Figuring out who to bring a particular issue or question to shouldn’t be a guessing game. Most concerns fall pretty clearly within the responsibility of a specific team at Basecamp, and the head of that team should be the first point of contact. At the same time, every single person who works at Basecamp is approachable and friendly, more than willing to point you in the right direction. If you have a question, you’re probably not the first, so speak up!
Below you’ll find a list of the major groups and teams within the company. They’re listed in alphabetical order by group name first and then, when relevant, by team. Inside groups/teams, people are listed in alphabetical order by last name, and the most senior people in a group/team are shown in bold.
Andrea LaRowe is Basecamp’s Head of People Ops. Andrea works with Jason and David to make working at Basecamp an excellent experience for its employees. She manages the day-to-day operations of the company, human resources, benefits & payroll administration, and event planning. Andrea is often the best person to tap first, when you don’t know who to talk to about a problem.
Navid Afshar is Basecamp’s admin assistant. He assists Andrea with all administrative operations, and he’s primarily responsible for coordinating the details for our meetups. Navid is another great person to ping if you don’t know where to go with a question.
Kristin Aardsma is the head of the customer support team. She’s responsible for the entire customer support team which uses Help Scout to respond to customer tickets. Her team consists of Jabari Allen (US), Ashley Bowe (US), Janice Burch (US), Sylvia Chong (Hong Kong), Chase Clemons (US), Merissa Dawson (US), Shanae Dykes (US), Tony Giang (Australia), James Glazebrook (Germany), Elizabeth Gramm (US), Chris Joyce (United Kingdom), Lexi Kent-Monning (US), Jim Mackenzie (United Kingdom), Jayne Ogilvie (United Kingdom), and Joan Stewart (US).
We have two C-level executives at Basecamp.
Jason Fried is our CEO and runs design. He’s principally responsible for setting the overall direction of the company. That means deciding when to embark on a new version of Basecamp or experiment with a side project (Basecamp-spinoff Know Your Company is one example). Jason also spends a lot of time writing and speaking about what we’ve learned about business, design, and organizations. He was one of the original three founders who started 37signals, the design firm that led to Basecamp, back in 1999.
David Heinemeier Hansson is our CTO and runs technology. He’s responsible for setting the technical direction of our products. He originally created Ruby on Rails, the web framework that we’ve built all our products on top of. David also spends a lot of time sharing what we’ve learned to the world. He has been working with Jason since 2001 and became a partner at the company when 37signals, the design company, transitioned to do products instead of working for clients in 2004.
Our data analyst is Jane Yang. She is responsible for testing and analyzing all sorts of Basecamp data – conversion rates, pricing models, back-end operational performance, user experience, and oh-so-much more. She works with Justin White on SIP to maintain our data pipeline.
The design group is led by Jonas Downey and consists of four teams:
Adam Stoddard is our lead marketing designer, and the only person on this team. He’s responsible for all design on basecamp.com, rework.fm, and any other public-facing web properties like the Basecamp help sites, etc. He’ll also occasionally work on physical products (book covers, merch design, etc).