The hall is packed! We had to carry extra chairs in.

Coudal is ribbing Fried and the audience is lovin’ it. He ribbed in-house creative departments too (with apologies). [Refer to Lucian’s later post for more info. I was a bit distracted at this point in time]

Coudal’s parting line: “The curious shall inherit the earth”.

Not the ‘meek’ (if meek means sitting around and doing nothing). Not even the ‘creative’. I can understand that. I’ve seen enough ‘creative’ people who nod their heads when I tell them about how CSS is much more than changing fonts and colours. Then they go back and continue design websites with nested tables, proprietary code, and no image labelling.

We aren’t ‘curious’ about learning new things, if it isn’t in our school syllabus.

Over now to Fried. He says, we all know the basics now - CSS, web standards. Now how do we become entrepreneural?

Fail in obscurity. Then your ego won’t be battered. “Embrace obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.”

Next, he says “less comes for free”. For instance, some want to outdo their competitors. If they spend ‘this’ much, you want to spend more. It works for some but not for all. Instead of outdoing them, try to ‘underdo’ them. Come up with products that are simpler and clearer.

[This reminds me of Creative’s way of battling Apple. iPod minis come in four colours? Let’s have 10! Hmm, still not selling well. U2 autographed the back of iPods? Let’s get our CEO to autograph our product too! Hmm … etc etc]

More pearls of wisdom: The more time you have, does not equate to getting more stuff done. You don’t need a lot of the stuff you think you need. You don’t need a lot of money.

Trivia - Basecamp ran on only one server for a year. In short, you don’t need redundancy or expensive hardware. He feels we’re moving back to the 90’s - the ‘venture capitalist’ mentality. You don’t need money when you’re just starting up - you need it only later.

Build less software. Build simpler products. You’re gonna have less time (as an entrepreneur). Polish the few features your software has, make them shine.

Leave stuff out. Add in new features, don’t take them away - that pisses off your customer. Simpler software means it’s easier to support your customer. Having less stuff means having less problems.

Software is not the solution to everything. Don’t build software that gets in people’s way.

How do you manage growth? Fried: Don’t plan too far in advance. It took Basecamp one year before we could pay our salaries. Then we stopped servicing clients and relied on Basecamp subscriptions.

Coudal: Then when you have more time you can focus on things that really matter. [expletives removed] Curious people aren’t just interested in learning. They’re interested in the process of learning.

Fried: Yes. You should hire these people. People who are passionate about what they do. People who are motivated. You don’t have to worry about what school they went to, or where they graduated. Who gives a s*?

[This is so right. The audience just applauded. I turn to Lucian and he nods. Look at the recruitment ads in Singapore - you need an IT certificate to do web design. In which case, I wouldn’t have qualified for almost every job that I’ve taken up so far, and web pages all over the country will only load in IE.]

Fried: Don’t respond too fast to things. For instance, if you improve your product, a vocal minority will complain because they don’t like change. And you feel forced to switch back to the old product, against your better judgment. We don’t need this knee-jerk reaction. It makes you look like you don’t know what you’re doing. Have conviction and explain what you’re doing.

Fried says, don’t write functional specs. A guy runs up to the mic and says, “I’m from Yahoo! and we write functional specs.” This draws laughter from the audience. The Yahoo! guy asks what can be done when he has to use a standard document.

Fried’s answer says, “What we do is write stories. Usually we keep them to one paragraph. A scenario that anyone can read, which explains what the software does.” [Note: This sounds like Joyent!]

Yahoo! guy describes his problem of having too many people adding on features they want, in the specs. Fried says his company bases what they can do, on a fixed time frame. Prioritise on things that are truly important. Launch it as version 1, then improve on it as time goes by.

Coudal has a RFP rule - if company’s specs are more than two pages long, they’re probably going to be a pain in the a** and they’re not worth working with. Fried adds that if the company put in the effort to write long specs, they’d probably want to keep their requirements that way.

This was an inspiring talk. My rating: 4.5/5.