Jason Fried:

It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to followers, friends, and feed count. This crap doesn’t mean anything. Kids are coming out of school thinking, I want to start the next YouTube or Facebook. If a restaurant served more food than everybody else but lost money on every diner, would it be successful? No. But on the Internet, for some reason, if you have more users than everyone else, you’re successful. No, you’re not.

37signals was once a neat idea and a compelling business model, but it ceased to be even remotely neat or compelling as soon as it became a fundamentalist ideology, a broken record repeating its own mantra with ever-heightening disdain for the alternatives.

With Fried’s singular obsession over profit he has a similarly myopic definition of the word “success”. Success, to Fried, is revenue now, profit now, and businesses that do not meet those criteria are not simply “unsuccessful”, they’re worthy of mockery and derision.

There are actually other definitions of success and other motivations for wanting to build a successful business, and it’s not just wrong but downright asinine for Fried to suggest that a company like Facebook isn’t “successful”. Mark Zuckerberg launched a website that created 700 jobs. 37signals wrote a manifesto that created 15. That’s got to count for something.