David Heinemeier Hansson

Partner, 37 Signals

            37 signals were founded by Jason Fried as a web design shop, and David Heinemeir Hansson was a part of the transition. He helped transform 37 signals from a consulting company to a product company. Heinemeir was working with 37 signals as a contractor while he was finishing his Bachelor’s degree. They did the design and he did the programming.

            The problem that they want to address in their startup was a need for a tool to manage the client project process. The idea came up to them that blogging had been a pretty good way of distributing information between people. The reason why Hansson and his partners start this startup was because they wondered what would happen if you took that blogging idea and applied it to project management? When they show it to colleagues in the industry, they quickly realized that others had the same problem; there was not a lot of software available for small companies to manage projects. So they started thinking, this is going to help us solve our consultancy needs.

            Most people were impressed by all the stuff Base camp didn’t do. They were used to these big, honking products that tried to do everything, where they just needed something simple. People used this startup because it’s just so simple to use. It’s got just the features users need and not all the other stuff.

            David Heneimeier Hansson building Rails while building Base Camp, he’s building Base Camp, and every way, he’s extracting Rails. In July 2004, Hansson released the layer software that underlies these applications as an open source web development framework. Ruby and Rails has since become one of the most popular tools among web developers.

            Things I learn while reading this startup are: Heinemeier Hansson was only the programmer and at the same time the Systems Administrator on Base Camp until February 2000 when they brought on their second programmer. While reading this interview with Henemeier, I was really amazed with him because he’s really a wonderful man. He’s still young and yet he had already contributed something in the society particularly in the computer world and he was able to make a difference at early age. He is working on 37 signals while starting his Rails project and yet he managed to do it and both of his projects become successful. When a person is starting a startup, part of it are the feeling that you doubt, sometimes you feel you could not do all the things. But for Hansson, whenever he had those feelings he viewed them as clues that he is trying to do too much. When you try to do one hundred percent of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and its pretty rare you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually needed.

David Henemeier Hansson won the Hacker of the Year Award at OSCON in 2005.