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David Senra: DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control

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David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and the co-founder of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. He has spent 25 years building a software business around one condition: no one gets to tell him what to do. Jason Fried hired him as a contractor out of Copenhagen for $15 an hour. He built the first version of Basecamp with just 10 hours a week — 380 hours in total — and still credits the shortage of time for how good it turned out. He does not trust himself with unlimited resources. Nobody should, he argues. Give a team too much money and too many people and it will build a blob. Forty-some venture firms came calling in 2005. The only investor 37signals ever said yes to was Jeff Bezos, who accepted a term sheet priced so absurdly high they were certain he would walk. They have been sending him dividend checks ever since. Basecamp has been rewritten three times, and the original 2004 version — discontinued in 2010 — still runs and still makes millions in profit. His marketing strategy, borrowed from Kathy Sierra, hasn't changed in two decades: you can't outspend the giants, but you can out-teach them. His product test hasn't either. He bui

David Heinemeier Hansson: I have a mild skepticism about my own ability to just talk at length about most topics that I care about, because I remember "Getting Real" from 2006, the brevity. We were so brief. All the chapters in "Getting Real," most of them are half a page. Some of them are three paragraphs. And I actually have a deep appreciation for our former ability to be that succinct. David Heinemeier Hansson: And it wasn't like we were trying to... It was just, here's the distillation of this idea down to these three paragraphs, and that's it. Now, what's funny about that is when we…

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