[virgilp]

Thank you, again. Now I understand where you come from, much better; and I see which of my assumptions may be wrong. I think this is where we fundamentally both agree and disagree:

> A manager's goal (especially a C-level exec or a co-founder) shouldn't be to win arguments, it should be to achieve organisational goals

Agree: this should be the C-level goal. But ("disagree") I also think that's _exactly_ what DHH was doing.

My reading of the kerfuffle is this: Basecamp somehow managed to established a toxic work culture, where employees were discussing internally contentious social issues and it got so bad that it was breaking the team apart and impacting business performance; something had to be done. So JF+DHH issued the directive "no internal activism". Seen through this lens, everything else makes sense (you can't tolerate internal activism if you already established it's hurting you badly, because that would negate your efforts to curb it; and you're willing to buy out the "activists" so that you get rid of them - yes losing employees is bad, but it's "chemotherapy bad": it hurts you but may help you survive. Painful, but required). Time will tell if my reading of the events was correct, I guess.

[side note]

> Although I wouldn't necessarily assume his account is entirely accurate or includes all relevant context either!

He claims it's a copy-paste (with some anonymization). To my knowledge, nobody called him out as a liar (and lots of people had reasons to).