside his own profitable business (37signals) and treats outside investing as a smaller, secondary activity.
• Backs people over spreadsheets — several of his investments are described as support for friends and founders he respects, sometimes without a strong expectation of financial return.
• Gravitates toward software, productivity, and internet businesses aligned with his own worldview: simple, focused, single-idea products built by strong founders.
• Skeptical of hyper-growth, blitzscaling, and "poking the world in the eye" — his public philosophy favors calm, sustainable, profitable businesses, which colors what he finds worth backing.