How Basecamp Runs a Global Remote Company with 60 People and No Managers

Snapshot

37signals (the company behind Basecamp and HEY) has been fully remote since its founding in 1999. About 60 employees. Distributed across five continents. No offices. No Slack. No full-time managers. They wrote the book on remote work — literally, twice — and have been operating under the same core principles for over 25 years.

This is not a company that went remote during a pandemic and made it work. This is a company that designed the remote operating system from scratch, used their own product to run it, and documented everything publicly. That makes it the highest-fidelity case study available.

Founded: 1999 in Chicago by Jason Fried (with Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim) as a web-design firm called 37signals. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) joined in 2003 and co-created Basecamp, which launched in February 2004 and eventually became the company’s primary product.
Products: Basecamp (project management), HEY (email), Shape Up (free methodology book).
Structure: Private company. No investors. No board. No outside pressure to grow headcount.

Core Philosophy

37signals believes that calm, focused work is a competitive advantage. Their operating principles follow from that belief:

• Async by default. Most work should not require real-time coordination. If it does, that is a design flaw, not a scheduling problem.
• Writing over speaking. “Writing solidifies, chat dissolves.” Every important decision, discussion, and direction gets written down — not because they are obsessive documentarians, but because it is the only thing that scales across time zones and future employees. (Source)
• Urgency is a default that should be overridden. “ASAP is poison.” Their communication guide explicitly names the assumption of urgency as toxic to focus and decision quality. (Source)
• Managers of one. Every hire is expected to set their own direction, determine what needs doing, and do it — without waiting to be told. (Source)

Communication Model

All internal communication lives in Basecamp. No exceptions. No email internally. No Slack. No Teams. “98% of our internal communication happens inside Basecamp.” (Source) Zoom is used occasionally for 2–3 person calls. GitHub is used occasionally for pull request review. Everything else is Basecamp.

Four required async mechanisms keep the company in sync without meetings:

These run automatically via Basecamp’s automatic check-in feature. They are not optional. They replace most status meetings, all-hands check-ins, and much of what organizations typically use Slack for.

Spatial context matters. If you are discussing a task, the discussion lives in the comments under that task. If you are discussing a document, comments attach to the document. Communication does not detach from the thing it is about. This is what makes the “everything in one tool” rule actually workable.

Group chat (Campfire) exists but is treated as a hazard. 37signals published a full guide on why group chat is harmful as a default: it creates false urgency, makes casual thoughts feel like decisions, and interrupts the focus blocks that deep work requires. (Source) Campfire is scoped explicitly to the equivalent of office small talk — “stuff that disappears, and that’s fine.” It is not for decisions, not for project work, not for anything that matters. The anti-chat rule is enforced by culture and policy, not by locking the tool.

The core argument: real-time communication is a tax on the whole company, not just on you. Every message that arrives during focused work is a request for someone to context-switch. The default should be to write something thoughtful and asynchronously, and accept that a response will come hours later, not minutes.

Planning and Cadence

37signals runs on Shape Up — the planning methodology they designed, use internally, and published publicly as a free book. (Source)

The full cycle:

1. Shape (during cooldown): Senior staff and founders identify a problem worth solving and shape a rough solution. Shaping means defining the problem, sketching an approach, and identifying the risks — without writing a full spec.
2. Bet (second week of cooldown): The leadership team runs a betting table. They review shaped pitches and decide what gets built next cycle. Work not bet on does not get scheduled. No backlog of half-approved ideas.
3. Build (6-week cycle): A small team — typically 1 designer + 1–2 programmers — builds the bet autonomously. No daily standups from management. The team uses Hill Charts (inside Basecamp) to show their own progress.
4. Cooldown (2 weeks): Bugs, documentation, planning. No new feature work begins during cooldown.

The critical concept: appetite, not estimates. The question is not “how long will this take?” It is “how much time is this worth?” If a problem is worth 6 weeks, it gets 6 weeks. If the scope does not fit, scope gets cut — not the deadline. (Source)

All teams run on the same cadence. There are six betting decisions per year. That enforces real prioritization.

Decision-Making Model

The co-founders (Jason Fried and DHH) are the ultimate decision-makers. They personally shape work, run the betting table, and set direction. This is not delegation theater — they are deeply operationally involved.

Below that layer, decisions are distributed to individuals. The “manager of one” model means that most decisions about how to do the work never surface to leadership. People are hired with the expectation that they do not need permission for most things.

For important decisions — new policies, major product directions, significant company changes — the process is: write it up in Basecamp, let it develop, let people comment. Not a meeting. Not a vote. A document that accumulates input and then gets decided.

What does not work well: conflict resolution and poor performance. DHH is explicit about this. These cases bubble up to the founders. There is no management layer to absorb them. If someone is chronically underperforming, the founders deal with it. That is the price of no middle management. (Source)

Org Structure

• ~60 employees.
• No full-time managers. Policy reinstated in August 2024 after a period of experimenting with full-time management roles. (Source)
• Management distributed among senior ICs. Each lead or principal programmer manages one mentee alongside their primary individual contributor work.
• No dedicated PMs, no middle management layers, no VP titles. Everyone touches the product.
• Flat by design. “Horizontal ambition” — getting better at your craft — is rewarded. “Vertical ambition” — climbing a promotion ladder — is not a path here. (Source)
• Status updates via automation, not hierarchy. Automatic check-ins replace the overhead of 1:1 status conversations with managers.

The Management Experiment (2021–2024)

37signals tried full-time management. It did not work.

Around 2021, as the company grew and took on more products, they introduced dedicated full-time manager roles. The reasoning was logical: scale demands coordination, and someone has to own that coordination.

By August 2024, DHH published a post announcing the reversal. The experiment was over. (Source)

What went wrong:

• Full-time managers created a new layer of process without improving decision quality.
• The founders became more distant from day-to-day product and engineering work — which is where their judgment is most valuable.
• Management roles attracted people optimizing for the management track rather than for craft and product.
• The “manager of one” culture — which depends on everyone being a self-directed professional — eroded when a management layer absorbed the accountability that individuals previously owned.

The lesson is not that management is always wrong. It is that at 60 people, with two deeply involved founders and a culture built on individual accountability, full-time managers added overhead without adding value. The model only works because the founders stay operationally close and hiring standards are high enough that most decisions never need escalation. Remove either of those conditions and the conclusion changes.

Tools and Stack

(Sources, handbook)

Rituals

In-person meet-ups happen twice per year, one week each, different city every time. Loosely structured. Strategic team sessions, 1:1s, and social exploration. This is where in-person relationships that sustain remote culture get built. (Source)

All Hands happens at the end of every cycle — every 6 weeks. Full company on Zoom. Product updates, business operations, new hires, anything worth sharing company-wide. (Source)

Everyone on Support (EOS) — every employee does periodic customer support shifts. Not optional. The stated purpose: “Talking directly to customers helps us realize what’s wrong and what’s right with our products.” (Source)

Social check-ins are sent automatically every few weeks: “What books are you reading?” “What did you do this weekend?” These are optional but designed to build the connective tissue that in-office teams build by proximity. (Source)

Onboarding

Onboarding at 37signals is entirely remote. There is no orientation week, no in-person kickoff, no cohort of new hires. And yet the system is tightly designed. (Source)

Before day one: People Ops ships a pre-configured Apple laptop. The manager emails Day 1 instructions before the start date. You have what you need before you log in.

Day 1: A personalized Basecamp project — “Welcome, [name]!” — is waiting when you arrive. It contains role-specific to-do lists for three parties: the new hire, an Ops buddy, and the manager. Everyone knows what they are responsible for. Nothing falls through a gap.

Three support contacts are assigned immediately:

• Ops buddy — handles technical setup: credentials, tooling, access.
• 37signals buddy — a cross-team cultural guide (not on your immediate team). Answers the questions you don’t want to ask your manager.
• Manager — sets project direction, schedules a recurring 1:1 from Day 1.

Week 1: real work. New hires start on actual projects in the first week. The 90-day ramp sets formal expectations, and most people report feeling fully integrated within three months. The model relies on the new hire being a self-directed professional from day one — the system provides structure, but not hand-holding.

What this means for you: Most companies onboard by proximity — putting new hires near experienced people and hoping osmosis works. 37signals replaces that with explicit structure: defined contacts, pre-staged projects, and immediate real work. You can replicate this even at 10 people.

Benefits and Working Conditions

37signals uses benefits not as a recruitment tactic but as an expression of their operating philosophy: calm work is sustainable work. (Source)

The 4-day summer week is worth noting in particular: this is not a one-off experiment. It has been a permanent annual policy for years. The implicit message is that sustained output at lower intensity beats short bursts followed by burnout.

How They Hire

37signals hires slowly and rarely. Open positions stay open until the right person appears — there is no hiring pressure tied to headcount targets, because there are no headcount targets. (Source)

The “manager of one” filter is applied at the hiring stage. They are explicitly looking for people who can set their own direction, identify what needs doing, and execute without being told. This is assessed through the hiring process, not assumed after joining.

Trial projects are used for design and engineering candidates. Instead of purely hypothetical interviews, candidates complete a paid project that mirrors actual work. The output reveals communication style, judgment, and quality under realistic conditions.

Who does not fit: People who thrive in collaborative, real-time environments will find the system uncomfortable. People who need active direction or rely on social cues from peers to stay focused will find the async default isolating rather than freeing.

The practical implication: At 37signals, one mis-hire is expensive in a way that it is not at a 500-person company. Without a management layer to absorb the impact, a chronically underperforming hire consumes founder bandwidth directly. Their patience in hiring is not idealism — it is risk management.

What They Do Well

• Documentation as byproduct: The communication system produces a written record of all decisions, progress, and direction. Future employees can read what happened and why. There is no institutional knowledge trapped in people’s heads or chat logs.
• Forcing prioritization: The 6-week betting table means someone has to decide what gets worked on. There is no infinite backlog of “in progress” items. Work either gets bet on or it waits.
• Maker schedule, protected: With no managers booking meetings, and async as the default, builders get long uninterrupted blocks by design — not by luck.
• Radical transparency within the company: Everyone’s check-ins are visible to everyone. Heartbeats and Kickoffs are company-wide. The result is a shared situational awareness that distributed teams often struggle to maintain.

Tradeoffs and Weaknesses

The written obligation is real. Daily check-ins, weekly previews, heartbeats, kickoffs, spatial-context documentation — this is not a low-overhead system. The freedom is purchased with disciplined writing habits. People who do not naturally write well or frequently will struggle.

The model strains at conflict and performance. DHH says this plainly: the hardest thing to distribute is dealing with people who are not performing. Without a management layer to absorb and handle these situations, they escalate to the founders. That is fine at 60 people. It is a structural problem at 200. (Source)

Scale ceiling is acknowledged. DHH explicitly says the arrangement would be “difficult to maintain at a grand scale.” This is a consciously small-company operating system. (Source)

Time zone gaps still exist. 37signals does not document specific norms for cross-timezone blocking or overlap hours. The “async by default” principle means people in different regions operate with genuine scheduling independence — and genuine communication latency.

Lessons Learned: What They Tried and Changed

37signals is unusually transparent about what has not worked. This is rare. Most companies describe their operating model as if it arrived fully formed. 37signals publishes the failures.

Full-time managers (2021–2024): Covered above. The short version: introduced them, found they added process overhead without improving decisions, reversed the policy publicly. The willingness to reverse a multi-year structural decision — and document why — is as instructive as the original choice.

Open company-wide political discussions: In April 2021, Jason Fried announced six policy changes at 37signals, including ending “societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.” (Source: Jason Fried, “Changes at Basecamp,” HEY World, April 26, 2021) The announcement was controversial — roughly a third of the company took severance and left. (Reported in The Verge, April 30, 2021) The stated reasoning: the company is not a family, not a social movement, not a platform for changing the world. It is a business that makes software. Mixing company communication channels with political discourse blurred that line and generated conflict without producing anything useful for the business. The boundary is now explicit: internal tools are for work.

“Save the world” mission framing: 37signals explicitly stepped back from the idea that their software is about a higher mission. Their framing: they make good software, they run a calm and sustainable business, and that is enough. The “we’re changing how the world works” language common in tech companies is absent from their handbook. They consider it a distraction from the actual work.

Trying to please everyone: Shape Up was in part a response to the failure of traditional project management — estimates, backlogs, quarterly planning, Gantt charts. They tried the mainstream approaches and found them consistently produced the wrong outcomes: scope creep, missed deadlines, features built to satisfy process rather than solve problems. Shape Up emerged from that accumulated frustration.

What Founders Can Copy

These seven practices transfer to any company with 15–80 people, regardless of whether you are fully remote. Per-item scale notes are in parentheses; the global ceiling reflects 37signals’s own size and DHH’s stated belief that the manager-less core would not survive at “hundreds or thousands.”

1. Replace status meetings with structured async questions. Daily and weekly automatic check-ins cost nothing and return hours. Set them up in whatever tool you use. (Applies at any scale; gets more valuable as headcount grows.)
2. Run 6-week cycles. Pick a fixed cadence — 4 weeks, 6 weeks — and hold it company-wide. The consistency creates urgency and decision rhythm. (Cleanest at 10–80; above ~100 teams typically need nested team cycles inside a longer planning rhythm.)
3. Write Heartbeats and Kickoffs. Force every team lead to write one-paragraph cycle retrospectives and previews. This alone creates the documentation most companies claim they want but never produce. (Applies at 10–80 cleanly; gets noisy above 100 unless filtered to division summaries.)
4. One mentee per lead. Distribute management horizontally. Every senior person takes one junior person under their wing. Scales to ~80 people without full-time managers. (Explicit ceiling at ~80, per DHH; do not extrapolate past it.)
5. Run a betting table. Once per cycle, the leadership team reviews what is shaped and bets on what gets built. Nothing gets worked on that has not been explicitly bet on. Hard prioritization. (Cleanest at 10–80; above this, divisional betting tables fork off the central one.)
6. Appetite instead of estimates. Ask “how much is this problem worth?” before asking “how long will this take?” Scope to the budget. Cut features, not deadlines. (Applies at any scale; especially useful when product complexity outpaces estimation accuracy.)
7. One tool, everything inside. Fragmented communication across email, Slack, Notion, Jira, and Google Docs is not a tool problem — it is an information architecture problem. Pick one system and enforce it. (Cleanest below 100; harder at 100–500 because subteams genuinely need specialized tools; very hard above 500 without a federation layer.)

Where This Model Breaks

• 200+ employees: The manager-of-one model requires calibrated hiring and dense trust networks. DHH says so himself. Do not expect it to auto-scale.
• If hiring standards slip: One chronic under-performer generates disproportionate founder bandwidth. The whole system assumes everyone is a high-caliber self-directed professional.
• Tight real-time collaboration: Roles requiring rapid iteration — live customer-facing sales, real-time video production, support escalations — do not fit the async default. 37signals routes around this by keeping those roles small and bounded.
• Young teams without established trust: A 10-person startup that hasn’t built trust norms yet will find the communication vacuum before the culture fills it. The system works because of trust, not despite the absence of structure.

Related Practices

• Async Communication — the foundation that makes everything here possible
• Planning Cycles — how structured cadences replace perpetual roadmap management
• Documentation Systems — the written culture that makes async durable
• Decision Ownership — how “managers of one” distribute authority

Related Frameworks

• Sync vs Async Decision Matrix — when to use real-time vs written communication

Sources

1. 37signals Employee Handbook: How We Work — https://basecamp.com/handbook/how-we-work
2. The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication — https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate
3. Our Rituals — 37signals Employee Handbook — https://basecamp.com/handbook/our-rituals
4. Getting Started — 37signals Employee Handbook — https://books.37signals.com/3/the-37signals-employee-handbook/7/getting-started
5. DHH: We once more have no full-time managers at 37signals — https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-once-more-have-no-full-time-managers-at-37signals-f8611085
6. Shape Up (37signals) — https://basecamp.com/shapeup
7. Jason Fried: Why I Run a Flat Company (Inc.) — https://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/jason-fried-why-i-run-a-flat-company.html
8. Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team — https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems
9. Jason Fried, “Changes at Basecamp” (April 26, 2021) — primary source for the political-discussion policy change: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
10. The Verge, “Basecamp implodes as employees flee” (April 30, 2021) — strong-secondary for the ~33% departures following the policy change: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employees-memo-policy-controversy

Inferences

• The total written obligation across all required async mechanisms (daily check-ins, weekly previews, heartbeats, kickoffs, in-context project documentation) is substantial. The “fewer meetings = more freedom” framing is accurate but incomplete — the freedom is purchased with disciplined documentation culture. Companies that adopt the tools without the writing discipline will get the overhead without the benefit.
• The twice-yearly in-person meet-ups appear to do more cultural maintenance work than 37signals explicitly claims. Purely async remote teams that skip synchronous time tend to lose trust calibration. The meet-up cadence is likely load-bearing for the manager-less model.
• The 2-week cooldown is a structurally enforced reflection period. Most companies try to carve out strategic thinking time ad hoc — it gets cut. 37signals builds it into the calendar every six weeks. This is not incidental to their ability to maintain direction.

Work with Alex

If your company is running into the coordination problems this operating system is designed to solve — fragmented communication, missed commitments, unclear ownership, meetings that replace decisions — Alex helps leadership teams design the operating system that allows execution to scale.