Trevor Burnham

I read Rework while en route to Mountain View to be inter­viewed by Y Com­bi­na­tor. And I want my time and money back. This is a book that could be con­densed down to a Page-​​a-​​Day calendar without any loss of data. I was aware that the book was an update of Getting Real, but I’d assumed the update would be one of sub­stance. Instead, all that’s changed is the style, most notably the addition of illus­tra­tions, thereby allowing the book’s large, 1.5-spaced text to stretch to 273 unsat­is­fy­ing pages.

To be fair, I’m not the target audience for this book. Sure, I’m founding a small startup that makes web-​​based software. But this book is strictly aimed at founders of small startups that make web-​​based software and are lifestyle busi­nesses. If you want to go the more tra­di­tional route (raise serious invest­ment capital, scale your business, and even­tu­ally sell or go public), Rework is as irrel­e­vant as it is banal.

The book consists almost entirely of apho­risms within 1–3 page sections, e.g.: “Plans let the past drive the future.” “Con­straints are advan­tages in disguise.” “When you make some­thing, you always make some­thing else.” Details are con­spic­u­ously avoided. A single-​​page section called “Start at the Epi­cen­ter” contains one analogy (“if you’re opening a hot dog stand… the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog”) and no concrete examples. As a web devel­oper, I’d love to know what this phrase means in the 37signals context: What’s the first line of code that gets written for a project? How is the work planned and divided before coding begins? Other rules seem no more plau­si­ble than their oppo­sites: “Start making smaller to-​​do lists too,” advices the book. “Long lists collect dust.” OK, but surely there are cases in which the sim­plic­ity of a single list makes it more appro­pri­ate than several?

I want books that transmit infor­ma­tion, not just vague inspi­ra­tion. Founders at Work is a terrific book that does both, and I was thrilled to meet its author yes­ter­day. (Jessica actually blurbed this book: “Rework is like its authors: fast-​​moving, icon­o­clas­tic, and inspir­ing. It’s not just for startups. Anyone who works can learn from this.”) But surely I’m not the only one who’s upset that Jason & David passed up a great oppor­tu­nity here: Rather than writing a man­i­festo, couldn’t they have dis­tilled their expe­ri­ences more con­cretely? They’ve run 37signals for a decade, and yet at no point in Rework do they say: “Here is a decision we faced, here’s what we did, and here’s why.” Wouldn’t that be more useful than a list of one-​​size-​​fits-​​all asser­tions, backed up by already-​​familiar case studies? (The iPod suc­ceeded because it had fewer features! South­west suc­ceeded because they fly only one kind of airplane!)

Rework is the embod­i­ment of the cult of 37signals. It encour­ages you to be exactly like 37signals, to find a niche in which you can make cus­tomers happy while scratch­ing your own itch. But not every business can or should be run like a software boutique, and even fewer can be prof­itable by selling “by-​​products” like this book, as one section advises. The fact is that there is only demand for a handful of blogs like Signal vs. Noise, and not every startup founder is cut out for the workshop circuit. Sure, 37signals develops good products, but I can’t help but wonder whether their business phi­los­o­phy might be dif­fer­ent if they didn’t have a lucra­tive side-​​gig as business philosophers.

Tags:   business