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No investors, then no customers
No investors, no board
Investors and a board would be able to tell the founders what to do, so the business was structured around never having them. Customers do get some say, since a business whose products nobody buys does not continue. Putting a product into the world, taking payment, and listening in return is a tolerable exchange.
Open source as a gift
Open source goes a step beyond that. Thousands of hours poured into a project like Emacs are a gift, and a stranger who tweaks a few things and sends a pull request on GitHub starts a little club of people making it better together. Ill-considered feedback on something that took 4,000 hours is different: whoever takes a gift of that size owes a modicum of respect, and paying is what earns a hearing.
Retiring from customers
DHH expects 37signals to be his last business, since he has made the money he needed to live the life he wants. Retirement will mean retirement from customers and the economic exchange, and after that he plans to keep making and sharing things with no claim on his time, his attention, or where he wants to go with it.
How does a board of directors control a company?
A board is elected by the shareholders and has legal authority over the company's direction. It hires and fires the chief executive, approves major decisions such as sales or large borrowing, and oversees the budget. Investors who put in a large amount of money often negotiate a board seat in the term sheet. A company with no outside investors can have a board made up only of its owners.
How do pull requests work on GitHub?
A pull request is a proposed change to a project's code, submitted by someone who copied the project and edited it. The maintainers see exactly which lines changed, discuss them in comments, and decide whether to merge the change. GitHub launched in 2008 and built its workflow around this model. Strangers can contribute to a project without ever receiving permission to edit the main copy.
Why has Emacs lasted for decades?
Emacs began in 1976 at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as a set of macros for the TECO text editor, written by Guy Steele and David Moon among others. Richard Stallman wrote GNU Emacs in the mid-1980s. It can be extended by its users in a programming language called Emacs Lisp. Its users have written packages for email, calendars, and writing that run inside the editor.
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