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David Heinemeier Hansson started working with Jason Fried as a contract worker from Denmark. How did he eventually become a partner at 37signals?
I’ve kept in touch with David over the years, and we’d planned on doing an interview for awhile now. It finally happened this past week. This is a pretty personal interview. I spoke with David about growing up in Copenhagen, and how he met Jason (there’s a great story in there). We also discussed his new book (with Jason Fried) called Remote, and how he stays motivated when writing. This is part 1 of the interview.
Show Notes
David Heinemeier Hansson started working with Jason Fried as a contract worker from Denmark. How did he eventually become a partner at 37signals?
I’ve kept in touch with David over the years, and we’d planned on doing an interview for awhile now. It finally happened this past week. This is a pretty personal interview. I spoke with David about growing up in Copenhagen, and how he met Jason (there’s a great story in there). We also discussed his new book (with Jason Fried) called Remote, and how he stays motivated when writing. This is part 1 of the interview.
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Notable quotes
Can anyone at 37signals take advantage of moving to warmer climates?
“Absolutely: I think about 1/4 of our people are in Chicago. We have quite a few people have moved around a lot. I think Jeremy Kemper, who’s on the Rails core team, has moved about 4 or 5 times; mostly to warmer places on the West Coast. One of our support people, Kristin, just moved from Chicago to Portland. So, we definitely have people who take advantage of wherever they want to live. This is one of the great benefits of remote working – you can choose to live exactly where you want to, and it doesn’t really matter. I don’t drop a beat: it doesn’t matter if I’m in Spain or Chicago.”
“For me, personally, it’s great to not be in the same city as everyone else. I do my best work in solitude. I love those short bursts of bandwidth with in-person collaboration.”
“People overemphasize the benefits of collaboration. Collaboration is great; but it’s overused in terms as a tool.”
“For me, the most important part of writing is having something to say.”
What’s your strategy for writing?
“I’ve been working on this book for the past 10 years (in terms of my forming the ideas, and gather the experiences). When it came to recording it all, the best strategy for me was to put on the turbo chargers and get it done.”
“[Growing up] I always loved good writing. That was my inspiration for starting my own magazine in high school.”
“That happens a lot: I get inspired by something, or someone, and say – ‘Hey, I want to do that to.'”
Show notes
Remote: Office not required (David and Jason’s new book – out October 29, 2013)
Creators and Guests
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In November 2012, I traveled to the thirty seven signals office in Chicago, Chicago and that's where I got to meet David Hanemeyer Hansen for the first time. I remember thinking, man he's a lot taller than I thought he'd be. He seemed over six feet but when I asked him about it later he said he's only five foot eleven. I guess everyone seems taller when you're my height. I'm I'm only five foot eight.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I I've kept in touch with David over the years and we've been planning on doing an interview for a while now. It finally happened this past week and it's a pretty personal interview. I talked to David about growing up in Copenhagen, whether he's always been into programming, and how he met Jason Fried. This is part one of our chat here on Product People. Before we get going with the show, let me tell you about a few of my favorite sponsors.
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Speaker 1:And Sprintly is perfect software for teams of three or more people. It's the easiest way for managers and developers to track the software development process. You and your team can try Sprintly for free. Go to www.sprint.ly. Once you sign up for a billing plan, use my coupon code product people TV 2,013 to get 10% off.
Speaker 1:Hi. I'm Justin, and this is product people, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. And this week, I'm joined by a man who isn't afraid to speak his mind and who drives race cars on the weekend, David Hanemeyer Hansen of thirty seven Signals. David, thanks for taking the time to chat today.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Right on. And you're just telling me before the call that you were in Spain for a while and now you're back in Chicago.
Speaker 2:Yes. We jump back and forth a bit, but right now Chicago is beautiful here in September. The weather's nice, so it's a good time to be back.
Speaker 1:Now, I've heard you say because at times you've talked really favorably about Chicago. What is it you like about Chicago, the city?
Speaker 2:It really is just a great city. I mean, it's got great neighborhoods. There's a lot of character to the different parts of city, and everything is just so reachable. Mhmm. If you're not travelling straight in rush hour, you can get anywhere in not very much time at all, and it's just a great place to be and to live if you want to be in the city.
Speaker 2:I live in something called Wicker Park which is just a fun neighbourhood to see. I came here what eight years ago, it's been fun to watch the evolution of neighborhood over those past eight years and having access to all the great facilities of Chicago, the city, it's a great place to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell me about where you grew up. Did you grow up in a big city?
Speaker 2:I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark. So, I mean, about a million two people or something there, which I guess is somewhat of a sizable city, certainly not Chicago, but it's a nice place as well. I enjoyed the twenty five years that I spent there, but after that I was also ready to see something else. I think you need a special disposition to stay in both Copenhagen and actually to some degree Chicago as well during the winter that I've come to realize I don't really have. So now that I have the option of picking the place I want to live, neither city are really a good fit for me during the winter.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm much more of a eighties and sunny kind of person.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And is that something like do a lot of people at 37 signals take advantage of that? Are there other people taking advantage of warmer climates? Because you guys do have that kind of distributed culture there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think we have about a fourth of the people in Chicago and then the rest are spread out all over the place. And we have quite a few people who have moved around a lot. Jeremy Kemper who is also on the Rails core team, I think he has lived in like four or five different cities during the time that he has been with thirty seven signals. And most of that time he spent on the West Coast in nice warm climates.
Speaker 2:And one of our support people, Kristin, just moved from Chicago to Portland. So we definitely do have people who take advantage of just the ability to work from wherever you want to live, which is I think one of those great benefits of remote working is that you can choose to live exactly where you want to and it doesn't really matter. I don't really drop a beat in terms of my involvement with thirty seven Signals when I'm in Spain or when I'm in Chicago or when I'm travelling wherever. And it's just a Feels like a great leap of progress for the working people of the world. And I say that somewhat just people were still staying active and involved with their companies.
Speaker 2:This used to be the domain of either old people retired or people who were so ludicrously rich and didn't want to work anymore that they could live wherever they pleased. But now that luxury is accessible to a far larger percentage of the population, I think that's just, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Have you noticed any other benefit of being in a different city? Like does sometimes a different place inspire you differently or know give you something extra that you might not have had if you'd stayed you know where the head office is?
Speaker 2:Sure. I think actually for me personally it's great to not be in the same city as everybody else. I find that I do my best work in solitude most of the time. I love the bursts, the short bursts of high bandwidth collaboration. I love when we do our meet ups here in Chicago about twice a year.
Speaker 2:I love other sort of avenues of short bursts of that stuff. But otherwise, I like working in solitude, isolation and quiet. And that's why when we're not here in Chicago, we live in places that are don't have a lot going on. Yeah. At least right around where we live both in Spain and when we're in California, it's not in the middle of a city.
Speaker 2:It's not in the middle of a buzzing thing. It's right it's out somewhere where there's not a lot of people around and we can just relax and I can focus. The upcoming book that we have, Remote Office Not Required, I wrote 95% of that was in Spain. Wow. I think that's and not only did I write 95% of it while I was in Spain, I wrote it over a course of maybe two months.
Speaker 2:And I think that that focus is very easy to discount because people have a tendency to overemphasize the benefits of collaboration in my mind. Collaboration is great. It's just that it's overused as a tool of doing great things in my mind.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. We just did a self publishing, a couple self publishing episodes a while back. What's your process for writing? Do you set like a daily, you know, word count a day? Or how do you get into writing and hammer out that much work?
Speaker 2:To me the most important thing for writing is to have something to say. So after we published Rework, the publisher was quickly eager for us to do another book. Mhmm. And I just didn't have anything to say. So that makes it hard.
Speaker 2:For me remote at the time where I wrote the book, wrote it together with Jason, but the time where I spiked out the book which was actually what we did. I started by spiking out I think maybe 20 essays to just get a feel for the material. Was there enough here for a book? Mhmm. I just I had all these thoughts about it because I had already been in conversation with people about remote work.
Speaker 2:I felt like we had a good inventory of arguments and we had been living the remote work style for a good decade or so. So I already knew all the things. It was just about transcribing insights, experiences and observations that we had accumulated into a book. And for me I do that best in rapid production. So I would write maybe three, four essays a day.
Speaker 2:And just really just churn it out as fast as I could. I have a tendency, I mean some maybe some ADD but I get easily bored. So the only way I was going to finish a book was to sprint through it. I would never ever have the patience to write a book over the course of nine months, a year, multiple years. I just I get bored too quickly.
Speaker 2:So to ensure that I would not get bored, made it basically my prime objective for work for those good two months. That was the bulk of the work that I did. I didn't do a ton of programming in that time and I just did just enough work with 37 Signals to keep everything running smoothly and weigh in on the things I needed to weigh in on, but otherwise just focused on churning this book out in the fastest amount of time. And that has somewhat of a negative connotation on it. Say churn out and you think people are just like phoning it in or not putting insider or care into the material when that is quite the opposite I have been working on this book for the past ten years in terms of forming the ideas and gathering the experiences.
Speaker 2:When it came to just recording it all, the best strategy for me was just to put on the turbocharger and get it done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's I think that's one of my favorite essays from Rework was that idea that inspiration is perishable. And if you don't jump on it right away, you can lose that kind of drive to get it done.
Speaker 2:That is exactly it. Because I have this with blog posts all the all the time too. If I actually take the time to make a note that I want to write a blog post in the future, it will never get written.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The only way I write blog posts is by having the inspiration to do it and then committing to do it, doing it within the next fifteen minutes. Pretty much all the blog posts that I posted follow that pattern. There are extremely few of them where I've sort of just let, like took a bunch of notes and just let it sit there. That generally doesn't work for me. And it was the same thing with remote when we committed to writing the book, the inspiration was there.
Speaker 2:I wanted the book published so we just churned through it and got it done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah I find that too. Were you always because now professionally, you're kind of known for three things. You're you're known for Ruby on Rails, the the framework for for Ruby. You're known for your business, thirty seven Signals that you co founded with Jason Fried. And you're known for writing.
Speaker 1:Were those things that you were always into when you were a kid? Were you a kid that was programming and writing and into business?
Speaker 2:All of the above. I mean, was interested in computer games, so I love gaming. I love writing too because it wasn't so much that perhaps I initially loved writing myself, I just loved good writing. I subscribed to a magazine called Edge, which is a British computer game magazine that I just thought had amazing writing And that in large part inspired me to to do this website because I wanted to do some of that. I wanted to to be part of that.
Speaker 2:So that is how it's gone with with a lot of these things that that I get inspired by something or someone and think, hey, I wanna do that too. Mhmm. And figure out how to learn as much as I can about the domain and then then figure out how to get to that point of of wherever or whatever it is that I I pick as an idol.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And how did how did you end up meeting your co founder Jason Fried?
Speaker 2:Sure. So in I think 02/2001, Jason wrote a blog post on Signal Versus Noise, the web blog of 37 Signals asking for advice about some bit of PHP programming. I should actually try to find that post. I bet we still have it somewhere. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Anyway, he wrote this post up, I forget what it is, think it was about pagination or something and how to do that. I'd been following 37, the company for a couple of years by then. I just loved the aesthetic of what Jason and the others at Third Time Systems were doing. It was just so the opposite of what everybody else were doing back in '99, February, 2001 Mhmm. When everybody had flash, splash screens and all that stupid shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and this they were a web design agency at the time.
Speaker 2:Yep. A web design agency at the time. And and Jason was just sort of branching out a little bit. He had already done some software back in the nineties, think for I forgot which platform oh, for the Mac. Like FileMaker Pro software.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So he was putting this app together himself called SingleFile, which was an app to keep track of your books. And he he was learning PHP to to make it happen, and so he wrote this blog post up, and I I was just sitting there in Copenhagen, Denmark, a fan of the company, and I was like, oh, oh, I know the answer to that one. So I just sent him an email, we got talking and traded a bunch of emails back and forth, and in the end, as the story now goes, he thought it was easier to just hire me than to learn how to program. And I got started working for Jason. Actually I think when I first got started working for Jason, I'm not even sure it was through thirty seven signals.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to remember whether Single File was actually a thirty seven signals product or not, but can't remember right now. Anyway, we got started working together in 02/2001. He was paying me $15 an hour and I was getting it delivered in terms of Apple hardware, which was pretty funny.
Speaker 1:So he would you you would, like, accrue all the hours Yes. And then you would tell him to ship you a computer?
Speaker 2:Yes. Pretty much. Because that was the first of all, the dollar was worth a lot more back then than it is now. But secondly the discrepancy in pricing between Apple goods here in The US and Denmark was even higher. So for me it was a great deal to get the maximum value out of this.
Speaker 2:I got iPods and I got the Mac laptop and so forth over those years. We're working together. Anyway, that working relationship eventually culminated in us starting Basecamp or starting to work on Basecamp in 2003 for release in 02/2004. And in 02/2005, I moved to The States, became a partner of thirty seven Signals and sort of you probably know the rest of the story from there.
Speaker 1:Well, this is how how do you get from working for Jason for $15 an hour to becoming his partner in when did you become his partner? In 02/2004?
Speaker 2:02/2005. The beginning of 02/2005.
Speaker 1:02/2005. Like, that that seems like an interesting transition because you were a fan of the company and then you responded and then he hires you and so how did that happen? How how did you eventually become a partner?
Speaker 2:Sure. So we'd worked together for a couple of years doing a variety of client projects where Jason and the rest of Third Seamless Ingalls would do the design and I would do the programming. So I was already sort of the tech half of thirty seven Signals. When we created Basecamp that was even more so. Certainly it was already a partnership whether it was recognized as a legal fact or not, that was the setup.
Speaker 2:And I was just finishing up my Bachelor's degree towards the 2005 and I basically just told Jason, well, Ruby on Rails had launched at that time too. So I I told Jason that I'd love to continue working together, but I was going to be in this game in order to work for myself. I mean I've been running all these gaming websites, sort of minor businesses on my own. I was not about to start now to be an employee. I had a shorter stint at a couple of software companies in Denmark as an employee and that never really worked out that well for either party.
Speaker 2:So I knew that what I wanted to do was was to work for myself. So I basically just told Jason, hey, let's continue working together but it's going to require that I'm I'm a partner in the business. Which was a lot easier sort of at that time. It's it's it's pretty tough to change the constitution of a business once there's like a big massive thing running. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But luckily for, I hope both of us, there wasn't at the time. I mean we had launched Basecamp but I mean it was only just covering the overhead. It wasn't exactly like we were turning out a lot of profit. So it was I think easier for Jason to basically see that I was accepting some risks. So he basically gave me three options.
Speaker 2:Either I'm going to pay you full market ish salary or I'm gonna give you sort of half of a slice of equity and a reasonable salary or I'm gonna give you just a full slice of equity but no salary. So you're gonna have to take on the risk that we might not make any money this year and well, you're gonna have to eat noodles. Yeah. So given the fact that I had no obligations and and I was willing to take that risk in the beginning, I said, well, I'm I'm I'm just gonna give this a shot. If if all else fail fails, I I guess I can just go back and live off the Danish social security net.
Speaker 2:It wasn't gonna be that bad. But anyway, so that was that was sort of the the setup and that's how we got going.
Speaker 1:That's so funny because you know, I I mean a lot of people can't imagine 37 signals not being profitable and not being a success.
Speaker 2:Well, thing was we were always profitable. I mean, it's all hard to you to find the measure of that profitability. Mhmm. I mean, so we were profitable, but, of course, it had nothing to do with the with the profits that supports a company of 38 today. I mean, at the time, thirty seven signals had two employees, Ryan and Matt.
Speaker 2:And then it had Jason is one of the partners, and I joined as the other partner. Right? So Yeah. I mean, profitability basically just meant that we could pay the salaries of Ryan and Matt and that we could cover whatever expenses we had for I think at that time we were subletting two or three desks in Chicago from Kudol Partners at like, I don't know, $500 or a thousand dollars a month. So profitability is not that hard if if that's your level of expenses.
Speaker 2:It's not like we had a head count of a 100 people or something selling like that. I mean that's the sort of the modest beginnings of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love hearing stuff like that. Like little tidbits. Like even you saying you thought you were paying about 500 or a thousand at Koodle Partners for your office. I love hearing stuff like that because it kind of brings some reality to the situation, you know?
Speaker 1:If anyone's like sees your office now, it's I've been there. It's beautiful. It's big and, you know, it just it looks impressive. But
Speaker 2:And, I mean, we we got that office, what, two years ago? Three years ago? Mhmm. For the longest time, I mean, for a decade. Did start out with some office.
Speaker 2:Jason then realized, well, hey, we're three people. We don't need a fucking office. Mhmm. So let's just pull that down and just get a couple of desks supplemented from somebody else who do need an office so we can save a lot of money on that. And then for a long time there just weren't more than four or five people in Chicago and we hired people who just lived wherever.
Speaker 2:So we just didn't need an office and it wasn't until basically, I mean even today we don't need an office. And in the average day I think maybe there are eight people in that office. What we bought was a luxury. A luxury that we could afford at the time. And I think that that's that's the history of 37 signals that we wait until we can afford nice shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We don't buy it on credit up front. We don't hire a bunch of people on credit up front. We earn our way until we can pay for it directly. And that's that's just been the ethos of the business and our of our business philosophy since since the beginning, which in any or in most other businesses would not be in any shape or form profound or even weird but somehow in the tech world it
Speaker 1:is. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part one of my interview with DHH. I like to keep these episodes about the length of the average commute.
Speaker 1:So come back next week for part two where I ask David how he knew he could trust Jason Fried as a partner and how he felt when Jason came to him with this idea of rebuilding Basecamp from scratch. You can find David on Twitter at DHH, and be sure to check out his book that's coming out, fall two thousand thirteen. I think it just went it just went to the publisher, didn't it?
Speaker 2:In two days, it's going to the publisher. In two? So October 29. That'd the precise release date.
Speaker 1:October 29, it's out. 37signals.com/remote. Thanks again, David.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Let me also just share with you something one of our listeners is working on. You can follow at Topside Concepts on Twitter. What Randy is working on is a product that will help companies improve their service by prioritizing input from their customers. It's a really neat concept. You can check it out www.topsideconcepts.com.
Speaker 1:And a big thanks again to our sponsors. They make this show possible. They help me pay for all the costs. Please go and check out fusioncharts.com. Fusion charts is a JavaScript charting solution trusted by over 450,000 developers around the world.
Speaker 1:If you need charts, go and check out fusioncharts.com and sprint.ly. Again, if you're looking to manage the software process, sprint.ly is the best way to do it. It gives a lot of insight for managers and developers into where people are stuck, what's being done, the overall velocity of the team. You and your team can try Sprint for free. Go to www.sprint.ly.
Speaker 1:I'm Justin Jackson. You can follow me on Twitter at m I Justin. Yeah. It's always hard to tell your first one. My wife and I have four, which I don't recommend.
Speaker 2:That is quite a plan.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. It's usually my parenting advice is to stop it too. Yeah. But you know our first we we just didn't get any sleep and we couldn't figure it out. And then the second one we realized some of its disposition and some of it depends on how you are as a first time parent.
Speaker 1:You're, you know, anxious and trying to figure stuff out, it doesn't sometimes that affects sleeping and stuff too.
Speaker 2:Right. Yep. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool, man. And how much how much time do you have today? Beautiful. And you've got Dropbox syncing off and all that?
Speaker 2:Yep. There's there's nothing running. I should have a good connection here. I think I have, like, 25 megabit from this Comcast line.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Are and you're at home right now?
Speaker 2:Yes. Cool.