David Heinemeier Hansson...
David Heinemeier Hansson helped transform 37signals
from a consulting company to a product company in
early 2004. He wrote the company’s first product,
Basecamp, an online project management tool. He
also wrote companion products Backpack, Ta-da List,
and Campfire.
In July 2004, he released the layer of software that
underlies these applications as an open source web
development framework. Ruby on Rails has since
become one of the most popular tools among web
developers and won Heinemeier Hansson the Hacker
of the Year award at OSCON in 2005.
In July 2006 (after this interview), 37signals president Jason Fried
announced on the company’s blog that Jeff Bezos had made a minority private
equity investment.
Livingston: 37signals wasn’t begun as a startup, correct?
Heinemeier Hansson: 37signals was founded by Jason Fried as a web design
shop in 1999. It transitioned from a consulting company to a product company
with the creation of Basecamp. I’m part of the 37signals 2.0 management team.
Livingston: So the launch of Basecamp was a pivotal turning point for the
company?
Heinemeier Hansson: It was not an overnight transition. While we were
developing Basecamp, 37signals had a lot of client work, so we couldn’t dedicate
more than about a third of our time to it. It wasn’t a client project; it was
something that we created as an internal tool to help us manage our client
work.
Livingston: Take me back to the time of the Basecamp launch and the transition.
Heinemeier Hansson: I was working with 37signals as a contractor while I was
finishing my bachelor’s degree. They did the design and I did the programming.
After a few years, it became clear that they needed a tool to manage the client
project process. One person wouldn’t know what the other was doing. It was
pretty disorganized and starting to look unprofessional.
The idea came to us that blogging had been a pretty good way of distributing
information between people. I had been blogging personally on Loud
Thinking and 37signals had Signal vs. Noise. So we wondered, what would happen
if you took that blogging idea and applied it to project management?
That was how we got started: the project blog was the first part of Basecamp
that was made. We got it up in about a month and then we started using it to
manage Basecamp itself. So it became self-contained very quickly in the sense
that we were using Basecamp to build Basecamp.
As we showed it to colleagues in the industry, we quickly realized that
others had the same problem; there was not a lot of software available for small
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