I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn't enough.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.

Meetings should be great - they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.

Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users. The Web, after all, is home to some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of indexed pages. But every company, big or small, can draw more Google traffic by using search-engine optimization - SEO, for short.

What's bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing.

I've run into a lot of companies that invent positions for great people just so they don't get away. But hiring people when you don't have real work for them is insulting to them and hurtful to you.

Remind yourself that other people's jobs aren't so simple.

Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it's improving the thing you already thought of six months - or six years - ago. It's the work of work.

Many of the things we do at Basecamp would be considered unusual at most companies: paying for employees' hobbies, allowing our team to work from anywhere, even footing the bill for fresh fruits and veggies in our staff members' homes.

As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.

I've seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn't matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.

When meetings are the norm - the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem - they no longer work.

Who you work with is even more important than who you hang out with because you spend a lot more time with your workmates than your friends.

Bottom line: If you can't spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you'll never get the best from them.

Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale - the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.

In almost every case, cutting things back is a way of favoring what is left.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

If you tell your story well, it can help attract customers; it can help people understand your business better, and you are more approachable as a business and a company.

You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.

When you can't see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.

Respect the work that you've never done before.

Deadlines are great for customers because having one means they get a product, not just a promise that someday they'll get a product.

I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.