My guest for Episode 119 of The Startup Playbook Podcast is the Co-founder & CTO of Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH).

Basecamp launched in 1999, initially as a web design company before shifting focus in mid-2004 to web application development. Its first commercial application was Basecamp, followed by Backpack, Campfire, Highrise and HEY.

David is also the creator of Ruby on Rails, an open source web application framework. David created Ruby on Rails as an internal Basecamp tool before releasing it to the public in 2004.

Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have built amazing applications using Rails. Some of the more famous include Github, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Kickstarter, Artsy, Zendesk, and Goodreads.

If that isn’t enough, David is also a bestselling author of books such as “Remote”, “Rework” and “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”. He has also raced in the FIA World Endurance Championship for the past seven years. In 2014, he won his class in the 82nd running of the 24 hours of Le Mans – the world’s biggest endurance race, while also winning the WEC championship in the GTE-Am category that year.

In June 2020, Basecamp launched it’s latest product – HEY, a premium email service to compete with the likes of Gmail.

We covered a range of topics in this interview including:

• Considerations when you take external funding
• How to make the most of remote work
• The importance of timing
• How to develop and create original thought around your product design and development
• How to balance the signal and noise of customer feedback
• Lessons from the launch of HEY!
• & much more!

Full interview below!

Show notes:

• Basecamp
• Ruby on Rails
• HEY
• “It Doesn’t have to be crazy at work” – Book (DHH & Jason Fried)
• “Remote: Office not required” – Book (DHH & Jason Fried)
• “Rework”- Book (DHH & Jason Fried)
• Jason Fried – Co-founder at Basecamp
• 37 Signals
• “The building of Basecamp”
• basecamp.com/books
• Signal vs Noise – blog
• signalvnoise.com/reconsider
• Duck Duck Go
• Jason Calacanis interview (Startup Playbook Ep086)
• Jason Calacanis x DHH 2010 interview
• Tiny Seed
• Indie VC
• Earnest Capital
• Flow – Book (Mihaly Csikszentmihaly)
• A Guide to The Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (William Irvine)
• The Manual: A Philosophers Guide to Life (Epictetus)
• To have or to be? The nature of psyche (Erich Fromm)
• The Sane society (Erich Fromm)
• Escape from freedom (Erich Fromm)
• The Stranger (Albert Camus)
• Nausea (John-Paul Sartre)
• “The books I read” – DHH 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019

Next interview:

Join our next live podcast interview with Simon Griffiths, the Co-founder & CEO of Who Gives A Crap
Date: 14th July 2020
Time: 8-9am (AEDT)
Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/Ep120Simon

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams

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